Desire Machine Collective

Artists: Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain
Discussant: Pooja Sood

September 19, 2008 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

As a collaborative praxis since 2004, The Desire Machine Collective have located their work through research, process and modes of cultural production that engage with film, multimedia installations, and public spaces. Sonal Jain (b. 1975) and Mriganka Madhukaillya (b. 1978) make up this collective, which originated with a dialogue, and since then it has been located in Guwahati. What this meant was a negotiating and subverting of the hegemony of the ‘centre’ through strategic devices that shape both the content and form of their works. Such negotiation works with the apparatuses of power, either within the nation-state or other knowledge structures. The collective derives its name from the Anti-Oedipus theory, a fundamental philosophical project of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

Locating their practice in a space of “post-authorship”, and in a realm of multiple subjectivities, a large part of their work is about creating a discourse within the visual domain, not necessarily culminating in exhibitions. Their early practice was with time-based moving images, being often overtly political investigations of identity, capital and space. As a trans-local initiative that employs technology for experimental projects with local communities, Periferry 1.0 emerged in 2007 as a logical extension of their practice.

This presentation maps the routes and activities of Desire Machine Collective.