Amba Sayal Bennett: A Mechanised Thought
16 October - 17 December
indigo+madder is delighted to present A Mechanised Thought, Amba Sayal-Bennett’s first solo exhibition in the UK.
Amba’s new body of work includes sculptures and drawings that explore the performativity of technology and relations to otherness.
Abstraction allows for instability and multiplicity, a possible means of communing with difference without it being instrumentalised. In addition to working with processes of abstraction, Amba explores our use of language, scientific methods, and her own encounters with materials in the studio, as staging relations to otherness in the form of the non-human.
Connected to this is an interest in Posthumanism. Ninety five percent of the neurotransmitters in our brain are made by bacteria in our gut, which makes it hard to say where the human ends and microbiome begins. Amba is not only concerned with these biological instances, but also with other encounters that extend our notions of the makeup of ‘human’ subjectivity. Centra, a modular hanging structure that sits somewhere between vertebrae and shedded skin, the former the body’s information highway and latter its interface, resonates with Amba’s making process. Whether using a drawing stencil in her works on paper, or a computer modelling program such as Rhino, she explores how, rather than being passive tools, these apparatuses have agency. Her works develop through human-material feedback systems resulting in a hybridised aesthetic. Composed of various organic and inorganic parts, her practice operates as a cyborg assemblage, much like the thinking, speaking and writing subject that she considers in this exhibition.
Language serves as our dominant cognitive technology—it is used by humans however it is non-human. As a kind of prosthesis, it enables different extensions of thought. Language is other but it also others. It has been used as a tool of colonisation. Amba is interested in what biases are built into the infrastructure of the technologies that we inherit (language included), what inequalities they enact and perpetuate. Writing systems are means of communication that function through the removal of the embodied and speaking subject. Claims to objectivity are often delivered in the third person, where universalism is favoured over positionality. From pastel colour palettes to ideological positions, neutral tones display a cool and detached sensibility. The clinical shades of the works: mint green and off-white, along with clean lines and smooth surfaces conspire to create an austere environment. The work explores the more sinister aspects of processes of disembodiment and sublimation and how they function as mechanisms of power. Scientific experiments similarly function through processes of exclusion: the removal of contaminants (including the human body) to observe, through machine vision, a predetermined object of attention.
Informed by her time spent at CERN last year, where she was struck by the vast subterranean architecture used to find the Higgs boson, a particle that was believed to exist some time before its discovery, Amba describes how the repetitive experiments used in its detection felt ritualistic, and how the material infrastructure of the Hadron Collider seemed to enact this belief. Throughout the exhibition, forms are often doubled. Blur is a layering of a single form, offset and visually hard to focus on, whilst the repeated structures Oure and Seynt are reminiscent of church altars, objects found in religious inner sanctums and engaged in ceremonial practice. Repeatability in science is a means of verifying hypothesis. It can be an industrial and mechanised act, but it can also be meditative, ritualistic and performative. A Mechanised Thought is a unique testing ground; material experiments offering a partial perspective into questions around the performativity of technology and non-human agency.
Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991) lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in The History of Art from The Courtauld Institute. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Amba is a co-founder of Cypher Billboard, an artist-run public program of site-specific billboard artworks and off-site projects based in London. Her recent exhibitions include A Plot for the Multiverse, indigo+madder, London, 2019, ABSINTHE §2, Spit and Sawdust, London, 2019, Espacio, Luz y Orden, José de la Fuente, Santander, 2019, Every Line Makes a Cut (solo), Carbon 12, Dubai, 2019. Amba’s works are in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Art Jameel, and the Saatchi Collection.
Fleshy Translations
By Moad Musbahi
I,
We do not know what the body is capable of.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
The Great Vowel Shift is an event whose reverberations are still heard today, a phonetic rupture that has had a lasting echo from the 14th century. It occurred over a three-hundred-year period that began contemporary to the Great Famine and the Black Plague. These were all occurrences that prompted the mass migration and displacement of people, matter and in the case of the Shift, the dislocation of the breath traveling through the larynx, the mouth and out into the atmosphere. A resonant migration that continues to be felt across the hard border of the auditory canal.
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INSTALLATION VIEWS
SELECTED WORKS
SCULPTURES FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
From 10.11.2020 onwards, we’ll be sharing Amba Sayal-Bennett’s digital drawings, made during England’s second lockdown, while the physical show remains closed.
“Initially I was using Rhino to design sculptural works and to prepare my designs for physical output such as 3D printing, CNC milling and plasma cutting. During the first lockdown when I had no studio access, I began to use the program more freely. Without having to consider different material constraints like gravity, distortion caused by welding, or tolerance, I started to create digital drawings that were never intended to be made. For this second (hopefully shorter) lockdown, I will create a series of drawings to occupy this online space while the physical exhibition remains closed.”
- ASB
