Chennai hosts Mimesis, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra's meditation on digital life

Somewhere on a server you have never visited, a version of you is being built without your permission.

Mimesis by Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra arrives in Chennai with urgent questions about data and identity

That is the dread living inside Mimesis, the new body of work by Delhi-based artist duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, now on view at Ashvita’s Flagship. Yet the exhibition does not arrive as a warning. It arrives first as beauty. Several painted canvases composed of bars, units, and imagined data forms cover the walls, drawing you in through colour and repetition before revealing the questions embedded within them.

The tension between this attraction and unease is central to the duo’s practice. Mimesis emerged from Arboretum, their long-running exploration of trees, memory and living ecosystems.

Where Arboretum was rooted in landscapes, migration, and belonging, Mimesis turns towards a world increasingly shaped by data. Developed slowly since 2022, the series reflects on how contemporary life unfolds across physical and digital realms. “As our days are stretched across online and offline realms, our experience today is being archived, measured, and reshaped in algorithmic rituals,” they say. “In this evolving digital condition, this exhibition asks what it means to inhabit worlds built through data and mediated images.”

Although parts of Mimesis have been exhibited previously in New Delhi, Savannah, Jaipur and Mumbai, this is the first time the project appears at such scale.

The title itself points towards imitation and representation, but the artists give the term a distinctly contemporary meaning. “Mimesis itself can be seen as a digital imitation of our own selves, of what we cannot see or perceive, but exists in its own right.” The paintings emerge from a process the duo describes as a “constant fact-finding process” that has occupied their studio for more than a decade. Information, statistics and observations are gathered over time and translated into artworks, publications, games and experiences. In Mimesis, that research becomes visual language. Data is stripped of its abstraction and rendered through the slow labour of painting.

That slowness matters. “The idea of painting is a slow process which counters the high speed of images and information that we are constantly bombarded with,” they note.

Viewed up close, the canvases reveal another contradiction. “In each stroke of the brush carefully made with sharp boundaries, you feel the deeply embedded humanness in what feels so calculated and concise,” the artists say.

For those unsure where to begin, the artists suggest a simple entry point. “It raises urgent questions about our lives today. It’s about our trust and anxieties for new technologies that are opaque. How do we trust these floating networks and systems, which constantly feed on our becoming?”

The questions become harder to ignore when one considers how dependent daily life has become on digital systems. “Strangely we don’t notice how much of our lives are depending on screens,” they reflect. “These gadgets have become extended body parts without which we feel incomplete.”

As the duo conclude, the works “open up urgent questions about our present stage of living.” In an era when artificial intelligence and automated systems increasingly shape daily experience, they argue that reflection itself becomes a form of resistance. “We have to slow down to understand things we take for granted.”

Free entry. On till July 17. From 4 pm to 7 pm. At Ashvita’s Flagship, Mylapore.

Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
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