?1972 (Darmstadt), lives and works in Darmstadt and Frankfurt
ABOUT SANDIP SHAH AND HIS ARTISTIC WORK
Sandip Shah is 35 years old. He graduated from the St‰del Academy of Fine Arts, Frankfort, where he studied with Hermann Nitsch; since then, he has been living and working at Frankfort and Darmstadt simultaneously. In his artistic work he regularly combines elements of painting, video and installation art, with his thematic subjects revolving around phenomena of contemporary society which he explores in manifold ways by means of space-related projects. Central to them is Shahís own apartment: a publicly lived-in art installation accessible also to visitors, a kind of research lab of things happening inside and outside.
Last year Sandip Shah included into his sphere of activities a small studio within the ìATELIERFRANKFURTî studio complex close to the main railway station. He felt inspired by the hustle and bustle of big city life, with all its noise, multiculturalism, and vibrant pulse. In situ he developed his ìProject: Sicherheitsb¸roî (bureau of security) which he keeps pursuing into the future, always on the look-out for new contexts. He started this project by occupying the porterís office, long-ago deserted, of the Frankfort police headquarters and replacing the absent porter with a surveillance camera. The result was a communication between man and machine. A fictitious bureau of security was born. In the course of this several-weeks-long art operation, everybody entering the door of the building was conspicuously filmed and, at the same time, confronted via monitor with his own vanity.
With this project, the artist comments on the surveillance mania which he sees on the rise in our cities, and he does so by slipping into the role of the controlling agents of the state machinery. Thereby, he links the Orwellian ìBig Brotherî-complex with human narcissism and everybodyís unquenchable longings for feeling like a super-star.
Additionally, from the authentic video surveillance material Shah procures innumerable black-and-white video stills, turning them into computer prints of the protagonists (most of whom he doesnít even know). These he later arranges into wall-size total pictures, thus bringing order into a crowd of people permanently moving to and fro. Sometimes he even enlarges details of his choice, turning them into anonymous phantom images and reducing them beyond recognition: pixel-riddled blow-ups, distorted portraits of personalities rendered all the more anonymous by partial use of black light.
Those figures recorded in digital light impulses may, however, take on a new identity outside the confines of photography. It is by the lengthy and complex procedures of his oil painting ñ hand-crafted, varnish after varnish - that Sandip Shah manages to invent (and encode) his figures anew, conjuring up force fields of complementary colours on his canvasses.
Each work of installation art is conceived with reference to a particular place. In most cases, at least two monitors are engaged, confronting occurrences of the present with those of the past. All the while, cameras keep filming ongoing events. Being part of the audience means being actor as well as spectator. You are confronted with an overwhelming mass of fleeting images of restless, ever-busy persons, ceaselessly stepping through doors in order to get from one room to the next. Thus, everybody becomes part of the whole, be it in real-life or via monitor screen. In his works of installation art, Sandip Shah documents the intersections of a society obsessed by constant change of place. As, from time immemorial, travellers have known very well that crossing a threshold they enter another plane or dimension, the artist likes to refer to his work as something equalling a modern mysticism of the commonplace. He draws up a genre picture of our time.
So far, surveillance installations have been realized at several locations, e.g. the Stolze-Haus Darmstadt, the FraKK (Kultur Komitee Frankfort), the Kunstblock and the Perpetuel Gallery, Frankfort, and at the public convenience room for men of the Freitagsk¸che within the ‹berwach Bar (including all in all 8 cameras, 4 monitors, 1 beamer) on the occasion of a general opening of Frankfort artistsí studios.
Text: Beatrix Pohle-Stiehl
‹bersetzung: © Dr.Roland Held, Darmstadt 2007
Sandip Shah is 35 years old. He graduated from the St‰del Academy of Fine Arts, Frankfort, where he studied with Hermann Nitsch; since then, he has been living and working at Frankfort and Darmstadt simultaneously. In his artistic work he regularly combines elements of painting, video and installation art, with his thematic subjects revolving around phenomena of contemporary society which he explores in manifold ways by means of space-related projects. Central to them is Shahís own apartment: a publicly lived-in art installation accessible also to visitors, a kind of research lab of things happening inside and outside.
Last year Sandip Shah included into his sphere of activities a small studio within the ìATELIERFRANKFURTî studio complex close to the main railway station. He felt inspired by the hustle and bustle of big city life, with all its noise, multiculturalism, and vibrant pulse. In situ he developed his ìProject: Sicherheitsb¸roî (bureau of security) which he keeps pursuing into the future, always on the look-out for new contexts. He started this project by occupying the porterís office, long-ago deserted, of the Frankfort police headquarters and replacing the absent porter with a surveillance camera. The result was a communication between man and machine. A fictitious bureau of security was born. In the course of this several-weeks-long art operation, everybody entering the door of the building was conspicuously filmed and, at the same time, confronted via monitor with his own vanity.
With this project, the artist comments on the surveillance mania which he sees on the rise in our cities, and he does so by slipping into the role of the controlling agents of the state machinery. Thereby, he links the Orwellian ìBig Brotherî-complex with human narcissism and everybodyís unquenchable longings for feeling like a super-star.
Additionally, from the authentic video surveillance material Shah procures innumerable black-and-white video stills, turning them into computer prints of the protagonists (most of whom he doesnít even know). These he later arranges into wall-size total pictures, thus bringing order into a crowd of people permanently moving to and fro. Sometimes he even enlarges details of his choice, turning them into anonymous phantom images and reducing them beyond recognition: pixel-riddled blow-ups, distorted portraits of personalities rendered all the more anonymous by partial use of black light.
Those figures recorded in digital light impulses may, however, take on a new identity outside the confines of photography. It is by the lengthy and complex procedures of his oil painting ñ hand-crafted, varnish after varnish - that Sandip Shah manages to invent (and encode) his figures anew, conjuring up force fields of complementary colours on his canvasses.
Each work of installation art is conceived with reference to a particular place. In most cases, at least two monitors are engaged, confronting occurrences of the present with those of the past. All the while, cameras keep filming ongoing events. Being part of the audience means being actor as well as spectator. You are confronted with an overwhelming mass of fleeting images of restless, ever-busy persons, ceaselessly stepping through doors in order to get from one room to the next. Thus, everybody becomes part of the whole, be it in real-life or via monitor screen. In his works of installation art, Sandip Shah documents the intersections of a society obsessed by constant change of place. As, from time immemorial, travellers have known very well that crossing a threshold they enter another plane or dimension, the artist likes to refer to his work as something equalling a modern mysticism of the commonplace. He draws up a genre picture of our time.
So far, surveillance installations have been realized at several locations, e.g. the Stolze-Haus Darmstadt, the FraKK (Kultur Komitee Frankfort), the Kunstblock and the Perpetuel Gallery, Frankfort, and at the public convenience room for men of the Freitagsk¸che within the ‹berwach Bar (including all in all 8 cameras, 4 monitors, 1 beamer) on the occasion of a general opening of Frankfort artistsí studios.
Text: Beatrix Pohle-Stiehl
‹bersetzung: © Dr.Roland Held, Darmstadt 2007
 |
 |
|
|
||
 |
 |