Conceptual artist UBIK brings together internet trends and childhood on the canvas

SMILE!, YOU ARE a con­ceptual artist.” reads the text on the first of three steel panels at the latest exhibition by conceptu­al artist UBIK. An emoji, that of an expressionless face, accompanies the text, conveying some form of awkwardness or perhaps mild annoyance. “Smile!, you are giving a walkthrough.” reads the next one, like a reminder to the artist or gallerist walk­ing visitors through the exhibition, but the clown face emoji here suggests some self-deprecating joke or pointing to how ridiculous this reminder is. Decoding an emoji is never an exact science. But if one were to hazard a guess about the grin­ning face with sweat emoji that comes with the text on the final panel (“Smile!, you are on a panel.”), it is telling view­ers whoever wrote this text is nervous, embarrassed, but also kind of relieved.

These text-based artworks are part of a new exhibition at APRE Art House gal­lery, Mumbai, by Vivek Premachandran, who goes by the name UBIK.

Titled ‘Gaps in My Resume’, it is UBIK’s first solo exhibition in India and their first anywhere in nearly a decade.

Comprising both old and new works that include text-based artworks, conceptual pieces and paintings, the exhibition is a playful and self-aware body of work that is framed as a critique of the art world and its market but is often having too much fun to hew too tightly to the theme. There are the text-based works —on panels (‘My practice is best defined by the likes it gathers on the internet’), t-shirts (‘My practice is best described as being friends with the curator’) stacked together on hangers as though on sale, on the floor (‘Nobody gives a shit about your art’) and even spread out randomly throughout the walls of the gallery (‘Sometimes plac­ing text at specific points can invoke continuity’)—that appear as much to be making a comment on the art market as having fun with the form. There are whimsical works like the one titled ‘A Good Time’, which is a replica of a neon sign at a bar UBIK frequents that switch­es on and off at precise times (11.30 in the morning, and 11.30 at night), or an old work dubbed ‘Portrait of an Artist through His Statements’, which is a jumble of fortune cookies that contains the artist’s bank statements at a par­ticular time. And then there are works that use materials like brass, iron and red oxide, which have already corroded to an extent and will continue to rust and deteriorate, drawing the viewer’s attention to the nature of objects in an artwork. “In a way, it [the exhibition] is a critique. But I guess it’s also me sort of opening up my practice and telling people, ‘Hey, this is what I do.’ As much as I’m critiquing the art world, I’m also a part of it,” UBIK says. “I just believe that you can poke fun at art… You can take the p**s out of the practice.”

UBIK, who had grown up in Kerala and Sharjah and lived in Delhi for some time, took art more seriously when they (UBIK prefers to use gender neutral pronouns) moved to Dubai in their early 20s. “I started a little design studio with my brother. We began a little art magazine together called Cliché, consoli­dated a lot of street artists in Dubai and covered mostly street art. I also started curating shows based on that… At that point in time, I wasn’t seriously consid­ering becoming an artist. I was still sort of figuring things out,” they say.

Much of UBIK’s early work revolved around street art, but surviving as an artist in Dubai meant a life of constant hustle. Random art gigs would arrive, and UBIK would only be happy to oblige. Some involved beach or yacht birthday parties, where they were expected to do live paintings. On another occasion, they had to cover a life-size replica of a Formula One car made of wire frame at the airport using only baggage tags. “It sounded like the strangest thing to do. And I did that for like four or five days,” they say.

It was sometime during this period, around 2011, when UBIK began to get drawn towards text-based and conceptual art. They were getting bored of drawing, and some friends who were artists and gallerists introduced UBIK to the works of conceptual artists. “I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This is an interesting sort of way to make work as someone who didn’t go to art school, but sort of skilled things in that way,” UBIK says. They then began to show their text-based and conceptual artworks at the Art Fair in Dubai, at the Kochi Biennale, at a gallery in Madrid (Sabrina Amrani, where they would show their works for about a decade), and many other galleries.

By this time, Premachandran had also adopted the name UBIK, the title of a Philip K Dick book that derives from the word ‘ubiquitous’, to dissociate their name and identity from their work. “People would look at my work, and be like, ‘Oh, but there’s nothing Indian about your work’, or ‘There’s nothing queer about your work’... But I find it very reductionist to reduce my practice to a singular identity,” UBIK says.

A lot of UBIK’s responds to digital cul­tures and trends. In 2018, in a solo show titled ‘Dear’ at Sabrina Amrani, they installed 10 TV screens that played 55 videos on a loop that they had uploaded on an Instagram account—all of these videos serving as a critique of the arts. “The entire show was on Instagram... The idea was that a buyer could buy that Instagram account. That was the premise,” UBIK says.

THEY RETURNED TO India by 2014, and were working as a brand designer at the India Art Fair, while simultaneously also working on their own art. But then, one day, UBIK quit their job at the India Art Fair (and later took up another as an art director the fashion magazine Sorbet), and just stopped working on their own pieces. “I think, it was a ‘me’ problem,” they say. “I was going through my own things in life. And I could not deal with the art world. It was getting toxic… And the way people treat each other, how competitive it is, and sort of how they put you down.”

But about two years ago, UBIK again began to feel the urge to return to their art. They had been writing down ideas, some of which were written works saved as concepts in their laptop and some that had made their way as text to their Instagram account.

The new exhibition is divided into two separate halls in the gallery, the first of which UBIK likes to describe as the fun room and the next as the grown-up room. The first, with its amusing text-based works and installations, has a whimsical and an almost internet meme-derived quality. The second, with its installation-focused and sculptural aspects that deal with materials like brass and iron and red oxide, seems to be much more personal.

The red oxide, present in so many of the works here, is something that comes from their childhood. UBIK grew up with the pigment at the fabrication fac­tory in Sharjah that their father owned, where it was used to coat metal to stop it from rusting, and in Kerala, where red oxide is commonly used in flooring and red soil is present everywhere. “I also like the fact that these works [that use materials like brass, iron and red oxide] will deteriorate,” they say. “There’s an alchemy happening behind the scenes.”

Two works, placed side by side, titled ‘Imprint’ and ‘Imprints’ are a good way of navigating the exhibition. These two are recreations, on different materials, from a scene in the 1987 Arnold Schwar­zenegger-starring film The Predator—of two muscular arms locked together in an arm-wrestling contest—that has had a rich afterlife as a popular meme. UBIK found the image interesting, they say, not just because it looked cool as an image and has a distinct homoerotic element built into it but also because it could convey a meeting together of two different periods in their life. “I like the idea of a past self and a new self of me meeting together,” UBIK says. “Also, it’s a very famous meme. And I wanted to subvert that.”