You’ve got a (e)mail

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Artist Suchitra Gahlot with her installation Shut Up Internet!

We are living in a world of digital addiction, where Internet takes up a large part of our time and is a continuous cause of chaos. The sheer convenience of technology has led everybody have access in our lives.

Pondering upon all this and cataloguing her digital life, artist Suchitra Gahlot has come up with her latest installation, Shut Up, Internet!
“I don’t resent the Internet but I do despair when I find myself enslaved to it. Shut Up, Internet! came about as a compulsion, it’s an 18-year-relationship that’s finally come to bear,” says Gahlot.
The installation has sixty suspended jars that contain forty thousand emails dating from 1995 that have been torn to pieces. Bits of paper fly to a controlled turbulence within each jar. While there is something hypnotic about watching shards fly furiously in the same place, the flight sequence is programmed to stop and start again.
The shreds of paper were once Gahlot’s personal emails. “I was indiscriminate in the selection of emails. The web quantifies everything. Communication mostly boils down to how many you read or didn’t read and not really who wrote in. For the most part emails lack intimacy. From my own inboxes of forty thousand emails, the ones that matter are only in double digits,” explains the 36-year old artist.
Gahlot, a former advertising professional took up art on a full-time basis 6 years ago. “I was never trained in art. But being a creative person in the advertising world my job involved conveying an idea in the constraints of time and space. Eventually, there were so many things brewing in my mind that I had to give vent to it and arresting visuals always got me excited, “ recalls Gahlot. She adds, “All my works have been based on my observation of human behaviour and relationships.”
She was first noticed with her 2009 installation One Thousand Tears. For it, she asked a thousand people the question “why did you cry last?” and their one word replies were labelled onto small vials filled with a saline solution that had composition of human tears .
“Shut Up, Internet! is contextual to our times. Over the next 100 years we will still ponder over love and loss but technology, as we know it, may lose relevance because who knows what future holds,” she concludes.
Presented by Shrine Empire at Alliance Francaise till September 4