Planetary Visions: On Manjot Kaur’s Constant Motion

Curated by Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee and Anuj Daga, the first week of VAICA's festival Fields of Vision focused on “Cartographies of Sensation.” Here, each artist’s sensibilities were represented through their works as they played with time and the space of the screen. Weaving together the scientific and speculative fiction in Constant Motion (2018), Manjot Kaur represents some of the themes that her practice has been preoccupied with, specifically decolonising the sovereignty over nature and of the female body.

Kaur’s diverse practice involves different media such as painting and drawing, as well as digital video, performance and performative installations. The first iteration of Constant Motion was, in fact, as a series of thirteen paintings called Random Order. These were inspired by a paper she read called the “Harmonization of Opposites” by Yannis Fikas, which categorises life force as a combination of opposites. While the original paintings are now exhibited at B.N. Goswamy’s house in Chandigarh, they were animated into a three-channel installation as part of the Khoj Peers Residency (supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation), which Kaur had been awarded in 2018. For this edition of VAICA, Kaur synthesised the three channels into a seven-minute film, creating a new order of meaning.

The film begins as flies populate the screen—multiplying seemingly out of control, before they start to vanish. We see diagrammatic representations of microbes, of flowers ready to be pollinated, and stages of human embryonic growth. The scientific coexists with the mythological in the artist’s consciousness as the diagrams of the initial stages of human embryogenesis are accompanied by mahamrityunjaya mantra from the Rigveda—which is invoked to protect from calamities and death. Similarly, the formula for force is placed playfully next to a painting of Hanuman carrying the Dronagiri Mountain, while clouds shaped like spaceships hover around. The simultaneity of such binaries (or multiplicities) adds layers to Kaur’s work as it constantly moves and mutates. The artist pays attention to the minute details of each object, placing them in new contexts that invite different readings. The abstract nature of the work allows for it to be read in an open manner, even as it speaks of larger ecological and socio-political concerns.

Adding another layer to the experience of the work, the soundscape is filled with ordinary machinic sounds. The electronic nature of these sounds creates a certain anxiety as they displace the viewer, puncturing the aesthetic beauty of Kaur’s style with a sense of unease. The sound design draws from Kaur’s video work from 2012, titled The Untalkable, which was also featured as part of “Cartographies of Sensation.” In a conversation, Kaur said that she found the banality of these sounds inspiring, adding that the idea behind the soundscape was to imagine the simultaneity of parallel realities. Kaur’s process while making this work was thus largely instinctive and intuitive, driven by the idea of randomness and order existing as antinomies.

The series seems to follow a certain progression in scale and time. Kaur’s film manages to move from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic and back again seamlessly. At the bottom of the screen, a counter reads out changing numbers. I had initially understood this to represent something similar to the idea of the scale of the universe, but Kaur informed me that it is actually representative of the population growth on a speculative basis from the year that she started making this work to the year 2050, taken from the website worldometer. The multiple ways of measuring operate on several registers, gesturing towards different meanings of time for the cell, the human body and the planets, along with the space occupied by each. The osmotic relationship between artistic and scientific ways of perceiving thus offer speculative possibilities in Kaur’s work. Constant Motion can perhaps be read as a call for new regimes of meaning and sensibilities that accept and understand these multiplicities, in order to foreground a sustainable planetary vision.

To read more about the works featured as part of VAICA's Fields of Vision, please click here, here and here.

All images from Constant Motion by Manjot Kaur. 2018. Images courtesy of the artist and VAICA.