radio play by Ajaykumar

Form: sound installation/podcast 
Date: 2007 

Public Presentation

• Powerhouse Museum,Sydney, Australia, Sep-Oct. 2007, (radio play v.2)Gallery and Online Presentations 
• Territories- light, sound & space group exhibition, Study Gallery, Poole, UK, Jul-Oct. 2007 (radio play v.2) 
• transpose: shedding the capacity to fit in, exhibition and symposium, Sakewewak First Nation’s Arts Collective, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada, Mar. 2007. (radio play v.1)

Exhibition Formats

i) Darkened Room: fully blacked out; several chairs for spectators; PA system, optional eye masks. To be presented at specific times. 
ii) Cubicle with CD player and headphones; eye mask; chair for spectator. 
iii) Open gallery space; Table, CD player & headphones; eye mask; chair for spectator. 
iv) Podcast or similar transmission from host gallery’s website. 

Exhibit Description 
radio play is in part a play on a radio play. It takes the form of a sound installation an auto-ethnographic audio presentation, crucially experienced in a darkened space. Confounding and interrogating conventional distinctions between practice and theory, radio play has resonances with performative lectures of John Cage, as well as film essays of Chris Marker, who, alongside other cine-roman directors, made 'films to read'. Formally and thematically the work engages with the Japanese concept of Ma - signifying emptiness-presence, interval, pause, rest, a space in-between, in-relation, and space-time. In engendering particular dynamics between image and sound radio play has resonances with Derek Jarman's Blue. radio play is an immersive work that elicits a particular spectatorship, facilitating possibilities of spectators as co-creators; engaging with a notion of artist as medium rather than auteur. radio play calls into question established notions of race and cultural diversity. In its auto-ethnography radio play is an original telling of recent British cultural and political history. It could be termed a work of sound art, of live art, and of new writing. radio play may also be experienced as podcast with eyes closed. 

Artist Information 
Ajaykumar’s art work concerns not the art object but the possibilities of creation of what might be described as creation of a sublime world that manifests in an ephemeral space between an art object and a spectator's experiencing of it; where art works come into being through the 'play' of others. His work re-conceives classical Buddhist and Tantric art in contemporary form; elicits notions of daily life as art; and stimulates particular ecological dynamics of the human being in relation to environment. Ajaykumar's art practice is trans-disciplinary, intermedia, and single form, spanning the disciplines of: internet art, video art, combined media installation, sculpture, film, site-specific art, environmental art, performance/live art, design, architecture, sound art, creative writing, dance, theatre. Ajaykumar is an academic at Goldsmiths University of London; member of the TrAIN - the research centre of the University of the Arts London, in Transnational Art, Identity and Nation; curator; and co-director of the shapes design studio: designing playful furniture, lighting, and gardens, and items that come into 'being' through the play of those who acquire or frequent them. 

Artist Contact Details
ajaykumar@ajaykumar.com 
www.ajaykumar.com
turbulence.org/works/iPak
www.shapes-design.com
turbulence.org/spotlight/ajaykumar