A new project maps abstraction with urgent messaging
This week we are sharing a new project by artist and Epicenter NYC co-founder Nitin Mukul: “You Were Here” is a video art installation on view through the end of the year in the 74th St.-Roosevelt Ave. station in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the busiest subway stations in New York City, where more than 100,000 people pass through daily –– in one of the most culturally diverse ZIP codes in the world.
The title speaks to elements of our surroundings and society that have already disappeared or are at risk of gradually disappearing. Mukul is reflecting on climate change, First Peoples, on recent incidents of disappeared and abducted members of our local community in anti-immigration raids and on those lost in a pandemic that hit this neighborhood harder than anywhere else in the city. The piece combines painted elements with footage that was all filmed in Jackson Heights.
The video opens with riders dropping from view as they descend the subway stairs, followed by bumblebees pollinating by vibrating their bodies to shake loose pollen gathered from flowers. These bees face extinction due to habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. An aerial image of Jackson Heights taken by an astronaut currently on board the International Space Station and shared with Mukul also appears – a metaphor for our place in the universe and how all our actions have an impact.
Originally trained as a painter, Mukul started making hybrid painting-videos while living in India in 2008, inspired by the intense Delhi heat. He eventually coined the term ‘durational painting’ to describe a painting that can only be experienced as a film. Creating a durational painting requires engaging with the atmospheric conditions at the site of its production. These ambient improvisational paintings begin by painting on a flat ice sheet and adding additional layers of paint and ice so it accumulates sedimentary-like levels of color and texture.
When the painting in its frozen form is complete, it’s placed outside and allowed to melt according to natural weather conditions while it is filmed. Experiencing the resulting video can be therapeutic, giving us a glimpse of elapsing geologic time. Viewers have space to build empathy with the forces at play in these pieces, and foster an almost animistic connection to them.
Durational paintings are immersive slow art experiences that encourage participants to momentarily disconnect from the spectacles of social media and the like, in order to sync with the work’s meditative pace. We can identify with the bodily quality of the metamorphosing painting. Its viscous, glistening surface, juxtaposed with and acted upon by the landscape and atmospheric conditions reveals that there is less separation between our human containers and the seemingly non-sentient matter around us than we might think.
This is slow, ambient art that also functions as an empirical reflection of the site on which it is made: the light, temperatures, time of day, location, as well as our climate at large. It can be seen as a new context for understanding abstract painting as a durational experience that is site-specific, yet borderless.
Join Epicenter NYC and Nitin Mukul for a viewing and reception on Nov. 21 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Los Herederos community space and radio station in the 74th St.-Roosevelt Ave. subway station. Details and RSVP here.This project was made possible by a 2025 NYFA Queens Art Fund New Works Grant awarded to Mukul. It is also part of Fall of Freedom, a nationwide outpouring of exhibitions, performances and public events on Nov. 21-22 in a wave of creative resistance to attacks on democracy and free expression.
