Ashok Sukumaran. The Neighbour
12 March – 12 April 2009
“The neighbour, neither friend nor enemy, is the one who may not be in your ‘network’, but is nevertheless in your world.” (Sukumaran)
Bombay-based Ashok Sukumaran is one of the few artists in the world making work that directly addresses issues of infrastructure: the ideological and human landscapes that surround flows such as electricity, water, data and trade. Beyond the claims of infrastructures of access, his work engages with ideas of distance, hierarchy, directionality and doubt amidst the “networks”.
This ambitious project is Sukumaran’s first major one-person exhibition in the UK. In The Neighbour, two ostensibly “mobile” habitats share space. One is a “static” mobile home from the late 1970’s, which developed as a way for lower-middle class families to partake in “caravan culture”, or escape longer term from the city and its property regimes. The second, coming from another direction in the same period, is a camper van, which follows gypsies and travellers in an attempt to produce the continuously nomadic home, built in the car factory.
Ashok Sukumaran's projects have imagined cross-pollinations across contemporary computer-based art, kinetic art, telegraphy, early and pre-cinema, and architecture. Sukumaran uses the medium of raw electricity in the public arena as his working material. In the e will construct a working environment around 2 large mobile homes that are "going nowhere", with electrical current, communication and water systems feeding from the sites’ visible industrial infrastructure and beyond to other unknown underground spaces in London.
Commissioned by Arts catalyst in association with P3, supported by the Arts Council and Ambika P3
