Dev Dhunsi – MaskiniTaal

When I lived in Norway, my family received weekly a local broadsheet from India. I remember picking it up from the mailbox, smelling the ink, and after it was read, watching it burn in the fireplace. Unable to read the writing, I studied and created my own stories around the images. Now, I look back and reconnect with the newspaper, using it as a reference and source to revitalise my own photographic archive and, at the same time, create new expressions. This has become MaskiniTaal, a new word combining the Norwegian word for ‘machine’ and ‘taal’, the word for ‘rhythm’ or a ‘beat’ in Indian classical music. Another machine and its rhythm is the train. In my case the Satluj journey through northern India. Carrying a human-like rhythm with sounds, smells, bodies and through miles and miles of farmers landscape.

MaksiniTaal is due to be published later this year by Heavy Books.

Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996, Norway) is a lens-based artist studying a BFA at Oslo National Academy of The Arts. Within Dev’s artistic the discipline and imagery locates itself between fiction and facts, often observing real time situations followed by a extended conceptual process leading to narratives and displays around the parameters of national identity, heritage and belonging.