From the sublime to the subliminal
PRIYADARSSHINI SHARMA
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Video art is a young medium, and young Aditi Nayar revels in the possibilities it offers of communicating, confusing, enticing.
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MESSAGES FOR THEN TAKING A specimen of Aditi Nayar's video installation work that caught the attention of Delhiites the other day
Video installation art is relatively nascent in India. And 23-year-old Aditi Nayar is one of India's few video installation artists and certainly the youngest.
She along with 16 South Indian artists exhibited her works at a show, Turning the Wheel: Traditions Unbound, at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, recently. That she is very young and that the field is very new gives rise to a natural curiosity on the subject.
Explains Aditi, who has graduated from the Chelsea College of Art, London, "Video art is about space and assimilating information from this space."
So it is about art that mirrors life and mirrors it in this given space. Video installation adds a spatial dimension to the otherwise two-dimensional painting on the wall.
The assimilation of information depends on the bank of experiences of the viewer. Different chords are stoked in the individual subconscious, sometimes subtly and sometimes brazenly. This produces an effect that jerks the subconscious affecting the mind subliminally.
"It is a technique advertising is using all the time," says Aditi. "In fact even when you are watching television you are bombarded with sensory bytes: sounds, sights, pictures and text in combinations of priority. You imbibe some things almost automatically and some things leave a mark covertly. In fact that unconsciously left mark is what advertisers make use of. In video installation, art uses the same principle."
So Aditi's `Fruit of the Loon', a one-minute video in loop is projected before a kinetic sculpture of motorised fibreglass hands that manipulates an imaginary puppet in space. While behind, on the video, moves mechanically a puppet character that is Aditi herself.
Her hands, legs and body move in fits and starts as the threads pull her in different directions and as water, fire, rain and earth shower and burst, blaze and burn her out. Half and full texts run on and off the screen creating a rigmarole that leaves viewers in a midway state of comprehension and confusion. And the viewer gropes through this continuous impinging of imagery, sound, drama and text to search for a meaning. The subconscious is merrily tickled as layers of meaning begin to unfold. So you find running messages and you decode them. `Stitch in time', `Andros, Eros, Ethos equals Pathos', `Famine feasts your eyes', `Rabbit's lucky watch' `Gubbish' and `Some truths can only be guessed', finds the young artiste using artistic license to the hilt.
`My own fun'
"That's my own bit of fun," she tells you about some captions that actually flash by too fast for the conscious mind to process, but this does not deviate from the higher truth the installation projects. The puppeteer's mechanical hands continue to manoeuvre the puppet, completely in his command, in faith or in atheism. The higher truth reigns and this post-modern artistic medium comes out winner. There's one running indecipherable message that remains to haunt just like that sound, that sight, those words and some thoughts that have an intangible presence. The scale of the hands, three sizes that of human hands, moving deftly, ceaselessly controlling destinies, is the powerful truth interestingly told, packaged in an ultra modern medium through the keen, precocious eye of a young, promising artist.
Background sounds of rain, fire and nuclear clouds are created digitally, morphed out of Aditi's hum. Hand painted raindrops, fireballs, cut and paste collages, digitalised effects, animation skills, the quick, choppy frames are wonderfully blended in the video as all her lessons at technique and taste collate together in this interesting installation, `Fruit of the Loon'.
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Entertainment
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
