THE SCALE OF INJUSTICE

THE SCALE OF INJUSTICE

4K Video, 2021
Edition of 4+3 AP

Presenting a room of incendiary red, Vatanajyankur reconfigures her studio in the exhibiting space, creating a combinational agricultural field and experimental laboratory. The artist situates visitors in an alternative bionic reality, investigating the exploitations of the modern agriculture industry. 

As part of Field Work series, Vatanajyankur conducted extensive travel research throughout India and Thailand. She spent four weeks in India living with cotton farmers and experiencing their economic, technological and psychological struggles first hand, then continued to observe the experimental testing of rice farmers, biologists, and various specialists throughout the outskirts of Bangkok. In this series, Vatanajyankur synthesizes this rigorous ethnographic examination in her performative videos, envisioning a future where industrialized humans become merged with parts of machinery. Testing her physical and psychological endurance, she manipulates her own body through arduous positions and repetitive actions. Vatanajyankur embodies the machine, remodeling herself into a cyborg-like being. 

Plunging viewers into the experience of an endless war, ‘The Scale of Injustice, 2021’ depicts the artist’s body as the broken scale of an imbalanced system, tirelessly bearing the falling cotton seeds on both sides. As one side of the baskets becomes heavy, the scale becomes inequal and causing her body to repeatedly fall onto the ground. In this work, she formulates a visual language of contemporary consumption and desire, revealing tensions between the mechinised human and the humanized machine. Transcending the machinised body, she challenges corporeal limitations, revealing the intrinsic human capacity for complete metamorphosis. The artist dynamically confronts the impositions of capitalist technology, investigating broader notions of power and transformation.