COLAB Art and Architecture, Bangalore
Two-person show with Christoph Schäfer, who lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.
Not long ago, architectural modernism presented the glass facade as equivalent to participation and empathy with the surroundings...democracy! Rapidly, this utopian dream turned into a landscape of spectacle and surveillance: the everywhere and endlessly reflecting 'curtain wall'... the dark glasses of security infrastructure.
Newer utopias, such as those being propagated via TV fantasy shows, fantasy Malls, and idealized workspaces, now provide an even more alluring vision of a global, mutable, but still secure identity. As we find in the script of recent Bangalore, the mall, the housing complex, the corporate campus all play familiar, anti-urban characters. Still islands of glass, but now with subterranean dedicated lines, and sky-borne 'direct-to-home' access.
This condition, which speaks also of the global IT-worker, of extended yet domestic desires, of immobility and paranoia, is addressed here by two artists from ‘elsewhere’:
Christoph’s work, ‘Melrose Place-d in Bangalore’, is about a housing complex in suburban Bangalore that is literally fashioned after the trendy Californian TV-series, Melrose Place. Through hand-drawings, videos, and found materials he explores the notion of utopian settlements, and their inversion now, into the IT-corridor, as gated communities.
Ashok's project at Colab, 'Sideways', addresses the gallery itself, as a browsing and storage infrastructure. A 'leak' is created across two spaces (the gallery and an interior design office across the courtyard) that are otherwise safely separated by distance, ownership, and assumed function. The audience experiences this network phenomenon, as part of the view. Glass is a weak spot (the window is nostalgia), in the electronic city.
Accompanying the work is a gallery of "window figures", ranging from Vermeer's geographer to the techno-voyeur (via guards, protestors, exhibitionists and more). See video for details.