Horses in the air: D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi

23 September - 20 October 2017

The title of the exhibition references the iconic work of Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer. Known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, Muyrbidge refined his methods of instantaneous photography which he then used to photograph a horse in motion using a battery of cameras with tripwires, each of which triggered a picture for a split second as the horse ran past, their shutters set off by the animal’s movement over the wires arranged in its path. A technical and a conceptual breakthrough, the resulting series of stop-motion images proved that all of a racehorse’s hooves were, in fact, off the ground simultaneously at some point in the course of its run. This 19th century study of equine locomotion demonstrated that the human eye, otherwise unsuited to notice the details of fast motion, was now enabled by technology to decipher the most minute details by freezing moments on matter.

Taking off from this cue, the exhibition focuses, through the works, on technology as it has mutated over time and the effect such mutations have had on the image. The works of the aforementioned artists inquire into the immersive quality of cinema and the philosophy of seeing, as cinema and art history come to inform and borrow from each other in terms of iconography and artistic tropes, in the attempt to create inventive visual data that complement their vision for such an amalgamation. The exhibition is directed at testing the viewer’s responses to the artwork concerned as it is mediated by a technologically-saturated habitus.