Building Ruins: RISD Alumni Show 2020

RISD Alumni Show 2020
Building Ruins

If we were to agree that our present is a mere left over of yesterday’s time-space and memory, we are merely engaged in building ruins. In the perpetual transformation of every now into a past, we produce in our present, the ruin of the future. Like sites under construction or swamps growing in decaying fields; building ruins characterize the simultaneity of creation and deterioration. Making and breaking is an integral part of growth. Much like child’s play, these opposing forces keep our curiosity in the world. It is through the process of doing and undoing that we find meaning within things around us and make them our own. Yet, trials, tests and experiments are often forgotten to end products. How do we write the biography of objects that are frozen into their state of becoming? Conversely, can objects find completion in their biographies?

In its constantly (d)evolving meanings, Building Ruins aims to generate an archive of objects and ideas by RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) practitioners that demonstrates the inherently interrogative nature of artistic endeavours. Through the archive, the curatorial ambition of the show is to present enquiries embedded within the practices of RISD alumni in India. It takes a closer look at their investment in the range of materials, techniques and processes that they constantly engage within their everyday. Building Ruins offers the possibility of exploring the play between the complete and the incomplete, permanent and impermanent, assembly and dismantling, fragments and wholes or even preservation and decay. The project inevitably demands a fragile tracing of a past into the present, yet maintaining its interpretive dimension for the future, invoked in its precautionary reading that too much building might lead to destruction.

Expanding on the notion of pure art, the project has consciously chosen a multidisciplinary approach that gathers not only artists, but also architects, graphic designers, textile designers, industrial designers who constantly engage and expand the boundaries of artistic thinking. This is uniquely enabled and evident in the RISD approach, where strict distinction between art and design is constantly challenged, blurred and redefined. Secondly, the exhibition stages novel experiments from unseen young designers alongside established practitioners of art and design. Not only does the show foreground absolutely new names in art, it also offers an opportunity for different generations of art practitioners to share values that still remain relevant and concerning to their practices. It promotes cross-pollination of ideas, knowledge and skills thereby promoting future collaborations and intellectual exchange. Lastly, the exhibition introduces design as an important function of art – one that cannot be separated while thinking of everyday environments. Thus, it demonstrates the promise of making our functional environments more artful.

Through a carefully crafted selection of ideas and responses to the curatorial theme of Building Ruins, the exhibition shall showcase about 20-25 works including (and expanding the limits of) paintings, photographs, books, installations, objects of art or designed artefacts, as well as ideas about living and environment. The curation, in its display, shall emphasize that art and design hold power to infuse meaning into otherwise mundane spaces. This shall be achieved through a careful interplay between objects within the exhibition, as well as the way in which they interact with the chosen spatial setting. In bringing together these fragments from art and design, the spatial design shall thus provoke the viewer to delve deeper into the potential of building ruins. The exhibition asserts the interdependence as well as the centrality of art and design in our everyday lives.


Anuj Daga
Curator

Listening to Lata

Some of my friends vehemently argue that Lata Mangeshkar became popular only because of the volume of songs that she got to sing. And ofcourse, there must be many, and even legitimate accounts of how she must have monopolised the music market. The more irritating problem to me however, is when people begin to judge someone (as populist) based on whom (here Lata) we listen to. Now, many know that I am into music, that I have learnt it, and also that I can reasonably sing well. When I listen to songs, I mostly listen to them very intently and carefully. Some performances of Lata (along with many others) have left me stunned of her acumen. The effortless manner in which she is able to glide through musical notes, the clever ways in which she plays with the beats, her ingenuity in taking aalaps - sometimes devised on her own that have become the signature of so many songs - are all admirable qualities. All of this, at a time when we didnot have technology where music can be punched, tone can be autocorrected or music and singing is recorded separately.

I often engage myself with covers of songs I like. These are mostly by Lata or Asha, or such other singers from their generation. Mostly, these are to understand the true potentials of an average singer. One often is able to notice in these renditions, the actual limitations one faces - because often, these covers are recorded using very low end, home bound technology. The appreciation of their original singers thus takes full meaning for one realises they were able to do much more in the limited technology back in the day. Further, these are moments which make you realise why precisely you like a particular rendition. I also listen to the male versions of Lata songs that I often end up disliking. (not giving a list here).

By and large, the argument is that we are socially conditioned to listen to Lata Mangeshkar. The questions that must be raised then are as follows: When people go to listen to Lata/Asha/Rafi songs in contemporary concerts, do they listen to the original, or do they listen to a version of the original? Having attend several of such concerts, where halls are full, it is obvious that audiences consume a mere second-hand version of the song, often imitating the voice. What aspect, in such a situation gets consumed? Do the listeners imagine the original Lata singing? Or are they appreciating the reproduction of the songs one has heard through the performer at hand? We come to consider here, that the listener, necessarily listening to the contemporary performer, takes pleasures in the nuances that he/she has registered in his/her own listening of the song - moments through which they make a mental map, or a diagram of the song, or more accurately, a diagram of pleasure within the object of music. These diagrams are difficult to challenge by contemporary musicians.

The shift of music register, or listening practice, from melody to voice texture took place only after 90s, when new assertions through global capital were enabled in India. People began to identify themselves in these new kinds of voice cultures, that shaped new listening cultures. Many old Hindi  songs where dubbed into remixes by newer singers, many of which were not successful. One can see how easily they lose listenership over the original counterparts. Voice casting almost overshadowded any need for melody, with the extended technological aid of autotune and electronic voices. Thus, music could virtually be produced without the need for singers. The first decade of the millennium saw a range of voice casting that created a new value for types of sounds, not necessarily melodies. Yet, these were all more often than not, easily forgotten. I would go on to say that post 1990s, music in Hindi Film Industry also was readjusting to the new instruments and recording techniques that were acquired from the west. One observes that the industry takes time to settle into the earlier melody-oriented music-making in the country. Thus we have very crude experimental music productions, even at the cost of perverse lyrics sometimes.

Even in times such as these, people find themselves going back to the older melodies sung in the simplicity of musical score in the early 60s-90s. In my opinion, one cannot simply relegate this music-listening as a populist act of consumption. And while one listens to Lata, one is equally sensitive of all the developments in music (atleast in the Hindi Film industry). Could then, the recent fetish for introducing and consuming new textures of voices, infact, be considered populist? I have been thinking about what critical frames would one consider in evaluating or appreciating music in the context of listening to songs produced in the Hindi Film industry. A friend recently pointed to me a music analyst who performs across stage shows. It's time I turn back to her and hunt this person down!

Wadiyar Centre for Architecture

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

published in Art India Vol. 23 / Issue 3

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Hear, Hear

From the expressions of labourers to the scripts of queer phone conversations, a group show brings together diverse marginalised voices. Anuj Daga listens carefully.



At the outset, the curatorial endeavour of the show As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice from the 21st of August to the 5th of October at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, seemed like a rehearsal in the reverse-invocation of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, where Spivak raises questions on the ways in which we investigate another culture and the ethics of interpreting and representing the other. Curated by Berlin-based Juana Awad and Mumbai-based Zeenat Nagree, the exhibition brings together 13 international and Indian artists whose works refer to various kinds of marginality like colour, class, caste and sexuality. Several artistic practitioners have engaged with under-represented and marginal voices as material for art over the last two decades. In their gentle repositioning of the project within the domain of the listened rather than the spoken, the curators of the present show hoped to invite reflection on the practice of representation wherein the critical gaze is turned to the observer, rather than the observed.

Mumbai-based artist Amol Patil presents archival audio clips of his father’s play who was a mill worker by day and a playwright by night. By methods of superimposition, re-recording and editing the voices on measured lengths of the magnetic audio tape, also originally used by his father, Patil produces a sound that seems to index the environment of labour, as well as the intimation of its theatrical experiments. This work is complimented by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang whose adjacently placed film Music While We Work documents along with the help of its workers, the sounds of sugar factory in her hometown Huwei. Wang principally stages sound as the collective memory of the labour force’s most significant experience in these closed down factories. Through these installations, both projects push the observer to listen to the experience of class as much as the post-productive quotidian lives of the mill-workers – one imagined in the play-scripts and the other compulsively remembered as music.

Sandeep Kuriakose’s Woh bhi line ka tha transcribes queer phone conversations into an uninterrupted singular script printed on a legal paper, left to be picked up and read by the viewer. The work coaxes the reader to be a voyeuristic listener although privileges the English reader in its decision to transcribe Hindi conversations (along with the English) into the Latin alphabet. Natasha A. Kelly from Germany and Karan Shrestha from India/Nepal sensitize us to the documentary voice of the emotionally or physically suppressed that we customarily attend to in ethnographic histories. Kelly draws our attention to the verbalized experiences of people of colour in Germany whereas Shrestha records the voices of the displaced from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In hearing these two works, one wonders if the artist also becomes the mediator of catharsis in one’s role as a patient listener.

Noise composer Raven Chacon’s sound installation remains the most riveting inclusion. Scores of music laid out on standees set a ghost-like stage for a concert that one witnesses on a screen. A disciplined row of gun-shooters fire bullets to the meters and scales of the composition. Although hearing the sonic gunshots on screen dampens the potential experience of the live performance, one can only imagine the lyrical brutality of listening to Chacon’s work in person, simultaneously inversing the notion of both firing and music. Chacon’s work fundamentally and poignantly addresses the questions raised in the curators’ schema. It ‘attacks’ our foundations of listening as practice – physically as well as symbolically.

The question of the ‘listened’ seemingly keeps slipping in the experience of the show, for it is hurdled by the compulsive indulgence in the visual (for an alien viewer), which also includes the read, the language, video or the installation (all functions of the eye). The limits of listening are thus metaphorically extended to mean paying careful attention to the ‘object’ at hand, or even speaking to one’s own silences. A counsellor or psychologist’s principal practice, inarguably, is to listen. The curation brings together multiple dimensions of the artist as a listener, and turns him or her into a psychologist of the self. However, one wonders if the curation imagines listening as a value-neutral act?

It is here that we come to interrogate listening as a possible mode of accumulating power. After all, speech is the material of listening. How does the listener draw power? How does the practice of listening constitute power? To be sure, the listener is not a body without agency, rather the centre of power in a discussion. What then, are the ideological and political underpinnings and pursuits of listening? How do we delineate the ethical-moral codes for the practice of listening? Do the speaking individuals objectify themselves in being listened? Such questions bring us to consider if the speaking body has any real agency, or is it only apparent? However, if we agree that voicing is an important act, then it is listening that enables speech. It is the presence of another body that mediates speech. Listening necessarily means to engage, empathize and think with the speaker. It demands attention and participation in meaning-making. Listening may consciously refrain from inviting any intervention during the act of speech. It thus offers a contemplative space where decisions are delayed and negotiations are sustained. Listening capacitates and prolongs the holding of thought just as it rises into the air.

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

published in Art India, December 2019

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Playing with Light

Through spray-painted sheets, folded foils, marble stones and a nylon fishing net sculpture, Rana Begum explores the interaction between space, form and colour, points out Anuj Daga.


One will be misled if one is merely taken over by the forms that are mounted neatly on gallery surfaces by the Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 19th of September and the 2nd of November. The large spray-painted sheets, folded coloured foils, terraneous jesmonite blocks, rounded marble stones and a fishing net displayed within the gallery are, in fact, quiet dialogues around colour and light. Rana Begum seems to be preoccupied with questions of interaction between shape, space and colour: how does light sculpt forms, what are the ways in which light can colour space, how do we wear the colour reflected off material surfaces, how do colours contour space? The methodical dismantling of colours that Rana employs in her construction of artworks, and its subsequent perception by the viewer opens a phenomenological field within which several such questions hallucinate much like her coloured spray-prints.

Palm-sized leaves of aluminium foil shimmer and mirror colour off their soft coat of paint into their warped micro-surfaces. They create a glow of tinted air within their contoured pockets. The linear grids, however, are the most mysterious lines on the foil surface. One wonders how these Cartesian lines get cast on the undulating surface of the foil? How could one possibly maintain the ordered nature of grids while still folding up the foil into a warped terrain? Rana collapses the smooth and the rough, the linear and the crooked, or even the opaque and the shiny onto each other. In doing so, she conceptually superimposes meridians of the flat cartographic map, the three-dimensional terrain and its subsequent interplay with light while producing a commentary on the experience of colour in space. As one continues to gaze through the works, the saturated hues within the work begin to solidify in the mind as the material of art.

The jesmonite cast works seem to be the solid counterparts of the thin folded foils, those that maintain their conversations with colour – now, bright and liberated. Each mounted contour is read in a distinct dominant colour, as if a de-layered GIS (Geographical Information System) map, isolated into its individual data terrain! When seen thus, the scaled landscapes begin to gesture about vegetation with theirseasonal colours of the fall and the spring. The polished marble pieces, all sets of different colours of the stone, reflect light crisply. They offer opportunities to consider the different colours in which light solidifies into stones. Each table of smoothened stones presents a family of sedimented saturations. Could these possibly have been excavated from one of the above representational sites?

In another section, a canopy of a fishing net spray-painted with rainbow colours splits each colour into thin threads. As one’s eyes traverse through the overlaps of these coloured threads in space, intermediate colours begin to appear. The blending of hues and their perception thereof allude to the dynamic patterns of spray-painted colour sheets. The space between the tautly held folds of the net diffract rays in feather-like delicacy. Further, the net casts shadows that index densities of these colorations on the ground. The dismantling of colour and its reconstitution in space is a characteristic experience of this gentle installation. Placed diametrically across a clear view of the Arabian sea within the gallery, the object begins to speak to the site, albeit in new ways.

Rana’s works clearly extract light and colour (essentially a function of light itself) as an experiential artefact. Primarily working through simple ideas and employing techniques like diffraction, diffusion, reflection and dispersion of light, one understands the pursuit of discovering a new experience in her experiments. Unlike the scientist, Rana works with an artful precision in order to create affective experiences that allow us to converse with light in a playful, childlike manner. It brings forth on canvas the psychedelic rendering of colours we often indulge in and perceive while wilfully closing our eyes. The sheer pleasure and mystery of such hallucinations find a lyrical documentation in Rana’s endeavour. Yet, her work is not divorced from form. Rather than reading sciography as a function of the object, Rana successfully inverts this relationship wherein crafting light defines her forms. This is the principal site of investigation that her works unpack for an artistic reconsideration.

Just Give Me Some Space: Panel Discussion

Transcript of the Panel Discussion organized at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, on the inauguration of 'Just Give me Some Space' authored by architect Suha Khopatkar. The discussion opens up ways of building empathies in academic practice, specially between teachers and students in an architecture school. The discussants include Vandana Ranjitsinh, Rohan Shivkumar, Nisha Nair, Suha Khopatkar, and Anuj Daga (moderator).

published in Indian Architect & Builder, November 2019.

Read full article with illustrations here.

Delhi

This time when I visited Delhi, a friend explained me the broad structuring of Delhi and it's suburbs. Delhi has grown radiating in different suburbs, those that include Noida, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Sonipat to consider the key ones. Noida, I came to know is the abbreviation of New Okhla Industrial Development Authority. When one goes to Noida, a totally new landscape, quite different from Delhi's colonies and bungalows dawns. The tyranny of apartment blocks walling one's vision are arranged into societies and townships. The other lineup is the glitzy IT complexes which I had never seen so blatantly while moving in the main city before. This is not to say that the new suburbs are bad. They have clean air, less density and lot of free space...those that the typical corporate-jib inhabitants idealize. Those whose idea of cultural engagement is largely the mall and the multiplex on a weekend. 

Yet, Delhi felt much easier to move through the metro, autos and buses. Inspite of all the deathly news of the toxic air, I saved myself without the mask. This time was also the first when I used Delhi's buses, and they were extremely convenient and cheap. I haven't really experienced choking roads in Delhi. To me, it has always been a city of wide roads, laid out concentrically, that doesn restrict movement just into a single spine like in Mumbai. The overlapping lines of Delhi metro make it quite complex and I feel it had been resolved quite well. Besides, the infrastructures seemed quite spacious as compared to Mumbai where people literally don't have space to walk on foot over bridges or train stations. Perhaps because Delhi simply has the land to spread, it felt more comfortable and convenient.

As a city of "colonies", Delhi has always fascinated me. The housing colonies are like hives with several entrances and internal gates that can bring varying degrees of control. I have always wanted to understand their layouts and how they become/merge in the public urban domain. Such a complexity of form disappeared in Gurgaon and Noida that had clear cut sectors with houses typically addressed with plot numbers. The metro in these suburbs begins to traverse larger distances between individual stations. The landscape begins to feel stretched... perhaps this is what we understand as sprawl. 

Last but not the least, I spend some really intimate moments with close friends and acquaintances in the city. This is also what made the entire trip memorable as compared to others. This time I felt a distinct warmth that the city offered to me and, at once I thought, what if I was a resident of this very City. Perhaps it is the growing familiarity with a place that coaxes us to consider such a possibility. Inspite of my continuous hopping in the city from one end to the other, glibly over public transportation or Uber/ola's, I believe I could make some worthwhile conversation with people in an otherwise intimidating place. In this view, the city allowed me to tame it. I have always believed that people in Delhi, unlike Mumbai, have had the time to sit and stare, or even talk. Mumbai is a city which perpetually keeps you vary of it's next slipping timetable. Perhaps I saved myself of it in Delhi being a visitor! Still, Delhi, for now, seemed more livable than Mumbai.

Stories in Mughal Miniatures

Notes from a lecture on Mughal Miniature Paintings by Prof. Arjun Das
at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya

A Glossary of Overused Terms in (architectural) Academia

Critical
We all want to be critical - and the word is often used as critique, more as a lament. to remain dissatisfied fuels the need to be critical. samira offered a strong explanation in the death of architecture exhibition though, of how critical can be more of a self reflective practice and remind oneself of one's position within the larger dynamics of things.

Relevant
Now, isn't this an extremely subjective term? on one hand, many people debate about how there must be space for all kinds of thought and on the other, it is curtailed by the idea of relevance. How does being relevant hold itself within the liberal space? And what may be relevant to one may be irrelevant to another. Do we assume a notional community in coming up to the framing of the relevant, and how much can we trust this notional constitution in the head?

Emerging
15 years ago, there were conferences that used the term "emerging", and today, the term is still slapped onto many symposium titles. It has become a tautological term for the contemporary. It claims the a faux-desire for being contemporary, and rhetorically wants to define the 'relevant' for today...

Innovative
If not relevant, then innovative! As if, the only way to validate your existence and worth is to produce something new. Are people who follow the past necessarily traditional? Could it be that the past be internalized in a way that offers pleasure to the present existence? Who after all, decides the relevance of innovative, and should it be really left to find its own course of destiny?


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now does this post sound very cynical?

Text as Text – Part I & II curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

Text as Text – Part I & II
curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

Anuj Daga

published in Art Journal, Oct 2019



‘In literary theory, a text is any object that can be “read”, whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block or styles of clothing. It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message […]’ explains Wikipedia. More specifically although, text is understood as written or printed work especially used for manuscripts and books that ought to be “read” i.e. interpreted. It took me some time to understand the invocation behind ‘Text as Text’ in both Part I & II at the ‘Art & Soul’ gallery in Worli, Mumbai, wherein curator and art historian Shubhalakshmi Shukla invites artists who work with “pure text” – those that primarily use alphabets and words in order to create works of art. In such a framework, one is pushed to think of the artist further than a writer, poet, journalist or any other professional who operates purely within the medium of words. In both the parts, the curation attempts to observe the intersection of text with gender, power, aesthetics and identity.

How do we approach text without literary training? Could an artist engage with words in a manner that could be distinguished from other literary forms? How does work of art in turn, inform textuality? These are the preliminary questions I begin to ask. Further, which words do you choose to frame so that you may keep coming back to, time and again? In such recall, the works of text become a painting. The fact that it must be read, and not simply rethought, asserts its lyrical precision, whereas, the multiplicities of meaning that its looped re-readings offer, make it possible to thread different worlds into a single thought stream. Text then is a ritual that ought to adapt to different situations and allow one to evolve in time. Artists use several techniques to work with text in different languages literally and visually within the small size format of the project. The disposition of these works in relation to text within the two exhibition cycles can be discussed through three broad relationships:

1. Text and Space

Text is scattered all around in our everyday environment, essentially encountered in motion. We are constantly reading text on signages, hoardings, bills or pamphlets on the street. These texts in floating space get framed, sliced, blurred, or animated with each other as we attempt to grasp them in the flash of movement amidst objects. Space thus gets inevitably encoded and embedded within the object of text, working itself into its reception and creation of dynamic meaning subsequently. The first cycle of ‘Text is Text’ brought together an exciting array of artists who explored the medium of text in a variety of ways. Of these, Bharati Kapadia’s film ‘L for LOVE’ expands the four letters of ‘love’ into an alliterated field of words within which its emotion gets nurtured. Using motion typography, the artist opens up a spatio-textual dialogue within the film where letters begin to dance in order to speak of the multidimensionality of love. In another work, free floating callout stickers like “Fight like a girl” or “Future is Female” mounted on a transparent partition wall by Vidya Kamat inevitably collage onto the viewers as characters of a feminist conversation within the gallery space.

In Text as Text - II, Nikhileshwar Baruah’s works from the ‘Capital’ series demonstrate some of these spatial aspects quite effectively in using receding font sizes or fading the overall text, at once creating perspective and depth within the reading. The graphical play initiates an assertive reading that turns softer and more contemplative as the letters assume normalcy. On the other hand, Prasanta Sahu’s typographic experiments in the two dimensional extents of paper, presented as diptychs situate us in the macro and micro aspects of agrarian politics through contrapositions of sliced and contained text. One is able to consider the textual grain from far and close, strategizing incomprehensibility in order to draw attention to the subject of agrarian economy. The words layout proximate fields within which several concerns around cultivation and care may be articulated. As one reads through the respective texts in these works, a certain spatial encryption strengthens their reception and offer a deeper reading into its meaning, giving them a three dimensionality. 

2. Text and Vision 

works by Hanif Kureshi

Text is an inherently visual medium; it is an extension of the eye, claimed media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Further, do we ever perceive text devoid of its visual appeal? If text is everything except the surface it appears on, then how does its visuality mould meaning? Legibility and visuality come together in unique ways to lend new readings to any given text. Much fixated like a painting, textual constructs could be quite complex. In Text as Text - I, artist Sanjeev Sonpimpare’s play of text on grains at once reminds of the rangolis that were traditionally drawn in front of house and temple entrances in grain flour, assumedly meant to feed the birds. The finger patterns drawn into food-dust create textual symmetries that suggest a leveling of caste and class in its visual syntax. In the second cycle of the exhibition too, there are several examples that play through the visual attributes of text. The hybridization of two scripts – English and Hindi, in the works of Priyanka Paul as well as Ajinkya Patil indirectly comment upon social attitudes, popular culture, cultural hegemony as well as globalization through gentle humour. Placed amidst poetry on women’s oppression, Paul accentuates class and gendered othering in social space using the lines “Tumhaare paas (maa) hai, humaare paas stig-(maa) hai”.  (तुम्हारे पास माँ  है, हमारे पास stig-मा  है)

Ajinkya Patil opens up multiple interpretations of his phrases through the fusion of Marathi and English words, take for instance: “Sukhache he naam (Audi) ne gaave”. (सुखाचे हे  नाम, audiने घ्यावे) Here, the subtle pleasures of materialism fused into the spiritual produces a humorous lament on the desires triggered within global processes. Here, Audi (the locomotive brand) and aavadi (meaning ‘liking/fondness’, the vocal doppelganger in Marathi for Audi) attempt to achieve a synonymy. Such techniques are frequently used in advertising in order to connect to a diverse mass of population speaking multiple languages. The verbal phonetics however has been harnessed into the visuality of the text in order to produce the desired effect of cultural collapse and acceptance.

It is perhaps its visuality that continues to communicate off text despite its illegibility. Hanif Kureshi presents eight frames of text which do not lend an easy reading to the viewer. Stretched and sliced, the phrases in each pair of frames placed one above the other question our notion of readability and reality. Kureshi compels the viewer to piece the words together in order to make meaning out of his work, which is quite direct and poignant. On the other hand, Nikhil Purohit attempts to introduce us to what may be a kind of machine language. In his grid of ‘NFSDOTCOM’, a series of letters appear like they do, in a crossword. The viewer is forced to wander within the array of letters in order to construct a meaningful word. In his ‘List of Things I Miss’, Purohit seems to imagine a language in which machines could communicate back to humans. Over a prolonged gaze, one may be able to spot four lost letters in a vast field of signs and symbols that machines and humans confound each other in: L O V E.


3. Text and Silence 

One’s engagement with text means one’s close association with silence, for it is a movement from oral to ocular, from the ‘once said’ to the ‘now seen’. Autonomous in its disposition, text creates a range of voices - although within the mind. We orate, repeat, and intonate text in our heads in order to make it mean something for ourselves. In doing so, the body is able to communicate with the mind, and eventually reach out to the world at large. People produce text through reading or writing in order to enter a new world through silence. In a work from Text is Text - I, artist Kim Kyoung Ae from Korea, settled in Baroda for the last ten years contemplates upon the rhythms of silence in her work, through which she mediates the fluency of communication. She explains how ironically, her broken English-Hindi communication with her Gujarati-speaking studio help Kantaben, is more fluent than her English conversations with an old friend. With her Korean friend on the other hand, Kim often able to speak in silences. Wondering if language is thus a mask over muteness, she translates silent frequencies of communication into text in her poignant work ‘P for Perspective’. The viewer is able to tune into different degrees of silences painted in the void of black, white and greys of the Korean word Cheok, meaning - ‘to pretend’. In another work ‘S for Survivor’, Kim expresses her mother’s silent and successful resistance to cancer. Much like the disease, an array of illegible hewn letters assume the character of unidentifiable alien cells within the body of the book. Kim explores the silent struggle of the body to keep its integrity against physical and psychological impediments in a series of paintings that work through Korean and English letters – both languages that she feels equally distanced from, and therefore proportionately silenced today. 

work by Kim Kyoung Ae

Kim Kyoungae-_ [cheok] Auxiliary verb,

You can't pretend forever

The textual articulation of emotions offers consolation to the restive mind. Several works in the two exhibitions demonstrate such tendencies. Further, there are concepts that cannot be experienced except though text. Text is a powerful medium through which another (im)possible world may be entered / opened, described or imagined. It allows collapse of unseeming ideas, surrealities that are difficult to be visualized. Words can become a useful gateway in order to challenge such silenced abstractions that may never be articulated otherwise. The textual medium is thus held in a double bind – of silence and its release thereof. It is the silencing of physical world, but a voice for the untold. Poetries, letters and other such forms of works in the exhibition in essence, speak to us silently. 

In its ensemble, the exhibitions ‘Text as Text I & II’ brings us to the various latent possibilities and expressions of text that obscure themselves in plain print. In some parts, the exhibitions allow us to engage with text in a manner different from encountering it in a book. In doing so, the works create a criticality within the space of text itself. Yet, in most cases, the setup remains extremely traditional, overlooking the contemporary modes in which text is consumed – those on mobile screens, LED marquees or tablets. Thus, the object of text remains static and unflickering, hung primarily on the wall like a painting. Most works lie within the liminalities of text and painting. However, the works installed miss interacting with the spatiality of the gallery altogether. Thus, they are unable to comment on the ways in which text gets inscribed within the body. The works within the exhibition could have been curated so as to talk to each other. In order for the invocation ‘Text as Text’ to become stronger, the curator may like to demonstrate how text can save itself from visuality, a space strongly claimed by painting. Yet, the curator keeps the promise of the textual medium and reserves it as an intimate resource for ready expression.

New words I have coined

Technoracism
A phenomenon when people are slot into hierarchies based on the technology they use / can afford. Or when people are put down for using certain kinds of gadgets following "preference hegemony" in technology.

Technoracist
A person who puts down others in feeling superior because he owns better gadgets.

Data Capitalism
The urge for collecting more and more information so as to trade it in any means.

Worlding
The process of meaning-making (often through language) in objects, things and space around you in order to be able to transact with it, and make it a part of your world. World here is understood as the set of things one knows outside of oneself.

Catalogue Essay: Shilpa Gupta

That long awaited essay!
Click Below to read:

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Hide


A catalogue essay for artist Shilpa Gupta's solo show at the Yarat Art Gallery in Azerbaijan. published by the Yarat Art Gallery in 2019.

The Readers' Rights

courtsey: Alexia Faubert

Vasantha Yogananthan at Jhaveri Contemporary

published in Art India
August 2019

Role Play

Vasantha Yogananthan’s painted photographs explore the Ramayana in a modern context and collapse the mythical and the quotidian, the manual and the technological, states Anuj Daga.



In showing photographer Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls from the 14th of March to the 4th of May in Mumbai, the Jhaveri Contemporary makes a gentle political comment. Exhibited alongside the parliamentary elections of 2019, Yogananthan’s photographic prefacing of the Ramayana coaxes a subversive reconsideration of moral values tensioned between a conservative right wing regime and an unassertive left wing and left of centre opposition in India. Yogananthan’s Ramayana offers an aesthetic frame through which prevailing ideologies may be teased out to gain perspective on morality, truth and the role of art.

An androgynous young boy, dressed as a woman wearing a saree, sitting on the threshold of the house against the almost closed door greets the viewer with a piercing gaze. Diametrically behind this door frame, across the gallery wall, is the picture of the same boy combing his hair to perfection. Spatially installed behind each other thus, the photographs call for a queer conversation inter-mediated by attires that essentially differentiate the same person into two characters. In working through such duality, the photographs in the exhibition demonstrate a continuous play between the real and the ideal; the performed, the hidden and the revealed; the physical and the mirrored.

The historicity of the Ramayana has been continually debated. As a travelling epic, it has been recited all across the subcontinent in varying versions. The imagination of its physical settings remains a subject of curiosity. What kind of geography did the central characters of Ramayana inhabit? What was the landscape of exile like? In Yogananthan’s experiment, the land, forest and the sea around which the mythical tale unfolds expend a mysterious quietness, achieved through the hand tinting of black and white photographs. This bringing together of photography and painting collapses several layers and registers: of myth and the everyday, of the manual and the technological or even of the fictional and the real. In its pastel saturations, gently pink skies or misty landscapes, the photographs blur our eyes and traverse us into a space of the imagination.

There is a tendency for the mythical to become fantastical in everyday India, whereas, in Yogananthan’s project, it seemingly becomes so normal that its image can no longer be distinguished as the ‘other’. It is through extreme normalization that the photographs induce defamiliarization. In doing so, the revered figures of Ram and Sita or Luv and Kush are literally divested off their sacred auras, where they no longer live representational lives. Rather, young men wandering in forests and fields, performing everyday activities when identified as such representational characters, at once begin to invert the real into mythical, albeit in uncanny ways.

It is through myths that societies borrow moralities for their everyday existence. Keeping rationality at bay while absorbing these myths helps in building a community that thinks homogeneously. While the virtues of righteousness, heroism and sacrifice upheld in an epic like the Ramayana are institutionalized within Hindu families in India, their internalization is often uncritical, possibly producing societies that exhibit traces of chauvinism. In such a scenario, one is then compelled to think if the ideal is merely a performance? In consuming a staged photograph, does the viewer complete this loop?

In bridging the gap between the representational and the lived, one wonders if Yogananthan’s photographs come to frame the aesthetics of the ‘hypo-critical’. It is the hypocritical perhaps, that accommodates both: the true and the false. The artist’s photographs explore and give form to the seductive power of the hypocritical. The make-believe realism achieved through the process of eventual staging of characters tames the truth as well as the lie, affording multiple realities to co-exist within one frame, one life.

The willing suspension of disbelief bears the seeds of a community that can unite benign bodies to take the form of a large agitation. A deep belief in the mythology of Ramayana as a defining Hindu text has kept the Indian state occupied to a large extent over the last few decades. It is ironical that a story recited to impart values of love and sacrifice appears to have become the agency for othering through religious polarization. The triplet of Longing for Love, Sea Monster and Secret Door could be a representative of such phenomenon, occupying the liminalities of tension and suspension between the land and the sea. Yogananthan’s hyper-normal Ramayana shocks us in its everyday-ness, allowing us to gauge the closeness of stories to our lives. However, Yogananthan eloquently summarizes in an interview with British Journal of Photography, “I realised the distinction between truth and falsehood wasn’t important…This was an important discovery for me, that this is where my photographs should lie – in this in-between world between physical reality and the imagined.”

What is a Diagram?

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We are often, time and again, posed the question of the 'diagram' in architecture in the course of our teaching. Inspite of the fact that there is generous discourse already available on the subject, even pretty articulate and thought-worthy; in pedagogy, mobilising the notion of a diagram seems extremely challenging.  When teaching undergraduates, to whom architectural methods, tools and terms are so new and abstract, so much of our talk ends up remaining rhetorical. Our use of the term 'diagram' when talking about the abstract relationships within a particular project - architecture or urban may sound rather incomprehensible, for at one instance we may be referring to the hidden formal logic of the building, whereas on the other, we may be thinking of it in a broader urban realm,  (wherein the project may be having a different dialogue). Sometimes, through diagrams, we indicate movement and encounter in a conceptual manner whereas at other times, we suggest volumetric rhythms which characterise a building. Needless to mention, all these are diagrammatic understandings through which we make a project amenable to the student, but all of these do not necessarily overlap into a single consolidate representation. Inevitably, in our discussion of building as a diagram , we keep changing our referential registers that overlap to (in)form, what one could call, an 'architectural composite'. In making sense of this representational multiplicity of such an architectural composite, students may be attributing the value of one diagram to another representation - that may fall short of making complete sense. It is perhaps in such confusion that the students beg the question "What is a diagram?"

Architectural diagrams are different from those used in engineering, economics, electronics, or other such disciplines. Linguistically thinking, 'architecture' and 'diagram' may almost seem tautological - for essentially, architecture is precisely the resultant act of bringing people or entities in a specified relationship. Think of it in terms of software or hardware, where the term architecture is particularly relevant. My father, an instrumentation engineer, would endlessly draw out circuits in drawings, replacing capacitors and resistors, in order to make a machine function more efficiently. There, the diagram was precisely the architecture of his work.  In a simplistic understanding, this singular diagram was the machine. This one to one co-relation of a digram to the real in the practice of electronics, for example, is often not the case for architecture of the built environment, for processes in a building or a city are layered with many systems and functions that have varying relationships. Thus buildings have multiple diagrams that are working together with each other.

We may borrow from the different disciplines to articulate a definition for diagramming in architecture. Each may seem applicable, but often these definitions become so abstract and theoretical to the extent of getting too subjective, and interpretive - and thus even debatable at times. This may happen due to the method in which one chooses to "read" a particular environment, thus removing an objectivity of the process of diagramming itself! But let us get back once again, to that innocent student asking, "what is a diagram" - where he is asking us to weed away our abstract and jargonized readings of a project to come to the point. What is being asked there?

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Let us now move to the architectural studio, in India. The question of diagram becomes particularly perplexing for the discipline at several registers. Diagrams, to be sure, are representations through which invisible relationships between ideas or objects may be explained and/or established. As architecture is far too obvious in its physical presence, often, to think of it as a diagram escapes imagination. (Often for students here, architecture, or building is the physical object in front of their eyes, and it is as objective a reality as it can be. There is certainly, nothing invisible about it!). Thus to think about them as diagram and decipher "invisible" relationships within them does not occur to them.

Secondly, diagrammatic thinking has not been an integral part of architectural education in India, the roots of which may be traced back to the manner of its colonial institutionalisation. Still largely taught in the mode of draughtsman's expertise, the design of building in India has largely remained a matter of aesthetic composition or construction. This is reflected in the kind of courses and emphasis laid on visual processes in most syllabi of architectural programs or teaching in India.

Thirdly, the knowledge of diagrams have primarily belonged to the domain of science and scientific thinking - a branch that explains phenomena that is not necessarily visible. Thus, its discussion and application in architectural pedagogy has been marginalised, even obliterated to a large extent. One may argue that the loss of diagram resulted in the loss of the political voice of the average architect, for he/she never could think of the intent of the building beyond the needs of the client, budget or demands of beauty. Neither thus, could one actualize one's agency as an architect.

But for the studio, diagrams for architecture are not limited to two dimensional representations. A range of things constitute diagrams that can be harnessed for architectural imagination today. These include art objects, stories, models, machines, and so on. This charged space of representation through which students are made to wade through is often too hurried given the constrained mass-education formats of architectural education. In such a scenario, the process of filtering that must take place towards the resolution of any project ends up in a mere groggy experience.

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As academicians, we passionately talk about building and its processes in metaphors using borrowed vocabularies from music, cooking, poetry or art (and other cultural domains). One wonders then, if architecture even has its own language? But it is here that we end up objectifying this fascinating act of architecture. To realise a building, is to realise precisely, how we bring the values in all of these acts of music, cooking, poetry or art in relationship with each other, only in a way that is visible and invisible at the same time for someone to read at yet relish, for someone to only smell and yet have the flower. Diagrams could then be those aromas which make up an environment and dissolve into the air. The only challenge is to bring students to breathe them. But can any one possibly teach someone how to smell diagrams off a building?

It is here that I am reminded of one of our first year design projects where we were to design a home for a comic character in the city. The character assigned to me was Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu - a short wise old man and his giant companion from Jupiter. What followed was a quick working of possible strategies into venn diagrams and their translation into three basic spatial types. When I presented these to my tutor, he was quite surprised at the clarity of my thought, to the extent that he asked me if I had been taught to do so earlier.

Diagrams for A House for Chacha Chaudhary & Sabu, 2004

To diagram is to prioritise, to decide and filter out anticipated redundancies within a given process. Diagraming is thus inducing a project with intent. What values do we read into built environment, and how do we charge them into architectural diagrams? These are aspects that need slow and careful discussions. Diagrams of architecture engineer values within environments. These can be experienced only with an attentive mind, and perceptive body. Pedagogical processes need to strengthen these channels. Diagrams, although, are not a formula, and thus they can not be learnt like theorems. They need to be practiced through observation and sensitivity.

The discourse on diagrams is rather convoluted for students. Perhaps, if students are able to voice their doubts with more honesty and eagerness, we may be able to develop sharper narratives to respond, and at the same time gauge the registers through which they approach the problem of diagram. However, the questions have to be deeper, and come from within them. Until then, we may keep asking, 'what is a diagram'?


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This essay has very little academic value and is written to surface my own doubts as a teacher. All the opinions and expressions are personal. The author is aware of the gross inconsistencies and jumps made through the writing.

Of the Cute and the Zany

will update citation soon!

Intercourse

Description of a ritual

"Vedic rituals did not require temples or even the creation of statues. They were based on fire sacrifices of various kinds that needed only brick platforms. Fire was the agent that enabled the transformation of the sacrificial food (matter) into smoke and air (energy). Though no early Vedic altars have survived, the legacy of their rituals is still alive in Hinduism, which views this city as one of its most sacred. At dawn every morning, thousands of devotees gather on ghats leading down to the shores to face the sun that rises across the broad expanse of the Ganges River and is reflected in its waters. Half immersed in the river, they greet the sun by cupping the water of the Ganges into their palms and pouring it back into the river with arms extended. This is followed by a slow turn of 360 degrees while standing in place, a miniature act of circumambulation. A quick dip in the river completes the ritual. This ritual can be repeated many times or performed with greater elaboration that includes long chants and sequences of yogic postures."


Francis D K Ching, Mark Jarazombek, Vikramaditya Prakash. A Global History of Architecture, second edition, John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2011. pg. 97

How to write a good Research Paper?

One of our faculties at Yale and passed this on to us and I thought it will be great to share it here!
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How to write a good research paper?


Argument: What is it that you want to say in the essay? how does it differ from existing literature? why is your topic important? Make sure you state your argument clearly. The more original, the better.

Contents: wealth of sources, both primary and secondary, coherently chosen; all the sources are relevant to the topic

Structure: a good paper is well organized; it is a good idea to present your argument in the introduction, to articulate it in the main body (which can be divided into sections), to re-examine it in the conclusion. A well written, strong conclusion is crucial to a good paper. The sequencing of sentences should be logical, so that your reader is able to easily follow your argument. Your paper must have a bibliography at the end.

Resources: use more than just primary sources, include works from the syllabus or from other courses if relevant, write a good bibliography divided between primary and secondary sources. A good paper shows command of relevant secondary literature.

Style: clear points, elegantly made. Vivid vocabulary, structure of sentences varies. Never use jargon (unless relevant) or colloquial sentences. Quotations are clearly identified by indenting if longer than three lines or in inverted comas if within the text. Your paper should be a pleasure to read. Follow the Chicago Manual of Style for footnotes and Bibliography.

Orthography: very few, ideally no typos or mechanical errors. Don't rush! Read your paper carefully before sending it, ideally a few days after you've finished it.

Title: a well-chosen title is a good starting point. It should briefly introduce your paper, if it is witty, and your paper is good, it is a plus.

Length: Stay within the word limit, you don't need more words to write a good paper.

Images: If you use images, make sure to include captions where you explain briefly what they are and where they come from. Images are documents just like texts and need to be referenced.

Presentation: a good looking paper is NOT necessarily a good paper, but it is a plus if a good paper looks good!

Anecdotes to ponder

"What will the chair be for a frog?"

"If I and chair are the same thing, what can I afford for the chair?"

"How do you live in a house with three husbands?"

"Having your own room means being private or being in isolation? Does being private mean being isolated?"

- Prasad Shetty

Construction Sites - II