Defund The Police

Nikhil Vettukattil

2 November – 17 December 2024

Private view: 1 November 2024, 6 – 8pm

Arcadia Missa is proud to present Nikhil Vettukattil’s first solo exhibition in the UK, Defund The Police

Grounded in Vettukattil’s six-hour, three-channel video installation, Decade 2014 – 2023. The exhibition is one outcome of an ongoing time-based practice. Across three screens we are presented with edited rushes of news footage, protests and struggles that continue to shape our present. Each year of material unfolds in sequence, though the events are themselves edited through a non-linear and associative approach. Layers of historical footage, field recordings, against remixed and sampled popular music, offer a space to make speculative connections between dissonant political moments of the past ten years.

The exhibition title refers both to a demand formulated against incarceration, necropolitics, and impunity: a global system of enforced and repressive order. 

Moving between the two spaces, the focus shifts from the visual to the audible. From an often saturated visual and sonic environment, the visitor is pushed to select the materials they engage with, and often confronted by materials they cannot fully access and resist consumption. 

Through the combination of archival video, readymades, and sound, Vettukattil’s exhibition creates an environment that dis-organises eurocentric historical frames that define and constrain. By encouraging a re-evaluation of historical memory, this exhibition resists the de-historicising tendencies of the contemporary moment. 

If in the 19th century model of the exhibition, the dramaturgy of viewership situated the visitor in a narrative of progress and modernity that culminates in a triumphant present, Decade is a 21st century rejoinder, to instead make sense amongst the fragments of these broken times.

Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include AGIT, Berlin, DE (2024); Sparebankstiftelsen DNB stipendutstilling, Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo, NO (2024) and Kurant Visningsrom, Tromsø, NO (2024). Recent exhibitions include ProtoZone 16: Hallucinogenesis, Shedhalle, Zurich, CH (2024); Hothouse Flowers, Podium, Oslo, NO (2024); Postproduction, Studiengalerie 1.357, Frankfurt, DE (2024) among others.

Thanks to Jan Gerber and Jack Dove