Desire Machine Collective

Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, photography, space 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, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice through their practice, both regionally in Guwahati and around the world. Their works have been showcased at some of the major international festivals and renowned museums. They were a part of the inaugural Indian Pavilion at the 54th International Art exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy and nominated for the LUMA award along with experimental cinema legends Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York, NY/USA and the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin/Germany. Over the years, they have created alternate spaces for art practices, Periferry being the most interesting of them. It is located on a ferry, on river Brahmaputra, docked in Guwahati. Working with redundant spaces that are dysfunctional, the project has activated a disused ferry and converted it into a space for research and aims to create a public space and public domain, physical as well as virtual for critical reflections.