Installation
KAIROI

By Sonam Chaturvedi

Fri, 20.09.2019 -
Sat, 21.12.2019
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

A vending machine, which processes time to give products, instead of money. People will be interacting with the machine by spending time standing in front of it, and according to the duration of time spent, they will get a product. The machine will play a sound message from the beginning till the visitor leaves with his/her product, and it will keep accumulating time.

A vending machine is usually located in places of transit, where people are in constant movement, in a rush, and want to quickly grab eatables to save time. But what if, instead of money, they have to spend time to get the product through a vending machine which reads time as currency. The amount of time spent sitting in front of the machine gives the person a product of that particular duration, without exercising their power to choose. Time is materialized and felt through a slow pace as one sits in front of the machine and waits, and as one tries to catch it, it stretches further away, endlessly. The work questions the role of time in consumerism, and the capitalist co-dependence of time and production. The capitalist project to give variety of things to choose from, to customize them, use various schemes, buy things online to save time, accumulate commodities, all these fronts are questioned through this work.

Actant

Sonam Chaturvedi is an intermedia artist based in New Delhi. Her practice spans through various niches broadly involving experiential, immersive, psychological experiments questioning the constructs of Time and Memory. They materialise through immersive video installations, film-essay, sound, found objects, artist’s books, automated-calling system and instruction-based art, amongst others. She has an MFA from Shiv Nadar University and has participated in various art exhibitions and residencies including, Imagined Futures Reconstructed Pasts curated by Meera Menezes at Bikaner House, apple in dream mode curated by John Xaviers at Mumbai Art Room, Random Variables curated by Ushmita Sahu at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, Winnipeg, Canada and Artist-residency at Kammari Residency, Cyprus, among others. She is presently teaching at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat.                                                                             To know more: www.sonamchaturvedi.com