//The Almighty Hit - 2023
'The Almight Hit' is a multi-media project that consists of a single-channel video, a sculpture, a photo montage, and a text piece. It was displayed in an open studio along with the live reading of a text in March 2023 at Jangpura, Delhi. This work responds to the global circulation of sugar as a commodity of colonial extraction and cultivation and examines its links with the rise of modernity in Britain during the 17th century.
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-The single channel video work was produced in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It represents the country’s colonial history and it attempts an indexical mapping of a region’s tumultuous relationship with sugar production. It documents the daily routine formed around a house old object, sugar bowl. As a coastal city with a high humidity levels, Colombo houses a warm, damp environment, ideal for a thriving ant population. The work follows the transformation of a still, house-old object- the sugar bowl - into a phenomenon, where the bowl is activated, almost performatively, to solve a recurring problem of preventing ants from getting into the sugar.
There is a direct reference to the practice of still life, a core exercise that every student undertakes in Art College. Here the changing light and the duration of time become objects of study as opposed to more traditional rendering exercises.
By showing the activated sugar bowl, the work depicts the modern values attached to its preservation. Through this, it hints at the symbolic role of sugar as a product of social 'upper' that has replaced alcohol, an intoxicating depressant that benumbs reason in the age of rationality.
Video link (six minutes excerpt)
Video details : Twenty three minutes, single channel video
- The sculptural piece in the project is a remolded form of the "Sanchi Torso" in sugar. The sculpture is one of two bodhisattvas, or ordinary persons, on the path to Buddhahood, flanking a statue of the Buddha. The sculpture is on exhibit in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in its deformed form. The recasting of the sculpture in sugar remarks on the political nature of a commodity, especially sugar, as it is disfigured, detached, and uprooted from its location and labor.
Made in sugar, 6 X 4 X 3 inches
- This project includes a photomontage depicting an image of the sun captured by NASA in 2019. With this, the work comments on the nature of commodities in the modern world as pure surplus. Georges Bataille refers to the endless prodigality or excess that humans indulge in the trade of energies. Human actions in history are attempts to reciprocate the infinite energy of the sun. The sun for Bataille is the prime and infinite surplus; it is the center of all energies, and to repay the burden is the fundamental existential problem. Modernity, with its progress and surplus, is an attempt to reduce this sun’s gift, the accursed share.
Black and white prints on paper, 33 x 33 inches
- The text piece elaborates on the history and politics of the colonial sugar trade and its transformation into a commodity of global circulation with the rise of modernity.