ZURICH.- Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, lives in New York and Belmont, USA) works with video and drawing. His works test the connections between small gestures and complex systems, asking what forces are at play, and what escapes our perception if we focus solely on details or only see the whole. With patterns that are in a constant state of transmutation, Masharani attempts to analyse this interplay, highlighting the role of the contingent throughout his compositions: across the duration of a video or throughout the production period of a series of drawings.
His videos are not the result of fixed planning, but rather emerge as montages of recorded, hand-drawn and digitally rendered material he collects on an ongoing basis. Emphasizing post-production as a significant moment of intervention, he regards each media fragment as one that could potentially be combined again, differently. He flays, spoils and stretches them to fit them together, resulting in loops in which the traces of his interventions are always perceptible. His videos, rooted in repetition and gradual transformation, employ techniques associated with experimental music production and non-narrative cinema. A central visual element frequently remains the focal point of the camera, around which the entire world seems to revolve. As an image of our perception of this world, the assembled elements point to an unseen cosmos of social abstraction, unconscious thought and discarded sensory impressions.
Masharani himself is nonetheless always present: sometimes explicitly, through a camera pan to his own face, or more subtly, through animated interventions that deliberately emphasise the subjective reworking of the material. In addition, aspects of the artist’s biography are encoded within the work – particularly his interest in how traversing urban space transforms consciousness, and his recent experience with illness. Through a combination of direct representation of individual elements in their surroundings and the demonstrative transformation of images and sounds, he moves between documentary modalities and artificial, abstract dreamscapes. The friction between representation and abstraction creates effects of recognition or misrecognition, estrangement or objectification, stuckness or unmooredness, disorientation or uncanny awareness.
His drawings often emerge as successive variations on an initial motif. Comparable to the individual frames of a hand-drawn animation, the works in his series follow a sequence that forms a comprehensive whole but resists chronological logic. The results are composed of deliberate lines and absent-minded strokes without figurative intention. Occasionally, however, representational forms appear – in this exhibition, the motif of the Earth recurs. This is a depiction of an undeniable fact that few of us have seen in its entirety with our own eyes. Since its entry into the popular imagination, the iconic image of our planet has been a focal point for the fears and hopes of emancipatory politics, functioning simultaneously as an abstraction and a representation of an elusive concept of a complex unity.
Masharani’s accumulated marks proceed at varying velocities as they encounter blockages, split into tributaries, form reservoirs and spill over. Thus, they aim to link various qualities of cognition – altered, discontinuous, ambient, scattered, roving or focussed. Through a series of reactions to happenstance, the final formations reveal that they are dependent on gestures: an initial mark, a compositional decision or an element of collage structures the destiny of the following steps and, ultimately, the whole work. Abstraction thereby also doubles as a language for understanding artistic practice in general. The drawings are created in parallel to Masharani’s video productions and propel his entire practice forward; they capture and contain various states of artistic concentration.
As he moves back and forth between close examination and a broader perspective with his almost meditative works, he continuously asks the question: What am I looking at? This enquiry stems from a desire to investigate the interplay between intuition and deliberation. For his first institutional solo exhibition, Masharani presents a body of work that diagrams the trajectory of a roving practice. His playful approach to permutation and transformation underscores the potential of these dynamics to reveal how structures can evolve and change.
The exhibition is curated by Otto Bonnen
