Love

Sudarshan Shetty’s Love shows a Braille typewriter incessantly typing the word ‘love’ on a sheet of paper. The repetitive production of the word, ‘love’ directs our attention to the mindless reproduction of the text in our daily life. As Shetty says, ‘Love begins with a basic human emotion, and at the other end of the spectrum it’s also a marketable phenomenon.’1 Using a Brailler to type the text, Shetty uses an international symbol of blindness to restate the cliché, ‘love is blind’. As a script, Braille is also paradoxical. It is both universal and limited to a particular group.

Viewing Shetty’s work is fun. It has elements of fantasy, storytelling and playfulness. It is edgy. The absence of human representation ‘humanizes’ the mechanical devices, turning them into characters that express our own frustrations and hopes. The artist suggests, ‘With my installations, I think the roles of onlooker and object become reversed.’

Movement is an integral part of Shetty’s work; and he often chooses to use old-fashioned and antiquated machinery. It is difficult to locate these objects in space and time or to tag them as ‘Indian’, ‘contemporary’ or ‘old-fashioned’.