Sense of the moment

Colombian-born installation artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s art refers to historical and cultural intersections between technology and temporality, while presenting the powerful and uncanny character of structures and machines.

- Lakshmi Narayanan

To understand Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s art and his thought process, you first need to understand the man himself. One look at his grand CV reveals Gómez-Egaña’s studied music composition, performance art, visual arts and completed doctoral studies with the Norwegian Research Fellowship Programme. One of the ‘First 25’ artists announced as participants in the third edition of India’s only Biennale, Kochi-Muziris, very few of us know that Gómez-Egaña grew up as a violinist and played the violin so much that one day he woke up and couldn’t move his arms from a strange pain. That’s when he realised that violinists are more athletes than technicians and that he had been doing it wrong all along. “To make things worse, I now had 10 hours a day to fill up with something. I went to London to start a new career and became a composer,” he reveals. “I also worked with dance and choreography, and then with drawing and sculpture.” So in short, rather than quitting, he took a physical injury as an imperative to explore new ways of making things work. Today, Gómez-Egaña’s practice expands across performance, sculpture, video, installation, and sound.His works refer to historical and cultural intersections between technology and temporality, while presenting the powerful and uncanny character of structures and machines. “I find great value in studying historical aspects of technology as it meets our current accelerated world. I believe that our complicated relationship to temporality lies in this genealogy,” says the installation artist, who will enrich and enhance the imagination of art lovers as a high-profile participant at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016. The historical and cultural junctures between technology and temporality make Gómez-Egaña’s art. In the intersections, he discerns both promise and peril — the double-e