Nikhil Vettukattil’s first institutional solo exhibition, ‘Years’, traces the final decade of the twentieth century as the threshold of our present, moving through its defining geopolitical events, contested microhistories, cultural milestones and technological breakthroughs. Conceived as a multisensory environment, it engages the various modes of representation that shape our memories and imagination of the ‘90s and history more broadly.
The exhibition’s conceptual starting point is Alienation (2021), a video installation featuring 560 scanned and cropped photographs from three seminal photobooks of the decade – Sebastião Salgado’s Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993), Michael Kenna’s The Rouge (1995), and Michael Schmidt’s U-NI-TY (1996) – alongside a video of stock footage from a smartphone production line in Bangladesh. Reminiscent of the experimental structuralist/materialist filmmaking traditions of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the film pairs a black-and-white flicker effect with a pulsating hard techno beat to stage an intense visceral encounter. Through this stroboscopic rhythm, it probes the fading remnants of twentieth-century heavy industry, labour conditions, and free time.
The operations at work in the video – the cut, fragmentation, navigation through the archive and found materials, as well as intensive stimulation and retinal fatigue – return in Years, a new site-specific work made up of a window text, collages and a sound piece. Years continues Vettukattil’s inquiry into how we record and experience time, both as individuals and as part of larger collectives. Throughout history, artists have been concerned with the experience of time passing and the reflection on an individual’s place in history. Vettukattil confronts this arduous task of impossible inventory by turning to collage – to cutting and assembling – as a means of processing the vast flows of information spanning geopolitical timescales, leaving upon them his own gestural marks and breathless caesuras.
Adopting the form of an extensive chronicle of the 1990s – the decade the artist was born – a timeline of dates and events wraps across the gallery’s glass doors, creating a flickering ground that dizzies the eye. The list is at once ambitious and overwhelming – much like the neighbouring series of collages assembled from cut-outs from Lithuanian periodicals of the 1990s mixed with visual and textual samples of world events from the foreign press. Sourced chronologically but positioned freely at different angles, they allow for shifting alignments within each plate and across the series as one moves through the space. All the while, Zenith’s Black Alienation (1996) – the soundtrack to the video installation playing in the adjacent room – bleeds through the architecture and imposes its own rhythm. Attention, in other words, is divided between text, image and sound, resulting in an asynchronous montage in real space. Connecting the elements and filling the gaps requires the audience to confront their knowledge, intuition, predispositions, and political positioning. History and memory emerge as contested, unstable grounds.
Together, these elements coalesce into a single perceptual experience bearing the characteristics of the cinematic, or what the artist himself frames as ‘expanded cinema’ practice. Popularised by media theorist Gene Youngblood in 1970, the term extends beyond the deconstruction of the ‘movie’ and is characterised by a desire for political, social, and artistic revolution. For Youngblood, the relentless influx of information and sensory overload had fundamentally altered traditional habits of perception. Expanded cinema offered a multisensory, multidisciplinary response, gathering disparate inputs into a coherent whole. In this exhibition, it manifests as a specific condition for connecting the seemingly disrupted and disconnected. By scattering cinematic components across physical space, the artist synthesises the sprawling matrix of information media, including print, broadcast, and digital networks as infrastructure that conditions the lived environment as much in the ‘90s as today. ‘Years’ implores us to think world.
As part of the exhibition, the latest iteration of the Institute for Scene Experiments (ISE) will take place at Sapieha Palace in November. ISE, a semi-fictional institution co-founded by Vettukattil, is devoted to the analysis, deconstruction and reconstitution of elements of scenes for camera, and to the exploration of alternative ways of staging narrative, framing and sound. Taking the form of closed group workshops facilitated by the artist, ISE shifts emphasis from the complete work of art to the structures and infrastructures that mediate the process towards a final work, including the scene, the sequence, the script, and the edit, amongst others.
Inesa Brašiškė, Povilas Gumbis
Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Speculation’, Beau Travail, Stockholm (2026); ‘AGIT’, Berlin (2024); ‘Sparebankstiftelsen DNB stipendutstilling’, Oslo Kunstforening (2024) and ‘Kurant Visningsrom’, Tromsø (2024); ‘Hothouse Flowers’, Podium, Oslo (2024); ‘Postproduction’, Studiengalerie 1.357, Frankfurt (2024), among others.
Selected group exhibitions include ‘Four Dilations’, MoMA PS1, New York (2025); ‘Ring of Fire’, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway (2025); ‘designsofthetimes’, Le Bourgeois/3236RLS, London (2025); ‘ProtoZone 16: Hallucinogenesis’, Shedhalle, Zurich (2024); ‘The Institute for Scene Experiments Part VIII’, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt (2023); ‘The Institute for Scene Experiments Part V’, Camden Arts Centre, London (2023), among others.
EXHIBITION TEAM
Curators: Inesa Brašiškė, Povilas Gumbis
Architecture: Gabrielė Černiavskaja
Coordination: Nunilo Rumbutis, Viktorija Misiulė
Graphic design: Jonė Miškinytė
Communications: Maksimilianas Opriška, Monika Jagusinskytė, Vėjas Anuškevičius
Production: Baltic Art Force
Installation: Jokūbas Čižikas, Antanas Dombrovskij
Translations: Paulius Balčytis, Veronika Vasiljeva-Niparavičienė
Copy editing: Dangė Vitkienė, Gemma Lloyd
Partner: Arcadia Missa, London
Exhibition opening supported by the Norwegian Embassy in Vilnius