The Arts Catalyst and P3 present
THE NEIGHBOUR
Ashok Sukumaran
“The neighbour, neither friend nor enemy, is the one who may not be in your "network", but is nevertheless in your world.” (Sukumaran)
An Arts Catalyst commission
13 March – 9 April 2009
P3, University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, UK
Admission free
Opening hours: 11am – 6pm Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun and 11am – 8pm Thu
Forum: Who is the Neighbour / What is the Neighbourhood?
Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 6 – 8pm
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 March, The Arts Catalyst and P3 present The Neighbour in the P3 space, a giant former concrete-testing hall, deep under the University of Westminster in central London.
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.
These two objects, from the inside and out, ask us to inhabit questions about the contemporary “housing industry”, the overlaps in our landscapes of desire, of crisis, and the psychic dimensions of enclosure and spacing that have evolved not just among people, but also among competing machines, and their regulatory frameworks.
Sukumaran says: “these are maybe second cousins, somewhere between the family and the polis. They are neighbours as a result of a mutual migration, from more traditional forms of modernity. This is an allegory of neighbourhood, a result our inability to fully escape each other.”
Psychological analyses of the neighbour (from Freud to Zizek) suggest the “logical tragedy” of the Judeo-Christian injunction to love thy neighbour “as thyself”. The landscape darkens, and curiosity, obsession and suspicion appear as deep forces that overflow the ideology of tolerance, or “safe distance” from the other. Still the neighbour remains largely unknowable, opaque.
Sukumaran: “Lurkers, pests, potential collaborators, potential spies, potential contaminants seems to appear often in our recent work. Their threat or presence shapes relations, and gives rise to the leaks, negotiations and traversals that we are interested in, those that test the older network paradigms.”
Ashok Sukumaran (b.1974) came to international prominence with the extraordinary work Glow Positioning System, 2005: a public lighting installation that involved street decorators, shop owners and residents to produce a giant panorama of lights, across a city square in Bombay, that one could move with a small hand-crank. His recent work is commissioned and exhibited internationally. In 2008, he co-founded CAMP, a space for critical artistic research, imagination, and archiving projects.
Sukumaran,was awarded the first prize of the 2005 UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and received a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica, 2007. He recently showed (with Shaina Anand) the video ensemble “Lossfulness” in the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London and is currently developing (with CAMP) a two-part work on the sea trade to Somalia, for the Sharjah Biennale, 2008.
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Forum: Who is the Neighbour / What is the Neighbourhood?
Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 6 – 8pm
P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, UK
This forum will open up discussion around issues raised by Ashok Sukumaran’s The Neighbour. Have the techno-utopias of communal communication been supplanted by technologies of paranoia, voyeurism and stalking? How can we then be curious, how can we be generous? When our designed means of escape, such as the mobile home, do not in fact succeed in their escape, what happens next?
Speakers include Ashok Sukumaran, Prof. David Garcia (Dean, Chelsea College of Art & Design) and Prof. Murray Fraser (School of Architecture & the Built Environment, University of Westminster). Chaired by Nicola Triscott (Director, The Arts Catalyst
ACCESS: BSL interpreted. Wheelchair access. Please call to enquire about other access needs.
FREE. Advance booking is highly recommended.
To book, call Lala Thorp on +44 (0) 20 7375 3690 or email admin@artscatalyst.org
Supported by The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and the Centre for Architecture & the Built Environment, University of Westminster, The Arts Catalyst and P3.
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The Neighbour is commissioned by The Arts Catalyst in partnership with P3.
The Arts Catalyst is a leading London based interdisciplinary art organisation commissioning new work that experimentally and critically engages with science.
P3 is a 14000 square ft space developed from the vast former concrete construction hall for the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering. The Ambika P3 programme commissions artists and researchers across creative disciplines.
The Neighbour is funded by Arts Council England and Ambika P3.
For press information, please contact Alison Wright at alison@alisonwrightpr.com or T: +44 (0)1608 811 474 or 07814 796 930
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