Static Range

This artist’s book is a new strand of Static Range, a multidisciplinary and multilimbed project that uses a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a canvas for speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity and love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe, and post-nation states. To date, Static Range comprises various elements—“transmissions”—in video, performance, textile, music, text, and botanical interventions. The artist’s book is a new component planned as a part of an exhibition curated by Irene Sunwoo at the Art Institute of Chicago (December 2022–May 2023). The book, Static Range, takes its inspiration from stamp booklets and flip books: it forms an analogue version of the eponymous animation in which the mountain, Nanda Devi, morphs in the nuclear sublime, radiant and blemished. Made with organic cellulose paper and entirely lickable, each page contains four perforated stamps. The book has a screen printed cover on cloth, and a wrapper containing an epistolary exchange between the mountain and the nuclear powered spy device that is lodged inside it, as well as three newly commissioned texts. Necessarily, the only way to consume this book is to destroy it.

Design by Sukanya Ghosh.