Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya
Live and work in Assam, India
Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, photography, and multimedia installation in their works. Assuming their name and theoretical disposition from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a seminal text from 1972 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Desire Machine Collective seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it in his preface to the text, “Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to a Non-Fascist Life.” Drawing on the ideas in this work, Jain and Madhukaillya confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice through their practice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam, and around the world.
The collective have been part of various exhibitions including Walking Drifting Dragging, New Museum, (2013); Being Singular Plural, Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York (2012); Intense Proximity, La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, curated by Okwui Enwezor (2012); Experimenta India: London Indian Film Festival, Tate Modern London (2012); Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, India Pavilion, Venice (2011); Indian Highway V, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (2011) and Being Singular Plural, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin (2010).