KAFKA’S CASTLE
Photo Installation (2017)'Art project that strikes a chord - Read-life embedded performance series by Amitesh Grover' - Art India
'CCTV footage placards with a singular word in an office-like space, creating a poetic sentence.' - Open The Magazine
Under the auspices of an art commission, I approached HCL Tech Pvt Ltd. for a placement in their company. HCL Tech Pvt Ltd is the biggest IT company in India. I proposed an employment contract in which I declared the request for a job as an art project. Millions of young Indians graduate in computer sciences every year in the hope that they are able to land a job in the booming tech economy of India. As someone who belongs to that demographic - male, in my thirties, having completed certificate courses in computers at college - I conceived of this art project as an exercise in occupational realism. By going to ‘work’ everyday, I embedded a series of performance acts that somehow allowed me to highlight the structure of social and political relations with all its ambiguities. I wanted to depict labour or labouring bodies, placed right next to the artist’s body.
I decided to adorn the artifice of the worker, dress as a subject of the company, working for the company, and yet somehow continue to pursue it as an artist. My intent was to appear as a worker, to learn the work of computer engineers, to go to office everyday, to get wages, to perform. Inhabiting this dual role of the artist and the worker needed rehearsal, but there wasn’t any opportunity; to occupy the position of an employee, but self-identifying as outsider; imbuing actions with a ‘hidden’ value, executing the job in the name of the company, and in the name of art, had to be learnt on the job. What is performing at work, and what is the work of performance? How is productivity, idleness, and attention measured and quantified across the dispensable resource of contemporary digital capital? The photo-prints below are low-resolution provocations inserted as ‘noise’ amidst a vortex of signals generated from various working sites for a company’s CCTV monitoring system. The resulting composition is a choreography of quiet thoughts exteriorised and staged for the surveillance archive, and left for the system to decode and reassemble.
Performed by Amitesh Grover (in collaboration with Arnika Ahldag | Medium: Single Channel Projection OR 65 low-resolution photography prints on sun board | With support from Akanksha Rastogi (Curator, KNMA), Gyanendra Sinha, Hendry Peter Hunt and Sanjay at HCL Sector 126, Noida | Printed at Digital Image Solutions, Delhi | Originally commissioned for and showed at the exhibition Hangar For The Passerby, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
Related iteration - https://amiteshgrover.com/leaky-folds
