Desire Machine Collective is a group of media practitioners based in Guwahati. Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, sound, space, photography and objects in their installation and works. Their experiments with a wide range of media techniques and strategies with the aim of probing narratives and modes of representations, infused with a political character lend them a uniqueness that contributed to their growth as one of the leading artist collaboratives in India’s contemporary art scene. Their works have been showcased at some major international festivals and renowned museums. They were a part of the inaugural Indian Pavilion at the 54th International Art exhibition of the Venice Biennale and nominated for the LUMA award along with experimental cinema legends Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York and the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin. Over the years, they have created alternate spaces for art practices, ‘Periferry’ being the most interesting of them. It is located on a ferry, on river Brahmaputra, docked in Guwahati. Working with redundant spaces, that are dysfunctional, the project has activated a disused ferry and converted it into a space for research and aims to create a public space and public domain, physical as well as virtual for critical reflections.
Contents
History
Sonal Jain is a fine arts graduate from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara, Gujarat, India. She subsequently served as a faculty member in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. Mriganka Madhukaillya received a degree in physics from Fergusson College in Pune and completed his postgraduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design. He currently teaches at IIT Guwahati. Their similar concerns and ideas of the nation, the centre-periphery divide and issues like fascism and globalization, led them to negotiate these complex spaces through art.
Influences and Art
Assuming their name and theoretical disposition from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a seminal text from 1972 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Desire Machine Collective seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information. Their primary aim is to ‘confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice through their practice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam, and around the world’. Desire Machine Collective attempts to move beyond a form that is representative and deal with complexities of image construction which deals with image as perception, time and location. They attempt to free the perception from being bound to a single standpoint and immobile eye, thereby challenging the ‘Renaissance perspectival stable view of the viewer looking out of the window, which creates an absolute distinction between the grounded viewer and the world in flux out there brought to focus from this point of grounded vision.’
Their earlier works addressed their interest in explorations into image and representations. ‘25/75’ reveals a world governed by numbers. These numbers are arrived at through dreams and the interpretation of dreams according to a system developed in the realm of the oral cultures of a particular community of people. The title alludes to “Teer” (arrow), a game of betting on numbers, based on the number of arrows that hit a small target. It is a traditional game of archery played in the Khasi Hills, of Meghalaya, Northeast India. Dreams here have a symbolism and bets are made on specific numbers based on the dreams of the previous night.
They have a penchant for creating alternate spaces for art, as evidenced by ‘Periferry’, an alternative artist led residency programme space situated on the MV Chandardinga, a ferry docked in the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogues across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge. As an extension of Periferry, in 2011, they introduced A+ type, an artist residency programme situated in the city of Guwahati itself.
Some of their projects that have widely circulated are ‘Trespassers will (not) be prosecuted’ (2008), ‘Nishan I ’ (2007) and ‘Residue’ (2011). ‘Trespassers will (not) be prosecuted’ is an audio installation consisting of sounds from a ‘sacred forest’ in Meghalaya. This work explores the realm of dematerialisation and transience. False memories (of a forest) are instilled in the audience’s mind and the work has a life after the installation is over. This soundscape was installed in a public space with subliminal notions of memory, ecology, and geography experienced aurally thereby reclaiming it and rendering it dynamic. It acts as an intangible intervention into time and space. By installing it on the Deutsche Guggenheim’s façade, Desire Machine Collective asked whether sound can be regarded as a material thing since, according to local belief, it’s forbidden to take out any object from Meghalaya’s sacred forest. The 39 minutes film, ‘Residue’, has images of a disused thermal power plant near Guwahati that’s gradually being swallowed up by the surrounding forest. It highlights their interest in studying the dynamics between machinery, nature and the relationship between images and how they are perceived. It also deals with the cyclical process of creation, destruction and memory and how it is replaced. They first showed ‘Residue’ in 2010 at the Deutsche Guggenheim and at the Lyon Museum in France, Venice biennale and Paris triennial. ‘Nishan I’ was shot in Srinagar, Kashmir. It is a 4-channel audio-video installation with 4 channels of sound. ‘Nishan I’ registers the interior spaces of abandoned houses that bereft of their primary functions serve as bunkers for the army, with traces of the absences that are repressed within them. The window determines the relation with the world and this relates to the split between the interior and exterior, the ego and the gaze, public and private. Through this work, Desire Machine Collective looks at sensory and perceptual states that result from a disruption of ‘organic flows’, the point of departure being a state of sustained conflict and the conditions it produces. It has been exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Their latest work is titled, ‘Noise Life’. More personal than other works by them, the piece points to excessive states of perception occurring in exceptional experiences of blindness or deafness. The work overwhelms the viewer with a chaos of sensations, and attempts to convey how we make compex sense of our lives and express our experiences. Some of their other works are ALMOST NORMAL (2005), ALFA BETA (2005), DAILY CHECKUP (2005), ABOUT BODY BORDERS (2006), ALIYAH (2006), PASSAGE ( 2006), UNTITLED ( 2007) and 30/12 (2009).
Exhibitions
Desire Machine Collective had their first solo exhibition Noise Life(2014) at Project88, Mumbai. DMC has presented their work in numerous group exhibitions including Being Singular Plural, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York City (2012), Intense Proximity, 3rd edition of the La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, India Pavilion, Venice (2011), Indian Highway IV, MAC Muséed’Art Contemporain de Lyon and Indian Highway V, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (2011).