“As an artist working between the UK and India, my central discourse deals with the global human desire to reconcile the rationality of one’s milieu with the irrationality of the world beyond. In particular I study how people from different cultures form “truths” from the data at hand and how that truth jars with the “truths’’ of others. Artworks explore contemporary concerns such as how data is mediated and formed into information, the uncertainty of the authorship and the evolution of a message as it travels through a multiplicity of unconventional cultural distillers, well beyond the institutionalised cultural gate keepers of the past.
My work is nourished by actively engaging people to feed a work with source data or actively being part of the work. Rather than studying people I prefer to work with them in an attempt to understand their perspective, sensibilities, motives and goals. Looking beyond the surface traits such as identity I try to draw out both the rational and irrational that makes us who we are.
By drawing on scientific and philosophical reasoning such as Turing’s Reaction Diffusion theory, I explore how people use both rational and irrational methods to form a ‘truth’ that is manifest as either tenets, metaphor(S) or motif(S). Using play, metaphor, repetition and reflection I try to create artworks (or situations that lead to the creation of artworks) that sit as a mirror to our insecurities.
Motif plays a big part in my work and can be seen as units of data or understanding. My approach is to view motifs as the building blocks of how we understand ourselves. I try to take these motifs far from their original context and understand their value beyond an affectation. It’s only then that we can see the real value within them.”
Ashokkumar D Mistry
