We Are The Aliens We’re Looking For showcases young and emerging artists with wide-ranging perspectives and interpretations of the ‘alien’, the ‘other’ and the 'strange'. Nihaal Faizal’s work in the show is a silent film featuring versions of a particular stock video of four girls dressed in a Christmas-themed bikini, pointing at a green screen. It makes one wonder about the surreal nature of digital media on the internet. While also bringing to mind the ubiquitous nature of advertising and the commodification of everything online. Kinjal Shah's playful sculptures on the other hand grapple with our obsessive reliance on technology through her take on our dependence on plug points. In her ceramic stoneware pieces, she tests the human urge to constantly plug our communication devices into sockets of electrical power.

In Singaporean artist George Wong’s short video, a little boy dressed as a police officer relays the rules of the game ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. He then plays the game with someone who doesn’t seem to understand or know the rules of the game. A metaphor for the rules of 'the system' set by figures of authority that George questions and finds incomprehensible.

While Ohida Khandakar’s haunting work is a film trying to capture the inner lives of orthodox Indian village women. Their mysterious and overlooked realm of living and working often dictated by patriarchal rules. Where some of them hope to be liberated by their work and earnings. And they conjure up whole possible imagined worlds. But work life in the urban context is complicated in many different ways. Aarti Sunder’s video focuses on what it means to 'work' in today's urban techno-capitalist context. Confronting us with our obsession with being productive, functional, working harder, faster, and better. The work draws from a chance encounter with anxiety-ridden fish and conversations with people and focuses on modern life's perpetual exhaustion and fatigue that possibly turn us into a forced new version of anxious humans.

Iranian artist Sinai's film is an introspective story in fragments told through images, video and Persian poetry. It dives into the psyche of the protagonist, who seems to be in a lucid dream-like state. Presenting to us a slice of his complex mind. Similarly, Tasneem's series of drawings on paper explore our wavering mental health in the context of today's global, techno-capitalist and alienated living. This particular series explores acceptance and confrontation of one's own inner realities, strangeness or alien-ness. Bringing forth abstract conversations through introspection and the very physical act of drawing.

 #UNFAIR, created by Wenceslaus  Mendes, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Mohit Bhalla and Anoushka Mathews, takes us through stories of alienation quite literally through extreme cases of racism. We engage in dialogue with the “African” diaspora here in India to understand what constructs prejudice, discrimination and othering. In the sound piece, Whisper, artist Ava Halloran draws on the term ‘alien’, which is used here to refer to the illegal immigrants coming into Europe via the Mediterranean sea. The sounds are inspired by the Mediterranean sea close to Marseilles, where the artist currently lives, and thinks through the tragedies of migrant ships sinking in the sea while trying to escape Africa. The othering and alienation of these people and their resulting deaths in the Sea.

And finally, Anand’s Zoo #2 takes us through a delightfully original anthology of short comic sketches straight from the whimsical mind of an artist who makes profound but simple observations from our strange everyday.

Together this mix of international contemporary artists working in various parts of the world offers a slice of their life and what they find alien in it. Thanks to the internet and the global world, we have access to these multiple contexts. That allows us to co-exist and empathise with the inherently human follies situated in these myriad different contexts.

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Text by Sahana Srikanth and Tasneem Lohani