The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Being Singular Plural

The exhibition will consist of several newly conceived and specially coproduced projects that celebrate and explore the unobtrusive, the unseen, and the individual nature of life and the moving image. The theories of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ideas of “being singular plural” and “the evidence of film” serve as the intellectual framework for the exhibition. Desire Machine Collective (Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya), whose name derives from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari seeks to redirect attention toward careful looking, watching, and listening. The duo will install a site-specific sound installation Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted (2008/12) as a public art piece outside the museum, and will exhibit two new moving image projects: Residue (2009–12), a 35 mm film installation, and Nishan (2007–), a meditative video installation on the contested region of Kashmir in India. Shumona Goel’s films investigate the stories of people who are often unheard or events that go un-witnessed. For The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Being Singular Plural, she and codirector Shai Heredia, present I am micro (2009–), a 16 mm black-and-white film that mixes documentary, fictional, and philosophical commentary. Amar Kanwar’s complex videos and installations are fragmented narratives of violence, displacement, and resistance told through lyrical images and texts. His The Torn First Pages (2004–08) indirectly portrays (among other stories) the unbelievable horrors perpetrated by the Burmese junta upon its people, as well as the lives of Burmese exiles living in Norway and the United States. Kabir Mohanty also encourages alternative types of visual and auditory experience. Some of his videos can be held in monitors that fit in the palm of one’s hand, while others test the limits of extended screenings. For The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Being Singular Plural, he offers his extended project Song for an ancient land (2003–), which, through its combination of new and archival material and complex camerawork, demands a new kind of viewership. Together with sound engineer Vikram Joglekar, Mohanty has also redesigned his multimedia sound installation In Memory (2009) to specifically respond to the museum galleries.

The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Being Singular Plural is organized by Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.