CHENNAI: In an age where every click, search, photograph and voice note is archived somewhere in the digital ether, artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra are asking visitors to stop and consider a deceptively simple question: what happens when memory itself becomes data?
Their latest exhibition, Mimesis, currently on view at Ashvita’s newly launched white cube gallery space in Chennai, explores the intersections of memory, technology and human experience. Through hundreds of painted canvases built from abstract, pixel-like forms, the Delhi-based artist duo transforms the visual language of the digital world into tactile, physical objects that demand slow looking.
The project emerged from an unexpected moment of stillness. During the pandemic, when screens became the primary window to the world, the artists found themselves reflecting on unfinished works, accumulated fragments and the traces left behind by time.
“The pixel felt like the right analogy because it is simultaneously the smallest legible unit and completely meaningless in isolation,” the artists explain. “Memory works like that too — a fragment that only becomes coherent when assembled with others.”
The hand is an argument,” they say. “The work is about systems that are cold, precise and automated, but the making of it is slow, embodied and fallible.”
That emphasis on slowness runs throughout the exhibition. In an era defined by endless scrolling and shrinking attention spans, the artists see their work as an invitation to pause.
“The speed of the feed is specifically engineered to prevent reflection,” they note. “We wanted people to have the experience of actually looking.”
Yet Mimesis is not a straightforward critique of technology. The artists describe today’s digital world as both empowering and unsettling. The same systems that preserve photographs, messages and memories also track behaviour, collect data and shape how people experience the world online.
“The same infrastructure that preserves a voice note from someone you’ve lost is the same infrastructure that logs your anxieties at midnight and sells them,” they observe. Rather than resolving that contradiction, Mimesis asks viewers to sit with it.
Mimesis is an urgent exercise to bring the conversations about consciousness, not a refusal of technology, but an insistence on remaining its author rather than its productJiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, artists
Over the years, Thukral & Tagra’s practice has evolved from examining consumer culture to investigating broader systems that influence everyday life. Today, their interests lie in understanding how technology, ecology and memory intersect.
When the question shifted from what we are buying to what we are becoming, they say. For Chennai audiences, ”We hope someone leaves with a question they didn’t arrive with, Mimesis is an urgent exercise to bring the conversations about consciousness, not a refusal of technology, but an insistence on remaining its author rather than its product.”