The focus of Sandip’s work has been an examination of power structures in the production and circulation of various kinds of intimacy in public, sexual, and social media interactions. Based on the ethnographic, archival, and biographical, his practice mines different visual cultures and found material to understand the failure of systems and the production of counter-systems that bear a glitchy memory of the original. He is interested in the spatiality of desire and what space does to the creation of varying types of desires.
His primary materials are photography, text, and publications. Photography as a tool of re-telling fiction has been of primary focus these last few years. This takes the form of conceptualizing and creating images sculpturally that are shot and take the final form of a photograph. He takes material from the public domain: cruising spaces, legal documents, newspapers, magazines, and social media, and places these in conditions where they play off each other so that new forms of reading can be realized. The manipulation and re-use of objects and images collected from these sources are, in many ways, the premise of his visual practice. This overlaps with his use of collage as form, which simultaneously ‘destructures’ and ‘restructures’ material. In its ability to archive and flatten the mark-making process, collage then becomes that which it seeks to represent.
About the Artist
Sandip Kuriakose graduated with an MVA (Painting) from MS University, Baroda (2014) and a BFA (Painting) from the College of Art, New Delhi. Shows include Lokame Tharavadu, Kerala; Tender Data, Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai; Listening as Practice, Gallery MMB Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai; In Search of Baba Singh, UCI, California; Against the Order Of, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai; FotoFest International 2018 Biennial Central Exhibition INDIA - Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, Houston; Regimes of Truth, Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi; The 6th European Month of Photography, Das Foto Image Factory, Berlin; Art For Young Collectors, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai; and United Art Fair, New Delhi among others. Residencies include Clark House Initiative (2018), CONA Foundation (2018), TIFA Working Studios (2018) and the Summer Residency Program, School of Visual Arts (2013). He currently lives and works in Bangalore.
