M.T. Karthik, Chennai, India

b. India 1967

Current Work:

The Rupee Ganesha Project [2005-2007]

M.T. Karthik is also an author, editor and publisher who conducts journalism and art-in-practice as forms of socio-political engagement. He is the Founding Director of AtelierMTK, a roving venture using cross-cultural infrastructure to produce contemporary artworks and events, and founder of two small presses, Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press and Oowoolagam Press, publishing in USA and India respectively.

Work resides in the collections of: The Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, The Milwaukee Public Library, Smith College, Stanford University, New York University, The Otis College of Art and Design, Occidental College, The University of Southern California and other archival, educational and private collections. Karthik has been published by Conde Nast, Hachette-Filipacchi and Artichoke Yink Press.

Some of Karthik's work has involved sound collection, recorded interviews, and audio production, like that in:

The First Contact Project [2005-2007]
recordings of people describing first experiences with computers

Audible Palestine [2004]
recordings, interviews from twelve days in the Occupied Territories upon launch of the Israeli Wall and of the Geneva Accords, December 2003

Karthik has been collecting and experimenting with sound
for decades: listening station

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Interviews Exhibits Talks Performances

Found in Translation at
The Center For Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN
Spring 2007

"Found in Translation"
New York Center for Book Arts, NY, NY
Sep. 29 - Dec. 9, 2006

"bin Laden is dead - is al Qaeda CIA?"
Mass Hypnosis&Underground History Since the Polarizing Events of 2001
Booklyn Artists Alliance, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY
Sep. 5, 2006

"Found in Translation"
San Francisco Center for the Book, San Francisco, CA
May 12 - Jul. 21, 2006

"Tricycle Museum" [as a part of Jam Sessions: Rigo 23-84]
Center Das Artes Casa Das Mudas, Calheta, Madeira Island, Portugal
Feb. 18 - May 30, 2006

"Pan-Asianism Central to Exile Activists Ideology"
A. Jeffs, The Japan Times, Nov. 19, 2005

"Embracing the Gadfly: the Interviewed thoughts of M.T. Karthik"
M. Herbst, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
Volume 1, Issue 4, Sep. 2005

"Media Pluralism in the Age of Surveillance"
C-Level, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA
Feb. 24, 2005

"Radio as Meta-Medium"
The New College, San Francisco, CA
Dec. 05, 2004

"News Director"
Pacifica Radio Station KPFK 90.7fm Los Angeles
Feb. 10, 2003 - Nov. 26, 2004

"Troubled Sleep: Art in the Age of Bush"
California Institute of the Arts Valencia, CA
[panel with Marc and Robby Herbst, Mariana Botey, Andrea Bowers, Josh On and Laura Owens]
Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004

"Visible Palestine" [with M.E. Gonzales]
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, CA
Feb. 25, 2004

...even the birds were on fire...
University of New Hampshire, Durham
Mar. 11-May 11, 2003

"Art and Political Communication"
University of California at Davis
Feb. 10, 2003

"That's for Hiroshima! That's for Nagasaki!"
Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles
Jan. 27, 2003

"US=THEM" featuring
"1984" a performance reading
of Orwell's novel on September 11, 2002
33&1/3 Books, Los Angeles
Sept. 11 - Oct. 7, 2002

"Rare Books of The Future"
[with Booklyn Artists]
Center for the Book Arts, NY
Jan. 25 - Apr. 02, 2002

...even the birds were on fire...
Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles
[performance with M. Weber]
Nov. 14 - Dec. 4, 2001

"What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"
performance reading of Frederick Douglass' speech
on the steps of the New York Public Library
July 4, 2001

"Books by Artists"
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY
Spring 2001

"The Voting Chamber"
Movements Gallery, Austin, TX
Feb. 20 - Apr. 20, 2000

"There's No Such Thing As The 21st Century"
installation performance at Greenpoint Riverfront Artists, NYC
Dec 5 - 12, 1998

The Mr. Wouldenhead Show
cafe installation in Williamsburg
August 1998

Pulaski Bridge Drop
Brooklyn/Queens border, NYC
Jun 10, 1998

SELECTED COLOPHONS

" Taiwan" [2005]
" Discourse on the Polarizing Events of 2001" [2005]
"dereliction"
" The Big-Time Pitch"
" US=THEM" [2001]
" 26 Days" [2002], edition of 26
" AWM" [2002], edition of 17
" eleven" [2002], edition of 29
"The USA Sucks"
" El Toro Corrido" [2002]
" Soon" [2002]
" Marathon"
" The Very Idea" [2001]
" Europe" [2001]
" The Shut Up Book" [2000]
" Thousand Year Wu" [1999]
" Yankee Gone Home Run" [1999]
more...

"Taiwan" [2005]
(for Rigo 23)

ink, acrylic, collage of scraps and prints, color 35mm photos, handmade cover of leaves bound with natural fibers

notations and snaps from two trips to Taiwan separated by ten years (1991, 2001) and composed as a political commentary on the radical transformation of local politics from KMT to DPP control. Presidents Bush 41 and Bush 43 regimes are described in relation to the island. From the vantage point of a U.S. American foreigner visiting as an English teacher and then a radio journalist and finally an artist's assistant, policy toward Taiwan is assessed under Bush 41 as he was busily conducting his war on Iraq - the so-called Persian Gulf War. Bush 41 was the first to sell weapons to the island - a policy continued to this day by Bush 43, who went further to try to divide and polarize relations across the Taiwan Strait, pumping up military sales to Taiwan while sending Secretary of State Condi Rice to tell European countries not to sell weapons to the PRC. The book ruminates on manipulations of local politics by the U.S. C.I.A. and includes art by Hung-Chi Chih and Rigo 23 during a period of warming relations across the Strait.

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"dereliction" [2005]

Click the link above to read the complete colophon

seafarer's maps salvaged by G. Borsa from a derelict tugboat on the Newtown Creek that separates the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, NY; gouache, acrylic, ink, and collage of printed paper, and prints from digital media by M.T. Karthik; binding by C.K. Wilde.

Initially authored during the Republican National Convention as it was taking place in New York City, "dereliction" [2005] begins with a slap across the face of the Prince of Wales in 2001 and moves through land and sea, ultimately ending in a cosmological Haiku.

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"Discourse on the Polarizing Events of 2001" [2005]
collaboration with A.P. Ferrara

Part One: The Polarizing Events
Part Two: The Division of Society
Part Three: The Discourse Recast
Part Four: 2002 = 1984 (a Library)

acrylic, oil, marker and pen ink, blood, hair, photocopied text, reprinted e-mails, white-out, output from digital media and library of zines and books

Discourse On The Polarizing Events of 2001 is an archive of documentation concerning the events of September 11, 2001, in the United States of America [and in particular in New York, NY], collected in the 85 days after the skyjacking of aircraft in Boston. It includes a Bibliography of zines produced in 2002 and various books, parallel texts, images and dvds produced by victims, friends and families of victims, academics and extremely literate independent U.S. Americans in the five years since the Polarizing Events of September 11, 2001, a.k.a. nine-one-one, nine-eleven, September the Eleventh and September eleven.

Collected, edited, organized and bound by M.T. Karthik and A.P. Ferrara, DISCOURSE ON THE POLARIZING EVENTS OF 2001 has established a parallel history to that authored by the Bush Administration and corporate-controlled media - by covering the opposition to retaliatory war and violence after the skyjackings in proportionally relevant terms, and remaining lucid and impartial in investigating the attacks as a crime rather than an act of war.

The Discourse is a significant archive of opinion and brings together well-researched conjecture in a linear manner as a follow-up to real-time fears, beliefs and suppositions expressed by witnesses immediately following the attacks. The Discourse thus creates a living memory of unreported opinions and events that were expressed, creating a critical perception of the subsequent fictionalizing of the Polarizing Events by U.S. American corporate media and political interests. The result is a collection of material that evidences, implies and directly points out major issues, discrepancies and unanswered questions in the U.S. government’s investigation of the events, most roundly concluded on the matter by the Ruling Party in their 911 Commission Report.

Composed from e-mails, discarded documents and images found in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and transcripts of television broadcasts, and video and audio recordings, THE DISCOURSE includes daily entries of events by independent authors, texts of the political opposition as well as contemporary news coverage of the events, printed copies of laws passed in the wake of the attacks and other public documents and includes the first New York Post, New York Times and New York Times magazine, New Yorker magazine, Time magazine, Economist magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Figaro, Greenpoint Gazette, and more, published after the attacks and purchased in New York upon their release. The collection also contains personal remnants of eyewitness documentation including napkins, scraps of paper, posters, flyers, banners retold memories of witnesses and victims through audio and print, an immense collection of material from the streets of New York and the beard of an immigrant South Asian New Yorker.

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"26 Days" [2002], edition of 26
[with B. LaFore and T.R. Watson]
acrylic, marker ink and inkjet print on cotton paper

The title is taken from the period of 26 days between the attacks of 9/11/2001 and 10/07/2001 when the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in vengeful retaliation. The centerpiece of this golden-colored 7" x 4" antiwar zine is a letter from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to the New York Times dated April 2002 - shortly after violent Israeli incursions into the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem, but 6 months before Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize - in which Carter proposes ways in which the sitting U.S. President can take steps toward peace in the middle east. An intensely detailed set of 8 maps of Israel and Palestine - researched, composed and graphically designed by B. La Fore - emerge from the centerfold of this letter. 26 Days contains a pull-quote from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad and writings by Phillip Knightley, Francis Boyle, Dr. Firoz Osman, Stephen Zunes and from an e-mail by a group of Palestinian doctors and intellectuals in Nablus.

26 Days was first exhibited at "US=THEM" [2002] at 33 1/3 Books and Gallery, Los Angeles. With cover art by T.R. Watson, this book can be read at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY at The Getty Museum and The Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA and seven of the remaining 26 editions found homes in educational institutions around the country.

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"AWM" [2002], edition of 17
inkjet on paper, with screened denim cover

a staple-bound collection of printed e-mails by Raj Balas, a South Asian man murdered in Brooklyn, NY in the days following the Polarizing Events. These E-mails, entitled "Anti-War Movement", and numbered 1 - 6 were sent to dozens of publications and institutions between Sep. 11 and Sep. 24, 2001, the collected emails compose a haunting posthumous plea for sanity in a time and place when vengeance-madness took the life of the author. Text on the denim reads, "J'accuse l' etat". The screened fabric is fashioned into a slip-cover designed by T.R. Watson. Also in the collection of the MOMA and Getty and at Occidental College in LA and other educational institutions and private collections.

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"eleven" [2002], edition of 29
(with Booklyn)

details and colophon available on Booklyn Exhibitions page

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"The USA Sucks" [2003],edition of 500

it sucks more oil, water, energy and resources than anyone else anywhere else, ever. So begins this small zine created from the transcript of an editorial aired by MTK on Pacifica Radio station 90.7fm in Los Angeles, KPFK, July 4, 2002.

Click on The USA Sucks link above to find an mp3 of the audio

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"El Toro Corrido" [2002]

(for and with TIFA and containing art by: Rigo02, M. Weber, A. Noble, B+, G. Jehan, T. Krahn, G. Slay, A.M. Watson, A. Roma, AP, Drs. M. Bates and M. Dwight and the very first print work of O.M. Milan)

photographs, ticket stubs, marker ink, acrylic, oil, color copy, white-out

Begun possibly on the night of conception -El Toro Corrido is a journal, a novel, an essay, a guidebook and a preface to the lifetime of our son. This book was composed from ticket stubs, photos, flyers and other items found and created during a year of pregnancy and delivery.

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"Soon" [2002]
acrylic, ink, white-out, ticket stubs, cardboard, paper made from cotton, twigs and leaves, black felt cover

This rumination on loss starts with a lesson on the politics of suicide bombing and ends in an audio cassette recorded from within the Alamo Dome in San Antonio, Texas, during the final pro basketball game played there by the San Antonio Spurs. The Alamo Dome is an example of the public swindle of stadium-building that took place all over the US in the 1990's. The game is lost to the Los Angeles Lakers when Laker guard Kobe Bryant, in the final 2.3 seconds, cuts through the lane, steals an offensive rebound and sticks-back the ball for the victory to eliminate the Spurs from playoff contention in 2002. A 35 mm photograph of the court at this exact moment from a perspective that includes the Jumbo-Tron monitor hanging over the court, captures the instant before Bryant cuts through the lane from two separate angles in one shot - the ball is frozen in midair rebounding off the rim. This very unique and very American book was composed on the Greyhound bus running between Los Angeles and San Antonio - a distance of some 1800 miles. It contains a poetic reference to and quotations from Charles Mingus, created as the bus passes his birthcity of Nogales, AZ. In the centerfold, a drawing entitled, "Portrait of the 20th Century" is accompanied by a quote from collage and book artist C.K. Wilde.

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"Marathon" [2001], edition of 101
color copy, ink, gold vellum, inkjet, compact disc

This audio magazine appeared as an edition of Karthik's books with soundtracks. In this case, the sound of literally tens of thousands of runners approaching the hill at the halfway point of the New York City Marathon on the Pulaski Bridge between Queens and Brooklyn. The book contains poetry and prose on marathoning in New York at the end of the 20th century. But the cd is the real artifact here - a work of endurance and grace, Marathon (2001), contains sustained sequences of runners at their limit and in their element. Engineered and produced by M.T. Karthik and mastered by A.J. Tissian. The cover features an image of mic position during the 2000 Marathon by Brooklyn photographer M. Lethem. Graphic Design by A.E. Williams.

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"The Very Idea" [2001]
100% cotton paper, acrylic, oil, plane ticket stub, water and multicolored variants of marker ink in silk box.

This 4" x 7", 400-word English narrative began as "The Very Idea Corporation," became a gorgeously elegant anti-TV sentiment and moved into a suspenseful moment in the air between a 40-something-year-old man and a 13-year-old girl that never resolves...

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"Europe" [2001]
plane, train, bus and metro ticket stubs, ink, acrylic, oil

A narrative collage of text and various scraps found in Europe [Madeira, Azores, Portugal, France, Amsterdam] December 25, 2000 - January 25, 2001. The book is handmade from leaves and bound with twigs in Indonesia.

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"The Shut Up Book" [2000]
ink, acrylic, white-out, oil, blood, cassette tape

A 4"x 5" unique that contains as its centerfold a photo of a 5' x 6' anti-death-penalty graffiti mural tagged by the author onto a police station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The book was exhibited at Phoebe's Coffee Shop two blocks from the site of the mural in summer 2000. The Shut Up Book contains a personal, pithy and playful anti-death-penalty poem with an audio magazine on cassette tape that includes Jimi Hendrix Axis: Bold As Love, Pacifica Station WBAI's coverage of the execution of Shaka Sankofa in Texas (June 2000) as well as a mix of ambient sound and music from radio in turn-of-the-century New York City.

In the collection of J. Rosencrantz, Los Angeles

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"Thousand Year Wu" [1999]
(with C.K. Wilde and E. Weil)
Algerian goat leather cover with cast plates. Fabriano cotton wrapped in Seikishu Japanese mulberry, India ink.

This very large (18" x 14") book was "made a thousand years ago." Drawings of forms from Tai-Chi Chuan, Kung-Fu and other disciplines are accompanied by pictographic text elements literally thousands of years old. Cotton paper wrapped in Japanese mulberry gives the appearance of a faded, well-traveled instructional text with an "evident" patina from use. Source material for the graphic elements included the more than 700-year-old Mustard Seed Manual of Painting. The original Chinese text by M.T. Karthik consists of variations on the theme of decrying the rational to favor the transcendental in engagements. This book was commissioned by the performance artist RZA (Wu-Tang clan) for use in a digital film project.

In the collection of The RZA (yo send it back bra')

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"Yankee Gone Home Run" [1999]
[with C.K. Wilde and M. Weber]
Ticker tape, buy/put/sell cards, confetti, Yankees ticket stubs, plastic, ink

The pages of this wickedly colorful book are composed of ephemera collected from the "ticker-tape parade" in New York City for the 1998 New York Yankees that have been plasticized into independent collages of remarkable detail. The pages play host to an original poetic rumination by M. Weber in the spirit of the game. This book can be read at the Milwaukee Public Library's rare book room.

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"Symphony with one rest" [1998]

"Mood" [1997]
a novel

"Truthful Conceits" [1997]
a collection of essays

"Sucka Free" [1997]
a collection of short fiction

"An Examiner's Chronicle" [1997]
a collection of poetry and prosaic fragments

This page is maintained by M.T. Karthik.