Mar 13th 2015

Maya Mackrandilal: Kal Pani

@ The Sub-Mission

1431 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago IL

Opening Friday, March 13th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, April 25th

THE SUB-MISSION is pleased to present Kal Pani, a site-specific installation by Maya Mackrandilal. Describing her artistic practice as trans-disciplinary –- incorporating several media including drawing, digital imagery, text, performance, video and installation –- Mackrandilal creates incomplete narratives that retell history. In her solo project in THE SUB-MISSION, Mackrandilal constructs a meditative space influenced by time she spent in Guyana, her family’s native country, on an Odyssey Travel Grant in 2011. An opening reception will be held Friday, March 13 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, April 25, 2015.

Kal Pani features a video projection of footage gathered from various locations in Guyana near the Mahaicony River, a main avenue for transportation that flows through land owned by Mackrandilal’s family. Recordings of spoken passages that address historical, political and cultural issues accompany the projection. Sourced from text written by the artist over the past several years, the spoken passages explore fractures in her family history caused by migration. The installation also features a clay floor painting that wears away and drifts as viewers move through the space.

They called the sea kal pani, black water. To cross it was a rupture, a separation from the land, from culture, from caste, to be forever outside, forever a nomad. This was the journey of my ancestors, as slaves and indentured laborers, from India and China and Africa. Even as farmers, intimately connected to the land, their descendants’ feet would wander.

– Maya Mackrandilal

Maya Mackrandilal received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited at Smack Mellon in New York, Heaven Gallery in Chicago and Ruffin Hall Gallery at the University of Virginia. She is currently an artist in residence at HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Mackrandilal lives and works in Chicago.

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