New exhibition: The Neighbour

Today marks the beginning of artist Ashok Sukumaran’s new exhibition The Neighbour which is now open until Thursday 9 April.

The exhibition takes place in ‘P3’, a 14000 square foot space developed from a vast concrete construction hall and is located underneath the Marylebone campus at the University of Westminster.

The Guardian recently called this underground hideaway “one of the capital’s hidden and most exciting new spaces”.

Ashok was born in 1974 and is Bombay-based. His work recently featured in the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2005 Ashok was awarded the first prize of the 2005 UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and also received a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2007.

In The Neighbour two mobile habitats share a space - one is a large mobile 1970’s trailer, and the other is a smaller yellow camper van.

The white trailer moves up and down imperceptibly slowly. One of the artist’s assistants said: “It’s so slow you don’t realise it’s moving until you stand next to the door and it passes you by.”

The two mobile homes reflect the complex relationship between obsessive neighbours, each vehicle slyly stalking the other. Ashok said: “We don’t know what to do with people who are neither friends nor enemies.”

The camper van has sets of headphones attached inside where you can hear everything that is happening in the trailer. Ashok jokes that “in here you could say this person has serious fetish for that house”.

It is within these older mobile homes and camper vans that neighbours would mix. Ashok said that it was in these intense traffic - jams that people would have to unite, creating an “interesting moment”.

Now though, we have retreated and society has become “obsessed by safe distance… From the gypsies, from the smokers, from each others.”

The Neighbour seeks to undo this ‘safe distance’. According to Ashok: “The space being open is necessary, for others to be able to enter it, for universality.”

By Charlotte Hanger