Susanta Mandal: A Few Moments of Now and Then
© Susanta Mandal
‘Naukar ki kameez’ (Shirt of a servant)
View photographs from the exhibition/installation
‘Naukar ki kameez’ (Shirt of a servant), is a similar sort of engagement with overlapping images within a sculptural body. It was made from my own experience. Our assistant who had been working at the art lab for more than 30 years, retired. After his retirement, we were looking for another person for the art lab. A bunch of people came and went in a year’s time and the process of looking for an assistant continued.
So, here I have used the portraits of these people to play with overlapping images and tried to hold various situations of the image projections mingle with one another, very slowly on a transparent screen. As a result, we see the new faces don’t actually fit well with the old one, and this process produces images which resemble Bacon’s distorted portraits in movement. But, the shirts (Uniforms) fit perfectly well. The title of the work was taken from a film by Mani Kaul, which was based on the literary work of Vinod Kumar Shukla.
Medium: Mechanical contraptions, 1-2 rpm motors, LEDs, lenses (Plano-convex), Transparency slides, silk screen and timer.
View photographs from the exhibition/installation