Although they enjoyed the casual dialog of two friends occupying a shared Bangkok studio, in September 2006, Varsha Nair and Jérôme Ming found their separate art practices animated by an unsettling set of unspoken conversations. Jérôme began to affix large drawings of tanks and colored panels to the workspace walls, while Varsha’s own sketches became transfixed with images of contorted puppets twisting in space. Both artists would later transform their respective works on paper into animations whose weightless movements and quiet adjustments would together resonate with the sobering gravity of the world just beyond the studio.

Three years later, much has changed, but hardly the “quick fixes” that anyone had anticipated. Indeed, mechanical puppetry and shifting colored sequences still intrude into the artists’ individual practices, as if the makeshift patchwork of images first stretched across their former studio’s walls had actually laid bare a far greater set of common concerns that would continue to preoccupy the two. In November 2008, while at a residency in Thailand’s Sisaket province, an unbridgeable distance from downtown Bangkok, Varsha filmed the unquiet lullaby of an Isan child swinging rhythmically from the threads of a hammock, falling in place. In early 2009, now working from Yaounde, Cameroon, Jérôme created a methodical animation of red gears pivoting in circular motion, turning and returning to a theme he had explored in a similar work twenty years earlier, albeit by means of vastly different video technology. The two artists’ off-kilter perceptions of the common world they inhabited in 2006 have indeed not “fixed” and righted themselves, but have rather become a fixation of both artists’ work, resurfacing in their respective practices today, in September 2009.