“I enjoy working with lights,” Mark Prime tells me from atop a steel ladder, as he fiddles with a set of light bulbs in the middle of Colaba’s Chatterjee & Lal gallery. The 52-year-old artist, exhibition designer and former musician is busy putting the final touches on his first Indian solo show titled play. pause. rewind. , which has been open to the public since mid-October.
The abstract structures on display, consisting of thin metal rods assembled in playful, asymmetrical 3D patterns, wall-hung or situated over water on a series of tabletops, are as enigmatic as their creator. Despite being one of South Asia’s most frequently sought-after exhibition designers, and having spent a decade working in Mumbai, the UK transplant is that rarest of rare things: he’s un-Googleable. He’s notoriously camera shy, and seldom agrees to be interviewed. So naturally, once he climbs down from the ladder and sits down with me for a chat over a cup of tea, that’s the first thing I ask him about.
“I don’t feel the need to be out there in the public domain,” Prime chuckles. “I’m just a bit shy, I guess. There are so many platforms, it’s endless. Facebook, Instagram — it’s an onslaught on your senses to be honest.”
An artistic sensibility
Despite his reluctance to be in the public eye, there are a few things we do know about Prime. He’s India’s leading exhibition designer, with many of the region’s most prominent artists turning to him for help in figuring out how best to display their work and set up their installations. Among the many exhibitions he’s had a hand in putting up, one of the most prominent is Anish Kapoor’s ambitious 2010 show at Mehboob Studios, with works in steel and wax. After a series of site-specific works and group shows, Prime presented his first solo exhibition, Underpass, at Peter Nagy’s Nature Morte gallery in Berlin in 2013. But what few people know is that long before his foray into the art world, Prime spent years working in the music industry, jamming with the likes of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from iconic English electronica act Underworld.
“I started as a drummer and worked in all sorts of areas — film music, TV, with bands,” remembers Prime, who started studying music at the age of nine, eventually teaching himself how to play the drums, guitar, the xylophone and the marimba, among other instruments. This was the mid- to late 80s, an exciting time to be in the British music industry. Post-punk and new wave acts, with their deconstructionist, art-militant ideologies, had blurred the line between fine art and pop music. Popstars quoted Derrida and the Situationists, while a new generation of art school kids thought of pop music as a new, vital and exciting arena for their art practice. “The work of people like [experimental English musician] David Sylvian is very much in a way where I’m coming from too, linking art practice with music and composing,” says Prime.
After four years at the Cheltenham School of Fine Art, Prime shifted to London to continue his music career. “We had a lot of struggles in London, it was kind of a crazy time. We lived in an old warehouse, where we used to do all sorts of things. We’d throw dance parties, we’d make crazy structures, it was a fun time.”
India calling
It was while in London that Prime started working with some of the city’s art galleries, cutting his teeth in exhibition design and display. But Prime doesn’t really think of himself as an ‘exhibition designer’ or ‘museologist’. “This term, ‘exhibition designer’, is something that just sort of came about. For me, it was just about helping artists when they needed help to set up things, make things look good. I come from a very strong engineering background, thanks to my father, so you have that mindset of being able to figure things out, which is a huge advantage. You could call me a musician, an artist, an exhibition designer; there’s so many things that all apply to my practice,” he says.
Prime first came to India 12 years ago, when he was invited by friends from the music industry who owned a hotel here. Inspired by what he calls “that crazy period in India when the contemporary scene was becoming very vibrant”, he shifted to Mumbai and set up a business working with designs and exhibitions. In his spare time, Prime worked on his own art practice, especially his experiments with light installations. The inspiration for the works in play. pause. rewind . comes from some of those same installations. “I make them using different things; some of these are very much about my experiments with lasers,” he says. “Which is great, because it’s like drawing with light in a room. I was keen to try and see if I could physically interpret these installations. What I do is that when I photograph the installations, there will be a certain set of lines and angles. And then I’ll look at that and I’ll start to play with that as a physical structure.”
In sync with rhythm
Though he doesn’t play music anymore, apart from the occasional jam, it still informs much of his art practice, including the works on display here. As a drummer, Prime was fascinated with rhythmic repetitions, polyrhythms and tumbling patterns, which inter-link, change, and go back on themselves. As an artist, his work continues in the same vein, albeit in a different, more abstract form. “I don’t see the difference to be honest, it’s just the same thing in different formats. A big part of my music career was the performance; I loved being on stage. And actually, sometimes when I make these works, when I’m making the drawings with the lasers, it happens really fast. Almost like a rhythmic performance: you start to go with the flow, you set up a pattern, you play ten bars and then you say ‘hey, where am I going to take this’? They are abstract, still, it’s not like it relates to a series of notes. But it’s an interpretation of that kind of feeling,” the artist says.
After a brief chat about the music he was listening to as he worked on the show (Steve Reich, Terry Riley), I get ready to leave. Prime, for his part, is itching to get back to playing with the lighting for the show. But before I head out, I have to ask him one last question. For someone who has been working in art for two decades, and having been in Mumbai for 12 years, why did it take him so long to do his first Indian solo? “It’s not easy to get exhibitions in any respect, and I was very privileged that Mort and Tara came to the studio and they seemed to enjoy what I was working on. But also, I just don’t have a schedule. I’m not on that ‘one solo, next solo, let’s take it to a different country’ trip. I’m just not that sort of artist,” he says.
The author is a freelance writer
play. pause. rewind is showing at Chatterjee and Lal, Colaba, till November 2.
