In the age of digital excess, Mark Prime moves like a phantom. One of South Asia’s best-known and frequently sought-out exhibition designers, Prime has cultivated the talent for being off the grid
Mark Prime
In the age of digital excess, Mark Prime moves like a phantom. One of South Asia’s best-known and frequently sought-out exhibition designers, Prime has cultivated the talent for being off the grid. The Mumbai-based artist is known to be fiercely camera-shy, and not just with the paparazzi; even his friends are not spared. Very often, his name is deliberately omitted from the catalogues for the exhibitions he has worked on. And, he rarely agrees to press interviews.
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Which is why, a fortnight ago, it is with mixed feelings (think of heading into outer space or stepping into a lion’s lair) and no concept note in hand, that we enter Prime’s apartment and studio in Gamdevi, where he is busy preparing for his first solo exhibition in India.
A couple of floors above, live the gallerist-couple Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal, at whose Colaba venue Prime’s ‘play.pause.rewind’ will be shown, starting October 14. Chatterjee has asked to join in, half-kidding that he wants to learn more about Prime’s show. While Chatterjee makes his way downstairs, we take in the compact living room where Prime has been busy at work. Assemblages of aluminium and brass rods clamber up the walls and sit on tables, with tools and reflective black acrylic canvasses around us. This could have been a smithery if it wasn’t for a painting by German artist Rebecca Horn quietly peeking out from one corner.
As Chatterjee joins us, a cup of tea in his hand, and our photographer packs his bags and leaves (with no image of Prime or the metal assemblages to take back) the artist says, “I don’t need that kind of validation outside of my art practice.” It’s true.
What’s also true is that Prime is no hurry to churn out a number of exhibitions or editions of artworks. In his career in the arts spanning over two decades, this is the second solo that the 52-year-old artist is presenting and it will have just about a dozen works. While Prime has shown site-specific works outside of the gallery context, his first gallery exhibition, titled Underpass, was hosted by Peter Nagy’s Nature Morte Berlin in 2013. It had neon-lights arranged in patterns and flickering in ways that simultaneously broke the patterns.
The forthcoming exhibition, Prime says, “Interprets those light structures physically through patterns. It draws on my love for pattern repetition.” The hand-polished metal rods form geometries that become the building blocks for what Prime refers to as “structures, not sculptures”.
As we wonder what’s holding the rods together, Prime dims the lights and focuses a table-lamp on the metal rods, which catch the light and throw back a beautiful mesh of twigs, like a forest caught in moonlight. What were say, 30 rods, now look triple the number, in an intricate play of light and shadow. Allow your imagination to run a little further, the rods seem suspended in mid-air, and as Chatterjee puts it, “frozen in time”. A label stating “Juggernaut” hovers above us, but Prime dismisses it, saying, “Titles aren’t essential to my work. These works in the studio will not be presented in the same fashion at the exhibition. The black acrylic and metal pieces will become a triptych; we also have works over water.”
The deceptively simple structures in Prime’s room come out of a long process of tinkering and reflecting. “I play with various techniques and wooden structures first, holding the forms together with clamps. I look at them for a few weeks, then look away, and come back to them, moving, balancing and adjusting them,” he explains.
The love for repetition, he continues, comes from his years as a self-taught studio musician playing drums and the guitar, and composing music right through to his 30s. While he doesn’t pick up his guitar as frequently as he used to, he continues to draw on these influences. “As a musician, I would practice relentlessly, going over a single phrase or pattern until I got it right, often over a hundred times. Backwards and forwards, shuttling. In a way, my works are repetitive patterns in 3D space — a logical progression from my interest in music,” he says. This love for a good loop is manifested in ‘play.pause.rewind’ and earlier in Underpass, where Prime co-composed an audio track to accompany the installation.
It’s but obvious that this ace exhibition designer has mastered the two elements he needs to work with in any gallery or venue — space and light. Since moving to India from the UK 12 years ago, he has installed many exhibitions at the Kiran Nadar Museum and managed, along with Jhaveri Contemporary, Anish Kapoor’s 2010 homecoming at Mehboob Studios, among others.
For him, it is also the love of being hands-on, with his own exhibition or others’. His father, “a fighter pilot with an exceptional eye”, “a sensational draftsman” and “a design engineer in the pre-computer era”, had a lot to do with it, he says. “Growing up in Malvern, spending hours in my father’s engineering factory as a boy, had me using machines and problem-solving at a young age. It has been a massive advantage to my arts practice, both music and fine art. I have learned to adapt to what is available,” he says.
As we wrap up, Prime, with the enthusiasm of a child, turns on a static laser beam, aiming it away from our eyes. He holds little mirrors in front of it, and the green light sprints about. “Some day, when I have the right conditions, I’d like to present an installation with lasers. I love creating illusions and, if I have the power to defy physics, I’ll perhaps learn how to suspend my artworks in free space. To change the current reality. Like Elon Musk. Wouldn’t that be fabulous?” he says.
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