'Brain Rot' Is Indian Artist Viraj Khanna’s Scathing Take On Our Digital Decay

Last night, I revenge-bedtime-procrastinated too hard and now I'm sleepy fr. The coffee is kinda mid and scrambled eggs are not giving so I'll head out for a dosa instead. The dude near my place has aura. Bro is him. His masala dosa is goated with the sauce. Sometimes I find this cute guy there and but I don't talk to him because I'm in my princess era and making the first move is not very demure; not mindful. Plus, he isn't 6'1 and doesn't read feminist literature so how based can he really be? Anyway, back to my mojo dojo casa house. Not to sound too blue-pilled but body has not been bodying lately and I must mog the NPCs so I'm gonna be liftmaxxing. Until next time. Thank you, Beyonce.

This was just my journal entry today; sorry for the aneurysm or like the kids say: brain rot. Believe it or not, this is the voice of our generation and the language with which we contextualize the world around us. Thanks to social media, our lives have become a never-ending feed of memes, trends, and viral videos that dictate how we see the world. We've traded nuance for bite-sized opinions and replaced dialogue with snarky one-liners. Our vocabularies are saturated with internet slang, and since language is how we think, Our intellect has officially left the chat. Even art, music, and literature, the lifelines we once relied on to expand our minds, are caught in the undertow of this reductive digital wave.

This is the bizarre, overstimulated, and mildly depressing world that Viraj Khanna’s second solo exhibition, 'Brain Rot: The Life You Live?', masterfully captures. Premiered during Mumbai Gallery Weekend, Brain Rot is a satirical deep dive into the bizarre state of existence that is life in the digital age. Viraj takes our collective neuroses — the overconsumption of trivial content, the psychological toll of always being online, and the constant need for validation — and spins them into a witty, absurdist narrative. His medium of choice? Dramatic fiberglass sculptures and intricate textile works that are as chaotic as the lives they comment on.

The exhibition is named after the Oxford word of the year for 2024 — 'Brain Rot', referring to the mental and intellectual decline we experience from endlessly consuming low-value digital content. Through his exaggerated sculptural forms, Viraj forces us to confront our relationship with technology and the extent to which we've let algorithms determine our emotional states.

Every oddball character in the exhibition is a crafted snapshot of our collective digital routine. One particular sculpture depicts a figure tangled in a web of wires, scrolling through a phone while their face melts into an unrecognizable blur. It's a powerful commentary on how we distort our own identities online, crafting tampered versions of reality to fit into the aesthetic we think others expect of us. Others titled, 'This Will Get Me a Lot of Likes', 'I Am Having Fun so Should This Be a Story', 'People Will Go Crazy Once I Post This', and 'Contemplating My Next Post' blur the lines between living for yourself and doing it for the 'gram.

The artist uses multiple mediums to drive the message. As the son of renowned fashion designer Anamika Khanna, he grew up surrounded by embroidery and textiles. This influence is evident in his work, where his mastery of needle and thread is used to convey the fluid, messy nature of digital identities. His embroidered textile pieces use distorted faces to depict fragmented realities, underscoring the chaotic energy of our online lives. One textile piece features an embroidered replica of one of Viraj’s own Instagram posts. It shows him lounging at an upscale restaurant with a caption that reads, “$300 lunch…Should I upload so people know?” The subject’s face is deliberately warped and chaotic, embodying the dissonance between real experiences and their curated digital counterparts. It’s autobiographical, sure, but also uncomfortably relatable.

Viraj’s work is based on the reflections of his own experiences as a social media user. Through his absurdist lens, he shines a light on the dystopian nature of our digital dependencies and questions the authenticity of human experiences that cannot exist without being documented. The artist brings a dyspotian twist to the thought experiment —

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

'Brain Rot: The Life You Live?' will be up for view at Mumbai's Tao Art Gallery till February 9.

Follow Viraj here.

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