Sonic Minute (On Education) - Collage + Poems + Sound Installation
Sood's intermedia project Sonic Minute (On Education) was selected to appear at Exeter Contemporary Open 2024. The selection panel, which consisted of independent curator and writer Jes Fernie, artist and educator Tania Kovats, and Exeter Phoenix curator Matt Burrows, whittled down several hundred submissions to fifteen artist-researchers. Sood's contribution was a series of mixed media collages accompanied by a single channel sound-work inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, and particularly his work's engagement with conceptions of nationalism, universalism and empire.
The collaged images explore the European exceptionalism that sought to dismiss the deep knowledge and rich cultures of India that predated, and continued to exist, alongside colonial rule. They are based on film stills from the 1940’s newsreel Indian News Parade, produced by the Indian government in the run-up to independence in response to more Anglo-centric newsreels created by British companies. These are layered with fragments of an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine, and extracts from C19th essayist and historian Thomas Macaulay, whose 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’ famously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ They are worked into by hand with red pigments, crushed pastels, and tape to evoke bloodstain and censorship, masking, as well as to dismantling and disrupting knowledge hierarchies. The accompanying single channel sound work layers contemporary instrumental compositions with field recordings from Sood’s time spent in Bengal, and forms part of a forthcoming album due to be released with Glasgow-based multi-instrumentalist Hank Tree in winter 2026.
These images are layered with fragments from the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine; as well as epistolary extracts from Thomas Macaulay, whose 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’ famously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ They are worked into by hand with red pigments, crushed pastels, and tape to evoke bloodstain and censorship, masking, as well as to dismantling and disrupting knowledge hierarchies. The accompanying single channel sound work features abrasive new compositions layered against field recordings from my travels in Bengal, as well as fragments of recited Tagore poems.
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