Artist Profile: Nihaal Faizal

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Anisha Baid: When we spoke last, you mentioned that your recent trip to the United States (as part of a residency at Amant in New York) felt like a significant juncture for your practice. Part of this, you shared, was seeing Marcel Duchamp’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We’ve spoken a lot in the past about the readymade, and I wanted to start by asking you how you are thinking about this now?

Nihaal Faizal: To me, Duchamp is an endlessly rewarding figure. It’s like he had access to time travel and so did everything first. Among other things, I recently realized that he was also one of the first to produce what we now know as “artists’ books,” working as author, publisher, designer, and distributor, with works like the The Green Box from 1934 or La Boîte-en-valise from 1941. Seeing his works in person was really special, because you see that he was very invested in scale, weight, tone, and color—it wasn’t just about the idea of something. He started off as a painter, and this is where the readymade comes from—the first signs of the readymade are sighted in Cubist paintings where bits of paper, string, and netting start to make their way in.

Personally, for me, the readymade is a form that shares a close affinity with photography. As you know, I started as a documentary photographer, and taking pictures was a way of preserving something. It was an act of taking something from the world and moving it around, from one context to another. The readymade functions in the same way, but instead of flattening an object, it allows one to preserve it in full, without privileging an angle or a viewpoint. Historically too, the readymade and the photograph have stood-in for each other. Though now of contested authorship, Duchamp’s most well known example of the readymade, the urinal called Fountain from 1917, was actually destroyed soon after it was made. Its survival is owed to a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, and it was the wide circulation of this photograph that preserved the work’s place in history. 

AB: Much of your work draws from a hyperlocal but globalized media and urban landscape. I'm thinking here of Emergency Vehicle (2022), your series of photo-realistic colored pencil drawings of the back of ambulances in Bangalore where the figure of the Michelin Man appears. This work, and others such as Dummy (2022), which brings together a collection of dummy CCTV cameras, points to a complex web of media history playing out outside and alongside a mainstream and globalized narrative of media technologies…

NF: I make work with and about what’s around me. Most often this is my urban environment, and most often this happens to be Bangalore. This is true of Emergency Vehicle but applies equally to a work like Dummy where all the dummy CCTV cameras that I’ve collected are turned on and displayed along with their packaging. These works, and many others, are about the city but really they are about seeing—about really seeing things.

When I was much younger, my high school art teacher would try and teach me to paint—a hopeless exercise. I would be working on a landscape, and while looking at my sky, he would ask, “where’s the green, where’s the purple?” I was convinced he was taking me for a ride, because I just didn’t see it. He would then demonstrate and it all turned out pretty great. This was when I realized that I could never be a painter. It wasn’t about mastering skill or technique—that could potentially be achieved with enough practice and discipline—but it was about a way of seeing, which I just didn’t have. Though I see a lot better these days, I don’t think I’m there yet.

The city is often like that, it is full of details—colors, objects, signs, textures—that are hard to see, especially because there is so much of it, and all at once. Often there are things that are everywhere, like surveillance cameras, but then there are also doubles—stand-in dummy cameras—that are equally ubiquitous. Both flash a red light and both appear to be working, until you look closely enough. Another example would be bottled water. In India, we have the brand Bisleri, which has been around for decades, but one can also find, with identical packaging and questionable quality, Beverley or Blislife or Blisleri. The funny thing is that unlike most knock-offs or replicas, water under these labels costs exactly the same as what it imitates. 

AB: I’m interested in the specificity of Bangalore city as a site in your work, how it becomes a locational marker for technology in the “global south,” often referred to as the “silicon valley of India”. Could we talk more about how things you are observing in the city act as either detritus from a global culture or as signs liberated from their commercial contexts, as in the case of the Michelin Man that appears on ambulances in Bangalore?

NF: The Michelin Man, which is the official mascot of the Michelin tire company, is one of the world’s oldest trademarks still in active use—it made its first appearance in 1894. Over the last several years, it has started to appear as a sticker on ambulances in Bangalore, completely divorced from any association with the brand. I asked an ambulance driver what this was all about and he told me that the figure was the patient, severely injured, wrapped in plaster, rushing to the hospital. It was simultaneously an image standing-in for both the patient and the ambulance, the injury and its potential remedy.

This mix-up of signs could have happened anywhere, but it happened here, in Bangalore. This is something that happens because of how information travels, and there is a fair bit of imagination involved. Something similar happened with desktop publishing (DTP) in India. Alongside the sudden introduction of computers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new field of design and print production emerged. Suddenly, software like Microsoft Word was used not as a word processor, but instead as a design application to make banners, invitation cards, posters, and flyers. It was turned inside out and put against its use, but still towards a certain kind of production. I’m interested in this kind of productive misuse, and we see it all the time in our cities, where neither tools nor signs nor methods are fixed and stable, but always transforming, as per need. Bangalore is full of these examples.

AB: I think there's something complex about vernacular design—design that arises from the local sensibilities that maybe predate what ideas of “good digital design” mean. It's interesting to talk about less professionalized tools and how their traces can be spotted in the city—like how you can tell what software something was made on. This work of yours, along with a few others, are interested both in digital design, as well as urban landscape in a way that makes the boundary between them difficult to define. Could you talk a little more about your work MK Stickers, which exists both as a freely circulating PDF and as a physical work consisting of five binders?

NF: MK Stickers is a work from 2021 in which I collected a sample of every product for sale from a vinyl sticker wholesaler in Bangalore. These stickers are all produced for use on automobiles, and in the city of Bangalore, where one’s experience of traffic is intimate and endless—we see these stickers all the time. Some express love and affection, others impose aggression and threats. Some are aspirational, while some mark personal, religious, or caste identity. Often these stickers repeat and recur, as they all come from the same distribution networks (like the shop that I based my work on), though sometimes they are also custom-made.

Having collected a sample of each sticker available, a total of over 300, I decided to organize this collection in two ways. One, to return it to the internet, which is where most of the source graphics for these stickers come from; I made a PDF featuring scans of all of these stickers still held within their packaging. Two, towards preserving and presenting these stickers in use, I made a set of five binders cataloging the stickers—essentially a large volume of sticker books. While one version circulates as a free-to-download PDF, the other circulates as an artwork in exhibitions. Both versions contain aspects missing in the other, and in this way neither one assumes a privileged form.

I often think of the context for a work and increasingly try to make works that are in response to their conditions and affordances. Once I was invited to contribute an insert for an art magazine popular in India (Take on Art, Issue 28). After some deliberation, I asked them to simply move the front cover masthead of this issue, from the top-left to the top-right. This particular issue was on history, and while looking through the magazine’s archive, I realized that the masthead had been fixed to the top-left for every issue but one—their inaugural issue twelve years prior. This simple gesture was my way of leaking back into the magazine’s history with something that would go on to be largely invisible. Though this intervention went on to be published on the cover, and though the magazine’s colophon confirms this gesture, I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed, and certainly no one’s ever brought it up with me.

AB: As an artist, you seem to operate as a collector, drawing on your observational practice to point to hyperlocal signs and histories. In some works, collections present themselves more traditionally (as groups of objects in Dummy), while in other works you revert to a laborious artistic production to represent the collection, like in Emergency Vehicle. How do you strategize how to work with a particular archive or collection?

NF: I’ve been collecting things as far back as I remember, and recently I’ve been thinking about where this impulse comes from. A friend and I were discussing the work of Lutz Bacher, and she mentioned that the artist used to claim a show-and-tell from her days in kindergarten as her first ever artwork. This show-and-tell was not about an object, but about a method that she had discovered—a method for cleaning dirt from under her fingernails. I also recently watched a film called (Untitled) from 2009, about a brooding sound-artist who claimed that his first composition was a page full of dots that he had sketched as a child. Excited by his production, he had asked his mother to perform this score, but she laughed at him, and he’s been bitter ever since. 

Thinking along these lines, I remembered that when I was very young, I was fascinated by how my grandmother drew stars. I would sit with her, and ask her to fill page after page, notebook after notebook, with these drawings. This activity occupied us for hours. I had no real interest in learning to make these stars, nor of doing this myself—that wasn’t the point. I laughed when I remembered this, because it’s not so different from how I work today. Many of my works are collections, many are instructional or rather propositional, and many are built through repetition. A lot of my work is quite simple or modest in terms of material, means, and scale and a lot of it involves doing very little, beyond setting things in motion, or collecting something. These works are never about any kind of mastery but always about a kind of curiosity.

Working in this way, the strategy I settle on for each work comes largely from the work's subject. I always work with what exists—whether it’s an object, an image, or a document. Sometimes presenting the thing itself does the trick—isolating it, pointing it out, combining it with more of itself. Sometimes I find that it needs an additional gesture—maybe a method of reproduction, to bring out something that I want to highlight. Occasionally, the thing does not speak, no matter the effort, and in these cases I try to find something else that can stand-in for it. This was the case with my film Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog from 2017, where the thing in question—a fan blog that my uncle ran for the singer Mohammed Rafi—no longer existed, and neither did recordings of a song that the singer performed at my grandparents’ wedding in 1958. In this case then, my film, a documentary featuring my uncle and my grandparents, came to stand-in for both the blog and the recording, while also coming to stand-in for my family’s telling of this story. The wonderful thing is that now this film is something shared between my extended family as a repository of memories, similarly to a photo album. It’s really an example of when a work exceeds its own conditions, to become something else—not art, not a document, not a film, but a very personal thing.

Age: 30

Location: Bangalore, India

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

When I was around five years old, my father brought home a laminated print-out featuring me with the comic characters Asterix & Obelix, that he had made on Photoshop with help from a friend. We were all roughly cut, extremely pixelated, and some of us cast a shadow, but it was the most wonderful gift and it really felt like a new world had opened up. This must have been when I first saw the potential of technology as a creative tool, or at least as a portal to something fantastic. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

For my undergraduate programme, I attended what was then an experimental study programme in Bangalore, at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Every semester we could pick our courses from all that was available across disciplines and departments, so I mixed up experimental film and art history and graphic design in various combinations and permutations. I subsequently attended the “Home Workspace Program” at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, which was also an experimental study program, but this time with a clearer contemporary art focus. 

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I run a publishing house called Reliable Copy, which I founded six years ago, that publishes works, projects, and writing by artists. I am also involved with Press Works, which is a design agency, art book store, and a distributor for independent publishing in India. 

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)