Suchitra Gehlot’s recent installation reflects her inability to control her digital addiction and finding an outlet for it in jars. She talks to Divya Kaushik about coming up with innovative and highly interactive pieces
The title of her installation, Shut Up, Internet, might convey that the artist is highly irritated by the digital space, but that’s actually not the case. Suchitra Gehlot says that the title has more to do with her own habits and the way she is occupied with the Internet. “It is a commentary on my own behaviour with the Internet. There is so much that it offers to us but we tend to make our own convenient choices from it. For example, I have an option to read something that’s useful to me or to download a piece of information, but I might end up watching some video which is of least importance to me. The title, Shut Up, Internet, conveys my need and desire to find the moment of quiet and avoid the immediate response to any digital update. For an instance, we are so used to checking mails or exploring new apps that as soon as the lights on our phones blink we leave everything to update ourselves on that. So the title signifies my desire to cut off a little from this addiction and find some peace away from the digital world,” explained the artist, whose first installation, One Thousand Tears, displayed at India Art Fair in 2009 got her wide acclaim. “It was about the relationship that each one of us have with tears. For some tears roll down during an emotional moment, but I had a very mechanical relationship with tears. I was suffering from migraine and I only shed tears when in extreme pain. I asked the people to write what had made them cry last. The responses shared reasons like loss of love to pain. I used a vintage printer to print these on labels, and stuck them on vials,” shared Suchitra, a Gurgaon-based artist.
Her other installation, Some Days I Wake Up Thinking Is There Really A God, showed 100 spilled ice cream cones. It was her comment on the wasted and spilled ice cream. Each of your work is highly innovative and interactive as the artist feels “there should be a quality of empathy in her works.”
Shut Up, Internet, at Alliance Francaise, is an installation of 60 suspended jars that contain 40,000 emails dating from 1995 that have been torn to pieces. Bits of paper fly to a controlled turbulence within each jar. The jars are arranged in a linear fashion and suspended from the ceiling so as to meet the viewer’s gaze. While there is something hypnotic about watching shards fly furiously in the same place, the flight sequence is programmed to stop and start again. For a brief few seconds, one is able to catch glimpses of notes, a word here or there before taking flight again. And as Gahlot says, these seemingly self-contained cells of chaos are reflective of the artist’s own struggles with digital living. The shreds of paper were once Gahlot’s personal emails. “I was indiscriminate in the selection of emails. The web quantifies everything, the phantom of the ‘zero-inbox’ is reasonably hardwired into our relationship with emails. Communication mostly boils down to how many you read or didn’t read and not necessarily who wrote in. For the most part emails lack intimacy, anyone can have access to you without you having a say. From my own inboxes of forty thousand emails, the ones that matter are only in double digits,” she said. Adding, “The installation itself is a response to the information deluge that we encounter every day. Years of enjoying the Internet have also brought with it a tremendous impatience; now we can barely spend any time with something of interest before hopping on to the next enticing hyperlink. As an artist it is my attempt to find pockets of reflection and silence. Shut Up, Internet came about as a compulsion. It’s an 18-year-relationship that’s finally come to bear. I belong to a generation who were at the cusp of the old and new. We watched it come into our lives and as we watch it take over our lives. I don’t resent the Internet but I do despair when I find myself enslaved to it. The installation is a manifestation of a digital addiction that I have always wanted to control but never managed to. Being addicted to the Internet is easy because it gives you everything you want, when you want it and you allow it in places so private that soon you don't have any places of solitude. There now exist waterproof phones because a study indicated that women like texting in the shower!”
The exhibition continues at Alliance Francaise till September 4 and will continue at the Shrine Gallery from September 9 till October 5.