Hetain Patel / at Chatterjee & Lal

published in Art India, April 2018, Volume 22 Issue 1

Dance of Life

Hetain Patel’s video installations provoke Anuj Daga to think about performative worlds and their complex anxieties.


One notices the laborious pace of Hetain Patel’s quasi-photographic video work The Jump exhibited at Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal from February the 1st to March the 10th. Dressed as Spiderman, Patel stages a scene from the Hollywood film – he leaps like the superhero in his grandmother’s house as family members watch by in amazement. In the video of the jump stretched to about six minutes, projected in two settings back to back – one in the living room and the other against a neutral background – the act sets a strange dialogue between the wondrous and the absurd. As the viewer shuttles between two staged and carefully overlapping slow-motion videos installed back to back, the referentiality of the supernatural and the domestic begin to interchange. It is in the constructed lapse of time that one comes to terms with the spectacle of mundaneness as well as the ludicrousness of the spectacle.

Patel is a UK-based artist of Indian origin and his works explore these two worlds in close contact with each other. These works were recently also shown at Manchester Art Gallery. In a well-crafted performance that takes place between two individuals before their marriage alliance, Patel proposes a setting in which personal relationships get forged and the dance of life gets underway. Presented in order to question the boundaries of rituals, race, class, physical access and language, Don’t Look at the Finger opens up ways where bodies communicate and connect beyond words.

If only the story had not resolved itself neatly towards the end, it would have left the viewer moved and intrigued by its cinematic setting, pace and choreography. Patel makes the film accessible but also inaccessible – moves and gestures do not always add up predictably. Patel’s strategic experiment with narrative refers to Hollywood and some of its tropes but also destabilizes our expectations from time to time.

A Pritzker for India

Many think it's too late. Many also feel that the committee almost missed the opportunity of felicitating Charles Correa. And given the fact that both these architects - Charles Correa and B V Doshi have served the Pritzker committee for much time, it's hardly possible that they are unaware of their works, or their contribution. Much of the West, especially America remains obvilious of the architects from the South Asian subcontinent. When I was studying at Yale, many of my colleagues or professors had never heard of Charles Correa (who has his buildings in MIT campus in Boston, as well as in the city of New York). I wouldn't expect them to even know of B V Doshi either. India has, after all, never remained an interesting place to study contemporary architecture for the West. Rather, unfortunately, it still remains the land of the exotica - of "maharajas, elephants and snake-charmers" - as they popularly say. The West has always valued India merely for its rich past. My essay has this binary in the head, because it is indeed the way in which the West has categorically overlooked South Asia in both -  historical or modern architectural scholarship.

I have plenty of anecdotes to prove the above slippage. I rather not get into it. Meanwhile, we all in India (must) agree that the Pritzker came to Doshi rather late. He's almost 90 years old, has not been actively building over the last decade, and has contributed significantly to the architectural discourse of India over the last 50 years. How do we reconcile this delay then? Doshi, as much as Correa, has always been a revered architect in India, and it would be incorrect to consider the Pritzker as a validation of his contribution. Infact, architects from the eastern "developing" countries have become Pritzker winners only in the recent past. Wang Shu was the first architect from China in the East to win a Pritzker in 2012, and now Doshi. For long, it has been the Aga Khan award that has held high regard in this region, one whose winners have maintained a low key, sustainable, egalitarian and humane architecture rather than the flamboyant, formalistic and high tech approach to buildings. It has been observed rightly, somewhere, that we see a trend in the Pritzker awards towards valuing a more humane Architecture in recent past. But is this "human" turn a mere tactic in foraying a more subtextual geopolitical move?

Let us consider; if we may; the possibility of Doshi designing buildings outside India after his Pritzker status. Will the coming home of Pritzker bring Indian architects any desirability or attention in contributing to the world Architecture scene? At the most, like my colleague Prasad (Shetty) said over a conversation, an Indian Architect would be invited merely to build an Indian or Indian-looking building (embassies, Indian international centres, etc.) outside India. Never shall Indian architects have as much value as our longing for other Pritzker winners like Maki or Zaha (or even starchitects like Holl) would, to come and design for us. Largely, we have still remained underconfident and direction-seeking followers of the West. Our craving for validation from the West is undeniable. Yet, I don't disregard their superiority, for they have invested infrastructures and systems towards architectural scholarship and research. But how can we claim these for ourselves? In much regard, Doshi's constant recollection of Corbusier and the rhetoric of the "Indian" in his post-Pritzker acknowledgements almost works against claiming confidence in our contemporary modes of thought. We have forever been stuck in the identity question, to an extent that we seem to imagine ourselves incapable of articulating a world outside our own. 

But supposedly, these are "Indian" values - precisely those that make us exotic and traditional. We can continue to celebrate these as the Pritzker finds place within India. The ideas of "modern", "Contemporary", "traditional" and so on require new articulation in our part of the world, specifically if we must come to value the architecture we produce. Such a revised framework for above terms is essential because we have not invested in institutions like museums or archives through which we can really assert a progression in thought. It is true that much of what we produce today is borrowed from floating imagery. But could we perhaps initiate a dialogue on the productive process (and even the creative effort) of constant hybridization that we constantly demonstrate in our built environment? Where else would you find so much experimentation? My claim may sound a bit shallow, but we do hope that in his acceptance speech, Mr. Doshi will lead us into a world where we come to sharply interrogate the existing notions of the above instrumental terms such as the "contemporary" or the "traditional" - amply explicated in his own work. It is thus, we may begin to claim some world architectural ground for ourselves.

Kanhaiyya Kumar's Political clarifications

Politics becomes a medium to change social norms.

Political issues however are different, and social issues are different.

Time creates circumstances that bring out work from you.

sub-altern = alternative readings (of history)

Our society is gradually becoming an aspirational society.

post truth societies: societies for whom truth doesn't matter at all, where perceptions establish the truth.

We are not able to filter from the overwhelm of the information in this age. Information has its own problems. That doesn't mean we shouldn't even try.

'Welfare State' concept has been demolished to bring in neo-liberal concept.

One no longer knows what is the base and what is the super structure. Are Modi's decisions political or economic? What is the base - economic or political?

Reservation is kept to resolve the already existing inequalities in the society. It's not meant to bring in new equalities. So many people are born into economic backgrounds, through which they have access to facilities. Reservation is meant to revise this.

The bad people are shouting only because the good people are silent.

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Kaushik Saha at Gallery Mirchandani+Steinrucke

Tyres, Nails and Nozzles

published in Art India, January 2018

The overwhelming greyness of Kaushik Saha’s landscapes in Order of the Age at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of October to the 4th of November carries a lament for the side-effects of development and modernity. . Vast patches of human-operated natural territories get framed onto Saha’s canvases by means of flattened tyres.. In seeing his artworks, the viewer can imagine resource-rich landscapes of oil fields, coal mines or stone quarries that have driven the nation’s development, but have also been sites of exploitation of labour and land. The narratives of development are mirrored onto the lives of materials that go on to occupy and lend meaning to these landscapes. In juxtaposing these surfaces with iron nails,metal nozzles and delicate scenes of everyday life, a unique commentary on the state of development emerges in Saha’s artworks.

Saha’s work can be experienced and understood in various proximities. The abstract compositions soon begin to disintegrate into different textures and narratives over a prolonged gaze. On going closer, one is able to observe strange activities in these obscure landscapes. As one steps back, a layer of invisibly inscribed words and letters – almost like a substructure of survey, information and data that not only regulates but also establishes repression – becomes apparent. Narrative subjects within Saha’s artworks are thus entrapped within both – the physical geography of the terrain as well as the virtual bounds of infrastructure. His experiments leave the viewer to imagine the grim futures of a leftover landscape after its intensive extraction and exploitation.

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Notes on Young Subcontinent Project 2017, Goa

Published in the Herald, Goa, December 17 (?), 2017
reported by Kishore Amati

Three Brutalisms: Shanghai

Diagram for a paper:


Three Brutalisms in Shanghai, China

1. Longchang Apartments -former jail turned into residential space 
2. 1933 - former slaughterhouse turned into a tourist centre 
3. Former neighbourhoods being gentrified and the takeover by edifices of capitalism

Longchang Apartments, Shanghai

1933 Slaughterhouse, Shanghai

Li long type apartments with the high rise development, Shanghai

Kitsch

Here is celebration of kitschy art at the Terminal 2 airport in Mumbai. I wonder why the curator felt that it was important to fill up every inch of space with some art or the other from some part of India. The orgy of ornament is suffocating! Over long forced walks at the T2, one is expected to brush along works that seem disparate and connected at the same time!

Over several ins and outs of T2 now, I am compelled to buy into Prasad's (Shetty) argument that the new airport is quite poor as a functional resolution - one that makes you walk much more than others, some times more than a kilometre to get to places of priority. One is baffled by the magnanimity of the airport for no real reason! Besides, as a public facility, as Prasad pointed, the airport becomes more and more cumbersome as it pushes access to public transport to the corner, and levies taxis and services a heavy parking or entrance charge! Setting itself aloof from the city, it becomes an exclusively private entity, for the elite to savour.

Prasad draws attention to the diagrams of several airports to critique T2. For those traveling once in a while, the new Mumbai Airport may be an experience. However, for regular commuters, the sheer redundancy of circulation within which the art work and plastic landscape is accommodated can become quite tedious. The airport makes you go up and down and pushes you through a humungous shopping plaza that you aren't necessarily ready to engage with. Besides, the long walks and the pressure to reach to the boarding gates in time never leave you with any room for standing and gazing by the overflowing artworks along the airports.

Nevertheless, there is no question that architecturally, the building is well detailed - but you leave it thinking -- at what expense?

Five Forms of Urban Engagement

published in Indian Architect & Builder, September 2017 Issue

P.S.: The published article has erroneously missed out the footnotes from the article, which the reader will find in the text here, along with the original subtitle.


FIVE FORMS OF URBAN ENGAGEMENT

Drafting a history of post-liberalization architectural practice in Mumbai through the lens of the film Reading Architecture Practice


Anuj Daga


In the discussion that followed the inaugural screening of the film ‘Reading Architecture Practice’,[1] urbanist Prasad Shetty framed the cultural landscape within which the work may be located as well as appreciated. He mentioned the recent major exhibition, another in making; three books on Mumbai and two films (including the current one) on architectural practice that have been produced in just over a year in the field of architecture in the city.[2] On the one hand, these works have brought architects to the forefront as active producers of culture within the city. At the same time, they also hint at the diversifying profession that attempts to fold in the rapidly changing forces of the built environment within their respective practices. Although insufficient in contextualization of contemporary practice due to lack of historical referencing, the present film serves as a useful index in tracing and recognizing the emerging distinct forms of architectural engagement(s) that both - shape and gets shaped within the post millennial urban geopolitical landscape. The film thus demands to chart for itself the historical transition of architectural practice from a dominant mode of physical production (professional practice) to recognizing forms of preservation, research and teaching as relevant ways of influencing and informing the built environment.

While the first decade after the economic liberalization, i.e. ’90s in India was celebrated in the creation of a global landscape of call centres, BPOs, five-star business hotels, convention centres, malls, multiplexes and commercial complexes in urban centres, the onset of the millennium sees a certain infrastructural as well as cultural crisis on the architectural horizon. Attempts to reclaim the public realm that was exceedingly slipping to the clutches of corporate sprawl is pursued through a form of activism by the practice of architect P K Das. It helped recover the small patch of Bandstand’s mangrove edge with the support of the Bandra West Residents’ Association. The present-day Carter Road interface with the sea was democratic in intent, however worked out through the universal imagination of a “promenade”. On the other hand, fresh global capital mobilizes the restoration of a lot of built heritage in the city that lay in decrepit condition. Architectural conservation of colonial legacy picks up momentum over the late 90s with institutions like UNESCO and INTACH bringing in money for preservation of the Victoria Terminus (now the Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) as well as the Bhau Daji Lad Museum – both undertaken by Vikas Dilawari in Mumbai. Preservation of natural as well as built heritage of the city thus marks the initial response of architectural practice to new global flows.

Discomforted with the alienated projections offered by international consulting firms invited by Mumbai government around the turn of the millennium,[3] academicians at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (KRVIA) had already begun to conduct studies of the transforming built landscapes, including the neighbourhood of Dharavi, as a part of the design studio projects. In large ways, our present distinct understanding of Dharavi’s informality as a networked ‘work-live’ typology (that cannot be simply resolved in providing new housing in remote parts of the city), took seed in these academic exercises. At around the same time in 2003, a group of architects, artists and social practitioners, some associated with KRVIA, came together to formulate the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT), whose intent was to seriously contemplate on the emerging urban changes within the city. Unlike the academic space, CRIT worked outside the exigencies of the institution, rather, it collaborated with a diverse set of scholars from different disciplines, and conducted independent research projects in order to expand frameworks and methods in deciphering the new form of the city. Much of CRIT’s work was focused on understanding this new urban realm and further through their work provoking to think about projected and possible ideas of (re)development, infrastructure, public space and right to urban space.

By 2005-06 when the city was on the verge of clearing Dharavi from the map – that was now the heartland and a prime real estate in the megacity of Mumbai – KRVIA strongly resisted and appealed to present an alternative imagination for this large informal settlement in contrast to the Mukesh Mehta plan that sought to re-work the entire place through absolute erasure of the rich cultural presence of Dharavi “slums”. As a reaction to the predominant myopic attitudes of imagining the city through tall mindless towers, Aneerudha Paul and Rohan Shivkumar, along with other faculty at KRVIA drove the problem straight into their design studios, involving the students to push for new ways of seeing, and further rethinking the environment, borrowing from their earlier mappings of Dharavi. The work produced over the studio became a valuable base to counter and put hold on the capital-centered, profit-oriented solutions, presenting to the Government optional ways in which redevelopment within the city could be imagined. This episode is enough to assert the creation of knowledge as mainstream “production” in the expanded field of architectural practice.

The growing discontent with the detrimental tendencies of capital driven design, made evident in the academic pursuits of KRVIA and CRIT, was also felt by several architects that prompted them further to look at their own contexts afresh for missed opportunities. The practice of Sameep Padora and Associates, for instance, has come to adapt research as integral to architectural practice. While Padora spends much of his time innovating typological formulations in his studio along with his associates, the firm has also given the dimension of soft advocacy to documentation and research. Experiments with forming architectural collectives, collaborations and associations are critically revisited post the economic depression of 2010. This is demonstrated in new alliances like the Bandra Collective – a group of architects and designers, including Sameep Padora, interested in collaborating on issues of public space primarily in their neighbourhood and beyond. The Bandra Collective looks to preserve and nurture specific urbanities that stitch the mosaic of city together. Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty from KRIVA and CRIT move on to institute the School of Environment & Architecture (SEA) in 2014, in collaboration with city architects and and a community based organization[4] with significant experience in conservation, environment, social work, urban design and research to fill the gap in the realm of architectural education that needs to attune to the fast changing nature of the city. Aligning practice and research strategically to each other has led to the reorientation of both – the profession and education.

‘Reading Architecture Practice’ merely collates these ideological directions that architectural practice has taken in order to shape and inform the built environment in response to the changing economic, social and cultural order of the city post 1990s, without pointing to their geopolitical underpinnings. Further, one should not overlook the fact, as Rohan Shivkumar remarked over a conversation, that these deviations by architects (in addition to many more) have come to be identified as valid and relevant forms of architectural practice in our context only after similar pursuits found place in the Western cultural and intellectual discourse. As we deliberate over the timeliness of the film within this historicization, we must recognize that it performs and provokes three important functions for practitioners of the built environment:

1. Reading: the need to observe and speculate the transformation of the physical, cultural and intellectual landscape we create and come to inhabit

2. Architecture: asking critical questions related to form and space in the urban environment therefore widening the scope of the practice

3. Practice: of how certain aspects of architectural training can be pulled and extended to politically inform and reshape urban history and lives of its inhabitants.

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ENDNOTES


[1] co-created by Rajeev Thakker, Samarth Das, Shreyank Khemalapure, Sunil Thakkar and Philippe Calia that documents five architectural practices in Mumbai: KRVIA (Aneerudha Paul & Rohan Shivkumar), P K Das & Associates (P K Das), CRIT / SEA (Prasad Shetty & Rupali Gupte), sP+a (Sameep Padora) and Vikas Dilawari Architects (Vikas Dilawari)

[2] Prasad was referring to the ‘State of Architecture’ exhibition that was hosted by NGMA in Mumbai, conceived by Mumbai-based curators Rahul Mehrotra, Kaiwan Mehta and Ranjit Honskote, the ‘State of Housing’ exhibition that is soon to take ground by the above set of curators, the books ‘In the Name of Housing’ produced by sP+a (Sameep Padora and Associates), and a bit earlier, ‘Boombay’ by Kamu Iyer and ‘People Called Mumbai’ by architect Nisha Nair who founded the People Place Project, in addition to the recent films ‘Nostalgia for the Future’ by Rohan Shivkumar and Avijit Mukul Kishore and indeed, ‘Reading Architecture Practice’.

[3] Around 2003, several efforts to transform Mumbai into a “world-class” city pushed the BMC to hire the International consulting firm Mckinsey who produced ‘Vision Mumbai’ document, whereas the ‘India Shining’ slogan was popularized by the then-ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) for the 2004 Indian general elections, wherein the dream to transform Mumbai to Shanghai was floated.

[4] The School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) is a joint initiative of Suvidya Prasarak Sangh (SPS) and Society of Environment and Architecture (SEA Mumbai). Suvidya Prasarak Sangh is a community based organization with an experience of over 40 years in running educational institutions. Source: www.sea.edu.in As accessed on 22nd August 2017

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Three Contentions: Critical Regionalism

Three contentions on the study of theory of Critical Regionalism in architecture today:

1. That Critical Regionalism (especially Frampton's version) became a framework through which many architects of South Asia could place their works in the main stream architectural discourse of the west. On the other hand it enabled the West with a linguistic vocabulary (terms) through which works of South Asia and regions around could be discussed.

2. While the idea of critical regionalism, as framed by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their original work suggested a kind of critical continuum of the theory itself - one where architecture must constantly revise itself and address its own epoch, Frampton's formulation deduced it into six points - often consumed as a formula. Frampton's framing of critical regionalism has been critiqued by Fredric Jameson for its stylizing tendency seen in the way in which the text was pedagogically deployed in many South Asian contexts, and sometimes evident in the works of architects working within the purview, themselves.

3. Critical Regionalism must be seen as a corrective theory against the free and careless appropriation of symbols and signs from history within architecture that had a banalizing tendency of postmodern thought - primarily for the South Asian counter parts who were far removed and dissociated from the discursive context of the West.


thoughts developed with discussants: Shreyank Khemlapure, Dushyant Asher

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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