"Ever found yourself waiting for an important file/image/video to download and, just when it’s on the brink of completion, lo and behold! your Internet ‘connection’ goes haywire and the download glitches? A fairly commonplace occurrence in the virtual world – and one of the many accepted blights of our twenty-first century existence. No matter how ‘connected’ we may feel, it only takes a snap of the fingers (or wires) to shatter that illusion. But maybe those fleeting, dejected flashes are opportunities to pause and reflect on the anomalies of the Internet – and those of life as well. Because very rarely do realizations come with a successful ‘file download’. Things must glitch to transcend."

The work is a satirical endeavor aimed at emphasizing the challenges of the modern 'Internet Age' and its inherent transience. It also sheds light on the harmful effects of digitalization on individual and cultural identity. The distorted sculpture serves as a fitting allegory for the rapid spread of assimilation, representing the negative consequences of digitalization.

Nandan Ghiya (b, India, 1980) is an artist whose practice explores the disjunction between various forms of image-based media. Although he received no formal training, his mixed media works reveal a savvy understanding of the function that photographs play in defining our perception of cultural and collective narratives. In juxtaposing found studio portraits alongside digitally manipulated images, Ghiya examines how advances in media-based technologies define our contemporary modes of perception while also threatening genealogies of rich indigenous histories. His work could be seen in conversation with artistic traditions of assemblage and collage. His deliberate commitment to handwork with acrylic, however, also suggests a deeper commitment to multidisciplinary practices that don’t entirely refute artistic traditions but instead utilize them to draw out more trenchant conversations about the erasure of cultural identities and modernism’s displacement of a traumatic colonial past.