One question played recurrently throughout my mind as I went through the motions of Nikhil Vettukattil’s ‘Defund The Police’ exhibition with Arcadia Missa. This being, “Who precisely is watching who?” It doesn’t make this facile to interrogate on the observer’s part, and something gives me the impression this exhibition, with its numerous, surveillance nodding TV screens and couches that are positioned in full view of the windows on either side, isn’t supposed to. In this sense, it becomes multifaceted., To strip this down further, in spite of the simplicity of its content, there’s a complexity to its context, this seems appropriate, given that ‘Defund The Police “refers both to a demand formulated against incarceration, necropolitics, and impunity: a global system of enforced and repressive order.”
In numerous facets, this concentration ensures the exhibition once again, presses play on Vettukattil’s three-channel video project, ‘Decade’ 2014-2023, which covers six hours and serves as merely one quasi-sequel to the artist’s ongoing, temporality-focused practice. Across the three box sets which sit against the interior of ‘Defund The Police’; observers come face to face with emended scrambles of news clips, struggles and protests, that the television models appear antique, one would go so far as saying, ancient, whilst the confrontations that play out across them are enduring throughout life, is paradoxical at best, sinister at worst, particularly when we acknowledge the ongoing perpetuation of violence against the black demographic. “Each year of material unfolds in a sequence, though the events are themselves edited through a non-linear and associative approach” the press release goes on to point out. “Layers of historical footage, field recordings against remixed and sampled popular music, offer a place to make speculative connections between dissonant political movements of the past ten years.”
There’s also a transitory interval within ‘Defund The Police’, but not in the least does it equate to giving observers any sense of breathing space, within an environment that feels claustrophobic to begin with. Largely because Nikhil Vettukattil has selected to detain archival videography, “readymades” and sounds together in one place. Nevertheless, visitors are prompted to “select the materials they engage with” whilst being “confronted by materials they cannot fully access and resist consumption.”All of this is supposed to happen inside a landscape that “dis-organises eurocentric historical frames that define and constrain.”The purpose of this is to encourage a reconsideration of historical reminiscence, and perpetuate the exhibition’s resistance to “de-historicising tendencies of the contemporary moment.”
“If in the 19th century model of the exhibition, the dramaturgy of viewership situated the visitor in a narrative of progress and modernity that culminates in a triumphant present. Decade is a 21st century rejoinder, to instead make sense amongst the fragments of these broken times”, the exhibition text concludes. With that, we are left to decide what period we choose to live in.
‘Defund the Police’ is the first solo exhibition of Nikhil Vettukattil in the UK and the multidisciplinary creator primarily envisages his projects from Oslo. Before bringing them to life by using a plethora of methods such as installation, audio, performance, text, videography and sculpture. Upon their creation, they are espoused as vessels that can be appropriate to ponder methodologies of representation and image-creation approaches in their relevance to personal experience.
