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.

Sedimented Topologies // Vinita Karim

an essay on the practice of (now) Dhaka based artist Vinita Karim

curated by Shristi Sainani

published by Gallerie Nvya, New Delhi

Sedimented Topologies
in the visual practice of Vinita Karim

by Anuj Daga

In ‘Invisible Cities’, one of Italo Calvino’s most celebrated novels, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo makes vivid to the aging Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan, the life as lived in the lands of his empire that he may no longer be able to physically experience. At the outset, Calvino disclaims that, "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." Polo goes on to narrate a post-factual account of fifty-five cities he has visited that, he reveals eventually, share features in common. My task here is to similarly sit by Karim’s artworks and closely observe the ideas hewn in the palimpsest of her landscapes. In other words, this essay tries to excavate the sedimented topologies in the works of Vinita Karim. Could Karim’s artistic practice be a visual allegory to Calvino’s storytelling technique in Invisible Cities?

Looking at Vinita Karim's visual works in succession is much like reading through the chapters of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the manner of the thematically organized city-titles in Calvino’s novel, Karim’s artworks are kaleidoscopic impressions of various urbanscapes that are created with paints and patches of embroidered fabric, on surfaces flat or spherical. More often than not, their geographies are characterised by an interaction of land and water within which different patterns of life settle in varied forms. Water bodies and landmasses get defined by each other and are sites of active inhabitation in Karim’s renderings – a fact that may be inferred even without the visible presence of a single human being. It is the assemblage of houses, ships, scaffolds, bridges and boats in their vibrant colours and eventful details that remain as key traces of thriving human activity. In the careful orchestration of these elements of inhabitation within her works, Karim mounts the architecture of her own topological manoeuvrings in every artistic iteration.

Karim’s orientation to space has been fundamentally informed through the constant crossover from city to city that happened over the decades by virtue of firstly, her father who kept relocating due to his work in the Indian Foreign Services, and later her partner whose work in tele-communications took them to places. From being born in Burma, schooled in Sudan, Kuwait and Pakistan, studying art (and business) in Stockholm and Sweden, and further traveling with her partner to Philippines, Egypt as well as India until settling in Dhaka in 2010, Karim’s life so far has been about perpetually making home in transition. How does one articulate a common language through which topological diversity of different lands may be hewn together? Further, what could we discern through the visual accounts that fold in the multiplicity of cultural landscapes in Karim’s artworks? Lastly, how does one read the inscription of “home” within visuals that themselves seem to index multiple locations?

In addressing the above questions, a conceptual opening of ‘sedimented topologies’ may serve helpful. In geology, sedimentation refers to matter that has been deposited by some natural process. It takes place when suspended particles settle within a fluid environment due to various forces acting upon them. On the other hand, in mathematics, topology (Greek for ‘place, location’) is concerned with those geometrical and physical properties that get preserved under continuous deformations such as stretching, twisting, crumpling or bending. The visual outputs of Karim’s practice are much like sedimented topologies, that attempt to preserve values of various geographies while in transition. The landscapes in her works are iterative acts of placemaking, where the heterogeneity of encountered landscapes is woven through the continuity of experience. In what follows, I will open up the mechanics of Karim’s artistic language.



Sedimented Topologies

Most of Karim’s works are carefully choregraphed assemblages of place and time. The artist intuitively employs the device of the cross-section that is frequently used in scientific processes to cut through something in a single plane. Such an action exposes to us the simultaneity of events that are visually organized in horizontal or vertical layers. For example, a cross section of the earth shall allow us to observe the different layers of soil deposits as they get placed one above another over time. A similar anatomical approach can be observed in Karim’s representation, where the canvas is visually stacked layer by layer vertically as well as in depth. The viewer’s gaze is grooved into the layers created within these multiple dimensions. In deploying such a visual language, the artist brings the compositional traditions of the East - particularly the Mughal miniatures constructed using flattened perspective technique or the deviating oblique planes of traditional Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings - in dialogue with the planar orthographic projections of the West.

The attributes indicated above can be demonstrated in considering several works across Karim’s career. For example, in her work ‘Offshore’ (2015), the canvas is vertically composed of the horizontal bands of earth, river, banks, city, mountains and the sky. In ‘Alizarin Sky’ (2015), rows of boats, series of bridges, flowing streams, elevated roads, a landscape of mountain crests, a distant cityscape and then the sky placed one above the other create a quiet night-scape. ‘Rhythm of the River’ (2018) yet again plays with horizontally floating masses of boats or lands that make each other within a large river along which an old settlement plays hide and seek between bridges and boulders – all occurring successively in a vertical axis. ‘The Magical Moon’ (2021) literally appears like the cross-section of a large ship that almost carries a city in its different tiers. A multitude of microcosms get created as well as framed within the outlines of the elements within Karim’s layered scenographies. They appear as sediments of time deposited over one another.

What could be the philosophical underpinnings of Karim’s expression and how do we come to experience it? Three specific visual tropes seem to set the coordinates through which the artist navigates her physical and metaphysical world. If the work of art is understood as a reflection of the artist’s inner reconciliation with the events of her life, then Karim’s expressions offer the promise of floating, bridging and dancing as the principal means of mediating a migratory life. These could be methods of meaning making through which the artist makes place amidst the uncertain waves of transition and transformation. Let me explicate upon these three meta-acts as extracted through her imageries:


a. Floating

Water remains one of the key elements in most of Karim’s paintings. Seas, streams, rivers and estuaries hold within them a constantly floating world – from fishes, to boats, to sails, to rocks, to cities and even islands if one may will. Large bodies of land become islands or archipelagos whereas cities seem to have settled over centuries by the water. Through a clever use of shapes, Karim is able to gesture to the many ecologies that thrive in and around water. In the end, water comes to frame the cities as in the eye-view of a distant bird. Swimming is a motif of placemaking in Karim’s world. It allows the translation of the factuality of constant movement into a spatial continuum. Much like migratory species that keep moving to the currents of climate, Karim’s geographical transitions find meaning thus into drifting drafts of time.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has used the metaphor of “flow” in order to explain the process of rapidly changing cultural landscapes in the era of new globalization, characterised by the intensified circulation of media, objects as well as individuals themselves. Implicated into this very phenomenon, Karim’s responses could be read as a practice of immersion, a deep dive into the interrogation of the politics of situatedness itself. These take deeper meaning when her paintings slide from the flatness of the canvas into the spherical surface of the fibre glass eggs. In her sculpture series, Karim coats an object – a symbolic shell contained by, and containing within it the fluid of life - with the very expression of flow. In doing so, the artist suspends the viewer in the soupy scales of the egg and the earth at once – orbs that keep their worlds stable while they float in water and air respectively.


b. Bridging

If floating displaces, bridging connects. Bridging is a constant act in Karim’s work. Long stretches of elevated bridges occur in many of her imageries suggesting crossing over, passing, transgressing borders, passing by, continuities between land to land, and even painting to painting. Bridges are not just physical devices to cross rivers or continents in Vinita Karim's work, rather they remain conceptual means of traversing time too. The sequence of arched bridges appear like film strips through which microcosms beyond are screened and revealed. The visual interplay between the background and the foreground of these bridges produces a pairing of the past and present into loops of time. The frames are spatio-temporal windows through which memories of the transforming cityscape dialogue with each other.

In 2010, when Karim shifted to Dhaka, she sought to incorporate local artisanal dimensions in her works. The aspect of embroidered patterns alongside acrylic paints has since then, remained an integral part in her canvases as an imprint of cultural collaboration. In Karim's works, the embroidered patches seamlessly blend into portions of painted canvas, yet producing their own topology of sorts. They visualise a mosaic of human settlement within the details of facades, fenestration and folds that shape the urban fabric. At other instances, they display floating life-forms within the fluid waterbodies. The stitching of embroidered portions within her paintings, one may argue, signifies the bridging of cultures, merging artistic forms, making place for cultural diversity and preserving heterogeneity. Further, the bridges propped up on semi-circular arches allude to the act of needlework itself - wherein one is able to imagine the work of city as a weave. Combining the mode as well as the material, the bridges come to sew a seamless landscape in Karim’s artworks.


c. Dancing

A carnivalesque energy grips the viewer in the colourful palettes of Karim’s compositions. Such a perpetual festivity is strategically orchestrated through a distinct use of colour and form. Within the overall mood of every canvas, the artist throws the viewer into a plethora of colours that converse playfully with each other. They appear as refracted landscapes in their fragmented topographies. Karim’s landscapes are not composed of hard straight lines, rather, they fold, bend, warp, deflect and deform gently moving up and down. It is these animated undulations between the crests and troughs of the mountains and waves that choreograph Karim’s urbanscapes – as if painted in the image of the gestures of a musical conductor.

The architecture of the scaffold frequently reappears in Karim’s works. Delicate dancing sticks hover over built forms and become frameworks for tents, pandals, drying or mounting stuff that sustains everyday life on the one hand, whereas they also take on structural forms of the jetties, decks, walkways, or even infrastructures for repair and renovation of settled urban fabrics. The standing and swaying of light infrastructures mounted onto these otherwise settled forms strike a lyrical chord to which we begin to dance in joy. They produce a gliding tension in the juxtaposition of the permanent with the temporary, the heavy with the light, in materiality as well as content – in effect producing a phenomenon of lively buoyancy – the ballet of the eye.


Floating, bridging and dancing is the process in which sedimented topologies of Karim’s artistic landscapes shape themselves. Following the above discussion, one is now compelled to wonder if the Mineral Series (2020-21) in which Vinita experiments with various pigments and minerals on canvases could be a material proof for such a conceptual proposition? In releasing the solidified rock-forms into her visual expressions, Karim presents to us an elaborate annotation underlying her extensive artistic practice. In studying these works, one finds crystallization of the elementary vocabulary as well as the grammar of the artist’s visual language.

Beyond material analysis however, could the three ideas also serve as poignant metaphors for a way of negotiating a transitory life, those that may be the quiet proposition of Karim’s art? Sitting by these artworks then may offer hope to the nomads who may never have the luxury of settling, or to the likes of Kublai Khan who may never have the chance to travel into the expanses of his entire empire. Karim’s paintings must be read as spatio-experiential maps, that offer comfort to both such minds. The artist has certainly covered as much as created a vast geography in the probability of finding a site for a home.



*****

images from Vinita's works in the archives of Gallery Art & Soul, Worli, Mumbai.

Working Notes

Domestic Fragilities

concept note for an exhibition curated by Farah Siddiqui and Natasha Mehta as an extension to the project 'Life with Objects'

Domestic Fragilities

More often than not, we seek that our homes have permanent fixes - in the furniture we build, in the fixtures we install or even in the finishings we invest in. Our domestic landscape in large parts comes to be defined by the mantra of durability. It might however be misleading to think of homes as places that accommodate mere permanence. In fact, they are the spaces that hold the very transitory and gradually depreciating physicality of life. We create the myth of permanence around us only to hold the escaping fragile human condition. In living with objects then, it is the fragile wares that mirror our state of being. Our investigations on life with objects extends into exploring this very condition of domestic fragilities which brings us to consider objects with care, attentiveness and sensitivity while they continue to silently serve their function with utmost artfulness.

The notion of ‘domestic fragilities’ is particularly relevant at the cusp of coming out of a pandemic. The present times have resulted in increased attention to our bodies and considered contact with the world around us. Ceramic is one material that expresses the precarity of this lived phenomenon more intimately than any other. Historically, baked clay and earthenware allowed humanity to store grains preparing them towards eventualities of droughts and floods. Across many cultures, earthen vessels are symbolically instituted and broken in order to mark life and death. Ceramics have remained principal objects of exchange that record lives and landscapes of their times. As objects that may be broken, damaged or destroyed more easily than others, engaging with delicate wares like ceramics within our domestic spaces quietly inculcate within us values of caution, attention and sensitivity.

In quietly sitting and serving our everyday needs, ceramic wares allow us to reflect on our gently transforming selves. They sit in different corners of our homes - on tables, in chests, our bedsides, showcases, kitchen racks – creating new equations with our bodies, reminding us to approach things with tenderness. Different cycles of time are embedded in their usage. They may be used to preserve and protect perishables over long months, hold flowers or fragrances for weeks or insulate us to the heat of the moment while sipping our morning tea or coffee. Ceramic wares may not be timeless, rather they respond to time in different ways. In being brittle, ceramics demonstrate the unique quality of holding toughness and weakness together in its materiality. The subconscious consideration of these contrasting aspects is what makes ceramics artful. It is in the realisation of such domestic fragilities that we become more human.

 

In a moving world

by Anuj Daga & Bharati Kapadia
curatorial essay for VAICA 2 - the festival for Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists

Access the essay in the VAICA 2 Catalogue

The pandemic year forced most of us into increased screen-times, where indulgence in videos remained the primary way of escaping the imposed interiority of the home. Speaking to a friend over a Zoom call, watching a tele-series over Netflix, browsing through a short clip over YouTube, or checking up a quick gif message over WhatsApp – all define forms of screen material that may be called “video” – through which we come to refill the world lost at present, while being in the safe confines of our home. The term “video” is now charged primarily with the way it is received, rather than produced. Screen devices once the primary instruments to broadcast video, are also the tools through which videos are produced today. Electronic and digital equipment has enabled camera-less videos, making it more accessible, resulting into a plurality of expressive moving image forms.

In curating the video works for VAICA 2, we came across a range of experiments that could not be classified within the existing formats of motion-picture exhibition. Video works demand a space of their own for they cannot be easily categorised within the existing genres of short films, commercial advertisements, promotional shorts, hand held reels, or playful voiceover tik-toks. Such forms of video production get quickly subsumed into the logic of the market or thrive on popular modes of expression. In addition, most of them have their own platforms, established social or commercial currency and channels of recognition and legitimisation. 

Video art on the other hand are works of art in the realm of the screen made in unique dialogue with its apparatus. These works do not necessarily respect the time-rhythms of the commercial formats. They are driven by their subjects and necessity of the creators’ expression. The logics of the marketplace do not bother them. In many instances, we encounter such videos in art galleries that annotate and accentuate a broader set works within conventional exhibitions. Galleries are traditionally designed to accommodate artworks like paintings or sculptures. However, many artists have also taken to producing video works exclusively, which demands a comprehensive discourse of their own. What would be the architecture of a gallery for video works be like? 

VAICA offers an intermediate space in order to interrogate, articulate and incubate such thoughts in the emerging landscape of new media art production in South Asia. The curatorial process for the second edition of VAICA gave us a chance to articulate nine provisional entry points through which video art may be appreciated and understood. These points have been crystallised from our close engagement with the material we received and sieved through collectively to put up the present festival. These thoughts are inscribed within the practice of video art in India, and thereby the list is an expanding, rather than a comprehensive one. They may seem to conflate with theories of cinema, screen or moving images. Yet, we argue for the existence of this curious form, that allows it to embrace screen expressions that do not fit into other existing spaces. In this background, the works of VAICA recognise and operate actively within the following perceptive registers of moving images:

1. Collision of serendipitous image-worlds

Often, we imagine our world through images which share similar visual characteristics; those that are defined by modes of art history, cultural trends, popular media and other such channels. This puts us at the risk of a kind of smugness, preventing us from taking a chance to craft a fresh world for ourselves. However, when images outside the sphere of sameness are brought together, they are likely to trigger latent worlds, potentially undiscovered within us. Video art allows a passage into these new worlds through the meshing of the unexpected.

2. Re-engineering the language of images

Video art challenges the basic techniques through which visual representations are shaped and brought together. Through a play in time and space, a painting may begin to move and shift, a body may exist in multiple locations and landscapes may liquefy and merge into one another. Such orchestrations push video art to slide between the existing grammars of image construction. The resultant work of art is not dependent on one single technique, rather is open to engaging with multiple media and methods. We can say that video art works through the disruption of temporal continuity, disorientation of spatial fixity, and disjuncture of conventional techniques of representation.

3. Fracturing the conventional narrative structures of story telling

Forms of storytelling that extend beyond the narrative structures of beginning-middle-and-end find space in video art. Forms like video diaries and video sketches are new ways to record time fragments. Such recorded memories are accessed today in jump cuts, often over personal screen devices. Also, real time can be fractured into fragments and transformed to appear in different forms such as GIFs or memes. Video art harnesses these emerging tropes as a formal device, thereby reinventing methods of assembling and organising the ways of storytelling.

4. Altering the proximities of vision

Video art works play with juxtapositions of images at different scales of space and time. They may unfold a small detail by zooming into an object or idea, or hold on our attention to a single frame for prolonged periods. In doing so, they can offer sharp commentaries on different subjects in little time. Works of video art shift and complicate our notions of the near and far, and attempt to sustain our gaze, amidst aspects that may be easily overlooked. It highlights the aspect of time that is built into the nature of seeing in a strategic and thoughtful manner, creating fresh ground for altered perspectives. 

5. Transgression of disciplinary boundaries

Video craft renders traditional tools of a discipline in alternative ways, inevitably leading into new territories of exploration. The screen liberates the artist from material fixity of producing an image, thereby making it easier to work with several media at once. By harnessing a range of techniques and forms, artists are able to push for new modes of expression and arguments that encapsulate issues urgent to their practice, and simultaneously move towards their reconciliation with the contemporary environment. In doing so, they articulate novel methods of hiding or revealing, narrating and communicating, or even diving into the inner life of the video creation. 

6. Pushing the limits of one’s artistic medium

What happens when one artistic medium is recast within the register of video? The imagination of one’s work and practice through the apparatus of the screen produces an extension of the tools of one medium, giving a new dimension to its own evolution. Limitations of a medium may be compensated by video in order to further an artistic thought. Drawings morph into animations; the spatial qualities of paintings may be explored from new viewpoints; projections of sculptures can warp images and performers may splice acts across time. Staging of mise-en-scenes and splicing of unlikely montages are techniques employed by several artists in imagining their work for the screen. In this sense, video acts as a valuable prosthetic for existing mediums of expression. 

7. Interaction between the body and the screen

Several of the works in VAICA 2 challenge the familiar ways in which our bodies engage with the screen. They compel us to twist and turn our own bodies in order to engage with the subject. Subjecting one’s body to display on the screen may reveal new choreographies of our own selves. Video art thus opens up the space between body and performance. It asks us to wonder if there is only one way of looking at the screen, if there are only limited ways to be inside our bodies, and if there could be space to inhabit in between the body and the screen. 

8. Re-orchestration of image, sound and text

Etymologically, ‘video’ emerged in 1930s from the Latin videre ‘to see’, on the pattern of audio. Video art interrogates established associations between how image, sound and text are bundled together within audio-visual space. At the same time, it offers sustained engagement with alternative non visual forms which aid visual imagination. Artists may launch images from the space of music, foreground poetry with moving images or collage photographs and texts to produce affective visual narratives. These experiments allow us to consider the internal dependence of various forms of expression and ways in which they communicate certain emotions and ideas to us.  

9. Challenging the idea of reality

Our physical and intellectual reality is increasingly being shaped by video-matter. Today, we access, record, alter and share our everyday life most readily through the act of video making. While videos made via screen devices multiply the ways in which we construct the real, video art offers an artful dimension by stringing these fragments into new abstractions. In capturing ‘noise’, video camera essentially introduces us to the notion of image resolution – the distance between two pixels, or units of visual information. 'Seeing' is often used interchangeably with 'knowing' in the contemporary society. Video art makes us aware of the gaps between the two pixels, thus creating room for more knowledge.

The ideas listed above are not mutually exclusive, rather they dialogue and reinforce each other, in most instances, in order to produce powerful abstractions that help us contemplate upon a range of emotions that we constantly negotiate in space and time. Video art lends the possibility to hold these ephemeral fragments and give them an expression, while VAICA takes these ahead to build emotional communities around them. We live in a moving world that demands a medium of expression complimentary to the transitory nature of our experience. Video art has the potential of holding the poetics and politics of such existence, while we wade through the transforming currents of the contemporary life. 

www.vaica.org

The Screen Classrooms

Under its 'Pan Scroll Zoom' series curated by Fabrizio Gallanti, the archive 'Drawing Matter' decided to publish some pedagogical reflections on online teaching during the COVID year.

The Screen Classrooms

Read full note here

OR

https://drawingmatter.org/pan-scroll-zoom-9-the-screen-classrooms/

Jitish Kallat: Circadian Studies

published in Art India Jan. 2021

Cast in Shadows
see works here


Jitish Kallat’s new show maps the transformation of bodies in relation to cosmic elements and cosmological rhythms as opposed to the industrial clock-time, reveals Anuj Daga.

 

In his most recent works exhibited at Nature Morte’s virtual viewing room from the 11th of August to the 31st of December 2020, Jitish Kallat continues his long-standing artistic preoccupation of exploring the meaning of time and its effect on the transformation of bodies. Kallat’s attention was held by the shadow constellations of twigs that had fallen in his studio, the changing outlines of which are woven into the rhythms of a new biological universe. Circadian Studies draws several associations together making us dwell upon the cycles of experience and existence and rethink the modes of corporeal and cosmological inhabitation.

The close observation of shifting shadows has been a civilization preoccupation. In the 16th century Europe, Galileo made accurate renderings of shadows he observed on the surface of the moon through his telescope to postulate the centrality of the sun within the solar system. Around the same time in the middle east, sundials were embedded within the architectures of several mosques so that the prayers for the divinity could be attuned to the cosmic alignments. Such obsessions (for finding higher meaning in aligning to the cosmic order) have only left us with fantastic instruments like the astrolabes that inscribe us in the geometry of a proximate galaxy, and at the same time monumental observatories that reflect astronomical cartographies of the visible sky on earth. In India, the time-devices of Jantar Mantar fantastically designed to counter the delineation of shadows bring to us the most subtle yet phenomenal sensation – those that confirm the sublime duality of the fact that the planet that holds us all still, is indeed moving.

Yet, what could be the value of mapping shadows today? At the foremost, Kallat’s invocation of the “circadian” inverts the uninterrogated reliance of the present-day body on the 24-hour time format that was imposed firmly upon humanity historically merely about two centuries ago. It is well understood that the strict scale of 24 hours was invented to manage efficiently the shifts of the working class in the industrial age, a social phenomenon that eventually articulated the notion of the ‘productive’ body and further situated life within the division of labour and leisure. The smudging of day and night, or shall we say the sun and its shadow within the emerging industrial society produced the phenomenon of the modern city and urban life. The biological reclamation of the industrial time in Kallat’s experiment provokes rethinking of the universalising hegemonies of capitalistic society that removed time from the body altogether. Through this realization, the body is liberated to find its own rhythm of being. The anthropocentric gaze is at once redirected to the natural clocks of numerous other life forms that allow us a revised appreciation of our routinized everyday.

The attempt to trace the twig in its shadow (rather than photograph it) may seem rather futile, for the differential passage of the shadow even while the artist draws its outline on paper inevitably distorts the already flattened body of its counterpart. What then, does the study constitute? Shifting gears from the scientific to the artistic, Kallat’s endeavour doesn’t seem to be about mapping the escape of time, rather the transformation of the body. The red and green lines bleed into each other indicating the phototropic dependence of all forms of terrestrial life on the one hand, and the animal-plant reciprocity on the other. The final result is thus a temporal adventure, a compulsive crafting of time into the shadow cast of the body as seen perhaps in the eyes of nature. In its diagrammatic universe, the grafting of the intersecting circles within the representational outline of the deceased plant indicates its impregnation with the seed on one hand and eventual bearing of the flower/fruit on the other. Not only does this intervention confound the fact that biological clocks are found in every tissue of all living organisms, but in doing so, the artist also collapses several spatio-temporal dualities together – the past and the future, the day and the night, the outside and the inside, the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial. It further poses simultaneous couplings within which life necessarily unfolds: moving and the static, material and immaterial, visible and invisible.

The notion of leakage of time has been further amplified in his untitled works where an hour glass shears itself within the space of an aging graph paper, seemingly struggling to release itself from the web of order. In disrespecting the pre-existent ruled grid of the paper, the drawn forms announce their desire of release and emancipation. In these drawings, time re-germinates into new amorphous shapes that could be read as the distant geography of the black hole or the close anatomy of a bumblebee. In one of these, the grid sheet suggestively peels itself in the centre to unfurl the viewer into new rainbow shades of time. Here, the motifs of the plant or animal cross sections showing rings and reins of age collide into the unity of an expanding universe. The artist thus suspends us in an overlapping spectrum of temporal scales within which life could possibly unfold.

Kallat’s drawings bring us to consider the five elements of sun, wind, water, earth and sky together. However, engaging with these works virtually under the condition of our pandemic-ridden home-boundedness is a timely interrogation of our naturalised relationship with heliocentricism. If indeed circadian cycles are related to our physical, mental, and behavioural changes with respect to its response to light, how do we make sense of our present selves being suspended in the non-space of internet that simulates us in a fundamentally different photo-reality? In our imposed interiorities (often bereft of sufficient exposure to natural light) then, circadian studies bear critical place, bringing us to the cusp of an urgent existential meditation.



Captions

Jitish Kallat. Circadian Studies. Graphite and aquarelle pencil, stained gesso, organic gum. 49cms x 60cms x 4cms. 2020. Images courtesy the gallery.

Jitish Kallat. Untitled. Find the medium. 76 cms x 97 cms x 6cms. 2020.