jesal kapadia

This is not a...

Video, 2 minutes 30 seconds, 2003

 

Probing the legacy of surrealism, particularly to Rene Magritte's famous painting 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe,' This is not a... attempts to unravel and relexicalize the European avant-garde in the context of metropolitan multiculturalism. The short video performs an ambivalent homage to three ordinary objects used commonly in an Indian household: a coconut grater, a tongue cleaner, and the idli-mold. These everyday instruments also border on the uncanny, displaced from their familiar context of use into a sparse white environment.  

The soundtrack consists of three accompanying musical pieces, which are devotional love songs that have no connection with the everyday character of the 'not objects'. Do they invest the stainless steel objects with a sense of nostalgia, reverence, and even fetishistic desire, or is it that the text is ironic toward this disproportionate affective endowment?

 Jesal Kapadia is an artist from Mumbai, India, now living in New York City. Her work has primarily been in the genre of experimental video and digital print media. Using a tactical approach in developing her projects, the experience of migration with its effects on the human body, psyche, and imagination is what she questions and represents in her work. Drawing from moments in the history of the avant-garde, particularly surrealism, and incorporating ideas from postcolonial feminist theory, her work explores alternative modernities emerging in India and its diaspora.

Jesal Kapadia is also the co-arts editor for Rethinking Marxism and a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant for film and video artists. Her work has been shown at various venues: Experimenta '05 & '06 Film Festival in Mumbai, SENI International Visual Arts Festival in Singapore, Contemporary Arts Center in Lithuania, MIT's Media Test Wall at the List Visual Arts Center, Momenta Art in

Brooklyn, New York, Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City New York, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at the New School University, Art in General in New York and most recently at Artists Space, New York. She currently teaches at the International Center of Photography and CUNY College of Staten Island in New York City and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.