Hailing from Assam in strife-ridden northeast India, Desire Machine Collective has participated in shows at premier venues such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, and has taken part in the Venice Biennale. The group’s first major exhibition in its home country wasa two-venue multimedia exhibition, “Noise Life.” Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and characterized as “a sensory auto-ethnography marked by ghastly alertness of the senses to a violent world outside,” it was reportedly six years in the making.
The focal work at Project 88 was a thirty-two-minute projected video, Noise Life 1, 2008–14, which consists of a set of disconnected images: a dilapidated building surrounded by tropical plants; an office hallway; flowing water; and a boy from northeastern India gazing at the landscape before running across a riverbed and falling. At Max Mueller, a series of more than a hundred stills (“Noise Life,” 2014) showed the same boy violently flailing against a black ground (think David Lynch’s Lost Highway).
