Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, sound, space, photography and objects in their installations and works.
Their use of experimental techniques and the political character of their narratives have contributed to their growth as one of the leading artist collaboratives in India's contemporary art scene.
Mriganka Madhukaillya received a degree in physics from Fergusson College in Pune and completed his postgraduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design.
Their similar concerns and ideas of the nation, the centre-periphery divide and issues like fascism and globalization, led them to negotiate these complex spaces through art.
Their primary aim is to ‘confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice through their practice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam, and around the world’.
They attempt to free the perception from being bound to a single standpoint and immobile eye, thereby challenging the ‘Renaissance perspectival stable view of the viewer looking out of the window, which creates an absolute distinction between the grounded viewer and the world in flux out there brought to focus from this point of grounded vision.’ Their earlier works addressed their interest in explorations into image and representations.
The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogues across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge.
This soundscape was installed in a public space with subliminal notions of memory, ecology, and geography experienced aurally thereby reclaiming it and rendering it dynamic.
By installing it on the Deutsche Guggenheim's façade, Desire Machine Collective asked whether sound can be regarded as a material thing since, according to local belief, it's forbidden to take out any object from Meghalaya's sacred forest.
The 39 minutes film, ‘Residue’, has images of a disused thermal power plant near Guwahati that's gradually being swallowed up by the surrounding forest.
‘Nishan I’ registers the interior spaces of abandoned houses that bereft of their primary functions serve as bunkers for the army, with traces of the absences that are repressed within them.
DMC has presented their work in numerous group exhibitions including Being Singular Plural, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York City (2012), Intense Proximity, 3rd edition of the La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, India Pavilion, Venice (2011), Indian Highway IV, MAC Muséed’Art Contemporain de Lyon and Indian Highway V, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (2011).
Here is the complete list: ‘Evoking Bodies, Questioning the Nation: Critical Cinema in India’ by Aparna Sharma chapter: An Arrested Eye: Trauma and Becoming in Desire Machine Collective’s Documentary Installations [1] Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 - Professor Sonal Khullar at the University of Washington [2] Noise Life at project 88, Mumbai [3] NAMELESS HERE FOR EVERMORE, Khoj Studios, New Delhi [4] 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 1.A presentation by Desire Machine Collective.
Death Becomes Her: Bombay Cinema, Nation and Kashmir (Kaushik Bhaumik in Conversation with Desire Machine Collective, Guwahati) http://synoptique.hybrid.concordia.ca/index.php/main/article/view/59 19.