U. Kanad Chakrabarti is an artist based in London and New York. His cross-media practice includes video, installation and writing. It is an enquiry that starts outside the world of art, particularly in finance and mathematics. He questions notions of originality and appropriation, the place of art in society, and the credibility of institutional critique under Late Capitalism. Often his work takes a temporal perspective, making a ‘history installation’ of quasi-fictional narratives, thus relating, but without simplifying, obscure or difficult topics, to a general viewer.
Shift + F9 (2015, 4’00”)
In Shift+F9 I had been thinking about energy and power – such as offshore oil platforms or fusion reactors. Conceptually and formally, the video was about models – whether in 3-D computer graphics, or, as evoked by Bloomberg screens, derivatives models. In 2014, six years after the financial crisis, I was particularly interested in how (economic, social, cultural) models get stressed and eventually fracture, sometimes catastrophically. At a poetic level, nowhere is this more evident than in images of the cities, once powerful yet now ruined, laid into dust by the wrath of shattered gods: Nineveh, Persepolis, Vijayanagara.