Aditya Mandayam "Zoon in a Zoot-Suit"

2014 02 07 — 2014 03 16 at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre
Author Echo Gone Wrong
Published in Events in Latvia

kim? Contemporary Art Centre invites to the opening of solo-exhibition by Aditya Mandayam “Zoon in a Zoot-Suit” on February 7 at 7pm – 10pm. Opening will be accompanied with a performance by “Black Mamba”: UFO VIP ICI

Let us bend light!

Aditya Mandayam. "Iliulu Uliilu", 2013

Aditya Mandayam. “Iliulu Uliilu”, 2013 

 

What is a lens?

– A lens is anything that bends light.

 

What bends light?

– All sorts of glass, plastic, feldspar, translucent and transparent objects bend light.

Gravity also bends light. This means anything with mass is a lens.

You are a lens. I am a lens. Every object around you is a lens. We all are lenses.

The effect is invisible at the human scale, of course. But at the galactic or cosmic level, gravitational

lensingeffects become nontrivial, even useful to the human species.

Adorno once described the world as a place of distortions, and to make sense of it requires looking at it through a distorted lens – what we recognise are distortions of distortions. We need to mutilate images in order to see the mutilations, so to speak. To those of us in the age of the computer, this seems obvious.

“Zoon in a Zoot-Suit” is a plate of various objects proposed to deal very much with one’s own perception. The movement from the male gaze and the phallic gesture, sweetmeats, smells, and moving images leaves us lonesome, facing various shades of yellow: a blanket, curcuma-dyed, brass, piss, velour furoshiki, pickled radish and rock sugar, agar- agar, jackfruit, yellow paper and chalk, euros, paper from old books, deep fried canvas, raw linen in chickpea batter, deep-fried in musta rd oil..

Aditya Mandayam is a travel and lifestyle writer from the Near East. He has performed under the names “Yayati Papita, That Palpitating Talapati”, “Popobobo Oddodood”, and most recently, “Ekko Lokkwa”. Recent and upcoming shows include “The Pink Spy” at MHKA, Antwerp, “MAKEDO DOMAKE” at the Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam, “Lizzard Lounge” at the National Museum of Art, Harare, Zimbabwe, and “Fusiform Gyrus” at the Lisson Gallery, London. Mandayam was an artist-in-residence at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts 2012 – 2013, and at Kiosko, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia in 2011. See cixa.org for more.