Fingerprint – The Back of the Front

Nita Tandon’s installation Fingerprint makes the discrepancy between the digitalised and therefore endlessly reproducible graphic image and the uniqueness of an analogue picture visible.
In the act of pressing each pixel onto a glass pane, the artist leads the scan of the fingerprint back to its analogue ascription. The process is a game of definitions played with the viewer in which they are forced to choose between analogue/digital, two-dimensional/three-dimensional, front/back.

As a consequence, the fingerprint – depicted on the entire surface – is left on each and every part of the picture, making the front the back and vice versa. In this process of transfer, where Plasticine and finger make physical and material contact, both bodies overlap and intermesh; identification becomes manifest in both its figurative and concrete sense.

Epitomised as a determinant of identity, the fingerprint becomes the object of questions concerning originality and seriality.

Daniel Wisser, 2010