The Horizon

How far do I need to be from the horizon to see it bent?
How elevated do I need to be to feel the curve of the earth?
For the limits of land are not straight
And the tip of the world I see isn't isolated from the other...

The Loneliness of Landscapes \\ Ronny Sen at Tarq

published in Art India \ Dec 2018

The Loneliness of Landscapes 

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Subcontinent 2018

SIGHTLINES


Through the last two editions, the Young Subcontinent project attempted to chart the contours and sightlines of South Asian art imagination and art practice, illustrating and celebrating the lines of convergence, the commonalities in historical experiences, the entanglements of its cultural roots, and most crucially, its shared aspirations and dreams. These tapestries of art practices from across the continent meditated upon and mediated the complex social, religious and political spheres of life in the Subcontinent. While, the first edition triggered dialogue and exchange between the artists from the region, the second edition probed further the socio-cultural and political tensions and struggles that animate and also in many ways, restrict imagination and art-making in the region. YS opened up contemporary aesthetic parallels to the much-trodden trade routes of yore, tracing common lineages of art history and practices, shared traditions of faith and ideas and ideologies of the sacred and the secular. The experiences of sharing a common space/platform at YS and the exchanges it provoked and pursued, brought to the surface the need to reinvent and reassert vital connections and traditions of exchange, to strengthen arts infrastructure and the urgency of developing vibrant platforms for intercultural dialogues and synergies. These interfaces invariably pointed to the potential of art in excavation and celebration, assertion and redirection of tools and techniques, resources and efforts towards rediscovering and reasserting the cosmopolitan roots and global imagination of the region. In the present global art, economic, and political context, such articulation of creative discourses and fresh sightlines are essential to foresee and forge new, exciting common futures through art-making, art-thinking and art-organising.

The geopolitical dynamics of South Asia is subject to several local, regional, national and global factors. On the one side is a kind of globalisation imagined and imposed by capital, aggressively moulding the structure and direction of economics and politics of nation states in the region. On the other are the menacing forces of fundamentalism and totalitarianism that threaten the democratic fabric and ways of living in this region. So an art project like YS is necessarily a struggle against monolithic culturalism and narrow nationalism based on othering, and one that argues vehemently for the coexistence and celebration of pluralities that constitute South Asia, its societies, identities, politics, economy and culture.

With this in view, the YS project ought now expand points of contact, explore sightlines of common struggles and aspirations, look at reassertion and reinvention of geographies, facilitate conversations and narratives of peaceful coexistence and democratic aspirations. YS aspires to imagine and develop into a free platform of art-making and theorizing, storytelling and mentoring, that will draw, and draw from, new sightlines for inter-cultural and political diplomacy.

\\curatorial note from YS2018

with Riyas Komu, Amrith Lal and Dr. C S Venkiteshwaran

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On Kitchens (India)

On Kitchens \\ Architectural Digest


CONVERSATION 1


1. How have kitchens changed from the time of Independence to present times vis a vis - its, shape, size, lighting, how it is located within a house, attachments, equipment?

It is important to note the practice of cooking and its resultant spatial implications on the planning of the house, when studying the Indian condition. Historically, cooking spaces must have been a ground activity where much aspects of food: from preparation to eating would take place on the floor of the house. In India, floor allowed the kitchens to become more social, allowing women to get together easily towards preparation and sharing of work. Apartment living comes into our milieu by the early 1920s, when the kitchen gets formalised into a room within the house. Early modern kitchens (in India) already usurp the terrestrial kitchen to a raised platform, making the sitting women stand. They also transform the kitchen activity into a sort of "assembly-line" : cutting-cooking-washing! The linear platforms bring in a new idea of organization and sanitation but at the same time complicate the hierarchical relationships of gender, caste, class w.r.t. the ideas of sacred and profane.

Several older apartment plans will show more than one door to the house - one for the toilet cleaners, one for the maid and the last for the owner. Thus kitchens would have their own service doors to keep the maids or cleaners (who belonged to a lower class) separate. Modernity thus got assimilated with deep contradictions.

For a long time, cylinder was the key object of the kitchen, around which storage spaces were planned. Steel utensil organizers can still be seen in some households. Refrigerators and ovens changed the planning of the kitchen significantly - and made the presence of electrical points within the space essential. The geography of the kitchen changed after the introduction of the piped gas, and the rapid take over of the modular furnitures. In recent times, one sees the shrinking size of the kitchens in the planning of apartments. The kitchen is seen as a mere functional space where social interactions within the house do not take place. Hence, their space is released into the other areas of the house. Dining - which once was a table, has now become a "Space" within the house. One often sees the dining notches carved out in living rooms in present-day apartments very evidently.


2. When did the change start from broad, expansive kitchens to smaller versions - both in India and abroad, what influenced this change?

Several socio-economic dynamics have also affected the way in which kitchens are imagined. Seen as an activity that does not contribute to the capitalistic process directly, household cooking (and therefore the kitchen) is often undervalued space, reduced to a storehouse. Such a move has serious implications that need to be studied. Moreover, one needs to understand how it gets gendered and further, what socio-cultural rubrics it operates within different castes and classes across different regions within India.



3. How popular are open kitchens in present times? What is the reason for the popularity and when did this change start taking place?

Open kitchens allow to merge smaller spaces into a large one, and help releasing space. In patriarchal setups however, where households operate on strict rules for women, kitchens are still not opened out to the public parts of the house (like the living room). The open kitchen perhaps became a way to symbolically claim values of modern living and lifestyle. Although having an open kitchen would necessitate its organized look at feel, forcing attention towards hygiene and cleanliness.



4. Do you think that traditional modes of cooking and equipment are now in danger of disappearing forever with the change in the size of kitchens? is it good or not desirable?

Is there a monolithic traditional mode of cooking? I am wondering what values are you trying to invoke in the traditional? Instead of the fear of disappearing, we must looking at the process of cultural transformation of the kitchen and its resultant effect on the human body. Improved amenities within the kitchens have certainly brought more dignity to the person who operated the kitchen - in our case, primarily the woman. If modern amenities are able to release time for women to participate or engage equally in activities that she could not pursue before, then such transition is welcome. If we are able to ascertain what values of the tradition and traditional equipment do we wish to retain, we may be able to bring it to our modern lives and amenities. However, traditional modes of cooking and equipment may also be deeply feudal and gendered and for once, we must consider the virtue of their disappearance too!


5. The concept of mess kitchens or work areas to supplement the kitchen space seems to be in vogue now, can you tell us a little about this?

Such spaces can only work within extremely communal societies. With strict ideas of the sacred and profane within the different classes and castes, food is a complicated affair in Indian social space. Community kitchens have been experimented in many places, but most operate within a single caste-group (you can think of the langars in Gurudwaras). I do not know about the "mess kitchens" that you point out.



CONVERSATION 2

Hi Anuj,

A quick clarification - I am not really sure what you mean by this:

The linear platforms bring in a new idea of organization and sanitation but at the same time complicate the hierarchical relationships of gender, caste, class w.r.t. the ideas of sacred and profane.

Please can you let me know what you mean by this?

Thanks




Dear Fehmida,

In older traditions, the processes of cutting, cleaning and cooking were often dispersed into different locations of the house. The house itself wasn't a BHK type (apartment type). These locations indexed certain hierarchical relationships that structured the overall process of consumption. With the introduction of the modern kitchen, all these different activities are streamlined into one room, more specifically onto a single platform counter. Interior designers and space planning manuals will tell you how these need to be organized for efficient functioning of the kitchen in modern homes. Thus, we see these kitchen counters with a space for preparation, cooking and washing (in that order) provided in a line - almost like an assembly line fashion. Such planning of the kitchen is generalized within newly built apartments to which, residents have to stick to (despite their alternative cooking practices). Those who can afford, alter their kitchens in order to continue older customs. However, within the standardized geography of modern homes (BHK type), these changes do not really offer much scope, and the most optimum solution is to stick to the linear platform.

The linear platform forces, to be sure, the people involved in cooking to be on the same counter. Given the deeply culturally coded gender roles in our heteronormative society, the kitchen can be seen as an instrument of divide or unision - for in the progressive, liberal families, the man and woman will be able to work together, however, in more conservative and traditional families, the kitchen will remain the domain of the woman, pushing the man out. This is my theoretical speculation.

Secondly, a lot of households still follow ideas of 'jhootha' or 'aitha' - which indicates that any thing eaten or partly eaten (even tasted / anything touched to the mouth, or touched with an impure hand) should not be mixed with the fresh stock - including vessels that contain them. The water pot is sacred, for it is worshiped and changed every year on an auspicious day. The used dishes and plates should be kept away as a matter of hygiene. The platform with the embedded sink does two things here: 1. It mixes up these "used/dirty" utensils with the fresh ones. The sink is also the place from where you draw water to clean things - thus the place of cleansing is also the place that accommodate the unclean. 2. The maids (who are often seen as a lower class, may also belong to lower class) now come on the same platform for cleaning the vessels. Traditionally, the place of cleaning would be outside or away from the cooking space.

Again, these are my theoretical speculations.

I hope you now understand my point on the complication of hierarchical relationships of gender, caste and/or class. One can present many case studies to bring out different shades of how modern apartment kitchens negotiate or work out these differences.

Let me know if this helps.

Best.

Anuj.

On Architectural Writing // interview by Shriti Das

Alternatives: Anuj Daga and Sharmila Chakravorty clarify whys and hows of Architectural Writing























The country has eminent architecture schools and equally prestigious media institutes. But did the two ever meet, formally? Not really. Architectural writing is not only gaining momentum in the media and architectural fraternity but is also an important tool that communicates design to architects, other professionals, enthusiasts and the masses. CQ speaks to Anuj Daga, an architect/writer, and Sharmila Chakravorty, a media professional, who write on art, architecture, design and allied disciplines about the many questions and misconceptions that riddle architectural writing.

The above edited interview can be found here

Full responses below: 

1. In a field as visual/tactile based as design, how does writing play a role?

If we can agree that all built spaces tell stories, then writing perhaps might be the most direct and effective way of narrating them. To write about design is to release a range of invisible nuances that an object may not lend you easily. The writer allows users to read new forms in which the work might be appreciated across history and geography, and thus makes the act of design democratic and universal.


2. How is design writing different from journalistic or story writing?

It’s not. Design writing can take different forms including journalistic or a novella. In most successful instances, it will bring critical attention to human acts and the manner in which they shape their ideas into material.


3. How did your design education help in this field?

Design education lent me a range of tools through which one may begin to articulate aesthetic experience. It opens up to a range of methods and parameters to appreciate things around us. Of course, these keep on changing and evolving with time. For example, ‘proportion’ and ‘scale’ were important parameters of assessing architecture that were introduced through design education. Today these parameters may seem archaic given that we experience much of space through media and the virtual. This example also illustrates how architectural and design history maps the shaping of our choices today and are deeply embedded in certain cultural and technological conditions of time itself.


4. How do you perceive a building critically and analyse it?

A sensitive observer necessarily has a deep sense of “self”, which is shaped through the cultural and social factors around himself / herself. Noted French literary figure Geroges Bataille once said that “Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of the being of individuals.” Simply understood, he meant to suggest that just like physical features of human beings may tell about their character and behavior, buildings express the aspirations and intentions of a society. The parallel between body and the building is compelling, and often, the process of perceiving a building is to understand one’s own experience within it with sensitivity and awareness.


5. How do you write about a building that doesn’t appeal to you or incline with your personal design belief?

More often than not, an unappealing project is an opportunity to expand my own limits of aesthetic experience. Often when I encounter an art object which I do not relate to, I have to inform myself about the cultural context it comes from. While the research helps in opening up new dimensions of seeing, it is also a reminder about one’s own cultural positioning, and the compulsive need to broaden it. Besides, design beliefs, like our very identities are malleable and transform themselves with time and experience.


6. It is believed that practicing design has more “scope” than writing about design – in terms of career, money, stability. In your experience, how true is that?

It is high time that we discard prejudiced cultural baggage we carry from a certain pre-liberal India and acknowledge contemporary architecture’s expanded field where the figure of the master architect continues to get blurred by a range of allied design practitioners who equally partake in shaping the final experience of any object or space. Besides, in the wake of increasing media and internet consciousness, conventional practices are realizing the value of archiving and communication. Given this change and there is more scope for design writing now, than ever. To the least, one can say that conventional building practice runs the same risks as design writers. Good projects will seek good writers. However, in order to bring value, design thinking, and writing has to take centre stage in education process.


7. What would your advice be to someone starting out in design writing?
Much of our design institutes (in India) are not equipped in introducing students to design theory. It is important that those interested in writing have a theoretical and analytical bent, so as to clearly present arguments about experience of an object/space rather than descriptive reviews that are often evident in their visual documentation. Focused reading and writing helps sharpening one’s own voice and way of looking. With ample written / visual content and free courses available on the internet by renowned universities, one must look forward to introduce themselves and expand their existing ways of thinking.

Young Subcontinent: An Intermediate Analysis

The blog doesnot see much writing because it is happening elsewhere. Some places like here:

https://issuu.com/anujdaga/docs/ys_essay_saf

This essay relooks at the two years of Young Subcontinent Project curated by Riyas Komu in Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival, organized by the Serendipity Arts Foundation. visit www.youngsubcontinent.blogspot.com for more details.

I am Sutradhar / Archana Hande @ Alibaug

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

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

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

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

Shakuntala Kulkarni / Julus / Chemould Prescott Road

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published in Art India, July 2018

Women at War

Ornaments and items of armour in Shakuntala Kulkarni’s works present a measured tension between tenderness and aggression, claims Anuj Daga.



Ornamenting the self is an act of de-familiarization. It rearticulates the surface of the body into new outlines. At Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, in Julus and Other Stories, Shakuntala Kulkarni mobilizes these aspects of the ornament while also exploring its other characteristics like protection and decoration. The show, from the 13th of March to the 7th of April, comprises chalk drawings, photographs, cane armour and ornaments along with a video within which the artist inhabits these idea-forms.

The viewer is greeted with an array of cane armour objects and adornments presented like disembodied parts. Masks, cages, shields, headgears, bands, earrings, laces – all woven in cane in variegated shapes and forms – suggest different ways of covering and securing the body.

The use of cane domesticates adornment as well as armoury. Their exchange or utilitarian values are removed, making them amenable for the everyday. The work quietly blurs questions of sentimentality and security within each other. It brings us to consider the politics of adornment and armoury in unintended but clever ways. In several cultures, for example, strategic parts of clothing are embroidered so as to ward off the evil eye. If such an analogy is extended to ornaments and their location, decoration and their bodily fixation, it creates a space of distraction through which a politics of defence may be softly mobilized. On the other hand, locating cane armour within several delicately woven jewelleries at once mellows the aggression contained in the objects of war. The measured tension between tenderness and aggression begins to mediate a new understanding of power.

The wall-projected video animates the objects and drawings and brings them to life. The artist’s enactment – assuming new postures within the sinuous cane frameworks – gives rise to the experience of the female body adorned as well as trapped within the creations. Perhaps, it is here that a larger commentary on the subject of gender emerges in the artist’s work. Within which kinds of apparatuses is the narrative and social status of women enmeshed today? How does one challenge these frameworks and what kind of orientations can these questions have towards action and re-identification? Kulkarni’s chalk drawings offer studies presenting histories of ornament usage; they also trace the transformation of the ornament into a weapon on the path of claiming the powerful, performative self.

Two posters for the summer!

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Gyan Panchal / Against the Threshold

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

Object Lessons

Gyan Panchal’s spare works explore the scope of sculpting – its nature, culture and limits. Anuj Daga is intrigued by the show.

Through which art-related category should one begin to understand Gyan Panchal’s works, presented at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 31st of January and the 3rd of March? One enters the gallery to not find any announcement or note. Objects lie discreetly in a state of disorder. Sticking, jutting, leaning, clinging, hanging from different surfaces of the gallery interior, they create an estranged setting. Panchal arrests these objects within carefully chosen moments in their respective ongoing lifetimes. They don’t appear to be too crafted, neither are they absolutely untouched by the artist. Are these found objects? Are these staged? Are these created? Are these borrowed? While they may be all of the above, the effortless art pieces at once make one reconsider the agency of the artist in the creation of these works. How does the artist orchestrate these objects as art, or even as things worthy of contemplation?

Each work indexes an action which is echoed in the titles. Works like beating or leaving transport the viewer’s gaze beyond their physicality into the space of ideas and acts that they embody. Alternatively, human actions acquire a shape in these objects. This is quite evident in the screen-printed wrapping plastic or the aluminum thali pressed along its rim. The flattened vests, the folds of which are resin-pressed and sandwiched between mosquito nets or the crafted theatre mask pressed against the raw slice of a walnut tree bark, make us attentive to the journey of the very materials that make up the works. The stained boiler suit hung upside-down over the sanded bucket peels on the floor begins to reveal untold and overlooked narratives about labour.

One of the consistent inquiries evident in the works of Panchal is about the nature of sculpture itself. In this regard, Heidegger’s meditation on what constitutes sculpture may be quite useful. In the essay Art and Space, the German philosopher proposes that the sculpted body, in fact, brings forth the type of space that it configures around itself. In other words, it delineates ‘emptiness’, in turn, defining spatiality itself. In blurring the space within which, as Heidegger points out, “the sculptured structure can be met as an object present-at-hand”, Panchal generates the possibility of it being re-imagined. This blurring can be physically observed in the (dis)play of artworks as painterly objects; and conceptually, in the creation of a space of ideas that surround these and alter the gaze through which the objectivity of the object is transcended. Panchal frees the sculptural object from purely aesthetic frames to address the discipline of sculpture. In the process, he opens up in-between spaces where several ideas of body, practice, art, society and knowledge can be tested. In assuming the position of the viewer across this transitory space, the show may rightfully be understood, in the spirit of its title, as being against the threshold.