On first encounter, Archana Hande’s Weaving Light may evoke the jali – intricate, perforated screens that filter light, casting delicate patterns that wrap the room, and you, in luminous design.
Look closer, and the jali reveals itself – it’s not stone or lattice but a column, and curtains, built from punch cards.
Hande’s immersive, room-sized installation is part of the exhibition Amongst the Clouds at Artspace in Sydney, which explores how digital realms remain deeply rooted in the physical world.
The punch card architecture in Weaving Light reminds us that today’s cloud data has its roots in information once stored on tangible, physical cards. (The physical foundations of our digital age began with weaving – when Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French merchant, transformed the loom into a programmable machine using coded punch cards to produce complex designs.)
Clearly for Hande, art is not a passive reflection of the world, but an active investigation into its contradictions.
Equally important in her work, in the shift from the physical world to the digital one, are explorations of how this change affects identity and memory.
Through light and form, Hande traces the changing legacy of industrialisation in a postcolonial world.
“Growing up in Rourkela, I watched as black-and-white television arrived as an experiment, not entertainment,” the Bombay-based Archana Hande recounts. “Diversity was not a buzzword but a lived reality in those cosmopolitan and secular sectors and colonies. We tried new things, like using TV, and that mindset is something I hold onto – especially now, when people seem less open to different ways of living and thinking.”
These early memories – cosmopolitan and experimental – still flicker at the core of Hande’s multidisciplinary practice.
She works largely with digital tools now, although her roots are in more traditional, hands-on forms of art.
“Digital has become an everyday medium – so can we avoid it?” she questions. “The new generation understands it and many times ignores to understand it. But, when you use it interactively or reactively, it is more easily communicative.”
Yet even as she engages with digital materialities, Hande believes we shouldn’t forget the value of older forms of art.
“Artificial creation, I feel, is repetitive and very generalized. The creation has a viewer span of a few seconds. The human imagination retains its identity. In my recent works, I speak and use analogue, and I see even the younger crowd approaching and engaging, and remembering it.”
So, does she see digital technologies as tools of empowerment or instruments of new-age colonialisation in today’s art world?
“They can be tools of empowerment – if used after understanding its strength and its flaws,” she quickly responds.
In her earlier works like ‘Project Cinema City’ and ‘People of India’, Hande used film and digital tools to explore how cities and people are shaped by history and stereotypes. In her latest work, she’s looking critically at the promises and problems of the digital world.
Looking across the current exhibition, she finds kinship with works like Liu Chuang’s Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities and Sophie Penkethman-Young’s Robot // Dog, both of which, like her own, consider the history of the journey of technology.
“These artists, like me, are thinking about how technology affects everything – from nature and culture to how we live and work. They deal with issues that arise through the timespan of analogue processes to current issues like bitcoin mining to AI and which have a huge impact on our ecosystem.”
In a rapidly digitising world, what does the future of memory look like to Archana Hande as both an artist and a storyteller?
“There’s way too much data now, and a lot of it is misleading or unnecessary,” she feels. “The challenge, therefore, is to preserve our memories, not let them slip away.”
Perhaps that explains the reference in Weaving Light to Ada Lovelace – who wrote the world’s first computer program in 1843. And that’s a memory worth preserving.
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