First look | ROW by TUNDRA at the 2023 Mumbai Light Festival

ROW by TUNDRA draws upon the notion of a ‘row’ as a basic way to structure data. (Image courtesy Floating Canvas Company)

Ten holographic screens stand in a single file in the centre of the Tao Art Gallery in Mumbai’s Worli district. The room is pitch black, except for two pillars that have been floor lit in red. An audio track starts up - an assemblage of metallic sounds. A row of light rings begins to appear seemingly out of thin air, turning white and red in sync with the music. The next second, they turn into single horizontal lines undulating like waves; quickly turning into sparky moving shapes, like electrified amoeba; and then into red exploding fireworks. Over a 10-minute loop, the light moves with the music, in much the same way as a line of ballet dancers would.

This art installation, “ROW”, has travelled around the world and won many awards before finding a temporary place at Mumbai’s first satellite event for the upcoming Mumbai Light Festival. Created by the Russian new media collective TUNDRA, “ROW” is a meditation on the way in which information zings—invisible, intangible—all around us, all the time now through radio signals.

It derives from the notion of a ‘row’, a basic way to structure data, be it in maths, a spreadsheet, or a note sheet. Through the raw visuals driven by generative sound, and the juxtaposition of a line of scalable screens casting increasingly chaotic light forms, “ROW” appears to dwell somewhere between order and disarray. Suffice to say: you can’t take your eyes off it.

“We have been big fans of TUNDRA for many years, having discovered them on Facebook (in the middle of the pandemic),” says Shakti Swarup Sahu, one of the three co-founders of Floating Canvas Company, the art platform that is helming the Mumbai Light Festival. To him, “of course there’s the hi-tech aspect of the installation, but it’s more about the play of light in three dimensions.”

“It’s a screen,” says Sahu, “but when you line screens one after the other, that’s when the magic happens. The effect of it changes with the set up—they’ve installed it in churches, chapels, even outdoors. The way that the light and sound bounce off the surroundings, it sort of makes the viewer, the installation and the space part of the same conversation.”

It is this immersive, interactive spirit that Sahu and Floating Canvas Company founder Aagam Mehta and Rahul Singh Yadav are trying to bring to the Mumbai Light Festival. “Growing up in Kolkata, I remember looking at the Durga Puja light installations in Chandan Nagar—these beautiful installations that would reflect current affairs, be it the Kargil War or Harry Potter,” recalls Sahu. “And while we do have a ‘festival of lights’ called Diwali, we do not have the sort of light art festival that has become popular in the world’s major cities, from Sydney to Singapore to Amsterdam.”

Light art installations are, expectedly, expensive affairs—but Sahu feels that as the technology has become better, more affordable and accessible, there’s been a boom in the number of artists experimenting with the form. “We thought we could make this an annual fixture in Mumbai’s calendar, itself a pretty global city.” And, given that space or location is as much an actor in the experience of these art works, they plan to use the city’s rich architectural heritage and natural topography for the festival to full effect.

The inaugural edition of the Mumbai Light Festival was supposed to launch in 2021, until the Covid Omicron variant disrupted all plans. Now, as they go into fifth gear with their plans, Sahu says there will be one satellite event each month till the main event, built in collaboration with the Mumbai Tourism Development Corporation and the BMC, takes off “most likely in February or March 2023”.

The Mumbai Light Festival website teases the participation of renowned Indian artists and designers such as Shilo Shiva Suleiman from Bengaluru and Aaquib Wani from Delhi, but the creators of the festival are reluctant to share more details till everything is locked and loaded. Until we know more, checking out TUNDRA’s “ROW” is a good place to begin your immersion into the world of light-based art.

“ROW” by TUNDRA, a satellite event of the upcoming Mumbai Light Festival, is on at Tao Art Gallery, Worli, till October 5. Tickets on Insider.com