[1]One usually associates the intention of any art produced with the intention of being exhibited in a gallery, museum and public space such as a mall or a street.
Studio and site specific art is a brave and relatively new and rarer concept that is still in a more experimental stage since they have limited viewership and still more restricted marketability. Mukesh Sharma’s latest works have been done in his studio in the back lanes of Vasant Kunj area of Delhi in two rooms of his studio.
Conceptually and in terms of execution, A Terabyteing Serpentine is an exceptional work. Made from scrap of keyboards, the snake seems to have entered through the window as the tail the narrow end is there and then expanded as he moves into the room, coiling over the walls, till it occupies the entire last wall as it opens its seven hoods. The sheshanaga like image is made up entirely of hulls of keyboards, emphasizing the insidious surveillance of personal information through digital media into all our lives, the omnipresent shadow of digitisation on our existence.
The keys from these keyboards have been used in another installation, Inverted Search for Immortality, where they are pasted on branches of a tree hanging from the ceiling. On one wall, there is a mural of a village temple painted in typical Rajasthani blue and on the other wall an oversized parrot green ornamented sari-blouse is hung. Apparently this represents offerings made by village women at the temple. The past and present, the technological and the ritual, belief and science are juxtaposed with each other, not in opposition but co-axially.
As an artist, Mukesh Sharma is trying to create a visual language that is contemporary, with materials that are also from the digital age, ubiquitous in their use in cell phones, computers etc, though of course, with the coming of touch screens and tablets even these are becoming obsolete.
Links:
[1] http://archive.asianage.com/t11jpg-500