The Sun Rises in The East: Ronny Sen

TARQ is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Ronny Sen, titled The Sun Rises in the East, presenting a new body of ten works. Constructing a speculative narrative, Sen’s project is set in 2045, Bengal, amid climate collapse and rogue AI.

 

The exhibition draws from Sen’s text, which opens with a stark proposition: “Winter 2045 in Bengal is unforgiving: the climate is erratic, and artificial intelligence has slipped into the hands of transnational criminal networks. A call from a Western photo editor sends Ronny Sen in search of a peculiar wooden dog, apparently the first synthetic analog learning machine ever built in the 1940s as a covert weapon system, in case the Nazis used the nuclear bomb first.”

The narrative follows the survival of the machine, now alongside a young boy: “The dog was designed to learn from its surroundings and serve any survivors of the so-called free world at the peak of World War II. It was deployed to numerous secret airfields newly built on the eastern edge of the British Empire for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF). The aircraft that would later drop the nuclear bombs on Japan were operational earlier in these very airfields, where the first B-29 bombers began arriving. He [Sen] travels to these sites, now abandoned for over a century, because the military-industrial complex must understand what happened to the first prototypes of these analog AI machines. Miraculously, he finds one intact, almost indistinguishable from a real dog, now a companion to a sixteen-year-old boy in the ruins.”

The journey culminates in a startling discovery and lingering question, “What has the dog really learned over more than a century, and what is it doing with this boy in the middle of nowhere?”

 

Blurring research, fiction, and image-making, the work reflects on the afterlives of technology and the uneasy relationship between learning systems and human survival. The exhibition catalogue will feature a new text by Ronny Sen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

 

Please click here to read the entire text.

About the Artist

 

Ronny Sen (b. 1986, Silchar) is a film director, screenwriter and photographer. His debut feature film Cat Sticks world premiered in the competition section at Slamdance, 2019 where it won a Grand Jury award. It is streaming worldwide on Mubi and is available on Amazon Prime Video. He worked as a co-writer for an Amazon original series titled Waack Girls. He has previously directed television documentaries for BBC. An investigative feature documentary he directed and filmed for the BBC World Service was nominated for 2024 International Emmy Award for News & Current Affairs.

Sen started his career as a photographer and has made two artist books, Khmer Din, 2013 and End of Time, 2016. He was invited to be an artist in residence in Japan by The Japan Foundation in 2013 and in Poland by the Polish Institute in 2016. He received the Getty Images Instagram Grant in 2016 for his work in Jharia coal mines which was shown in his second solo exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai, in 2018, titled Fire Continuum. 

His other solo shows include New world chronicles of an old world colour, TARQ, Mumbai, India and Arena, Belvedere Museum, Netherlands, in association with the Noorderlicht Festival, both in 2016. Ronny has also participated in group shows like Abandon, presented by the Gujral Foundation in association with Outset India in 2015 and In Secrecy, Art Heritage gallery, New Delhi, India in 2011.

His works are included in the permanent collection of the Alkazi Collection of Photography and Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru.

Ronny Sen lives and works in Kolkata.