Manisha Parekh / Line of Light - Review

Review / Line of Light
Published in Art India, May 2017

Herscript

Manisha Parekh’s works has Anuj Daga reading between the lines.

Try to look hard and you will see the landscapes in Kanji typographic characters. Manisha Parekh’s Line of Light at the Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, from the 7th of February to the 4th of March, makes this translation quite obvious.

Linguistic studies demonstrate how the symbol for a mountain in the Kanji script is derived from three peaks, while that of a tree is visibly rooted in the ground with a free end in the air. Originally diagrammed from their actual visual counterparts, Parekh’s intervention overlaps these Japanese ideograms with images, pressing us to think of nature itself as a script. Five dark indigo-dipped papers explore this script using Braille-like formations pierced by a sharp stylus. The form and medium dissolve within each other in Parekh’s Gratitude giving rise to a productive ambiguity that emphasizes multiple readings. She suggests we look closely at how in forms animated and static, nature leaves behind a communicative trail to be deciphered and decoded.

These works presented by Parekh were originally produced as part of a residency in 2013 at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan, built by architect Tadao Ando, whose buildings, as many may know, bring individuals in very emphatic confrontation with nature.

The installation Shadow Garden draws closely from the architecture of fuki leaves – those that stand on a singular stem upright on the surface they grow on. Competing with each other for light, these leaves form a shaded canopy that creates an environment where new microcosms can flourish. Tracing the paths of worms that feed on these leaves, Parekh attempts to map the conversation between different forms of life. Further, the veins of the leaves are suggested by the grain of the cypress wood in the artist’s reconstruction, bringing us to think about the contrasting attributes of young and old, soft and hard, life and death – as thought of in eastern philosophy –simultaneously. Life merely occurs in between these extremes as seen in the punched worm trails on the abstracted substrate.

Within the framework of nature and script, Parekh’s paintings attempt to formulate new ideograms that can expand the limits of experience. Tangled Foot works through three amorphous shapes in indigo, gold and a stippled swatch freely moving in space and frozen into different configurations. If the conceivable world is limited by language, can Parekh’s drawing project open up new environments that can be inhabited though experiments in abstraction? Can their interpretations hint at multiple meanings similar to the manner in which pitch accents change words in kanji pronunciation? Invisible Notes furthers this attempt by presenting to us a hundred possible contemporary Japanese hieroglyphs drawn in a sparkling silver watercolour on handmade paper. The artist’s endeavour to collapse art and the medium of art into each other challenges the distance between the human world and the natural world created and mediated by language.



Manisha Parekh. Shadow Garden. Japanese cypress wood and Indian silk. 100 units. Variable dimensions. 2013. 

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Shanghai - I

First things first.

When visiting Shanghai, be prepared to work with the restrictions that come to be imposed upon you within the framework of a communist government. At the personal front, you will not be allowed to access gmail and facebook directly. So if you think you will keep updating your status on either of these platforms regularly and smoothly, it's not going to work. You will need what is called a VPN - Virtual Private Network - a facility that will allow you to fake your real location and access information on your google or facebook account. This may rather be tedious for the speeds of internet may drop and all VPN sites may not allow you to access every virtual place you may like to reach to.

At the larger level, you will be subject to the Chinese land - which means all sorts of written and oral communication is non-English. There are many perspectives to this aspect, and I am still unable to resolve the pros and cons in my head. It may almost be impossible to communicate in China if you don't know their language. (something similar to visiting Kerala)! The tones, rhetorics, script, gestures - all may be different, including the way we count 1 to 10 on fingers. Thanks to an offline app from google translate, we could convey our everyday basics to shopkeepers and public around. Government officials, police and staff at metro stations etc. will be able to speak to you in English. But thats about it. You won't be able to read menu cards at restaurants, street signage, maps on phone, street iconography, shop names - everything is in Chinese. At once, you realize how incapacitated you are just because of the virtue of language. Think a step further, and you will understand the hegemony of English in the global scene. China clearly slaps the world with its secure and sound operations in mandarin.

I loved looking at the Chinese characters - they looked beautiful to my architectural eye. I particularly liked how contained they are into invisible squares - together forming a neat consistent outline. Their geometric construct appealed to me. Further, the fact that each character could be interpreted in multiple ways in the given context deepened my interest in the way their script must have been conceived. In a brief conversation with a Chinese student about how the script is written and understood, I learnt each stroke of character in Chinese guides the way in which it will be pronounced and spoken. At the same time, these are often derived from its visual counterpart in the real world. That means that the character for a tree would look like the diagram of a real tree. The script is inherently etymological, constantly hinting at the contextual specificity of the written word. Loosely, for example, mist will be written as "water in the air", or a particular fish will be written as "an animal from fresh water lake". Understanding the real world in this manner makes Chinese conceptually sharper.

It's not as if the Chinese don't know English. They use mobile phones, tablets and computers that are wired in English - to type Chinese characters and words. They are fairly fast at it, as one observes on metro trains while they type on WeChat or make a search on Baidu. WeChat is a fairly advanced version of Whatsapp in China which is used for a range of activities beyond chatting. You may hear people sending across snippets of voice messages all the time, as you walk along the streets. Further, the app can be used for announcements, payments, bookings, updating your own status, and so on. It's their mini version of Facebook. Baidu is the Google counterpart in China. It's primarily in Chinese and fairly limited in terms of its search outputs. A few Chinese colleagues informed me how scholarship is so difficult and gets limited through Baidu searches, how commercial it is to be filled with numerous advertisements, and how constrained its reach is. On some occasions, they remained curious about the references I kept mentioning in my conversations, for they had not come across them in their Baidu searches.

China does not support Google maps, so you have to use Baidu maps - where everything is in Chinese. They may not make any sense to you as an outsider unaware of their script! In present times, as a traveler, you can not move around a city without internet connection. If you have to be on your own, you should be equipped with your maps, apps and chaps. For this, you need a smart phone with a reasonable data and calling connection. Data and calling plans in China can be very expensive. However, it is possible to bargain your priorities for mobile plans in China. After being sold a fake SIM card along the street-side shop, I went to a registered mobile store to purchase a new one with the help of a local friend. He was able to negotiate for me a customised deal with more data, compensating on the amount of talk time! It is there that I thought what a brilliant idea it would be for buyers to be able to customise their mobile plans...something like buying vegetables as per your need. What it opened up for me is the lucidity and arbitrariness with which telecommunication companies actually fix prices for its consumers. Wouldn't it be useful to pay only for what and how you use - won't that also manage the burden on telecom lines more efficiently instead of making a population more consumerist?

Having spoken about the limitations, I must point out on the other hand that Shanghai is an extremely organized city. The metro lines make a web while intersecting with each other to connecting different neighbourhoods in the city.  Neighbourhoods in Shanghai are almost analogous to those in Mumbai. Unlike my entry to Manhattan, New York, which was marked by a distinct starkness of the sky scraping buildings almost perspectivally covering up the sky, Shanghai's landscape wasn't really alienating. The scale of buildings and the street life in Shanghai are immediately relatable to an Indian city. One is not funneled between the tunneled sky scraping streets like in New York. Instead, streets are wider, buildings are fairly spaced out, optimally high, and further, the drying laundry & its  infrastructure on building skins remind you of the lives that inhabit them.

Most parts of Shanghai have lanes dedicated for bicyclers. Bicycles have become popular in the city with the coming of rental companies like Ofo and Mobike that lend users the vehicle for as low as 1 RMB for an hour. You can pick and park the cycle in most parts of the city. Motorcycles and bikes on the other hand are electric and they do not make any noise on the roads. In narrower streets, they move effortlessly with pin drop silence. Sometimes, your footsteps are louder than the quietly moving vehicles. Cars don't honk unnecessarily, and roads are rather lively but quiet. Traffic rules seemed confusing to me because vehicles kept turning and passing by even when signals were red. Perhaps there were intermediate rules between slow movers like pedestrians and bikes which I could not investigate into.

Much built landscape of Shanghai that we see today is gentrified. Gentrification is a repeating narrative for its emerging urbanity, bringing a more consumerist dimension to the city. Gated communities and commercial-recreational zones are replacing older communal housing settlements. People who are moved from the inner city to rehabilitation spots are often compensated with money or property. Often, they do not have any right to protest against eviction. Thus, many end up accepting and moving to an apartment away from the city as allocated by the Government. Another dimension to this movement is the cultural fact that owning a house, for men, is a precondition for marriage. Many young Chinese men living in older fabrics await for renewal schemes to be able to own a property and move on with their personal lives. I understand that my explanation above has certainly flattened the complexity of such issues. It is a subject to investigate deeper. It is therefore, that the organizers of Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society were so eager to have my talk on our project "What is a Home?" wherein we had documented the stories of ten sites of rehabilitation and resettlement in the city of Mumbai.

Several young men came for the talk, including a philosophers, engineers, architects and artists. Most of them were interested in the question of "What is a home?" They shared their own stories and contemplations on the idea of a home - intellectual and physical. Some raised questions of existence and what it means to exist. One of them brought to light the etymological understand of the word - he elaborated how "ex" refers to "outside" and "ist" refers to the "inside" - and thus existence is about the movement between the inside and outside. Another young guy spoke about the pressure of owning a house after his marriage, which he contests with the idea of home as a shared social space, not necessarily physical. Several stories and ideas about the home came to light over the discussion, which almost collapsed in the helplessness of the political ideology that Shanghai, as opposed to Mumbai, operates within.

Between Books & Buildings

Contemplations

The text starts behaving in a particular way when it is bound in the form of a book. The book has its own agency. The environment in which the book provokes the reader to be read and the manner in which the body engages with it talks about the body-space dynamic embedded in its form.The reception of text in a given environment - static or mobile - is a function of time. The body space rubric is thus also coupled with time, eventually describing time into the reading of the content. Text of the content has its own time (of reading and of its own place) the way text paces thought, which creates a certain environment. What happens when this transmission clashes or collapses with the time which the absorbing physical body is suspended in? Can the format of the book mediate time?

The table of books 

On books: Discussing with Poonam Jain

Participants making their own books

Participants working on their book projects

Artist Poonam Jain opens up ways of imagining books through her works.

Participants listening to Poonam

The team

Structuralism and Structuralists

Says Foucault:

"Imagine a photograph representing a face. If you make this image go from positive to negative, in a way all the dots of the picture are going to be modified. That is to say that all the points that were white will become black and that all the points that were black will become white. None of the points, none of the elements therefore remain identical. And yet you can recognize the face. And yet the face remains the same even though it has gone from positive to negative, and you can say that it stays the same; you recognize it because the relations between all these different elements have remained the same. Relations between the points have stayed the same, or relations of contrast and of opposition between white and black have remained the same, even though each of the dot that was white has become black, and each point that was black has become white.

Deep down in a very broad sense of what structuralism is , we can say that structuralism is the method of analysis that consists of drawing constant relations from elements that in themselves, in their own character, in their substance, can change.

Structuralists are people for whom what counts in essence, are systems of relations and thus not all the lived individual experience of people... what I do belongs at heart like structuralism to this great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject..."

Notes from the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016

India never evolves, it jumps. We have situations where one day there is no toilet and the other day, they are hundreds. We have situations where there is no electricity, but the person of the house has a mobile phone.
We are not going to ever have 240 museums - like London.

What we have to do is to open up locked up temporary infrastructure for arts and artists. Second is to open up / find patrons who will have something worthwhile to offer.

India is not necessarily an educated race, but we are highly intelligent.

Feroze Gujral

--

What is the History of memory? How do we utilize memory?
The struggle of the archive is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
A shared history means a shared experience.

The phenomenon of Europe and America coming and "helping" us to discover our destiny.
Rise of extreme nationalism in our countries.

What kind of crisis emerge, what are the violent implications when a country wants to expand its economic might in its surrounding areas? The first 1857 nationalism movement was against the economic exploitation.  What are the ethics of working in a particular kind of political economy?

War has forced a lot of people to migrate. Migration to America and Europe have not yet been a big political question. But these questions are going to come up. Nepal is stuck between two world superpowers - India and China.

We have to learn to be silent and listen to our neighbour.

When you have no power to talk to the big, powerful people, the only way to probably talk to them is humour and satire. It completely undermines the political process and art can bring about some subtlty. You can be standing opposite to a very highly intelligent person who is opposing you and still not be bale to be do anything about it. It is here that art can intervene as a mediator. Art has influenced and shaped narratives in every culture - and it happens over a longer duration of time. Subtleties of political debate can be conducted only through art.

To be sure,  nation/states can't understand humour.

Amrith Lal

--
If you are true to yourself, you are true to your political time. So this question will be inevitably there in your work. So you don't have to question consciously.

Riyas Komu