Ajay Kurian

Ajay Kurian: I am presenting in the stairwell, so it runs from the basement to the fifth floor and it will be kind of a series of episodes. 

In a sense I'm thinking about a world in which representation, cliché, and a world of gazes are confused. The naturalizing figure of the animal becomes the underlying political force of how one starts to read each figure. So that sensibility of caricature becoming, or cracking open some of our own political anxieties, some of our own anxieties about otherhood and what's creeping in to take away what's yours. I think it's an easy way to start looking at the reactionary spirit of the age that we’re in. 

Narrator: Kurian explores that spirit in part through figures like the chrome chameleon near the top of the installation. 

Ajay Kurian: In a lot of political philosophy it's always the wolf that's at the top. If you look at Machiavelli, if you look at all these treatises where the wolf is praised or the fox, the wolf or the fox. I wanted the wolf to become second to the chameleon because it feels more appropriate for this moment. That it's something that feels very open, but is tyrannical in a new way.