Kaushal Sapre & Mohit Shelare

About the Actants

Mohit Shelare is a practitioner investigating the body and its documentation. The intersection of performance and its recall with diversity informs his work. His methods of rethinking the event problematize the designs of understanding. He is aware of the politics of exclusion and underlines the modes of resistance in his actions. He is interested in the technology of biopolitics. Shelare has a BFA degree from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai (2015), and an MFA from Shiv Nadar University, Uttar Pradesh, (2017). Currently, he is participating in the Home Workspace Program 8th edition, Ashkal Alwan, Lebanon.   
                                            
Kaushal Sapre is an artist based in Delhi. He is interested in how technology reconfigures social and individual experiences, especially in the context of the digital milieu. He responds to these questions by hacking into technological artefacts using programming, DIY electronics, image and sound processing and other creative research based practices such as drawing and text.  He is also especially interested in sound and makes his own digital and physical instruments. Sapre has an MA in visual art practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi (2017) and has a background in engineering and physics.

Chhaap tilak sab chheeni is a collaborative project initiated by Mohit Shelare and Kaushal Sapre. Inspired by Amir Khusro’s intimate description of the stripping away of his symbolic identity just by meeting eyes with his spiritual mentor, Shelare and Sapre would like to explore questions around contact, intimacy, control and the making and unmaking of identity through contemporary biometric technologies. After a brief period of research and experimentation, the project will culminate in an intensive workshop where they will collectively try to produce alternate relationships with technologies such as fingerprint and iris scanners, touch sensors and their software counterparts through performance and play. Questions like ‘Can the act of touching an interface become an incident?’, ‘What does it mean to fool a fingerprint scanner?’ and ‘How can biometric apparatus be repurposed?’ lie at the heart of their inquiry.