We love cars and owning one has always made humans proud since decades. In a unique exhibition titled Automaton Love, three artists — Ayesha Jatoi, David Chalmers Alesworth and Mehreen Murtaza from Lahore, Pakistan, present their interpretation of the impact that automobiles have had on the lives of human beings in the form of pictures, sounds, projections and installations.
Umer Butt, curator of the Grey Noise gallery in Lahore, has brought the exhibition to India. He believes, “There is an explosion of cars around us. Owning a car is becoming such a fetish in the world.
The automobile’ is indeed the most important invention of the century. The exhibition tries to bring about the exclusive, selfish dream of the ultimate car, coming in contact with the outside world.”
The three artists are residents of a city of ten million, where some three hundred new cars get on to the roads daily, but a mere eight percent of the populace have private transport. Here, the car is the king and the environment is continually carved up and polluted in deference to the needs of the private motorist. It is here too, that the private vehicle is the ultimate object of desire.
Yet, the majority of drivers are unschooled, unlicensed, and totally fatalistic. Butt says, “The result of this is a sprawling market of cannibalized cars, in the vicinity of the shrine of Data Gunj Baksh, the patron saint of Lahore. Here, the almost pristine parts of the recently deceased, mingle with those of the newly stolen and freshly dismembered. An exclusively male, necrophiliac and auto-erotic atmosphere prevails in the market.”
The exhibition tries to sum up how we spend a substantial part of our lives in the motorcar, and how this shared experience of moving together in an elaborately signalled landscape condenses many of the experiences of being a human being.
Catch Automaton Love from February 10 to March 3 at THE LOFT, Lower Parel.
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