Regimes of Truth: An In-Progress Viewing - Shaunak Mahbubani

24 - 29 April 2019
Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi

Who writes history? Who controls history? Who controls what we believe? Why do we believe the things we believe? What does belief have to do with control? What does control have to do with truth?

‘Regimes of Truth’ examines the ways in which information is collected, segmented, augmented, whitewashed, and disseminated as the machinery of consolidating power. To borrow from Foucault, one would be doing a great disservice by viewing power exclusively as a destructive force. Power, as we know it today, gets truly sedimented when belief systems are constructed through multiple means of conditioning.

Our current political climate offers us rich fodder to see these theories in action and observe systemic actors attempt to validate their positions. Histories get happy endings and parties get acche taglines in a circus of starched khadi. We must remember though that this circus has travelled far to reach here, and its weathered tent and altered logbook cannot be exempt from our watch. Our fight remains not only with the jokers in power, but also with age-old conventions of power and its masculine manifestations: the nation-state, the data-bank, the quick commodity, and the clear boundary.

This ‘in-progress’ viewing experiments with coalescing vicinal strategies, artworks, and performativities to understand our ecosystems of Power-Knowledge as complex and intersectional, but inherently charged with our agency within them. The space is created to enquire into the potential of taking rigidity, discipline, control, and transforming it into new forms of disseminating, organising, and recharging. The distilled charge from this viewing will develop with the present artists into a final showing, also bringing together organisations and individuals seizing the means of dissemination, to create a gamut of approaches to navigating our uncertain futures.

This exhibition is a part of Curatorial Intensive South Asia 2017, a curatorial fellowship initiated by Khoj International Artists’ Association and supported by Goethe Institut, New Delhi.

Photographs by Pranav Gohil

MANDEEP RAIKHY (Choreography) & SAMAR GREWAL (Sound Design); Saavdhaan!, Performance and Sound, Variable Duration, 2018

ARKO DATTO Captivecams + Panopticams, Photographic prints, multiple dimensions, 2015 (Ongoing), Installation View

ARKO DATTO Captivecams + Panopticams, Photographic prints, multiple dimensions, 2015 (Ongoing), Detail View

MANDEEP RAIKHY (Choreography) & SAMAR GREWAL (Sound Design); Saavdhaan!, Performance and Sound, Variable Duration, 2018

ARKO DATTO Captivecams + Panopticams, Photographic prints, multiple dimensions, 2015 (Ongoing), Installation View

PAYAL ARYA Deficiency or absence of light; darkness. 2. a. The quality or condition of being unknown. Single Channel Video and Smoke Generator, Dimensions Variable , 2018

CHANGING NARRATIVES: Textbooks as Evidence

Installation View, First Floor, Gati Dance Forum

MANDEEP RAIKHY (Choreography) & SAMAR GREWAL (Sound Design); Saavdhaan!, Performance and Sound, Variable Duration, 2018

ASIM WAQIF FACT=FICTION, Single Channel Video, 11:33 min, 2016

ARKO DATTO Captivecams + Panopticams, Photographic prints, multiple dimensions, 2015 (Ongoing), Installation View

SANDIP KURIAKOSE Suresh Kumar Koushal v. NAZ Foundation (India) Trust (Civil Appeal No. 10972 of 2013), Hard-bound artist book, 98 pages, 22.86 X 15.24 cm / 9 X 6 in, 2017

ARKO DATTO Captivecams + Panopticams, Photographic prints, multiple dimensions, 2015 (Ongoing), Detail View

GATI Dance Forum, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi

MANDEEP RAIKHY (Choreography) & SAMAR GREWAL (Sound Design); Saavdhaan!, Performance and Sound, Variable Duration, 2018

MANDEEP RAIKHY (Choreography) & SAMAR GREWAL (Sound Design); Saavdhaan!, Performance and Sound, Variable Duration, 2018: A visitor joins into the performance