The exhibition “Big Casino” at the Kunsthalle in Zürich presents works by Vijay Masharani. Vijay Masharani works with video and drawing. His work takes a look at how small actions connect to bigger systems. He doesn't plan his videos fully; instead, he mixes different bits of footage, drawings, and digital stuff he collects. His work shows how things change over time, like in music or films without stories. His art also includes personal touches, like his experiences with city life or illness. His drawings are like a series of pictures that change but don't tell a story in order, often featuring Earth, exploring how we see and think about the world. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich is his first institutional solo show. In this video we have a look at the exhibition on the occasion of the opening reception. Unfortunately, Vijay Masharani wasn't able to come to the opening, so instead of an interview on location, he talks about his work and the exhibition via a video that he has recorded at home.
Vijay Masharani: Big Casino is curated by Otto Bonnen. The exhibition runs until May 25, 2025, concurrently to another exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, a retrospective of Levan Chogoshvili.
Vijay Masharani: Big Casino. Solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), February 7, 2025.
Vijay Masharani: Big Casino is curated by Otto Bonnen. The exhibition runs until May 25, 2025, concurrently to another exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, a retrospective of Levan Chogoshvili.
Vijay Masharani: Big Casino. Solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), February 7, 2025.
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:02I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:04I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:06I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:08I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:10I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:12I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:14I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:16I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:18I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:20I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:22I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:24I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:26I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:28I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:51I'm going to show you a little bit of what's going on here.
00:53This exhibition develops a relationship between drawing and video.
00:55drawing and video. At times I animate drawn elements and I draw with a sense
01:00of dynamic or shimmering motion associated with moving image. Both video
01:07and drawing register the motion of the hand. They share certain cognitive
01:10processes and have a relationship with duration. Looping videos, circular motifs,
01:16the rotary motion of the camera also play off each other. I never draw with a
01:20plan. It's a discovery throughout. I never shoot really with a plan. I normally just
01:26go back to the same place and kind of exhaust a couple approaches until
01:34something new happens, which is why I prefer to work with subject matter. Then
01:39I'll have to schedule anything other than the quality of light. There's no
01:45shortcuts to this process of digging for the shot, but there are more and less
01:52effective structures and dispositions to increase your luck, like discernment and
01:58really an openness to the world to deliver you something different than you
02:03sought out, like the fact that a semi truck happened to be idling near my
02:08tripod, sending vibrations up into it and causing the hand of the pointer statue
02:14to quiver in an analog jitter. Bill Viola's The Sound of One Line Scanning is a
02:22contribution to earlier discourses about video trying to develop a notion of
02:27medium specificity for it. Part of that was distinguishing video as the
02:32outgrowth of audio, acoustic recording technology, whereas cinema comes from
02:37photographic celluloid images repeated. He says all videos are essentially
02:41drone music compositions and I think he actually says they're like ragas and he
02:45associates it with some sound as first principle thing in probably a misreading
02:51of some Hindu text. Doesn't matter. There are a couple drones in the
02:58exhibition. In the video of urchin foragers and in the one video I filmed in
03:03the hospital, the ambient sound of the video is tuned to a chord using a
03:09parametric EQ, sharpening, heightening, and sculpting the existing frequencies
03:13into a harmony rather than adding a score. So you work with what's already
03:17there. I started making these video gestures in 2021 after I took a year off
03:21to make music and the videos ended up being around song length and mixed and
03:26developed using strategies of coaxing out latent qualities in media the way
03:30you might process a piece of recorded audio. They are gallery videos so
03:37there are certain assumptions that a spectator will rove, enter, and exit a
03:41video at different points. The biggest inspiration for this show was spending
03:46a lot of time with Lutz Bacher's monograph snow that includes many of her
03:51video gestures. Although she pulls it towards sculpture and installation, I
03:57pull it towards drawing. There's many more people in the video gesture tree
04:02but I spent so much time with snow I think it's worth mentioning. I find this
04:09mode of spectatorship to be a very interesting challenge and productive in
04:12an exhibition like this in which videos of different lengths are not synced up,
04:18bracketed by other videos and drawings. You're sort of moving around in and out
04:22of them further producing a sense of infinite dispersive permutation.
04:34Animation makes the videos more subjective. There's a personal symbol set,
04:39chains of appended associations that have to do with my purview and my life.
04:46Animation also heralds something more general which is an invisible world of
04:51discarded sense data, social abstractions, language that mediate and occlude reality.
04:59Over time my animations have become more gestural in order to keep moving through ideas with fewer
05:06software bottlenecks. Video workflows tend to be pretty stop and start. Gotta wait for stuff to
05:13process. And I don't really like that. I want to make it feel more similar to drawing and writing
05:18actually. Where your thought is really actively synced up with the activity the whole time.
05:26So I don't really do flashy VFX, processor intensive stuff like I used to. I try to get
05:30the most out of very simple, quick masks. Time displacement dissolves loops and straightforward
05:36collage and compositing techniques. These go a super long way if you're working with good
05:41building blocks which is also what I'm looking for when I'm shooting now. And ultimately I really
05:49arrived at a totally agnostic, it could all land somewhere attitude. I don't believe that there
05:56are unusable pieces of media. Some just have their utility deferred in time. I've sat on
06:03media fragments for years before they got integrated into artworks proper. You change,
06:08your perspective changes. Something that used to be a quixotic odd duck, something peripheral,
06:15superfluous, marginal becomes central, the main thing. And the whole thing gets turned inside out.
06:22And if you can start to control that process, it really starts to feel like alchemy.
06:28And once you've found the right combination of moves and elements,
06:33it doesn't take a lot of technical virtuosity to complete any of these animations.
06:38Okay, there's something ambient about the works that reflects my own tendency to kind of zone
06:44in and out as I make work. I really like Ray Tirada's book, Looking Away. She has many examples
06:51of people who express dissatisfaction with the world and take leave of it into forms of ocular
06:56play. One example is psychotic patients who lose themselves in flecks of color in the concrete.
07:03Love that. I'm always thinking about the flecks of color in the concrete.
07:06You can lose yourself in the wet folds of a single dollop of scrambled eggs,
07:11or the luminescent textures of a trippy aquatic pet store, or in a nationalistic epithet, which
07:16produces a different but not wholly unrelated kind of unreality feeling. Like, hate is trippy, too.
07:25I thought more about painting for this exhibition than any previous show, even though there aren't
07:30any paintings in it. I call the gouache stuff drawing. It's drawing. I think that one thing
07:37paint does that drawing doesn't is generate its own details. When drawing, you draw them
07:43in yourself. And a lot of people have commented on the details in the drawings. And I always
07:48like to mention an excerpt from Bachelard's dissertation. I think it's so good. Detail is
07:54richness, but also uncertainty. At the level of detail, thought and reality appear to be
08:00set adrift from another. Reality loses its solidity, and in a certain way, its constancy,
08:07its substance. Finally, reality and thought are engulfed in the same nothingness.
08:13So there's something annihilatory and obliterative in details, and I think that's what keeps me in
08:19them. The smallest vertical drawings, me and Otto, Otto Bonin, the curator, we call them star
08:27drawings internally. They're the spine of the show. They can be thought of as a non-sequential
08:35animation. I used to really want a lot of novelty, like so many new forms all the time. And then I
08:42arrived at this one form bursting forth, which really distilled a motif of exploding emergence
08:50which had previously presented in drawings, but really as one element among others.
08:54Once I fixated on it, I ended up achieving more variation by working in a serial, repetitive mode,
09:01flaring out around the circle again and again. Most begin as an attempt to repeat a previous
09:07drawing, which is impossible. So failing to repeat becomes the best way to generate different
09:12approaches that disperse across multiple works. I always work on two or more at a time while
09:18working on the medium and larger drawings, and the videos as well, normally after, draw during
09:23the day, computer stuff at night. So they have a propulsive quality for the rest of the practice.
09:28They are, in a sense, its motor. This exhibition reflects my interest in a set of questions
09:34associated with modernism, one of which is the relationship between modernism and spirituality.
09:40I am engaged with no mystical or spiritual texts. It's not really an interest of mine.
09:45What I am interested in is when you read something like Krauss's essay on grids,
09:49and she has a line that's like, there's a contradiction between science and spirituality
09:55is the repressed unconscious of modern art. The contradiction between science and spirituality
10:01is the repressed unconscious of modern art. I was trying to figure out some art questions,
10:06how to make a drawing, how to make a work of art. These are my questions.
10:11I saw these strategies of focusing on a symmetrical, circular form, sometimes akin
10:15to a mandala, sometimes more cosmic, sometimes more like a negativity or a collapsing inward,
10:22as a solution to certain art aporias. In the process, forms associated with spiritualism
10:28basically crept in the back door, and then they were already in the house. And I said, okay, fine,
10:32you know, you can stay. I also think I've embraced them after a brush with mortality.
10:38There's something about how the experience of making a symmetrical patterned drawing,
10:42or writing an elliptical essay, or replaying a video over and over in the editing bay,
10:48that pulls the mind away from the body and its suffering and its absolute corporeal finitude.
10:55And this is a very different way to arrive at these spiritually inflected aesthetics than,
11:00say, an earnest belief in any sort of cosmological monism. I got no opinions on it.
11:06I leave that one up to others. The second modernist thematic that I find timeless and
11:14endlessly inspirational, really, is reflecting on the transformation of consciousness by traversing
11:22urban space, walking around the city. One work, which is my favorite video on the show for that
11:28reason, and also because how much it connects to earlier videos in my practice, is Facade Rotary
11:35Sequence, in which I walk around San Francisco's billionaire row in Pack Heights and observe the
11:40mansion facades wearing a beaded mask. I've made these rotary sequences since 2019 by building
11:48custom helmet rigs so that I can film myself looking at things, orbiting the camera from me
11:55to what I'm looking at and back again. The subject matter of the sequence registers
12:01my interests at the time of filming. When I was interested in Diaspora, 2018-2019, I filmed
12:07Halloween decorations in Indo-Caribbean neighborhoods in Queens. When I was dealing
12:12with existential apocalyptic emotions in 2023, I filmed the dark voids at the end of subway platforms
12:19in New York. And now, having spent a year trying to escape an intense bodily reality, I feel like
12:26I've been in a sort of nightmare and I became obsessed with the dreamscape of these multi-million
12:33dollar mansions. And I wonder why rich and evil people would want to conjure this hallucinatory
12:38atmosphere in their neighborhood full of abstract, psychedelic, patterned motifs in Spanish colonial
12:47revival, Italianate, Victorian, and contemporary architectural styles featuring lots of semi-opaque
12:55glass surfaces, dramatic shadows, grids, illuminated gardens, ornaments, columns, and engraved French
13:02doors as in the 1912 Getty Mansion, which appears towards the end of this sequence.
13:09Also watched a lot of SF noir to crack this piece open. I was inspired to start drawing the Earth
13:18when Paul Gilroy, my MA advisor, held up a first edition copy of W.E.B. Du Bois's The World in
13:24Africa and emphasized that putting the whole planet on the cover of a book in 1947, a time
13:30when Du Bois was committing himself to the peace movement, was a radical gesture. Today, any image
13:37of the Earth obviously brings up climate change and works like End of the World speak to that
13:41didactically. More subtle is Grazers, in which I filmed sheep and goats brought into my neighborhood
13:47to clear dry brush since they made quicker work of it than humans, a practice that is seeing
13:53increasing popularity as California faces annual wildfire threats. I filmed wildfire smoke over the
14:00salt marshes near Facebook in 2019 in Morning in Advance. 2023, my coarsening has footage from a
14:07burned out redwood forest. I make landscape videos just as the gouache and pastel earths. I consider
14:14them landscape drawings. But the enigmatic image of the Earth encodes much more than the specter
14:22of catastrophe. It is a sort of fulcrum for many different strains of emancipatory politics
14:29and thought as soon as it enters our visual imagination. Soviet propaganda, many other artists,
14:36thinkers return to it. Du Bois, Badiou, Teck, Pettibon for sure. Movie director, film director,
14:42Cyberberg, Ivins. It's everywhere, but somehow I still want more Earth.
14:51One of the most important pieces of advice that Otto gave me was that it didn't really matter
14:55how the works looked at the end. This allowed me to take a leap of faith and devote myself wholly
15:01to a process of discovery. Philip Guston spoke about the horizon for the process of painting
15:08being a sort of evacuation of agency from the artist to the point that where the marks fall
15:14basically feels like fate. I think it's super difficult to achieve. I will say there's only
15:20one complete drawing in the show where I'll say I think I got there, and it's my favorite drawing
15:25in the show basically for that reason. It's titled Apparition. Those marks, they couldn't
15:30have happened any other way. They're exactly where they only ever could have been,
15:36and yet it, you know, I can't say it with a straight face. It's all contingency and decisions.
15:45Otto offered me the show while I was finishing up chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia,
15:51and I immediately started shooting and drawing. However, we talked a lot about how we didn't want
15:56this to be an illness show because honestly there's just way more to me. I'm an artist.
16:03That said, autobiographically speaking, the experience of illness has been transformative
16:08like nothing else in my life, and also you just start to see it everywhere. You know,
16:13de Chirico associates the birth of metaphysical painting with an unspecified experience of severe
16:18illness after which he had an epiphany sitting in a plaza, and then, you know, famously these
16:24plazas get emptied out and filled with his objects and mannequins and fruits.
16:33Bolaño wrote two of his best novels after his diagnosis of terminal liver disease,
16:38and I do think the sort of barreling forward motion of his prose has this sort of exhaustive
16:44need to get it all out there before time's up quality. As I got further from treatment,
16:51that's late style, you know. As I got further from treatment, signifiers of illness naturally
16:57faded away. Most of the work I made while still in the hospital got cut, save for the video called
17:02Not Fog Eucalyptus Methotrexate. The experience of treatment does recur in certain biomorphic forms,
17:11loosely resembling the spine, the pelvis, and the lymphocyte. The reason why I'm delivering
17:16these remarks from home rather than Zurich is that a couple of days before I was supposed to
17:21fly out to install this exhibition, I was diagnosed with a different mutated acute lymphoblastic
17:27leukemia in a highly unusual return that is not a relapse of the original cancer, but a new,
17:33different, and also worse, but still hopefully curable, I don't know, addition.
17:42I'm sharing this, frankly, pretty personal information because I do think it changes
17:47the tenor of the exhibition. Instead of a journey upward and outward from a condition of biomedical
17:54corporeal existence to a fuller humanity in which I can focus on the realm of ideas,
18:01texts, artworks, histories, and not just the chemical, chromosomal, quantitative makeup of my
18:08cells, the exhibition is made basically in a blinking interval, a very small aperture of
18:15health, six months really, bookended by illness and treatment, which brings me to the title of
18:22the exhibition, Big Casino, which is what Junior Soprano calls his cancer when he's diagnosed in
18:29The Sopranos. This euphemistic term for cancer originates in the 1960s heist movie Ocean's
18:37Eleven, the original one. They call cancer the Big Casino because the house always wins,
18:43which I hope not to be the case. I will say that now that it is only a six-month interval of decent
18:50health, I wouldn't have spent the time any other way. I loved making this show. I was so happy to
18:55have, again, what I thought of as an off-ramp. And I do think that this is an exhibition that
19:03takes great pleasure and even freedom in thought and art making, and that this is probably the
19:10truest frame for this multifaceted exhibition.
19:33So
20:04um
20:18you