Opolis at 25 / The _Opolis Lexicon

The _Opolis Lexicon

To be sure, one of the first impulses of the _Opolis alumni on receiving this booklet would be to look for the project that they may have worked on during their term at the office. Between images and texts, our eyes will roll between the lines that one of us may have repeatedly drafted on the computer. And in absorbing those lines, we may remember the discussions, deliberations, differences that have now settled not merely on these pages, but also in space. This book is much more than just a memoir or an intermittent archive, but a record of the collective efforts of twenty five years of “homing” by Opolis. In appreciating them, we may perhaps begin to observe certain values that now dwell in our own consciousness, our way of world-making.

To begin an architectural practice in a rapidly globalising city at the onset of a new millennium comes with its own challenges. The lure of the market, the risk of “missing out”, the seduction of shimmer, the lurch of luxury - have been the global forces that have fundamentally influenced most architectural practices during the last three decades of transforming India. As fellow participants in parsing this transformation, we may observe how Opolis lends its lexicon in attending to these forces with a contemplative stillness. The houses from geographies presented here, shaped within a forest of global choices over the last two-and-a-half decades, invite us to consider three vantage points, amongst others, from which we may choose to look back while thinking ahead in our own respective practices of spacemaking:

1. Holding the Ground

The ridge is not merely a topographical condition rather an philosophical indulgence in the works of Opolis. Many houses consciously sited along this line where two surfaces meet at an angle, do not seek attention; instead they firmly hold the ground behind them. Built as large retaining walls, the houses then appear to reserve the ground while descending us into a large open shelter on the other side. With no real “insides”, they become architectural acts of conservation. Could these be gestures of impressing oneself firm into landscapes of transition while bringing us to quietly contemplate upon the openness ahead?


2. Alignments and Deviations

Within plotted properties, the projects often establish a primary axis along which subsidiary spaces are distributed, offering a sense of order and orientation. This axial ordering is complemented by deviating roofs and deflecting walls that subtly resist alignment, introducing moments of departure within the plan and section. The axis, in this sense, functions less as a fixed directive and more as a guiding force—one that invites return rather than demands obedience. Does this dynamic tension between structure and drift serve as a compass for addressing the architectural contemporary?


3. The Open Alcove

By pushing and pulling walls, the houses offer different degrees of containment, while remaining open. Within the domestic schema, most projects demonstrate an architectural mediation of the western fireplace and the oriental tokonoma into an recessed room that is receptacle for the intermediaries of everyday life. Taking different forms within the inside and outside, these spaces become open alcoves, reversing the gaze within, and serve as internal windows into our own lived realities/lives.


When seen through the above lenses, the twenty-five homes and their drawings not only bring us together in our respective interactions with Opolis, but also revisit the values shared and learnt silently from the practice. Many of our thoughts got realigned to a certain modernist ethos assimilated by the practice from various masterful experiences from across the globe. The focus on showcasing only houses is not to overlook the important institutional and urban spaces that the firm has designed, rather celebrates architecture’s primary purpose of homing. If we must collectively look at these houses, and their drawings as an intellectual enterprise, we may be able to trace the distinct strands we carry ahead in our own practice. Ultimately, the compilation gestures to twenty-five years of professional companionship and familiarity - direct or indirect - that informs a small corner of our conceptual home.


- Anuj Daga

still (in parenthesis)

a note on exhibition of works by Prabodh Parikh

Parentheses are punctuation marks invented to denote supplemental, secondary or sidelined information in language and logic. Much of this supplemental information actually contains the “stuff” of life - that we try to make meaning of. Foregrounding these marginal gestures, this exhibition brackets a few sets of visual experiments by Prabodh Parikh crystallizing the inquisitive restlessness of a mind nourished amidst a fertile environment of artists, philosophers, poets, writers and architects over the last five decades. Working with lines and colour, mediums dry and wet, on canvases small and large, the artist generates uneven geographies of the mind within which quiet figures appear gently reposed. One sees the desire to anchor the anxiety of emergent formlessness of the drawn matter by discreet anthropomorphic punctuations that allude them as bodies or movements, made legible to the gestaltic eye. This compulsion to form an image within abstraction demonstrates the struggle to resolve (and yet remain with) the chaos of everyday life. 

The body in these abstractions traverse several states of existence - from elemental to elaborate. While loosely (dis)entangled lines sometimes themselves come together in entropic densities, at other times they sit quietly onto noisy backgrounds. Figures once alone/unattended slowly morph and coalesce into allied bodies, at other times, their communality awaits sublimation within the canvas. Through these  subtle distinctions and dissolutions, they invite the viewer into subtle acts of meditation. The drawings then are quiet interruptions, still in parentheses, that must be accommodated amid the rhythmic  choreography of a routined experience. These are conscious and subconscious states of being that map the  journey of the individual to belong to the community, and return back only to become an individual. What shapes does such travel morph us into?

The placement of a parenthesis can significantly alter the meaning of a proposition, revealing how peripheral thought comes to silently shape the centre. Parentheses hold implications, intonations, inflections, and the excesses of meaning without which the primary content is susceptible to lose its context. We often bracket aspects that are integral to life yet remain unspoken, treating them as provisional - information  that is essential but suspended. Having moved from doodles on the margins to drawings on canvases, the works in this exhibition suggest what is ostensibly marginal may be constitutive, and that meaning resides as much in the bracketed aside as in the main text. They preserve inner ideas as addenda, safeguarding what cannot be fully absorbed into the linear flow of literature or life. To engage with such subtleties requires not only seeing them with the inner eye, but learning to remain with them: the challenge is to be there, still.

Artful Mergings: Print and Place / London Original Print Fair 2025

 

Tracing Roots Through Prints: India Printmaker House at London Original Print Fair 2025
by Anuj Daga
April 25, 2025

published in India Art Review online journal

Link: https://indiaartreview.com/stories/tracing-roots-through-prints-india-printmaker-house-at-london-original-print-fair-2025/

ORIGINAL TEXT

Artful Mergings: Print and Place
Anuj Daga

(How) do traces of one’s roots find their way in one’s artistic work? This is the question that prompted India Printmaker House to bring together a group of seven artists at the London Original Print Fair 2025 from India and the UK Indian diaspora. The tightly curated show featuring prints by artist Shivangi Ladha, Ian Malhotra, Mahima Kapoor, Avni Bansal, Rewati Shahani, Saruha Kilaru, and Jaimini Jariwala at the Somerset House between 20-23 March 2025 opened up a host of means and methods through which questions of identity, belonging and memory of cultural past may be gestured in artistic practice. In creating such a landscape, this exhibition not only foregrounded contemporary experiments in printmaking by young artists but also strategized a channel for cross-border connections and collaborative exchanges.

Born to a family that fled from Pakistan to Mumbai during partition, Rewati Shahani continued to live in London after studying Fine Art at the Central St. Martins. She expresses the shift in her own space-time coordinates in her minimalist screen prints that impress translucent maplike cut out forms on solid rectangular opaque bases. At once, these appear like irregular stones placed on a planar surface. In overlapping these, she mixes up their characteristic values of the heavy and light, organic and geometric, natural and manmade, alluding the sedimented geography of a location to leak into a distant ephemerality of the horizon. In counter positioning the land and the sea thus, her works ask if horizons are mere imaginary datums or places may find their real geographies ever? In doing so, the work begins to speak of the location of culture as it moves through bodies and borders. 

London-based artist Ian Malhotra plays with the real and virtual in his ‘Monday-Sunday’ series where he etches videogame midnight skies onto paper. He explains, ‘[q]uite a lot of open world video games have diurnal cycles for realism, so the light and weather changes throughout the day as the character walks through the landscape…When the game's diurnal cycle arrived at exactly midnight, I took a picture of this sky.’ Referencing these frames in his sketches, Malhotra makes his canvas black, converting it into a digital screen, further marking white luminous lines to render the cloudy skies. The folding of the past over the present occurs in Malhotra’s works at multiple registers. The mass circulating virtual images are etched exactly in the manner of the imaginary landscapes etched by noted Western artists, eventually reproduced by print for mass consumption - highlighting the fundamental space-time dichotomy of engaging with images. Moreover, the endlessness of the sky and the screen - the two infinities that have united humanity historically as well as in contemporary times - find a common ground in Malhotra’s canvas.

Mixing of forms occurs through the deployment of transparency in Saruha Kilaru’s non-figurative  prints on a variety of  surfaces such as glass, ceramics, fabrics, sequins and paper. Kilaru carries forward the aesthetics of watercolour renderings in print, wherein colour-forms get defined by material textures. Her works invite us to enjoy the shapes that liquids take in resisting external forces, in turn acting like a stretched elastic membrane themselves due to the cohesive forces between fluid particles. The glimmering surfaces of Kilaru’s prints attract the viewer's attention to the constant slippage between light and colour, animating surface tension as impressionistic work of art itself. 

Mahima Kapoor’s prints allude to magnified images of environmental contamination as seen under a microscope. Strains of entropic bodies - those that appear foreign to each other - coexist within a single frame in her artworks. Her series ‘A Place of Oasis’ seems to be a snapshot of polluted wasteland that holds organic and inorganic matter decaying together, making us consider discordant colours and temporalities in simultaneity. In making the viewer stare at these, Kapoor discomforts the onlooker while surfacing the unwelcome chemistry of decomposition. She thus charts a map of pollution at different scales, inducing an affectual response to the chemical, biological and allergenic processes that are byproducts of human action.

Avni Bansal orchestrates the coming together of shapes into indigenous mythical patterns in her ‘Phallic Series’. Celebrating the unison of male and female sexes in her bilaterally symmetric block printed compositions, Bansal depicts sexual interplay with splendour and adornment. Bansal seems to expand the repertoire of ancient tantric symbols in her monochromatic crimson red prints that tell a tale of biological transformation and spiritual transcendence. In these compact prints, one observes a grammar of shape fractals that hold the energy of life in an androgynous balance. As one looks at her other prints, the orientalist gaze begins to dissolve into a more rational one, reminding the imaging of the world in print by naturalists and botanists when these very mythical forms begin to appear as cellular and scientific. 

The relationship between the self and the world is further explored in the prints of Shivangi Ladha. Through an iterative process of printmaking, Ladha overlaps multiple states of being, within which a female body realises its existence within the world. Rigorously repeated sleepacts soon transport the viewer into a dreamlike space of the subconscious, evoked in the graded application of colour on or off the individually impressed bodies. Should her works ‘LightWeaver’ or ‘Rise I’ be mounted vertically, they shall begin to index the performative embodiment of her print practice itself. Ladha’s prints demonstrate the everyday rhythms through which one reconciles the inner self with the external reality. The viewer is invited to participate in the process of collective awakening in Ladha’s artworks - one that shall truly allow us to make the world one’s home.  

Jaimini Jariwala explores the question of home through the materiality of fabric that she has been surrounded with since her childhood. The historic port town of Surat, where Jariwala grew up emerged as a major textile industrial hub after independence. By using the cyanotype and stitch on paper, the artist at once brings the warps and wefts of the textile to dialogue with the oceao-mercantile ecology of her place. The figure of the home is held in tension between land and sea, recalling the life of sea-farers along the coast of Surat for whom much life is lived on the sail. The semi solid, skeletal, amphibian homes normalise transient living in a world that itself is on the move. 

The seven artists presented in this unique show have been brought together through the various programmes of the India Printmaker House, which is a platform dedicated to cultivating a vibrant art community united by a passion for printmaking. India Printmaker House (IPMH) believes in bridging cultures and expanding the global dialogue of art. The works presented by the IPMH at the LOPF 2025 have demonstrated a range of ways in which the question of place and belonging surfaces in the thinking and practice of the participating artists. Here, the medium of print begins to reveal the dualism of stabilization and destabilization, also reflective of the nature of lives that the artists who imagine homes within or outside borders constantly traverse, and effectually merge in their works of art. 

***

Notes on Play - 2

Connected to Earlier Post

Cult of Play: A new book looks at how children play in the city
published in Hindustan Times, 24 March 2025

Link: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/cultures-of-play-a-new-book-looks-at-how-children-play-in-the-city-101742756856410.html

includes my essay:

Locating Play Across the Inside / Outside
Case of Mumbai apartments from 1970-2020
Anuj Daga

abstract:

This paper aims to trace the evolution in the cultures of play-spaces for children within the changing apartment living configurations of the middle class within the city of Mumbai over the last fifty years. The contention of the paper is to bring out the dialectic relationship between the forms of spaces and spaces of play that emerge in the densifying suburban residential neighbourhoods of Mumbai. In order to scope this study, I focus on three stages in typological forms of apartment configurations that have evolved in the city over 1970-2020, and the allied neighbourhood provisions to compensate for playspaces, that primarily come to characterise suburban living in Mumbai. These evolutions are reflective of the social, economic and political forces that shape urban development, and in effect the infrastructure of play as inscribed in the city.

A Plastic Parody

Full Essay Published here
https://serendipityarts.org/writing_initiatives/a-plastic-parody

A Plastic Parody

author: Anuj Daga

On a warm July evening in the Oworonshoki suburb of Lagos, residents from the nearby slum neighbourhood gather around a rather worn-out community hall in the corner of a large open ground beside a massive community water tank built during the previous election, that lay dry for the last five years. Two young men walk past the onlookers, urging them to pick up discarded plastic bottles collected from the neighbourhood streets in large polypropylene sacks, for what will emerge into a communal orchestra. The music beaten out through these empty bottles of purchased water along with other locally made instruments marked the opening of the Slumparty 2023 event. Originally started by Obiajulu Ozegbe or ‘Valu’ and his collaborators in 2019 as a way of mobilising the youth in the underprivileged areas of Lagos to alleviate the tension and violence within the community; Slumparty has morphed into an annual event that brings movement artists from across the world in their pursuit of redefining the perception of slums and overlooked sites in Lagos, through performance.

Slumparty became a serious affair soon after its first iteration when a performance of the local youth, who were otherwise turning to crime and divergent social activities due to inadequate access to infrastructure or issues of unemployment, compelled the local authorities to repair the street where they performed. Realising the potency of performance as a transformative tool, several performing artists, musicians, and visual artists gather annually thereafter to address socio-political and environmental issues through the festival, while training the youth in experimenting with contemporary forms of expression. In its edition for 2023, themed “Village of Dreamers”, artists from Tanzania, India, South Africa, New York, Cameroon, Ghana, and various parts of Nigeria were invited for a workshop to channelize latent insecurities into productive desires amongst the youth. This essay shall focus on one such performance conceptualised and executed during the event by the Ennovate Dance House the day after Slumparty’s inauguration.

Amongst the several collaborative and experimental acts lined up to take place on the street-turned-stage on the following day within the Oworo neighbourhood, the one that stood out was ‘Afro Communal Offering’ that addressed various social, political and environmental concerns. In this performance, a beastly creature completely clad in colourful plastic bottles creeps up from around a garbage bin, invading the street-stage with its jubilant dance. Soon taking over the space, the creature exerts a ferocious yet seductive appeal, swinging and jumping to engulf the audience in its being. Alarmed by its unusual advances, a few young men enter the scene, beating the masqueraded beast with wooden sticks. As its plastic skin begins to splinter, the creature slows down, finding its way out of the site/sight. Subsequently, a body covered in white emerges from the same garbage bin, and by demonstrating complex dis-entanglements, the body brings a certain calm to the otherwise volatile site.

Given the cultural context of Africa, the history of Lagos, and its contemporary challenges, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ is a particularly layered performance. In the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, masqueraded performances have long been a symbolic way to communicate a spirit’s message to the community through dance and other forms of expression. In a contemporary interpretation, the masquerade here is a costume constructed by stitching an abundance of empty and leftover plastic bottles into the colourful tentacles of the beastly body - simultaneously attractive and repulsive - much like the ghostly and inevitable presence of plastic in Nigeria’s everyday life today. The dance of the plastic beast on the street speaks to the spectacular presence of undesired waste suffocating the life of its people. Enveloping oneself thus, in plastic waste produced through the inevitable consumption of an everyday essential commodity like water, in itself makes a compelling political statement.

Water woes are historic for Nigeria. One recalls Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti - the principal innovator of Afrobeat - singing Omi o l'ota o in Yoruba, which is loosely translated in Pidgin English as ‘Water No Get Enemy’. Fela is not only calling out the corrupt postcolonial regime’s apathy towards the struggle for water as a resource , but also suggesting how its provision would assure success for anyone who attended to it within the system. Fela’s lament, from 1975, fifteen years after Nigeria’s independence, holds relevance until today. In several of Nigeria’s neighbourhoods, including Oworonshoki, accessing everyday drinking water is still a struggle, as it often has to be purchased from departmental stores or local suppliers for the lack of functional water-supply lines. Water is traded and exchanged in plastic gallons and bottles replacing the need for the traditional earthen calabash in Nigerian households. Valu, the choreographer of the performance elaborates: “Whether we buy or the government supplies, it is general practice now to use plastics to store water, it’s part of the reason why some parts of Lagos are very dirty as plastics have blocked the drainage system.”[1]

The beating up of this masqueraded beast by young men of the community therefore gestures towards the beating out of not only the damaging aspects of plastic from the environment and Nigerian everyday life but also the bane of bottled water. In another view, it is a demand for sustainable supply of potable water that will prevent the dependence on petty plastics. The white spirit emerging out of the garbage bin further references several local practices. The spirit is clouded in white powder which is rather significant for Nigerians. In Yoruba culture, when a person gives birth, the friends and family smear white powder on their face to celebrate and bring the new child into the world. Striking irregular poses, wrapped in a cloud thus, the other-worldly spirit speaks of both water and youth to lay tender ground for a healthy future. The appearance of the white spirit followed by the young men beating the plastic beast with a stick is also reminiscent of the Eyo festival celebrated by the Yoruba people. During this festival, the streets of Lagos are lined with performers clad entirely in white holding a palm stick, to ward off evil spirits and purify the city. In many ways, the act invites the youth to take up some purpose against these environmental evils that seem to be politically rooted.

Performed consciously and consistently on the dust-laden, yet-to-be-finished streets of one of the poorer neighbourhoods, Slumparty has brought significant change in the perception of Oworonshoki that was seen as a dark district in Lagos until 2019, into a place of celebration and political action. It is the condensation of multiple histories and futures through their embodiment in sound, space, materiality that (re)produces the everyday environment and social reality for public imagination. Dancing on the streets makes them safer, mobilising opportunities for the youth to express and assert their presence in the city. As new acts are performed, residents peep out of their rusted tin-roof houses, transforming the site into a theatre of possibilities. Professor of sociology and urbanism Abdoumaliq Simone, in his book For the City Yet to Come articulates: “Urban Africans have long made lives that have worked. There has been an astute capacity to use thickening fields of social relations, however disordered they may be, to make city life viable.”[2] In this vein, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ thus entangles the body and the city, reincarnating traditional tropes of African culture into the proliferating toxicity of plastic that not only becomes the material to produce music and masquerades but also eventually turns into a dark metaphor for the state of transforming ecosystems, unequal access, and asymmetrical modernity in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital.


Inputs by Ennovate Dance House
All images and videos by the author.



[1] Valu, founder of Ennovate Dance House in a conversation with the author.


[2] Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386247

The Rhetoric of "World-class"

As airport roofs and bridges collapse, so do India’s claims of ‘world-class’ infrastructure

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/airport-roofs-bridges-collapse-india-claims-world-class-infrastructure-9442147/

Published on July 9, 2024, online in Indian Express

read HERE

Bus Stop Poles

 

Of fading, erasing, pasting, cramming, overwriting, repainting, decomposing, rusting, hiding, overlapping, fitting, squeezing, crunching, breaking, bending, showing and still standing.

These are poles through which waiting/halting spots for BEST buses are often marked on the streets in the city of Mumbai . They are like google pins in real geography. This morning I wondered how this almost bygone way of marking a bus stop, that are largely (must be) an artefact of smaller villages in India, still exists in a megacity like Mumbai. These red poles are plonked within once-tar finished roads, that stand like iron flags listing the number of bus/routes that pass along this road. Within these mass produced steel plates, the numbers have been once beautifully oil painted by "urban" calligraphers who would have to fit in the alpha-numeric bus numbers in at least two languages. Despite the fact that the newest bus stops have these instructional details printed and produced in newer techniques, BEST strangely preserves many of these poles with old-fashioned bus number plates that remain vulnerable to the externalities of tropical weather and urban roughness. 

Often, these beautiful number-plates are abused or graphically disregarded by the newer supervisors who do not see these these plates as a work of art. One can sense that how the urgency of dispensing updated information, and the unavailability of these oil paint calligraphers have led to the haphazard and careless pasting of shabbily handwritten stickers with bus numbers. In other instance, several numbers may have faded or erased to weather and time. Several such poles across the city, unlike the above two, stand crooked loosening their foothold into the every-dug road substrata. Many of their levels have gone haywire due to the concrete up-layering of roads. That such benign information boards could be of utmost important to the labour class that may be visiting these neighbourhoods or city for the first time is perhaps partly out of the purview of the BEST management. That these half-erased numbers could be misleading, misread or handicapping; and perhaps even lead the traveller to a wrong destination does not perhaps bother the regulators of this infrastructure.

However, one must give it to the urban dweller that he/she parses such fragility of the system with a measure of generosity. Such fractures of information produce a distinct sociality by forging communication within strangers waiting together for a common journey. Here, one reveals their destination to the other, with trust and hopes to find a way to reach safely. Here, options of movement are debated, and new alternatives for mobility are discussed. Here, serendipitous connections are made in the overlaps of routes and journeys, or disappointments about the missed buses are shared. Here, exasperations are co-performed and frustrations are vented through grins. And at times, it is here that battles are fought to secure a seat over a long journey.

The red shining bygone metal  bus stop flag stands stiff to this everyday roughness of the city, waiting to either dissolve or be engulfed into the smartness of the upgrading city.

On Art

"...Experiences that donot have words yet..."

All art perhaps tries to say something that conventional verbal or written language cannot capture, and vice versa. When something verbal can be expressed in art, it then becomes representation, or illustrative. This is the critique of representational art, perhaps. This, art that moves us is affecting us at a level slightly deeper than comprehensible. In the comprehension of that excess is where we push the boundaries of knowledge. The percentage of this excess may be very little, but to push that aspect is precisely the work of the artist. That is perhaps artistic practice, and what accounts to artistic "work". This work is not possible in the domain of representation, or total translation. For instance, if translation has to become art, then translation has to culturally push the limits of original text to become sustainable and critical for the present or future. This also doesn't mean that accurate representation of reality is not art. It doesn't mean that hyperrealism doesn't count as art. Here the context of time and space in which that art gets produced must be taken into account, for the disposition of that representative content on art may be quite different. To reinvent accuracy at different periods in history through the technology of its time, or in conversation with the technology of its time is then the content of art. This kind of churning allows perspectives to become referential and produce a search for relevance.

On writing

There is little that I have posted on my blog over some time. At least as compared to what I used to post over a decade ago. There was a lot of reflection on everyday life and I could see a lot of value in that. I was writing about my experiences of teaching, of talking to students, colleagues, rambles, discussions - basically recording the sociality of my everyday life, until one day when everything came back to eat me. I realised that the personal blog could become so political, and deeply affect so many people. And it is since then I moderated, censored heavily what this space could carry. Over the last few years, I have taken to old form of writing - in notebooks, diaries - for several reasons. The blog become too formal a space because it was indexed into many formal portals. Secondly, it gained the burden of being too correct and responsible. Thirdly, denser ideas did not find time and space to be elaborated and hence never got posted. Numerous half written posts exist on my draft-list and remain to be completed. Post covid -  a period of recuperation from the deep mental agony of the lockdown - has been a time of little enthusiasm. Could it be the effect of the vaccine that our brains work at half enthusiasm levels, or was it merely my own struggles to mend the complexities of my social life that held me back? I do not know. The diary notes have been ways of purging half cooked emotions into the notebook - something that this blog could hold before. At 37, can I afford to express myself as confused as before, as insecure as I was in my 20s? I think as we grow old, we produce new insecurities, new confusions. I have clarified a lot of my life-questions, however, I still remain clueless about what happens next, where to bend this journey in a meaningful way, and what risks could that have? Would there be a way of coming back, and should one even care?

I took a big step of finding myself a studio space soon after the lockdown was over. 'A room of one's own' - as Virginia Woolf would have phrased. Here, I come to be in the silence of my inner mind, be away from the gaze of my biological family, produce my own sociality, and experiment the rules of domesticity at my own terms. My studio is frugal and filled with curiosities of my own. A lot of times, this space allows me to think of the questions I theorised in the 2010 research fellowship on domesticity I submitted at Kamla Raheja Institute of Architecture. Here, I live the concepts of "dwelling" that Heidegger once wrote about, or imagine being Kafka's non-descript animal from 'The Burrow'.  What could this space become - a garden, a library, a bedroom, a studio, a laboratory, a museum, a hostel... Yet, it doesnot take away my loneliness completely.  I have realised that loneliness is a deeply personal thing. There could be a loneliness that is simply external which one feels in the absence of people. However, this loneliness that I experience is deeply internal, that doesnot quench on finding space or people. How could these two forms of loneliness be connected? It is in the answering of this, that perhaps dwelling becomes home. 

They say that reading is central to writing. And hence, I try to read. But reading is not merely textual. Reading is visual, aural, verbal, tactile and deeply sensorial. Sometimes I wonder how so much has already been said. Lately, I have found descriptions laborious. I have struggled not only to reproduce an event in text, but also to consume a representative text. Sometimes, these descriptions are extremely complex and at other times, they are very thin. How does one maintain just the right tension between these two extremes. It is here that I have felt my urge for poetry in text. Texts do not appeal to me unless they are poetic enough - that they have to work through all properties of a musical composition - of tempo, lyricality, rhythm and beats. Such production of text takes time. These texts have the possibility of offering way more in too less - like concentrates. They work with a measure of abstraction that can afford interpretive multiplicity. It is this quality that allows text to become deeper, and wider. How then, are classic writers able to produce so much writing? I think waiting is central to writing. Just like waiting is important for any other thing. Waiting makes one feel that they are immobile, unproductive, stationary, still. Such a feeling can make one so weak, and insecure. However, waiting could bring more assurance, clarity, poise and profoundness to one's work. Waiting fertilizes ruminations. It is in waiting that readings get ruminated to fertilize into cultural matter.

However, today, I felt that writing about my lack of writing could be an opportunity to lay out my own doubts. Perhaps that could allow me a platter to pick a direction, however weak it may appear, to lead into. The past months have been particularly disappointing for difficult weather - in all respects. Firstly the summers of Mumbai are not temperate enough for any creative work. Secondly, I kept away from travel in the hope of, and in preparation of an international travel to Lagos, Nigeria. Unfortunately, this didnot work out. This lost opportunity to travel for research to Lagos, Nigeria left a momentary, yet deep hole in my trajectory... something that could have allowed me a new vantage point to look at the world, and the self. For all the effort and resources that went in, it felt like losing the game after the hardest attempt. The feeling of futility and failure worsens in an already existing space and situation of loneliness. Opportunities come and go, although, how does one work through the intermediate period of waiting. How does one comprehend the failure of that one clear ray of hope that appeared amidst all other confusion? It is against this backdrop, that I feel the pain of not being able to accomplish the Lagos trip. Researchers put together papers for conference or publications through their exposures they strive, struggle and scavenge from various sources. The lost opportunity for travel is a lost opportunity for writing too. 

Encouragement is essential - for any activity we do. Encouragement is an assurance for continuing what we do, it is borrowed faith for the work of cultural practice. In the capitalistic world, encouragement also comes from the flow of consistent work. In other words, the continued demand for your thoughts is a form of assurance for you to keep working. It is a strange model of patronage. How does one assure such kind of demand for one's work? The extent of dissatisfaction increases when one has supposedly enhanced one's skill substantially but is not acknowledged or asked to lend that skill enough. There is an ecology through which cultural production takes place. Could the lack of encouragement hint at a rupture of this ecology? How does one balance criticality and encouragement for one's work. This would call for an engaged network of friends who are interested in your work, and what you do, how you do. It takes so much time to cultivate friends. The fear of investment of time into making friends was one of the key reasons I decided to move back to India. Moreso, I have stayed in the city because it is a familiar territory. The recent years have had me run into circumstances when these equations seemed to get recalibrated, even if in appearance. Can deep friendships simply disappear? Can old friends vanish quickly? 

Many such experiences have made me estranged, that have caused a profound ambiguity in my skill. I am hoping to reassure myself in the coming days to get back to writing more, doing more, in general being more positive and productive. This would call for a disciplining and grooving deeper into work, that doesn't seem like work? Let's see. 

Hope Horizons: Works of Jagadeesh Tammineni

Exhibition of works by Jagadeesh Tammineni
by Aazhi Archives 

at Fort Kochi

This collection of works presents the mythical realisms that emerge in the printmaking practice of artist Jagadeesh Tammineni. Tammineni juxtaposes familiar subjects that create a surreal estrangement within which several personal and political pasts and presents may be situated. His works try to offer a political commentary on the subjects of labour and longing, power and peace – held in a mood of glimmer and gloom.

Strands of Tammineni’s mythicality may be traced back to his assimilation of his father’s allied engagement with the make-up for mythological characters for traditional plays in his village, beyond the drudgery of tilling the rice field on the one hand; and the dreamlike poster-visuals of Telugu cinema seen and rehearsed in drawing during his childhood on the other. These imageries, through the filter of Francis Goya, offer him the syntax to put together his soft satires of everyday politics.

Tammineni uses animals in his works as symbolic motifs that unknowingly also create a space of empathy. As Gandhi fondles the peacock, tiger, or the cow, one is reminded of an innocence that is now entangled in the political play of identity. These animals with symbolic nationalistic status are further woven into the working apparatus of the contemporary state. The animals in these works struggle to save their appropriation within the narrative of power. In another instance, such as the head of the sewing machine doubly morphed into a bull/donkey - the cultural motifs of labour - the artist laments upon the lack of dignity workers are able to gather for themselves despite their endless toil. Such visuals comment back to the farmer and the field as much as the precarious labour on urban construction sites today.

The staircase of shards, the sewing machine on a slipper, the labour and lightning, Gandhi playing with the animals – are all hope horizons that the artist impresses upon the contemporary viewer - something that is in view, but never reachable. The gentle glimmer in the chandelier not only demonstrates the masterful print-work of the artist, but also leaves us in the promise of the light that surrounds the darkness of gloom in his works.