Peek-a-boo!: Fellows Friday with Aparna Rao
Part of Bangalore-based art duo Pors & Rao, Aparna Rao (watch her TED Talk) embeds high-tech and humor in interactive, sculptural artworks that awaken us to our own subtle behavioral patterns and emotional responses.
What’s your vision and motivation for making this art?
I think it’s more a compulsion than a vision. It all started with The Uncle Phone. If you’ve seen my TED Talk, you’ll know it’s the very long phone I made for my uncle, who used to sometimes insist that I assist him in making a phone call by dialing the number for him.
In the Indian context, it’s a really bad thing to deny these simple requests and others, such as, “Can you get me a glass of water?” You can’t say, “No, I won’t do it.” And yet, if these requests become the cause of so many disruptions in your daily life, there is a need to rationalize it somehow. Just the proposition of having to communicate something very simple and innocuous to an uncle can become a very complex and difficult thing due to the issue of respect — it’s all so culturally coded.
I felt a need to deal with this complexity, which is so hard to put into words, yet occupies such a big space in my mind. Somehow I needed to find a way to express or even think about it. That was how it all started. I am quite satisfied with how the phone addressed this need – in an inquiring and affectionate way, without making a really big drama.
Artwork, The Uncle Phone. Click to see larger size. Photo: Jorge Martín Muñoz.
And what was your uncle’s response to it?
Actually, I didn’t really want to tell him because it would be too much of a confrontation. So I just kind of casually brought it home one day and didn’t address the story directly. He rightly assumed that it was a gift for him or inspired by him, but the funny thing is, he only realized the meaning and motivation behind it nine years later, after my TED Talk went live. So the talk was personally quite a highlight in my relationship with my family. They publicly came to understand what our work is about, and a lot of it is about them!
When my uncle finally understood the piece, he laughed. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t take things to heart. And the object is very affectionate. It’s humorous and flamboyant, like him. He also felt really happy being the hero of the TED Talk in a sense, because he inspired some of the objects, which others have also appreciated so much. I think he knows somehow he had a big role.
The complexity of the cultural struggle seems to inform your work. I’m curious about Missing Person — in which one spectator in a room is always invisible in the monitors — and where the idea of invisibility might fit into that.
A lot of people find the intercultural aspect of our work confusing, because my collaborator, Søren Pors, is Danish, while I’m Indian. So while the intercultural dynamic is there, we’re more interested in interpersonal relationships. About Missing Person — we just had this idea about experiencing a sense of invisibility, how it would feel to be invisible. The first time I experienced it, my brain went into a bit of a flip: “Okay, what the hell?” It’s a strange sensation, which I’d never had before. So that was exciting.
Probably, on one level, Missing Person is about the superhero idea of invisibility – being omnipresent and able to do your own thing without being seen. And on another level, maybe it is also a reference to the culture of domestic help in India. The usual practice is that you don’t acknowledge them on the same social level — mostly not at all. You don’t say hello, you don’t speak with them. It’s like they are furniture, to the extent that it is quite common to discuss deeply private things in their presence because you just forget they’re there. This seems to be a mutually comfortable arrangement.
When I came back to my home country after being away for six or seven years, I found the whole thing quite strange, interesting and comical – as did Søren. Also, many other things had prompted us to think about invisibility, both in a physical sense and a social sense.
But we found that people access this work on many different levels. For us, it was fun to be able to play with invisibility in a group – the work allows you to transfer your invisibility to others in the room by your movements in it. However, in Japan, they have a cultural phenomenon called Hikikomori, where people isolate themselves in a room, confining themselves for several years at a time, and society just stops acknowledging their existence. When we showed this work there, some people experienced it as a very dark piece.
To read the complete interview, visit the TED Blog.
