ONLINE EXHIBITION
TALLUR L.N.
Interference
December 2020 - February 2021
Two museum workers stand in front of a near-two-century-old carpet, gripping wooden sticks with which they measure the task at hand. In one smooth motion, they strike the dead surface of the fabric, causing ripples and producing dust the texture of smoke, which then billows and descends on the men. Complemented by a recording of rippling water, the sound conjures the echoes of mortars issuing in the distance. Dust, once hidden in the carpet’s many weaves, fills the scene, and the men seem to vanish within their work.
Interference
The dust from this carpet is the subject of Tallur L.N.’s video Interference (2019), displayed below, where this scene unfolds in slow motion over four minutes. The particular carpet in the video – with its floral patterning and brilliant green – was once presented to Muhammad Mahabat Khan III, the last ruling nawab of the princely state of Junagadh. It was a gift from the jail administration, where imprisoned freedom fighters wove every inch of its body under watchful eyes in the late 1800s. Since then, it has been walked on by many, including ministers, royalty, guests, colonial officers, executives and curators. The dust, and its explosive re-entrance into the world of today, embodies time itself, and its slow trudge across the carpet’s length over all these decades.
Born in Koteshwara, Karnataka in 1971, Tallur now works between Bengaluru and Seoul, focusing on site-specific installations and interactive media. Using a variety of materials – including bronze, silver, stone, wood, coins, LED screens and machines – his work often explores the binaries between the sacred and the secular, purpose and futility and the generative and destructive. Tallur is interested in the anxieties, fears and desires that shape history, colonialism and global capitalism, and his work pushes us to reconsider the accumulation of meaning over time, opening up the relationship between object and symbol for deeper investigation.
'Interference' was made in partnership with the Junagagh Museum in Gujarat, India. Special thanks to the Junagadh Museum; Varia Kiran, Videography; Vandita Jain, sound engineer; and Bhanu Prasad Singh.