Desire Machine Collective is a group of media practitioners based in Guwahati, in the state of Assam in India. Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, sound, space, photography and objects in their installations and works. Their use of experimental techniques and the political character of their narratives have contributed to their growth as one of the leading artist collaboratives in India's contemporary art scene.
Their works have been showcased at some major international festivals and renowned museums. They were a part of the inaugural Indian Pavilion at the 54th International Art exhibition of the Venice Biennale and nominated for the LUMA award. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.
History
Sonal Jain is a fine arts graduate from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara, Gujarat, India. She subsequently served as a faculty member in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. Mriganka Madhukaillya received a degree in physics from Fergusson College in Pune and completed his postgraduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design. He currently teaches at IIT Guwahati. Their similar concerns and ideas of the nation, the centre-periphery divide and issues like fascism and globalization, led them to negotiate these complex spaces through art.
Influences and Art
Assuming their name and theoretical disposition from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a seminal text from 1972 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Desire Machine Collective seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information. Their primary aim is to ‘confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice through their practice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam, and around the world’. Desire Machine Collective attempts to move beyond a form that is representative and deal with complexities of image construction which deals with image as perception, time and location. They attempt to free the perception from being bound to a single standpoint and immobile eye, thereby challenging the ‘Renaissance perspectival stable view of the viewer looking out of the window, which creates an absolute distinction between the grounded viewer and the world in flux out there brought to focus from this point of grounded vision.’
Their earlier works addressed their interest in explorations into image and representations. ‘25/75’ reveals a world governed by numbers. These numbers are arrived at through dreams and the interpretation of dreams according to a system developed in the realm of the oral cultures of a particular community of people. The title alludes to "Teer" (arrow), a game of betting on numbers, based on the number of arrows that hit a small target. It is a traditional game of archery played in the Khasi Hills, of Meghalaya, Northeast India. Dreams here have a symbolism and bets are made on specific numbers based on the dreams of the previous night.
They have a penchant for creating alternate spaces for art, as evidenced by ‘Periferry’, an alternative artist-led residency programme space situated on the MV Chandardinga, a ferry docked in the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogues across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge. As an extension of Periferry, in 2011, they introduced A+ type, an artist residency programme situated in the city of Guwahati itself.