Dis.em.Bodied H.ours

In Dis.em.Bodied H.ours, Vinod Balak engages with the ontological primacy allotted to the human condition through a deeply personal journey. In his works, he explores the inescapable mediation of history in producing the humdrum of contemporary living; one made legible through the mundane activities of consumption and possession. However, Balak turns these objects not into passive recipients of human desire, or linear progress, but instead into spectral beings in which human-human and human-nature relations are constantly reconstituted. In other words, Balak fashions a world for us in which the lines that separate humans from the ownership of objects is blurred. There is a subtle, yet immutable, dialectic of production: objects as carriers of human elements and humans assembled as object-bodies. He renders the most mundane objects of our lives into highly charged spectacles of ethical and political reconstruction. Central to his works is an attempt to re-cognise these objects as a product of extraction; of violent severance of someone else's labour. In doing so, he is not coy about unpacking the myriad moments of consumption as particular forms of violence, a distillation of the long arc registers of caste, class and gender that make these quotidian acts of possession and consumption a crude, zero-sum game. A recurring affect is produced through the strange juxtaposition of ordinary objects and discombobulated body parts. The novelty lies in setting these violent acts in the uncanny domain of the home. The onlooker is transported to the unheimlich whereby, Balak strips the comforts and familiarity of a home by placing unsettling, even terrifying objects, amidst its most intimate settings. 

A final word. The works here compel one to see the present as a detritus of a collective past. Balak’s compositions do not celebrate the progressive telos of history, even if applauding them for inverting the telos might feel hasty, or contrived. There is a fragility that his works capture, a moment in collapse, but also on the eve of collapse. A moment, not wholly contingent, not entirely prefigured. But one that rots. In the rot of its objects. In the dismemberment on which the objects were realised.

Shatam Ray