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

Decolonizing Architecture

"It's like the person who had good handwriting was made the leader of Gram Panchayat."
- Prasad Shetty on the attitude in which architects were taught and imagined in the first few decades of the introduction of the profession in India.

"They were expected to execute the drawings to accuracy on site - so a person who could read drawings well and supervise sites was a good architect. But any good engineer can make a building. The architect must realise that his/her task is to craft space."

The Loneliness of Landscapes \\ Ronny Sen at Tarq

published in Art India \ Dec 2018

The Loneliness of Landscapes 

Anuj Daga is moved by the poetry in Ronny Sen’s documentation of the raging fires of Bihar’s coal mines.


In a selection of images clicked with an iPhone, Ronny Sen’s show Fire Continuum at Tarq from 23rd August to 29th September, presents a distinctly political landscape in a poetic rendering. Through an array of ‘tablet-sized’ portraits, Sen attempts to capture sights of wonder and despair spread across the coal fields of Jharia. Known for their everyday violence, popularized in recent Hindi cinema, regions of Bihar and Jharkhand have been perceived to be extremely rough. Rightfully so, for much of my summer vacations would be spent in these ‘dark’ areas visiting several collieries with my maternal uncles. The long bumpy bike rides on mountains of coal in brazen heat made us inhale ample coke, leaving us with black sweat and rough hair. More so, coded conversations and quiet exchanges would expose me to negotiations and inner politics of everyday existence. To look at Ronny Sen’s work is almost a personal revisiting of those old dust-laden journeys in the burning summers of Bihar.

Underground fires were first reported in Jharia in 1916, some of which continue to be alive. One of the first sets in the exhibition captures flames rushing out of the belly of mines. Vast tracts of mined mountains lie open in clouds of smoke and dust in Sen’s documentation. At once, the viewer is compelled to link the journey of coal into dust that eventually exhausts through fire into smoke. The photographs hint thus, at the simultaneous explosion and implosion of coal into fire.

Fire is in continuum with life and death of people settled around the coal mines of Bihar and Jharkhand. As much as it supports the livelihood of people in the region, it has also taken many lives, like in the Dhanbad Coal Mine disaster of 1965 where an explosion led to fire in the mines killing 268 miners. In addition, the burning coal creates vacuum below the land causing its subsidence that has often led to engulfing whole settlements. Yet, locals refrain from leaving Jharia due to the fear of losing livelihoods. The dual bind of loss and hope is best expressed in the gaze of subjects that Sen goes on to capture in his photographs.

Coal mining in India began as early as 1774, which only picked up with its need as fuel for the steam engine locomotives that came to the country in 1853. The First World War saw the rise in demand of coal subsequently, slumped in the inter-war period, and scaled up again for the Second World War. While several private and government companies existed for extraction and trade of coal for nearly two decades after independence of India, an overall nationalization of coal mines took place by 1973, essentially to prevent unsafe and unscientific mining practices and poor working conditions of labourers.

However, the coal mafia in the region have continued smuggle coal in an organized and sophisticated manner, through a nexus of politicians, government officials, businessmen and locals. Such open violation of the State policy is suggested in a clever framing of the white ambassador on the fuel-laden black mountain in one of Sen’s photographs. The smug play of colours creates a quiet, yet powerful statement.

Photo-sets detailing the explosion process and architectural ruins, laid out on adjacent walls of the gallery, narrate the story of development and decay. The solitary nature of people and buildings bring to us a strange sense of loneliness in looking at the entire landscape, both seemingly awaiting an intervention. The emptying of resources by extractive and environmental processes produces a vacuum that gets amplified and framed in the clinical treatment of the images.

The show is an artistic survey of an environment that we often take for granted. While the exhibition introduces us to the environmental pressures that resource-laden sites in India often undergo, the viewers may find themselves seduced into the surreal calmness of the images. On the other hand, the form of the exhibition – portrait photographs taken through a phone – begs for a discussion on the numerous impulsive criticalities that we freeze visually on our mobile devices. Taking photographs of shock, wonder, amazement, deviance, spectacle, violation and aspects that construct us through the defining of the other has now become a habit amongst many of us. The ritualistic production of documentary evidence allows us to formulate our personal relationship with landscapes and actions of the State. We produce and travel with several exhibitions thus, all the time. What happens to these photographic exhibitions that we carry and share personally across new media platforms? By pulling them out for public display, the exhibition in some way, attempts to demonstrate the soft power of such impulsive criticality to become a cogent tool for mobilizing action. It extends agency to the viewers to observe closely, their own environments.

Jangad Singh Shyam

At KNMA, Delhi.

I am Sutradhar / Archana Hande @ Alibaug

The above images are works of Manasi Bhatt from the show 'I Am Sutradhar' conceptualized by Archana Hande together with artists Sachin Kondhalkar, Gayatri Kodikal and Mansi Bhatt. The project was installed at the Guild Gallery, Alibaug. It was one of my favourite installations amongst all others, for its subtle surreal quality. It alludes the cultivation of body parts for a variety of consumptive purposes. One sees hair, skin, noses, eyes, fingers in different shapes and sizes for different needs grown in the kitchen garden of a house in alibaug along with other vegetables. The works need to be nurtured, cared and cured for those to whom it may deem fit. On one hand the relationship between body and burial are inversed whereas on the other, the reality and artificiality of life are simultaneously invoked. 

In its installation, several themes of performance, cultivation of the body, appearance, issues of race, colour, biology, growth and debates around life get invariably enmeshed. The different body organs are left overs from the artist's earlier performances within which she alters her body through the application of artificial skins, membranes that are given characteristics of human flesh through artificial solutions like latex or silicon. These chemicals have lately come to embody a lot of new age machinic bodies that are made to not simply think like humans, but also appear like the species. Thus, artificial intelligence fed into machines are enveloped into human skins through such processes. The experiments of creating life artificially, through non reproductive logics have been of modern scientific interest for some time now. The construction of tissues, cells, skins and organs are said to lend new life for those in medical need. We must all remember the successful demonstration of Dolly sheep through cloning human cell growth during mid '90s - one of the first experiments on developing a mammal bio-technologically. Subsequently, several experiments were undertaken to (re)produce several mammals from history and the present.

While cloning has continued to remain a scientific pursuit (posing much debate for humanity itself), there are several other aspects that seem to be in proximity of such thinking. The face is the most cultured part of the human body, and in recent times, certain standard ideas of "perfect" beauty has been mobilized within all cultures to push people to take steps to transform their biological selves. Cosmetic surgeries have only seen a rise in the last few decades towards achieving this universalised ideals of beauty by women, and men. Beauty products, skin lightening products, fairness creams - that showed a rise in consumption over the '90s became ways in which people imagined to appropriate the benefits of racial superiority. Only recently, has serious concern been drawn to such induced attitudes and misplaced aspirations. In such a background, Mansi Bhatt's cultivation of organs in the frontyard of the farmhouse in Alibaug begs a deeper discussion. Can we harvest our own body parts and also have the means to alter ourselves? Is it possible to choose one's skin colour, or body type? How has media influenced our sense of beauty, how has it lead to the fragmentation of the physical self, and thereby the mental self? These are questions that grow in Mansi's field of thoughts.

The human hair growing from the ground is one of the most subtle, yet compelling aspects of the installation. In the overall scheme of "organ" farming, it seems the most palpable because of its allusion to grass. In assuming its utility, it makes us wonder about the men (and women?) concerned with premature hairfall and balding (even due to medications), for whom, wigs, transplants and other kinds of treatments may be temporary or permanent solutions for fixing their social image. For many public figures who have significantly shaped the imagination of personal appearance in the sphere of everyday, such makeovers are compulsive, and even naturalised. Such adaptations defy natural course of body growth, and embrace a reality frozen over the projected social space. In the bio-technologised world of vegetal growth, could the cultivation of "organic" farming of body-parts produce a new pattern of consumption? But artistically considered, the hair growth makes us wonder if earth itself is bald! 

When is Space?

Incidentally, I have not mentioned anything on this blog about the major architectural exhibition that I worked on early this year: When is Space? - that which was curated by Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty, commissioned by Pooja Sood, held at Jawahar Kala Kendra. The exhibition took place during 21st January to 21st April 2018. The reason why nothing came to this blog is because I put together an entire separate website for the event (www.whenisspace.in). I contributed several writing pieces on the whenisspace blog. Besides, as the Assistant Curator, my responsibility was to put together the exhibition catalogue, the exhibition placards, overseeing the content and design and lastly conducting the seminars and conferences as allied events. Alongside, I was also made responsible for putting together what came to be called as the 'Jaipur Room' - the one with all historical documents of the city. Often it becomes very difficult to ascertain what one's role has been in putting up an exhibition when working in a creative group. Several of our energies went together in creating many parts of the exhibition. My effort was to become a lubricant which could help mobilize the entire exhibition towards its completion.

Prasad's pre-planning for the exhibition layout.

Pankaj Sharma with the Curatorial Team, on Jaipur Archives

Jaipur Winters with the team

The curators involved me generously over the entire planning - taking me together for site visits, studies and archives. I have to commend Rupali and Prasad for their persistence and hard work with which they envisioned ideas into reality. I feel too insignificant of my contribution within the entire process as compared to their work. I merely tried to "fill in" where some directorial purpose was required as they focused on other more important things. This was more circumstantial than intended, for I was quite occupied assisting Riyas Komu for Serendipity Arts Festival's 'Young Subcontinent' Project in Goa. There was substantial traveling and research involved along with significant amount of coordination that went into bringing and installing artists from across six countries of South Asia for the Young Subcontinent Project. Within this, there was my teaching at SEA along with visits to Jaipur. It was useful to be informed about the developments in person, however, my initial involvement began from refining the curatorial note and then working on the graphic material for the exhibition, eventually robustly taken over by our project assistant Dhruv Chavan.

Pooja Sood, unknowingly, although perhaps rightfully qualified 'When is Space?' as one of the largest exhibitions of architecture in India. While one had preliminary doubts, one was compelled to believe in her pre-assessment on seeing the works manifest on ground. Which other architecture exhibition brought five live installations, life size scaled models, room full installations and a range of drawings and models together in once space? In addition, the exhibition also boasted of two conferences along with a dozen curatorial walks. Such an ambition clearly brings the scale of the exhibition at par with either Vistara, or The State of Architecture. The project almost became a mini-biennale. Originally intended to run for three months, it was extended by another month.

One of my biggest learnings was in the process of translation of the text in Hindi. The work opened me up to some really exciting conversation with our translator Sveta Sarda, and led me to the undertaking of my next important class project on translating the wonderful catalogue of Vistara exhibition (one that was curated by Charles Correa) as a part of my History class. As a translator / editor, one is constantly struggling between what essence to retain, and what to let go. It also opened me up to the rich internal contemplation on the idea of space as conceived in oriental philosophy.

To just shift behind the scenes, Prasad, since much beginning prefaced four ideas on space (something I think he learnt from Lefebvre's 'The Production of Space'). It is important that they are noted down for architectural consideration, and to remind oneself that architects play a role in steering the discourse on space. These four propositions, observed by Prasad from his research on understanding of space include four categories in which it has been understood and intervened so far:

a. Euclidean space: The mathematical understanding of space, through geometry and eventually cartography - taken ahead through endavours of Newton and Descartes in order to locate objects in reality. In essence, they imagined space as a container for events in life.

b. Einsteinian space: Einstein worked through folding space and time (and everything within it) into a continuum, indicating that we are aggregates of time and space. In some ways, it is an empirical extension of spiritual teachings of vedas. His famous mathematical equation E=mc2 also brings together life as energy that is constituted of light and matter.

c. The Kantian Space: Kant suggests that 'space' is something like a lens that one wears to see things (in a most basic manner). He suggested that human beings are born with certain 'apriori' idea of space and time.

d. Lefebvre's space: Lefebvre believed that space is a cultural phenomenon, and that it is produced through the constant act of social process. Thus, for Lefebvre, space was a social entity.


On reflection, one finds three important guiding principles that came to structure the exhibition. Incidentally, these were also points that I had raised in my critique of 'The State of Architecture' exhibition held at NGMA in Mumbai during 2016. These include:

1. The Idea of Practice (and not projects): The 'When is Space?' exhibition attempted to focus on the ongoing inquiries that individual architects are pursuing within their practices. The projects included in the exhibition were seen merely as sharp pointers that exemplified these questions. Thus, projects do not become an end in themselves for a practice, rather another opportunity to experiment with the ongoing questions that it tries to engage in over a longer term. The exhibition was thus, not a collection of architectural projects, rather a bringing together of contemporary inquiries on space hidden/latent within the architectural practices across the country.

2. The question of Space: Everyone on the team worked with the understanding that space is a produced act. It is not a default "given". The curatorial endavour attempted to provoke and ask the question of space as a historical condition - what it is, and what it means today. It thus did not differentiate between architects, artists, philosophers, intellectuals, theorists, students, and many other 'practitioners of space'. Thus, architecture was located within an expanded field, and the question of space was central to the curation. The exhibition asserted that space is a shared entity, and it is co-produced, where architects play the role of sharpening its ideological dimension. It is here that the exhibition also attempts to address the "when". People and space produce each other through a series of engagements, and certain configurations of space characterise key moments in time. The exhibition attempted to ask what regimes of thinking 'space' have existed, and how does one locate contemporary architectural practice within it?

3. The Paradox of Exhibiting Architecture: What methods does one employ to exhibit an entity that encompasses our very lives? The exhibition experimented and brought together a range of ways in which architecture gets experienced - through drawings, models, installations, mockups as well as the virtual. Further, it brought audiences to consider intangible elements like light as well as sound (music and spoken word) structure our experiences in a given space. The exhibition pushed people to create their own associations by throwing them into a gamut of carefully curated sensorial environments, punctured by historical and contemporary readings. In doing so, it provoked the viewers to think how life shapes up through sensorial interaction and consumption; how we become inhabitants of the world, and what, after all, is the nature in which we inhabit the world today?


--

Some memories:

Planning Spatial Toys. Drawing by Dhruv Chavan under the direction of Milind Mahale.

Making frames for hanging the mounted photographs

Teja Gavankar's installation in process

The meticulous planning behind the House of Five Gardens by Samir Raut.

Vipul Verma working the construction of the endless cloth pieces in order to create a large enclosure within the volume of JKK, for Sameep Padora's installation

Bringing the tallest staircase on campus!

Reams of cloth...

The first iteration of the Floating Roof, by Dushyant Asher, held over his work desk at the School of Environment & Architecture

Please visit www.whenisspace.in for more information!