Juggernaut

Emre Hüner, artist

born 1977

Juggernaut, 2009

Material/technique: 21 minutes 8 seconds; single-channel video

Credit line: Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2014.0126.01

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

The title of this video work is derived from the Sanskrit word Jagannāth, meaning “Lord of the Universe,” a reference to Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. A 14th-century European travel chronicle recounting the ritual procession at the Jagannāth Temple in Odisha, in which large statues were ritually processed on massive chariots, observed how celebrants who blocked the immense carts were crushed to death. Thus, Jagannāth became juggernaut, a word denoting an immense object on an unwavering path of destruction. Like its ominous namesake, the video Juggernaut conjures, in the words of the artist, “the gigantic apparatus that humans have created to improve their way of living, endless machines, abandoned buildings that once stood new and beautiful and utopian model cities that fail to function, all now stand dry and lonely.”
The video unfolds in dreamlike acts punctuated by an evocative, ominous soundtrack, mixing film footage and Cold War–era animation with live action sequences of suited men meeting in smoke-filled rooms inspecting models and machinery. Through persistent looking and probing, the aggressive tone of the video explores a range of subjects encompassing utopia, technology, modernity, and natural and built environments, which ultimately reiterate the fallibility of progress.