PRESENTATION: Doug Aitken-Under The Sun – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Doug Aitken is an artist who relentlessly pushes the boundaries of art by exploring the intricacies of modern life, hyper-connectivity, and the increasingly porous relationship between humans and technology. His work – spanning nearly every medium, from film, photography, and sculpture to immersive video installations and architectural interventions – places viewers at the center of experiences that confront both the landscape and their inner worlds. Aitken’s art captures shared moments of awe while questioning the isolation inherent in our technologically driven era.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: NMACC Archive

The first exhibition in India of Doug Aitken. “UNDER THE SUN” unfolds across three floors of NMACC’s Art House while exploring three distinct narratives—Past, Present, and Future—each occupying a separate floor. Together, these chapters guide viewers on a temporal journey that explores how we experience and understand time and space, history, and our place within it. Aitken questions the human experience through a prism of mediums, from locally crafted sculptures and textiles to a video work and a new immersive light installation. The show premieres multiple site-specific commissions, many of which are the result of a two-year collaboration between Aitken’s studio and more than a dozen Indian artisans across the country, using locally sourced materials and advanced craftsmanship.

The first floor, “Past”, draws audiences into a tactile landscape of raw materials. Carved wood, reclaimed debris, woven fabrics, embroidery, and stained-glass fuse into a dislocated natural environment that showcases all of the locally crafted artworks in the show. At the center of the installation, spiraling wooden boats are encircled by six monumental human figures rising from the ground. Each body is formed by artisans through a combination of intricate robotic milling and hand-finishing, using raw logs and reclaimed wood hand- selected from throughout India’s Gujarat state. Though they appear unfinished, their proportions align precisely with the human body, functioning as structural modules—pixels of matter—evoking innovation, while preserving human presence, rendering them at once imposing and fragile. Along the surrounding walls, six textiles merge age-old, luminescent embroidery and weaving, each tracing a sacred Indian river as veins across hands—a poetic nod to India’s living traditions of ‘hand’-made craft. Combining custom digitally woven base fabrics with hand-embroidered designs—an interplay of modern production methods and traditional artistry—the textiles represent nearly 600 hours of meticulous craftsmanship by a team of 8-10 artisans using a texturally rich mix of Indian and global stitching techniques, chosen collaboratively by Doug Aitken’s studio and Mumbai-based Milaaya Embroidery House.

The second floor, “Present”, transforms the gallery into a kaleidoscopic environment of mirrored walls and shifting screens inside Doug Aitken’s “NEW ERA”video installation, enveloping viewers in a work that provokes reflection on the cultural and social shifts shaped by technology. The film explores the history of the mobile phone and its inventor, Martin Cooper, weaving a narrative that places rapid technological change in dialogue with enduring questions of human connection and identity. Mobile phones appear in contrast with vast natural landscapes, forming a striking meditation on the coexistence of technology and nature.

The third floor, “Future”, presents “LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS”, a new immersive light sculpture by Aitken, commissioned for the exhibition. At its center stands a luminous orb with a vertical core of hundreds of suspended LED tubes carrying smooth waves of light. The abstract sphere continuously expands and contracts above a rustic wooden flooring that restores the raw essence and tactility of the Past. Visitors are invited to lie down, physically grounding themselves to absorb the shape-shifting glow while enveloped in haze and a hypnotic drone soundscape. Pulled like a moth to a flame to the central piece—an atom, the sun, a heartbeat, an AI being—the viewer gazes into a pulsing abstraction of the future.

“UNDER THE SUN” creates a bridge between Indian and Western cultures—a dialogue across time and material. It’s a kind of modern mythology—a landscape of artworks that question where we’re going and reflect on where we’ve been. The pieces are hypnotic and exploratory—they shift between the organic and the virtual. Each floor has its own pulse: the physicality of natural materials, moving-image representation, and pure energy in motion.

Info: Curators: Roya Sachs and Mafalda Kahane, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), Art House, Jio World Centre, G Block Rd, G Block BKC, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai, India, Duration: 6/12/2025-22/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-23:00, www.nmacc.com/