An artist duo treading an unconventional path

The sudden bout of fame and recognition thanks to their selection for the official India Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale has suddenly catapulted Desire Machine Collective to the very centre of the contemporary Indian art scene. It’s a major achievement and milestone for the two young artists - Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain.

The seeds of the artistic duo, as has been reported, lie in the 2002 communal riots in the state of Gujarat. Both Madhukaillya and Jain were in Ahmedabad at that point. The latter taught at the National Institute of Design (NID) and he doing his post-graduation (cinema), when they witnessed the violence after the tragic burning of a train. It was, states Mriganka Madhukaillya, something that ‘we probably failed to understand’.

That painful experience was what prompted their decision to go back to Guwahati. The other and perhaps more important one was their keenness to address the core ‘problem’, as he describes it, with ‘the notion of the north-east’. ‘Periferry 1.0’ (the pun in the title underlines the centre-margin dialectic), their most noteworthy piece, addresses just the very issues.

Their art project, Periferry, was supported in part by the New Delhi based artist-led platform for experimentation, Khoj. However, the arrangement will come to an end later this year. Thankfully, Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) has funded the venture on a project basis, informs Mriganka Madhukaillya who now is associated with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati as a teacher.

A series of international showings does help to attain fame and name. For instance, the collective will be showing at the renowned NGBK Gallery, Berlin. Madhukaillya Jain explains in an interview: “Often you receive a production fee and not a commission as many well-known artists often do. The journey of artists treading an unconventional path is never easy, it’s evident. Desire Machine Collective’s journey is a testimony to this…