7:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to invite you to the opening of Feeble Transmitters, a two-person exhibition of works by Tara Aliya Kesavan and Indranil Choudhury. 

The show features paintings, ceramic sculptures, and hybrid objects punctuated with speakers, screens, and projections. The artists invite the viewer into a world filled with feeble transmitters – devices studded with diminutive portals, gently dispatching sounds and images from other places.

Note: The week-long show will also feature two live events, programmed around the themes explored in the show. RESONANT CHAMBERS will present an evening of live sound performances on a quadraphonic sound system, featuring artists that investigate the materiality of sound as central to their practice. LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE features a screening of two films exploring the origins of cinema by Zoe Beloff that are shot on 3D B/W 16mm film. Come through!

Exhibition Note

In this series of paintings, Kesavan chronicles the emergence of the image of the urban, working woman in India. They feature subjects who are absorbed in their daily tasks, at times interacting with apparatus common to laboratory and office environments. Kesavan freezes these passing moments using loose, diaphanous layers of paint. Their swimming surfaces throw these ordinary vignettes into more enchanted territory. The figures seem to occupy a moment suspended in time, their interiority taking precedence over a steady grounding in time and space.

She draws from public and personal records to access this visual imaginary. This includes state sponsored documentary films from the 1950’s – 1970’s modeling the image of the “modern Indian working woman” in a newly independent India; accounts about the life of Saeeda Bano, the first professional female news broadcaster in India; feature films like Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray; as well as stories of her grandmother’s working life as an acoustical engineer at All India Radio, India’s public radio broadcaster.

Kesavan’s sculptures present forms that mix soft curves and lines that evoke the body with the precise cuts and openings of technological devices. Embedded with small, glimmering openings of light and moving images, they stand with one foot in sculptural space and one foot in media space.

The acoustic horn is a motif in Choudhury’s sculptures. Perhaps the most universal sign of sound, the simple yet inviting form beckons viewers to peer into openings that rupture the logic of physical space. Soft trails of sound emanate out of these forms, drawing our attention back to the clay bodies that hold them, literally shaping the sound as it emerges.

Choudhury will also present a series of acrylic pieces that occupy a space between manufactured objects and organic forms. He draws on the material culture of industrial design in audio, and explores the relationships and rituals that people have with consumer technology.

Bios

Indranil Choudhury is an artist from Kolkata, currently based in Brooklyn. His work spans moving images, sound, sculpture, and installation. He has shown work with Locust Projects, Miami, Queens Public Library, and Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. He is an MFA candidate at Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program. He teaches filmmaking, podcasting, and new media at Marymount Manhattan College. He is currently an artist in residence at the Fat Cat Fab Lab makerspace.

Tara Aliya Kesavan is an artist from New Delhi, currently based in New York. She works across painting, sculpture and video. She has exhibited work at Locust Projects, UnionDocs and Center for Performance Research. She teaches at the Film and Media department at Marymount Manhattan College. She helps produce screenings and events at UnionDocs, a center for documentary art in Ridgewood, Queens. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.