Fotograf Magazine

“I can listen to it all the time,” says Urvi from the front seat of the parked car. The viewer sees her put on the song that she likes to listen to over and over again. “But I don’t feel the rhythm in here,” she adds, and the viewer slowly realized that the here that Urvi is talking about represents a counterpoint to somewhere else. But how to understand these two places, and what relationship exists between them?  Vojtěch Novák’s exhibition I don’t feel the rhythm in here, which consists of a video in a neon-orange room accompanied by a loud pop song, is the first in a three-part series entitled Silk Road Hybridization. In this series, Novák explores the movement of specific cultural phenomena across the globalised world. The song Urvashi Urvashi, which plays on the video, was originally composed in India in the 1950s and was subsequently re-arranged with new words by the music industry in Great Britain. It can then be traced to other cultures that appropriate the things that one culture has passed on to the next. It is a bilateral exchange that disrupts the conventional power arrangement between the center and the periphery, between former colony and former coloniser.