Temsuyanger Longkumer QUINTETTE

About

Featuring printmaking, painting, sculpture, and time-based art, QUINTETTE brings together five projects exploring themes central to the artist’s practice, including sociocultural traditions in ethnic societies, and the correlation between communities in the microbial world and our own.

In the artist’s childhood home of Nagaland, skulls of buffalo slain during festivals and rituals are proudly displayed outside dwellings to commemorate the events and considered invaluable assets of the household.  Drawing inspiration from these treasured decorations, Superstars is a series of sculptural portraits celebrating the lives of individuals whose interactions have left a lasting impression on the artist.  Made with an array of materials and objects, these symbolic portraits are an attempt to pay homage to their encounter.

At the centre of Living Impressions lies the issue of cultural traditions disappearing in the face of constant technological and societal change.  Using narrative storytelling, with a mosaic of ancient wisdom and new technology, a fleeting moment from the life of a village chief is captured and preserved through projection onto three-dimensional reconstructions.

More recent works in the exhibition explore the relationship between the microscopic world – the politics and diplomacy between neighboring cells, the battles waged, fought, spread, repelled – to that of the external world outside of the skin. A delicate balance is at play between the external structure of Longkumer’s terracotta sculptures and the multiplying cells growing around and inside them; referencing the spread of ideologies, belief systems, and their viral or divisive effects on people.

The movement of lines, light and marks on the monoprints evoke both the individual energy of a single organism and the greater world they help to form.  This chain of events is echoed within the paintings, created with the materials used to make the prints.  Using an element of chance to work intuitively, the existing marks left from another event inform new happenings, creating a unique story of their own.