“Sculptural audiovisual installations allow us to plant one foot in real space and one foot in virtual space, letting us build worlds that respond to a physical environment while creating openings to other imagined places. We enjoy the chance discoveries of found objects as a starting point for our work. As the sculptural pieces come together, we start sketching out images and sounds that might animate them. For this work, we want to contrast traces of human habitation with speculations about how we may reimagine our relationship with non-human worlds.” 

 - Tara Aliya Kesavan & Indranil Choudhury

Locust Projects presents Current Occurrences, the eighth edition of the LAB MFA summer exhibition program featuring Tara Aliya Kesavan and Indranil Choudhury, MFA candidates at Hunter College, The City University of New York. The exhibition opens to the public with a preview and reception on Saturday, July 23 from 6-8pm, and is on view through August 13 from 11am-5pm. Admission is free.

During their month-long residence, Tara Aliya Kesavan and Indranil Choudhury will create an installation with found objects, animation, and sound. The artists will bring domestic forms to life by activating them with hand drawn layers of projected imagery and spatialized sound, building an imagined world teeming with non-human activity. 

Titled Current Occurrences, the show uses objects that act as thresholds - doors, grilles, screens - to create sites where indoor and outdoor, real and virtual, human and non-human collide. A floating door becomes a portal into a domestic space where spectral presences carry out curious routines. Ornate grilles take turns to hum, transmitting snatches of sounds from a disembodied choir. Fragments of brick lattices create openings for skittering creatures to wander and return. 

Tara and Indranil draw from artistic practices that preserve the tactility and craft of classical forms while being open to the creative possibilities of new technology. These include Shigeko Kubota’s exploration of landscapes through a hybrid practice that complicates the categories of sculpture, readymades and video; Tabaimo’s site-specific video installations that confront viewers with surreal, animistic worlds through the visual idiom of Japanese woodblock prints; and Shahzia Sikander’s expansion of cultural boundaries within Indo-Persian painting.

In her moving image practice, Tara uses a mix of materials like watercolors, charcoal, and chemigrams to create handmade images that she digitally animates. Indranil composes spatial sound works by collaging field recordings, found sounds, and music.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Tara Aliya Kesavan is an artist working across drawing, film and sculpture. She teaches in the Film and Media Department at Hunter College. She also works as the Programs Coordinator at UnionDocs. She is a candidate for an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, CUNY. 

Indranil Choudhury is a media artist working in sound, sculpture and video. He teaches at Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College. He is a candidate for an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, CUNY. 

Together their recent work includes: 2022 Queens Public Library Podcast, 2021 Jamaica Flux, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, NY; 2020 IART, Hunter College, NY; 2019 M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Kowloon, Hong Kong