Nikhil Vettukattil is developing a multichannel video and sound installation, with the working title ‘Decade 2014-2024’. The work consists of a three-screen video of edited news footage, remixed and sampled music, lectures and political speeches montaged and remixed together. The sound and image will overlap to bring unexpected visual and auditory juxtapositions that might present non-linear ways to think about relations between seemingly unconnected objects and events.
The exhibition will invite conversations about the source material, on how we might collectively narrate the recent past, build counter narratives, draw timelines, arrange text and images collectively, or re-examine past events in light of our current political conjuncture.
Cosmopolitical in perspective, the project nonetheless focuses on particular thematics within environmental and liberation movements, feminist and LGBTQI struggles, indigenous and decolonial histories, border politics, all drawn from existing digital archives. These will be processed in a highly subjective, tangential and fragmentary way. The intention is to make speculative connections between histories that are often viewed in isolation rather than part of an intersectional network of mutually reinforcing and global processes, sampling and editing sound and video to make abrasive and durational remixes.
Bio: Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist living and working in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, their practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences. They studied at Central St. Martins in London and the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP). Recent exhibitions include Hothouse Flowers, Podium, Oslo (2024), Postproduction, Studiengalerie 1.357 Goethe University, Frankfurt (2023), Contaminators (with Halvor Rønning), FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023) and Claustrophobia Alpina III, Ford, Geneva (2023). They are a founding member of The Institute for Scene Experiments. Forthcoming solo presentations include Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo, Arcadia Missa, London and AGIT, Berlin.