Susanta Mandal: A Few Moments of Now and Then
A Routine Scrutiny
© Susanta Mandal
Length: 04:18
2006
In 2006, I was engaged to develop a body of work based on a city called ‘Delhi’. It is a city where intense checking goes on everywhere to make a shield against continuous unidentified threats; CCTV cameras constantly watch the unknown. I came to Delhi almost a decade ago. During this time (when I was making this work) I had a longish beard, which, along with my brown skin and my accent made it obvious that I was not from this very city. So the question that would often bothered others was, where am I from and what am I doing here? Though I have never been harassed, I have been questioned by the police a few times at night on my way back home. So I decided to bring in this experience to my work.
In 2006, almost every day I used to start with my camera from my residence to another corner of the city to capture images to map the city with photos. I had captured almost a thousand shots, mainly portraits of people (working class), fragmented cityscape, and textures of wall, skin, everything; and from these images I finally picked up around 70 images; put them on the wall quite rapidly. This created clusters of sorts, with different sizes of photographs. I then installed a set of moving lenses attached with contraptions in a way so that portions of photographs could be seen through them in an enlarged form.
Under every lens I used small LEDs, so where the lens moves, light moves there and the rest of the photograph becomes dark; this helped create a theatrical atmosphere in the space.
It Doesn’t Bite
© Susanta Mandal
Length: 01:39
2007
2007 onwards, the idea of ‘Nothing is permanent’, that everything is changing every second; our mind, our beliefs, that existence is a fragile form of complex entity, started occupying my mind. So, in most of my works, some parts are always impermanent. In this case, I introduced heaps of bubbles in my works. These bubbles create a fragile structure which lasts for a few seconds and bursts one by one. It is a performance on the structure of steel, where super-soft motion of bubbles breathes on solid steel. Capturing bubbles, clouds, or holding them in a cage is physically impossible. The apparent playfulness in the structure comes to an end with an unknown emptiness. Title: ‘It Doesn’t Bite’
Naukar ki kameez (Shirt of a servant)
© Susanta Mandal
Length: 00:54
2015
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.
Untitled: ( From the show Mechanism of Motion )
© Susanta Mandal
Length: 02:06
2005
Here, the three thresholds, imposing grids of black metal frames separate or restrain a triple video sequence of a shrill-sounding mechanical drill driving holes in a wall surface. The images are seen through water falling down transparent walls of glass being cleared by wipers. Between the real and the virtual, between the flat and the progression inside, between solidity and transparency, roughness being mediated by fineness, different but pervasive layers of experiencing existential motions and sensations can be intuited and faintly extended onto human emotions.