BAN♡ITS (2024–25)
Out near the lawless eastern borderlands of the sub-continent, a No-Visa-Required artist returns to make a film installation with a crew of washed-up ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. As they comically reenact their romanticised past, we confront the divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry as political resistance. Presented on a festive LED wall inside a temporary village pavilion, BAN♡ITS (2024–25) asks: when the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?
The work combines cinema, ceremony and party aesthetics. Flashing lights animate the roof; speakers burn beside the screen. The installation becomes both social space and stage set.
The bandits occupy every frame as “knowing” subjects, spraying slogans, philosophies and nihilistic declarations across the screen. Their wiry leader emerges as prophet, performer and political theorist, insisting that their failed and increasingly inert violence remains a form of revolution. Extremely unserious, serious people, in other words. But revolutionaries have always been a little theatrical. Revolutions still happen.
The artist remains physically absent but verbally present: an interloper, a pariah and a minor agent of exoticism. The bandits casually discuss murdering him for his possessions, yet he cannot quite transform their boasts into heroic cinema. Unable to verify their mythology, he turns to their soliloquies to fill the vacuum where his own art is supposed to be.