REMEDIES

The Factory of Feeling

By Himali Singh Soin, October 2015

Here, industry is intimate, sound is sinuous, the body, robotic. San Francisco based Surabhi Sarafjourneys back to where she grew up, surrounded by the sights and sounds of her father’s pharmaceutical factory in Indore, re-creating the story of the medicine and the machine in the form of a series of multi channel audio-visual installations. What we experience is sound so primal that it might be mistaken for emanating from within the viewer, a dance between the maker and the thing made, simultaneously stoic and sensuous.

As a child, I wandered the factory premises, mesmerized by the machines, by the dazzling transformation of powder pressed into pills. This factory, made up of my father’s familiar face and his employees, who soon came to be adopted guardians and friends, was not the factory of filth or forbidden activity. It felt like a big house with many small rooms. Skittering between those long dimly lit corridors into the bright churning rooms, I loved bothering the workers with my childish curiosities! In 2012, while visiting our factory as a grown-up, I was amazed at how many of them still worked there, having become like an extended family, and how many machines were still in order. Their aged noise juxtaposed organically with newer more precise and quiet equipment. I wanted to capture all these elements—my memories, the machines, the men and women—and, having a history of making art with sound, that was where I began.

Though she strays from an overtly political narrative, at first drawing the eye to the aesthetics of color and sound in mechanistic processes, it is impossible not to view the work with a lens toward a post-industrial critique. In contrast to Marx or Benjamin—whose perspectives were unabashedly occidental—Saraf, distinguishes between labor and work, the one associated with banality, the other with meaning, offering a view of the factory that is not devoid of storytelling, a view of the factory not as vacant but as vibrant. It also presents the pharmacy, especially in rural India, as one that heals rather than harms. However, it is a vision that stems not from naiveté but actual embodiment: in the process of collaborating with actors, designers, cinematographers, Saraf’s artistic production came to mimic the processes of the factory itself. The theatre becomes therapeutic. It is in these collaborations with skilled and fairly paid work that she embeds her more utopian ideals.

The title of the show, Remedies, suggests a period of healing, and the necessary ritual of repetition requires for its undertaking. Repetition, as a structural device is a key to decoding Saraf’s work. The series comprises three parts: tablets, capsules and syrups- the first two are on view in this exhibition.

Each series includes a large central video projection and video box sculptures. The central video features a dozen performers in long, panoramic shots. The ambulatory pace of the camera and the light reflects the silently morphing mechanical flow of the substances depicted. The distinct processes and movements at the factory act as a score for choreographed interpretation and timing. Transformations, of solids into liquids and isolated chemicals into cohesive compounds become raw material for the sound installations and movement techniques.