If you were to dig straight from where you are to the other side of the Earth, where would you reach? What would it be like to consider that your daily commute, to think constantly of the geographical opposite of where you are? Would it change how you act, see and experience life in your own location? Project 88’s ongoing show 8688 posits Mumbai/Bombay and Los Angeles/L.A. as said geographical opposites and draws on work from both cities to look, as the show’s curator Diana Campbell-Betancourt says, “as far past ourselves as possible [so] that we can understand what makes us who we are”. The show features Neha Choksi, Sandeep Mukherjee and Shreyas Karle from the gallery’s roster and other artists originally from or based in the U.S.A., including Andrew Ananda Voogel, Kristen Mosher, Pae White, William Forsythe, David Horvitz, Lisa Oppenheim, and Teresa Burga from Peru.
Sandeep Mukherjee, Untitled(Ladder/Serpent), paint on aluminium foil, 2016.
Time and space
L.A.-based American artist Pae White’s ‘ Popstellation ’ (2016) a collection of over a hundred Japanese paper clay “popcorn” is suspended mid-air in the middle of the gallery, a popcorn Milky Way inspiring numerous connections, from the movie industries in Mumbai/L.A. and the penchant for popcorn while watching their products to meanderings on space/time and their inexorable effect on how we live. Visually, it becomes central to the exhibition.
One enters the gallery to see Mukherjee’s sculpture ‘ Untitled (Ladder/Serpent) ’, 2016 in its first ‘unfolding’ — a serrated aluminium loop that rises out of the ground and plunges back into it. It’s somewhere between a metal flatworm and a loop of lava rising from the earths depths, cooled too fast. The work, modelled off Mukherjee’s 10 ft. studio ladder, was created as an ‘unfolding’ sculpture, an image of the studio ladder that folds and unfolds through space and time (to go as far to link back to Mukherjee’s mothers folded saris from his childhood). He brought the work from his studio in L.A., folding it in a suitcase, and then unfolding it at Project 88 for the first time. For Mukherjee, the image of the ladder was conceptualised as a slice of flowing matter so that any entity or object is a slice of this movement in the universe. It’s a reminder that the universe is in constant motion, and we are all made of star stuff.
Lucy Raven, The Deccan Trap, Video with sound, 4’19”, 2015.
Moments of loss
Shreyas Karle’s ‘ Anti-gravity ’, 2012, settles on a shelf opposite White’s inedible popcorn. The work is seven prints and two glasses of water, balanced delicately, featuring the artist’s trademark union of science diagrams and imaginary physics. While its place in this exhibition about opposites is fairly obvious, spending time with it makes you think of the language of science and the subsequent loss of words and vernaculars that occurs. The moment of loss stretches through Peruvian artist Teresa Burga’s ode to memory, age and ability. Installed next to Karle’s work, Burga’s untitled works from 2013 are based on drawings by a pair of young sisters, Jasmin and Brigitte Hagenmeyer in 1972. Presented as diptychs, Burga places the original drawing by a child next to her painstaking reproductions at nearly age 80. Eventually, you begin to wonder about the Hagenmeyer sisters, how Burga might have come into contact with them/their childhood art projects, and how she would have communicated this desire to reproduce said art projects. Given the distance and difference, it feels improbable and quest-like, even in the age of social media where connections are merely a few taps and clicks away.
Lisa Oppenheim’s ‘The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else’, 2006, explores sunsets in New York and Iraq.
Measuring the miles
To remind us of distance, Campbell-Betancourt uses Horvitz’s ‘ Untitled (Dead Horse Bay, Palos Verdes, Malibu, San Pedro, Stromboli, Girgaum Chowpatty Mumbai) ’, 2016 and Lisa Oppenheim’s ‘ The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else ’, 2006. For his work, Horvitz creates vases of sea glass that he collected over his travels from the various places mentioned in the title: from Dead Horse Bay in New York to three locations in the Los Angeles County to the volcanic Stromboli Island to Mumbai’s Girgaum Chowpatty. Not only does Horvitz link these spaces that exist prominently on modern day tourist maps, but by using sea glass, he also casts an eye to the past and to ocean currents. Naturally occurring sea glass, like Horvitz has used, is glass from incidents like shipwrecks and is chemically and physically weathered by seawater (as opposed to fresh water) for at least 20 years for it to achieve the specific texture and look that marks it as sea glass.
While Horvitz creates objects, Oppenheim projects a dialogue between (or some might say via) two images. A projection comprising 80 slides, the work explores similarities across distance through images of sunsets in her native New York, in which she holds found photographs of Iraqi sunsets by American soldiers deployed there. The widely televised Iraq wars left no room in the imagination for picture-perfect sunsets, or anything that could be seen as idyllic, welcoming or peaceful. In some of the 80 photos, you can pick out an explosion or the outline of a military vehicle in the distance, but mostly, we imagine a place which, after 24/7 war coverage only inspires fear and anxiety as a possibility for something else. The soldier in Iraq and an urban artist in New York, both escape their day in the beauty of a sunset.
A view of the installation.
Inevitable connections
Another shared experience is Lucy Raven’s ‘ The Deccan Trap ’, 2015, where the artist considers India’s VFX industry and how it works with Hollywood through the workflow between a special effects studio in Chennai and a corresponding studio in L.A. Through a single channel video (which will also feature in Raven’s upcoming solo at London’s Serpentine Gallery), she looks at the flow of work: the Indian studio works when the L.A. studio sleeps, providing relief while allowing work to continue, and the systems developed that make this daily handover possible, conducive and lucrative for both parties involved. While this work — happening across India in cities like Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai — isn’t unknown to us, it speaks to a strange sense of belonging, which can be deconstructed as a feeling of being part of something bigger (and what is bigger than entertainment technology?). It left us wondering, do we want to belong to something rather than someplace?
Also in its first iteration, and installed almost on the other side of where it was conceived, is Kirsten Mosher’s ‘ Soulmate 180 ’ which looks for an antipode to belong to. It is an extension of a world where a “3 a.m. friend” is a given (and might not even live in the same country, and all you might know about each other is everything except your physical self). What if your geographical soulmate, your antipode, was in fact a patch of waves? As Mosher found while developing ‘ Soulmate 180 ’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the museum had its antipode in the Indian Ocean, not too far from the coast of Madagascar. Working off of pop culture ideas of geographical opposites — famously, Yosemite Sam in a 1952 episode of Bugs Bunny, who thinks he’s dug straight through to China while looking for gold — Mosher wonders what it means to have a geographical antipode to a space, and what that might do to our understanding of geopolitical displacements and shifts constantly occurring so far away from us.
In the show’s version of the work, we see a 1:1 segment of its geographical opposite — a patch of the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile — into the floor of the gallery. “Geographic, cultural and political displacements and shifts are happening all the time, but one antipode displacing another is as radically re-orienting as finding a tattered scrap of Borges’ 1:1 map opposite to where it was drawn,” says Mosher in an email from L.A., referring to Jorge Luis Borges’ one paragraph story about map-territory relations.
deep connections: Pae White’s ‘Popstellation’ (2016), a collection of over a hundred Japanese paper clay “popcorn”, becomes central to the exhibition.
Touch of humour
For a show that pulls on so many connections, Campbell-Betancourt ensures there is levity, physically in installation, as well as in content. Pae White’s popcorn demands you take a ‘popcorn-eating’ selfie, Kristen Mosher seems to be burrowing down into the earth, and choreographer, dancer and artist William Forsythe shares a ludicrous moment from his childhood. His video, installed high up so you have to crane your neck to see it, recreates his childhood imagination of people living on the other side of the world. As a child, he thought people on the other side of the world would’ve had to constantly hold on to their surroundings or fall into the void of space. Campbell-Betancourt reminds us of Pliny the Elder, whose book The Natural History was finalised in 79A.D., just before he died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pliny, in a chapter concerning the plausibility of Antipodes, proposes, “We maintain, that there are men dispersed over every part of the earth, that they stand with their feet turned towards each other.”
Maybe he wasn’t, but we imagine Pliny was speaking of “difference”. So is 8688 , with the added caveat of empathy and scientific value as tools to come to terms with those differences.
The author is a freelance writer
8688is on at Project 88, Colaba till December 31
Kirsten Mosher, Soul Mate 180, video installation.
