REVIEWS

KARTHIK PANDIAN:UNEARTH

By mEENAKSHI THIRUKODE Karthik Pandian is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work spans material and medium, like 16mm film and architectural constructions, as a means of negotiating histories. His installation Unearth, which was recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is the final piece of a two-year research project that involved filming and recording at the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia. The site, located outside and underneath East St. Louis, Illinois, is a signifier that Pandian uses to understand the work in terms of history and contemporary architecture. Unearth consists of five columns, three made of reinforced concrete and two made of mirror pane glass. Embedded within each concrete pillar's layers are shells, mason's line, and reels of the 16mm film that didn't make it into two films that are projected on the opposite wall. The films are projected from the reflective columns, which alternate with the three in concrete. Materiality is significant in Pandian's work, not only in terms of his process of constructing architectural structures by hand, but also in how he came to use 16mm films for his film work. Capturing material on film and manually editing 16mm proved to be a time-consuming process that offered its own limitations. It was precisely this aspect that Pandian found inspiring. Essentially, fragments of histories remain, and all attempts to re-create and relate them are painstakingly pieced-together steps toward understanding antecedent events and their relation to modern and contemporary societies. We see that in the projected footage in Unearth, where glimpses of the shells, broken glass, and earth run on a loop. The importance of material extends to the mirror-pane columns that support the projectors, which allude to the role of institutional experience. By making columns resemble cases that protect artifacts on display at museums, Pandian relates the fragmented experience of understanding cultural production not just to our understanding of cultural objects, but even to humanity's own history and evolution. Some of Pandian's early influences are rooted in his upbringing in a South Indian family. As he said in a recent interview for Art in America, "The biggest impact of visiting India when I was younger is my interest in sacred architecture and the experience of going to Hindu temples in Southern India. I went to these sites as both a tourist and a pilgrim, between devotion and curiosity. That's relevant in the way that I approach research, which has a lot to do with complicity. . . On my last trip [to India] I was reading a guidebook and the travel writer described the region where my family is from, Tamil Nadu, as the 'only living classical culture,' which I feel has some relevance to what I do." From this stems his interest in translating the notions of travel, research, and attempts at cultural understanding not strictly in terms of linear time but as crisscrossing and overlaid trajectories. As one navigates the space, lit by the projections and welcomed by the sounds of fireworks the artist recorded during a Fourth of July celebration close to the site, the sense of partaking within some timeless ritual hangs heavy in the air. This isn't by accident. The orientation of the columns, reminiscent of Cohokian ceremonial and defense architecture in a north-south axis, and the films, in an east-west axis, is a way not only to re-manifest an American past but also to emphasize - WHITEWALL 32 - Installation views of Karthik Pandian: Unearth (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 15, 2010-March 27, 2011). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. an architectural continuum from past to present. This was the focus of Pandian's first iteration of his research at Midway Contemporary Art, where prehistory was reflected within contemporary architecture in Chicago. Unearth is the final step, in which the ultimate act is to destroy the columns, perhaps as a way of reiterating the hand of time on the lineage of territorial historiographies.

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