What happens when memories, emotions, and lived experiences are translated into pixels, bars, and data points? Can technology truly capture the nuances of being human? These are some of the questions that lie at the heart of Mimesis, the latest exhibition by Delhi-based artist duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, currently on view at Ashvita's in Chennai.

An arrangement of hundreds of paintings on canvases that come together as a large-scale installation, Mimesis is an extension of the duo's ongoing Arboretum series. While both series represent the journey of the two artists into the world of memory, archives and human existence, the key difference lies in the lens through which these ideas are examined. Arboretum looks at nature as an archive for memories, whereas Mimesis turns its gaze towards the digital realm, questioning how experiences are preserved in an age dominated by data.

Jiten Thukral (L) and Sumir Tagra

"Arboretum is an exploration of organic systems, where trees are the living repositories of memory," elaborates the duo. "Mimesis extends this inquiry into digital terrain, replacing the tree ring with the pixel as the fundamental unit of recorded experience. The conceptual through-line is the archive itself: what gets preserved, how it accumulates, and what it means to be a body leaving traces, whether in soil or on a server," they state.

Algorithms and patterns

At a time when technology is becoming deeply entwined with the very core of human existence, the artworks represent lived moments through a gamut of bars, pixels, graphs and other data-inspired elements. "The visual vocabulary of Mimesis, whether its bars, dots, grids or imagined graphs, functions not as literal data visualisation but as a poetic stand-in for lived experience translated into measurable units," informs Thukral. "Each painted form proposes that a moment, an emotion or a memory could be rendered as a coordinate on a plane. It resembles data without being data, inviting viewers to project their own readings onto it, be it political, personal, or ecological," he adds.

In an age dominated by artificial intelligence, algorithms and data, Thukral and Tagra turn to the slow, deliberate act of painting to explore the very technologies that are reshaping human experience. "The choice of painting as a medium to engage with digital systems, by itself, is an argument. However, we were interested in the capacity of the process to estrange us from the familiar; to make us feel the weight of a digital life we have largely stopped noticing," explains Tagra.

The laborious manual effort behind each stroke, mark, and form highlights an obvious juxtaposition between the fast world of technology and the slow world of art. "While AI depicts speed, pattern recognition and legibility, painting introduces slowness, touch, labour and deliberate ambiguity," he further notes. Mimesis also showcases the artists' concerns regarding issues plaguing society. Alongside the artworks are fifteen 'Recent Memory' reports that touch on subjects ranging from voter deletion in Bengal and drone strike statistics to India's groundwater crisis. Yet, the paintings themselves resist direct illustration, allowing viewers to draw their own connections.

Beneath its seemingly technological surface, the exhibition compels one to ponder what makes us truly human. Using the language of data and algorithms, Thukral and Tagra create a space where emotion, memory and technology quietly co-exist. "On the whole, the show asks what it means to translate lived experience into data, and whether a painting can hold what data cannot," they sum up.

Mimesis is on view at Ashvita's Chennai till July 17.