Thomas Erben Gallery presents the first US solo exhibition of Ashok Sukumaran, an artist increasingly recognized for his conceptually oriented new-and-old media interventions into the urban infrastructure. Over the past year, Sukumaran has produced work in a variety of contexts, including self-initiated projects in Mumbai and Bangalore, comissioned public art in the US, on the media festival curcuit and at art-world venues including the 2006 Singapore Biennale, his work has recieved major honors, such as a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica, 2007, and First Prize at the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, 2005.

On view is the video documentation of Glow Positioning System, a seminal work from 2005, as well as two other works on video: Two Poles and One Agreement, from the artist's ongoing Recurrencies series.

Glow Positioning System (large projection, duration 5:50 min.):
A crank-driven panorama of lights, mostly cheap "chinese" decorative lights, in a giant and oddly shaped loop around the GPO Kabutarkhana Chowk in Fort, Mumbai. This project was realized as a large collaboration between the artist, street decorators, and over forty neighborhood agents. The panorama refers to various traditions of imaging and "tourism," from crank-driven scrolling canvases to cinema itself.

Two Poles (right monitor, duration 4:45 min.):
A modification of a decorator's pattern box, resulting in a half-kilometer long line of light, that could be activated by a switch at each end. Because of this size, the "decoration" exceeds its original site on the Banda promenade, disappears over the horizon, and ends up in a no-man's land at the edge of the Danda fishing village. With time, the smooth back and forth of a proto-signaling system is disturbed by boys on the Danda end, who engage in tactics of refusal, jamming and the occasional auto-rickshaw trip to spy on the others at the other end.

One Agreement (left monitor, duration 3:45 min.):
An agreement of electrical "sharing" between two consumers, the owner of apartment on the Banda promenade, and a sandwich vendor on the street below. The vendor can control the current distribution from a set of dimmers. The vendor's light is exactly inversely proportional to a light in the apartment owner's living room and the speed of his fan is exactly the inverse of the speed of the owner's fan above. In this way the vendor draws electical power when required, while the system maintains the total energy consumption at the original level. There is no physical cable between the two (their electricity comes from separate sources, the control is wireless), which makes sharper the provocation within this para-legal arrangement: that such "micro-contacts" can be potentially made by any parties, anywhere.

Sukumaran presents the title "Forms of Address" as a way to consider the point of "address" as separate moment from the act of "communication." "Address" marks a potentially because it is the point at which communication can begin to occur, or can fail by refusal. As the artist puts it, "The address, apart from its meaning as a physical locator, marks the point in communication where the distance between the addresser and the addressee is expressed, is not yet collapsed."

The catalog accompanying the exhibition contains essays by Nancy Adajania and Erkki Huhtamo.

Ashok Sukumaran, born 1974 in Sapporo, Japan, holds degrees in both architecture (B.Arch., the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi), and media art (MFA, University of California, Los Angeles). He currently lives and works in Mumbai, India. He is a co-initiator of CAMP, a platform for cross-disciplinary practice including the arts, based in Mumbai.