An exploration of works made in sequences or as sets

Nature Morte presents a new group show, entitled, 'Serial Pursuits’, at its Berlin venue. It includes works in various media by artists David Mabb, Manisha Parekh, Dayanita Singh and Audiobombing Crew.

In Manisha Parekh’s new gouache paintings and graphite drawings on paper, her imagery is bio-morphic and seemingly automatic. Successive images build into a canon of identity and cultural inheritance, both Indian and international.

Audiobombing Crew, founded by Markus Zull and Stephan Ebersthäuser in 2003, creates serial sound loops, which are collaged together from analogue sources. The duo works with technical defects and their dynamic manipulation. By mixing Indian pop songs sourced from Bollywood musicals and spoken audio materials, the artists develop sound loops whose repetitive nature resembles the tone of ancient mantras.

Dayanita Singh's work 'Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter)' is a photographic portrait of the MGR Memorial House in Chennai, India. The former private residence of M.G. Ramachandran is now a museum that commemorates the beloved Tamil actor and politician, where his personal belongings are displayed as relics. Singh uses the camera’s special ability to capture loss to create the memory of a memory held up by a lattice of formal repetition.

In David Mabb’s works, namely 'Rhythm 69' and 'Two Squares', various wallpaper and fabric designs of William Morris are spliced together with the avant-garde art of El Lissitzky and Hans Richter. Presented as paintings arranged in formalist grids which mimic the regulative practices of industrial production, his smash-ups of the now haute-bourgeois decorative motifs and the once radical but now sentimentalized utopian experiments are steeped in the irony implicit in negotiating a politicized art practice today.

The London-based artist has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions at venues like the Liverpool Biennial, the Delaware Centre for the Contemporary Arts, and Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto.