Arriving at the Terminus

published in "Treasure at the Terminus: Stories in Wood and Stone", Public Relations Department, Central Railway, India. 2019

courtesy: The People Place Project

Arriving at the Terminus

Anuj Daga



Many of us who have grown up in Mumbai have ritualistically crossed through the halls of CST to reach our place of work, meet a friend, extend it as a landmark to a stranger or simply board from its premises an outstation train. In our constant hurried passing, we may have missed observing this magnificent building so as to consider it closely. It merely takes a delayed train to slow you down in this rushed city, and draw your gaze into the building’s intricate, layered details that transcend you into its hidden, forgotten worlds. It is here that the building begins to unfold the myriad stories that take us back in time – allowing us to live an alternative urban reality. CST intersects with our lives at a range of scales and informs our identity(-ies) at several registers. One may be able to excavate within its artifice, several histories as well as the way we come to address the contemporary landscape. Ideas of colonialism, urbanity, modernity, mobility and everyday are intrinsically tied within the object of the CST.

As we begin to travel these time-lines, we encounter multiple revelations about the way in which our own lives are intertwined into this grand urban artifact. Recounting some such journeys through CST may bring value to its presence, but more importantly to discover paths we may take to confound into ourselves. Being the first railway station built in South Asia more than 130 years ago, announced as a World Heritage Site in the early second millennium, what does it mean to arrive at CST today? How does it become a visual metaphor that indexes values of enterprise, promise and hope for a city like Mumbai? What future does it behold for its public and how does it find place within our everyday? These are questions I would like to explore by discussing the project in five scalar modes of arrival.


1. The arrival of the British

The presence of the British colony in South Asia can only be felt as it comes to engage as well as create a new public sphere for the natives through its modern institutional apparatus. The introduction of the railways in this light, has been fundamental to the endavours of the British for establishing connectivity between the different regions of India to aid purposes of trade, communication and defense. The machinery of postal system, policing and many others principally depended on the development of railways as the mass mobility system. Such institutions were eventually opened for use to the natives, who subconsciously imbued modern sensibilities within themselves in attuning to new ways of movement, gathering and communication. In opening up all these new ways of connecting and communicating, the railways restructured a medieval life into modern, it stitched the pastoral into the industrial. Being the first railway station, CST marks the onset of such institutional shifts, in essence, the arrival of the British colony on south Asian land.

While introduction of new means and methods reoriented native life, the British too were rapidly learning the new territories they came to claim. The representation of oriental nature and culture within the British palette can be studied amply in the architectural details of CST. Tropical flora and fauna intricately sculpted into various parts of the building indicate the wonderment of British in the Oriental land. Crawling reptiles and jumping monkeys on column capitals, leopard and crocodile gargoyles, lush leaves and peacocks spanning arch windows of CST amply speak of the curiosity of the new landscape that the British colony came to occupy. It was precisely the resource laden South Asian territory that attracted the British. Instead of exploit, today, the CST building might as well be celebrated as an emblem representing such bountiful landscape.

Architecturally, ideas of structuring and organizing large scale public and office space are best demonstrated in the planning of the Victoria Terminus. The meticulous attention towards management of multiple traffic flows – vehicular and pedestrian - can be studied in the archival correspondences and annals of British record. The lofty free flowing spaces thereby designed towards ordering effective public and private movement within the building calls for appreciation of architectural foresight. The design of CST lends organizational principles for public transport buildings that are worth considering for layouts until the present day. The conjoining of the long industrial platform shed to house the trains with the ornately crafted bureaucratic headquarters is synthesized uniquely through the introduction of intermediate public spaces within the scheme. On the other hand, in its C-shaped courtyard type building form, buffered with semi open verandahs folding around a covered driveway, the building marks the arrival of the public institution that mediates in its form, the relationship between the Colony and its subjects.


2. The arrival of the locomotive

Large groups of people gathered all along the two sides of the railway track from Bori Bunder to Thane on the inaugural day to witness the spectacle of the engine driven locomotive for the first time in their city. For the natives, it was unbelievable to imagine a carriage running without harnessing animal or human energy. The railway engine alluded to a mysterious black creature spewing out smoke, magically escaping space and time – a device almost straight out of the mythical texts! The collapse of myth into the modern machine marks the arrival of the locomotive within the native peoples’ lives. With time, the technology of the steam operated machines was understood and put to wide scientific use in setting up industries or looms, or even the early cars that reshaped Mumbai’s physical and cultural geography.

The railways drastically changed the experience of space and time within the Indian subcontinent. Firstly, with the coming of locomotives, the travel time between places reduced drastically. Distances that took three days to traverse now could be covered in a matter of few hours. A post which earlier took ten days to deliver could now be sent in a day. Evidently, the railways gave a tough competition to the existing animal-driven modes of transport both, in speed and carrying capacity. Secondly, it allowed wide panoramic views of the Indian landscape in a quick passing of forests, fields and mountains extending new ways of appreciating the territory the natives themselves inhabited. Lastly, moving on its dedicated levelled tracks, the train was much more comfortable than the bumpy rides of the horse or bullock driven carts, uninterrupted by externalities of extreme weather.

More important than any other, the arrival of the locomotive, for the first time, produced the notion of a moving public. Forging new relationships while traveling with large groups of strangers underpins the social agency that the railways opened up. To be sure, the initial overwhelm, hesitation, unfamiliarity, wonder and surprise towards the new mass-moving machine must have bonded people over and along the train journeys. The CST has historically been thus the house of new friendships within the emerging city. Although the strong hierarchies of class within bogies have loosely remained as a colonial hangover until today, in being chained to each other held on the common track, the introduction of the train gave a secular direction to a composite society held together in its contradictions.


3. The arrival of the migrant

Mumbai has largely remained an aspirational city due to its primary anchor in trade and entertainment industry. Historically, as the birth place of the cotton mill as well as cinema in India, Mumbai has territorially as well as visually reached out to the masses across the country drawing them in for labour and leisure. The CST has remained a significant physical and symbolic medium for such travel of people and ideas. In Hindi cinema, an exterior longshot image of CST building announcing the opening of a film, is synonymous to the idea of Mumbai: it maps the entry into the world of work and enterprise and the dreams and promise of the land. It’s quite tautological to think that for those who travel to the city through popular cinema or in real, the first sight of Mumbai has often been the monumental Victoria Terminus.

CST has forever remained an important sight seeing landmark for the tourist circuit in Mumbai. A newly built viewing deck at the crossroads in front of the building allows travelers and enthusiasts to enjoy a prolonged uninterrupted gaze of the city icon. In consuming visually, the building brings up simultaneous emotions of being and outsider and insider within the city. The onlooker is compelled to contemplate upon one’s changing social proximity with the city while held in its embrace. These thoughts bridge the initial awe of the migrant to routine everyday of the city dweller, allowing to trace one’s past to the present. It is in this way, that we meaningfully fold in our “outsider” migrant identities towards that of belonging and claim.

Undoubtedly then, CST stands today between a circle of markets represented by various communities who came to Mumbai and settled over the eventual years for purposes of trade and business. Simultaneously, a large population of labour serving the textile mills came to offer Mumbai the distinct chawl type which supported a unique density of urban life and culture. While the railways went on to connect these neighbourhoods over time, the terminus became the official terrestrial gateway for the population traveling from inner peninsula to the peripheral city of Mumbai. In doing so, the CST marks the arrival of the migrant that gives the city its cosmopolitan character and a thriving cultural diversity.


4. The arrival of Mumbai

With the settling of the newly built terminus and the smooth functioning of the trains, a large number of wealthy and prominent citizens came to invest in the expansion of railway lines to the extents of residential towns in the north. These are the philanthropists to whom we owe the infrastructural development and image of Mumbai. Further, realizing the potential of the new mass transit system, surrounding areas began to flourish. The C-shaped typology of the building was steadily assimilated into the bureaucratizing built environment of Mumbai. Many key buildings of Mumbai were commissioned to be built adapting the motifs and manners of the Victoria Terminus. The Taj Mahal hotel by Jamshetji Tata is one such example that asserts its power using the architectural language experimented in VT. Subsequently built public institutions, gymkhanas, bungalows or even chawls in the city are modest typological expressions of the terminus building.

Over the years, the local trains have come to be understood as the ‘lifeline’ of Mumbai - those that collect and redistribute people in the city. The railway is the primary mode of transport that people use to commute in Mumbai. Of the three prime lines that broadly run north-south along the entire city, two culminate into CST. To arrive at “Mumbai” essentially means to arrive at CST – it is the historical demarcation of Fort (precinct) whose ramparts were brought down to release and reclaim land for the construction of the terminus so that the city could extend further. Until today, coming to CST is coming to the Town – not just the colonial town, but also a place that embodies the urban essence of Mumbai – a city known for its work culture disciplined fundamentally to the timetable of the railways. Until today, local trains in Mumbai are identified in their time-stamps.

As the representative image of Mumbai, the CST has been constantly restored and retrofitted with new technologies, amendments and extensions. The electrification of the steam engine during the 1930s, the conversion of bogies from DC to AC, the constant upgradation of railway compartments towards creating comfortable environment within the trains, the appreciation of concourse lengths and heights - all remind us of the historical shifts that the building, its patrons and the public have laboured together over time. The addition of underground subways, new discreet outlets for the public have all been designed respecting the original vision of the place, however debatable. The recent colourful lighting of CST’s exterior invited ample criticism from conservation architects and the public, which only indicates concern over how people see the building as a reflection of the city. In keeping pace with time, a public building like CST ceases to become outdated and validates Mumbai’s contemporariness.


5. The arrival of ‘everyday’

Over the latter part of 20th century, while the suburbia in the north sprawled as the place of residence, the downtown in south remained the principal place of work: the commercial district where most Mumbaikars travelled ritualistically to spend much of their productive time. A life of commute, commotion and care that culminated in the environment of VT lent Mumbai its ‘everyday’ identity. To enter into the numerous bodies with an estranged feeling of belonging to the city is what the terminus accommodated and mediated generously. It announced the feeling of fruition of the everyday that one desires for. It became a social shelter outside of home where one is able to meet a city of one’s own under one single roof. In bringing together people to consume a life of possibilities and promise, the terminus defines a distinct realm of the everyday.

Over the years, CST has multiplied its institutional role to transform itself into a shelter, refuge, home, museum, a stage for performance or has even served as a symbolic backdrop for protests. It is needless to mention that for the enormous staff that controls the operations of Mumbai railways from CST, the building is nothing less than home. Besides, for the public, the terminus has always been the place of refuge during heavy rains or other man made accidents. In several instances in the past, the transactional spaces like corridors or passageways have been lent for hosting mini public exhibitions informing the commuters about their city in small ways. Performers have used its hallways to stage street plays or flash mobs in order to engage or educate the diverse population of the city. CST introduces us to these multiple facets that constitute our everyday life and make it meaningful. It is an everyday that makes a million dreams real. It brought, and still continues to bring the same people regularly at a place and setting up a rhythm, a routine through which they enter into their “everyday”.

Over the last 20 years, the station has undergone several transformations – physical and cultural. In the spirit of overcoming colonial hegemony and bringing the building’s identity to terms with the contemporary times, the station's name was changed from Victoria Terminus to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in March 1996 in honour of Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire. In 2017, the station was again renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. In 2004, CST was awarded the World heritage status, which has focused plans on the conservation of its premises. In 2008, the station bore brutal terrorist attacks, after which it was installed with a serious layer of security in the form of metal detectors and CCTV cameras. This has seriously affected its publicness. My essay has struggled between calling this piece of architecture as VT, CST or CSTM, precisely because of the mixed and layered relationship it has built within us with the city of Mumbai, that indexes its history. Although the city keeps sprawling farther into the northern suburbs, once in a while, we all crave to visit the station in order to remind ourselves of the identity we hold as Mumbaikars. The CST is now an object of longing to fulfil the dream of what it means to be in Mumbai. It is an icon that defines Mumbaihood, in which we begin to seed the dreams of a larger future.

Ratheesh T at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

published in Art India
in Vol. 22, Issue 3



The Artist and his Backyard 

Ratheesh T’s detailed works capture the political intimacies with a small-town life in Kerala, notes Anuj Daga. 

Ratheesh T.’s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, 2018, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community. The nonchalant naked artist standing in the centre of the room in I Am (Cleaning Pond) greets the viewer rather defensively. The ripped wall of the house exposes us to the nullah over which it is probably built. The clothes scattered all over the furniture create an uninviting environment. Any attempt by the viewer to know more about this mess is repelled/rejected? by the artist’s smirk and assertively shielded by his bare body. 

In How Are You, Who Are You?, the semi-naked artist, now wrapped in his lungi, is busy with the ritualistic preparation of puttu in the kitchen – with grated coconut kept on a table and the pressure-cooker on the counter alongside. As he fills up the puttu vessel with rice flour and coconut, he alerts himself, yet allows the pigeons who appear to be regular visitors to the kitchen, free play of the room. Showing his back, the artist seems too engrossed in his domestic chores to engage with the viewers. 

Kiss (Clear Pond) presents a daughter and father sharing an intimate moment at the edge of a lake. Filling up the background, the lake with floating flowers, reflecting skies and buildings frame and isolate the two from the rest of the world. In I See You, the protagonist is seen teaching his partner to fend off a boar that has possibly strayed into their backyard. His warm closeness to the woman in the dark, whose eyes he covers to mask fear and the torchbeam with which he stuns the beast, creates an aura of private trust around them. Being witness to this moment makes the viewer feel like an intruder. 

The artist’s rootedness in his village and community life and his autobiographical explorations allow us entry into his world while maintaining a measured distance. While on the one hand, these scenes from his daily life strongly assert his Malayali identity, the viewer is strategically othered through moments that might embarrass or induce disengagement. The characters in the paintings do not always lend themselves readily to the viewer. Ratheesh’s works thus often turn the anthropological gaze in and leave the viewer feeling estranged about his status as an observer. 

Two paintings lay out details of everyday public life. In one work, the viewer is led into an overlooked backyard with dense trees where we see a dilapidated toilet block, with a broken vent pipe, built away from the main house. Amidst discarded household junk, rotting coconut shells, bottles, banners and the national flag is the toilet wall scribbled with everyday gibberish and political opinions within which the life of the community unfolds. The life of this community is detailed in another painting where interdependencies and close knit relationships among its people become visible. In the foreground, you see three young men carrying a large cutout of the hammer and the sickle, cutting their way across an everyday scene within his village gently lamenting on the state of communism. 

Saami presents the artist as a protagonist wearing a t-shirt and jeans to whom the villagers approach with wonder, mischief and merriment. The women washing themselves by the stream and the dark men cleaning their teeth with datoon laugh at what appears to be a new avatar of the artist. An old friend plays funny tricks with a cigarette lighter – he playfully threatens to set the artist’s beard on fire. The artist stands un-defiantly, lost in thought, a benign smile on his lips. The artist is now an outsider. 

Home during COVID

One of the many ways in which the understanding of the home may be approached is the fact that the home is able to offer us an environment where we may perform our most intimate acts. We feel we are at home when the apparent distinction between the inside and outside of the body resonates in a way that both mirror each other almost perfectly. The physical manifest of the home is then able to echo and reflect desires that are felt inside, and eventually be shared with a common world outside. In reality however, the walled units that we come to inhabit are hardly a representation of ourselves. We occupy conflicted territories with overlapping desires, varied ideologies, different practices and our own personal schedules. These several-ities are hardly recognized with the singular space of the physical shelter. The rooms we come to occupy as houses allow us to live merely a fragment of our own selves. Where do the other selves get lived then? How do they manifest otherwise? What is the locus of the home if lived in mere fragments? How do we assemble them and attempt a picture of the home?

The Covid 19 lockdown has impressed upon us the above questions more sharply, for it has taken up the privacies that were not necessarily lived within the outline of our apartments, rather scattered into the recycle bin of the city space. In lending anonymity, invisibility and blurring of the body, the city extended to us latent personalities that could thrive through alienation. It would contain a thousand alter-egos which could emerge and disappear, be constructed and forgotten, could be recreated and rejected, reinvented and re-lived. In doing so, unknown pockets of urban space become meaningful in the register of a provisional home. In constraining people within their apartment boundaries, Covid has partly taken up the agencies over our parallel selves – those that were hidden into the vast alternate world that vectored our home. The restraints of home boundedness have resulted in an implosion of these multitude of dimensions within our personalities that were indexed into a different geography. Where do these lives get lived in the imposed self-quarantine? What new personalities emerge within the clash of dissonant selves, and spaces within the sphere of the geometric home?

While for some, living outside the outline of the house may be a metaphorical idea of the home, for many in the city, it is the hard reality. This only becomes more apparent when we consider the population living in squatter settlements, or denser low income areas. Here, members of a family consciously choose to step out or remain outside the home to allow space for the other, or escape the limiting shell of their shelter. Intermingling with the community outside one’s physical domesticities offers security to the home-makers. For the old people, it would be a way to find their own breed, but more importantly unburdening their families off their distinct social lives. Staying outside the home is thus also a mechanism through which the tension of social space is released into the excess of the city. Covid has confiscated the tool of disappearance which sustained the home, for people living in dense, small settlements.

We no longer can be naked – in a way of performing a self that could afford for itself unfiltered pleasure. Within our geographies of quarantine, we must wear a social garment. On portals of virtual communication, we must screen bodies through the interfacing windows. And more literally, we may not touch, or be touched by people we encounter outside our zones of captivity. If nakedness also is indexed in our personalities, then the masks Covid has forcefully made us wear index the various layers of social, physical and personal insecurities that it has exposed us to. The multitude of homes that otherwise bubble and burst amidst the exchanges within these domains have flattened into thin air. As of today, we live in atmospheres of division – red, orange, green, regulated through several mediated machineries. These divisions are here to stay for long – as ghosts of the pandemic that will hallucinate and erupt during forthcoming times of crisis. How do we foresee the new differences that have already begun to surface (on) the human body? What will be the revised geography of shelter for these newly differentiated bodies – through caste, class, religion and contagion? How will these bodies be (re)covered? And how can they remain naked?

The Covid lockdown has sensitised us to the overlapping time schedules, and programmatic conflicts that arise out of the different ways in which humans bundle up forms of work and leisure. The home is a place where ways in which its inhabitants carve or forge their protocols of work and leisure in the axis of time - those that may produce inherent conflicts. Cooking while listening to the radio is an essential everyday practice through which a mother may inhabit her home. The music and chatter on the radio is an essential ingredient for her work, through which she is able to access a world that she remains disconnected with due to her domestic moral obligations of feeding her family. However, the leakage of radio sound into the space of another person, now in the home, but used to the insulated and neutralised environment of an office may render him/her unproductive. Such an overlap may be addressed by occupying isolated spaces within a large house, but in smaller apartment setups, employing ways of personal isolation may indicate unanticipated social and moral signals. Timetables of domestic chores and individual official work get intrinsically entangled with each other within families living jointly. Spaces of the home are engendered across time in different ways. The resolution of these schedules may mean the bulldozing of one home over another. How do these work-live relationships, those that combine with different degrees come to cohabit within a singular space? Who is to compromise - and what inherent ideologies and power structures get exercised in such assertions? What are the protocols for allowing liberal environments to flourish within the home? The lockdown introduces us to ways in which people prepare unique programmes and design their everyday, as well as make it livable. However, negotiations within such a space may present us with solutions that look in very different directions.

Living through the pandemic has led to the discovery of new walls within the domestic space, and the dismantling of invisible divisions between the selves. Relationships and responsibilities rearticulate themselves within the ritual of the family. We all make a home in different time cycles - those that have coalesced into a new hybrid that standardizes in a way that produces micro displeasures. The accruement of such feelings result in unknown repressions that leak out in undesired situations. Such interactions hint at deviations in mental health that cause ruptures in social relationships. Although human beings contain these changes within their empathetic selves, the world perhaps will have to face the pent up rage in different irrational forms - a mediation over which may be necessary and crucial towards abating physical and psychological damage of the world. What infrastructures do we have for such mediation?

Covid regulations have restricted immediate and direct access to our “home” – that which we make in tracing the city at our own terms. It prevents the inhabitation of fragments that enliven our latent selves. The sheer immobility within our domestic spaces has compelled us to resign from our ability to think actively. In the new static floor, the mapping of change is limited. The pandemic has stunted our means to chart new material and intellectual geographies. Many have lost their intellectual stimulus to immobility. Some have realized the centrality of movement for escaping into one’s everyday. Although, this is an opportunity to defamiliarize oneself to one’s unembraced domesticity. Corona is the new Big Boss, and we are its (un)willing Trumans. It has brought so many strangers together within a small area. It has forced us to forge new equations to live together, find new solidarities and assemble a complete picture even in the evident fractures of existence. It is this reconciliation that perhaps indicates the terms at which we may re-enter one’s homes again as we step outside.

First Questions

How were buildings made before the British introduced the orthographic methods of drawing? How did the focus on orthographic drawing and European construction methods shape the thinking and practice of architecture in India? Can construction be thought through ideas beyond permanence and resistance? How do we think of a history of architecture beyond styles? Why should the architect disturb this status quo? What is the value of fiction in architecture? How do we mobilize data meaningfully in architecture? What is the experience of technology? What are the limits of resource extraction? How do we understand and reconfigure digital-material relationships in architecture? In what registers can architects think of space and form? What processes would strengthen acts of meaning making with our environment? What questions must be asked for emerging urbanism? What is research in architecture? Several such inquiries, gathered by academics at the School of Environment & Architecture (SEA) have resulted in the book ‘First Questions’ that provokes spatial practitioners to challenge their equation and role in addressing the built environment. The book marks the completion of first five years of experiments and interrogations at SEA, oriented towards making inroads into these inquiries, as much as generating new ones. The thirteen incisive essays layout a landscape of thoughts that architects, academics and students ought to engage in urgently, and intimately. It is time we asked these first questions.

Parul Gupta / Space; underscore

essay for Parul Gupta's works displayed at Studio reD, Prabhadevi.

Space; underscore

While Newton believed that smaller masses in space are fundamentally attracted into the gravitational “pull” of the heavier ones, Einstein suggests that objects essentially experience a spatial “push” that determines their movement and relative position concerning each other. Parul Gupta’s works are tensioned between the above “push” and “pull” of space, characterized in her experiments with the practice of drawing. In her sensitive perception that is intuitively moved by the silent suggestions of shifting lights, shadows, events and perspectives, Gupta essentially morphs space into a dynamic entity. Through her works, one can consider several scientific as well as perceptual registers of space- time at once, that get translated into drawings, sculptures and site-specific interventions. In doing so, Gupta underscores her works not simply as an aesthetic preoccupation, instead as a fertile field of knowledge.

 

A series of squares set within meticulous grids destabilize our modes of perception. Stable tilts, deviating parallels, unidentical equals and accurate unfits characterize these works. On a deeper gaze, seemingly stable Cartesian space begins to appear warped. Is one cheated into a perceptual labyrinth or has one entered a space of distortion? Gently diverging lines of the substratum and the surface leave one thinking about their interspatial relationships. The solid squares leap out of the paper, the drawings take one deeper into the infinitum of the grid. In this tension, the viewer is challenged on his/her grounds of rationality. 

Gupta’s works index and overlap several spatio-temporal graphs that invite closer investigation. Densities of space created in folding, releasing, splitting, dissecting, fading or strengthening lines within an imagined continuum narrates numerous stories. Are these scores waiting to be sounded into music, or are these barcodes of a number yet to be counted? Are these the unfolded scales of early observatories that were built to map the cartography of the skies; or are these seismographic charts that mark the tectonic shifts to which our everyday gets attuned on ground? Are they streams of microwaves within which we are inevitably swimming or the rhythms of a pulsating organ emanating from within the body? As we consider these questions within the artist’s finely drafted lines, encompassing poetry of mathematics begins to emerge. 

What does a line want to be? Perhaps in Gupta’s practice, this question is inexhaustive. The lines take multifarious forms creating degrees of opacity and translucency, rigidity and movement. Gupta demonstrates that her lines are continually breathing and have an agency of their own. They fold the viewers within forces of space to guide them into gentle action. Her works are orchestrations of line assemblies that do not limit themselves within the bounds of the frame. Instead, they speak to its edges and even bargain to enter from outside or escape from within them. It is here that her serious constructions assume an emancipatory quality of play and find their planes of engagement with the observer.

All images: Parul Gupta.

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

published in Art India Vol. 23 / Issue 3

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Hear, Hear

From the expressions of labourers to the scripts of queer phone conversations, a group show brings together diverse marginalised voices. Anuj Daga listens carefully.



At the outset, the curatorial endeavour of the show As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice from the 21st of August to the 5th of October at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, seemed like a rehearsal in the reverse-invocation of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, where Spivak raises questions on the ways in which we investigate another culture and the ethics of interpreting and representing the other. Curated by Berlin-based Juana Awad and Mumbai-based Zeenat Nagree, the exhibition brings together 13 international and Indian artists whose works refer to various kinds of marginality like colour, class, caste and sexuality. Several artistic practitioners have engaged with under-represented and marginal voices as material for art over the last two decades. In their gentle repositioning of the project within the domain of the listened rather than the spoken, the curators of the present show hoped to invite reflection on the practice of representation wherein the critical gaze is turned to the observer, rather than the observed.

Mumbai-based artist Amol Patil presents archival audio clips of his father’s play who was a mill worker by day and a playwright by night. By methods of superimposition, re-recording and editing the voices on measured lengths of the magnetic audio tape, also originally used by his father, Patil produces a sound that seems to index the environment of labour, as well as the intimation of its theatrical experiments. This work is complimented by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang whose adjacently placed film Music While We Work documents along with the help of its workers, the sounds of sugar factory in her hometown Huwei. Wang principally stages sound as the collective memory of the labour force’s most significant experience in these closed down factories. Through these installations, both projects push the observer to listen to the experience of class as much as the post-productive quotidian lives of the mill-workers – one imagined in the play-scripts and the other compulsively remembered as music.

Sandeep Kuriakose’s Woh bhi line ka tha transcribes queer phone conversations into an uninterrupted singular script printed on a legal paper, left to be picked up and read by the viewer. The work coaxes the reader to be a voyeuristic listener although privileges the English reader in its decision to transcribe Hindi conversations (along with the English) into the Latin alphabet. Natasha A. Kelly from Germany and Karan Shrestha from India/Nepal sensitize us to the documentary voice of the emotionally or physically suppressed that we customarily attend to in ethnographic histories. Kelly draws our attention to the verbalized experiences of people of colour in Germany whereas Shrestha records the voices of the displaced from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In hearing these two works, one wonders if the artist also becomes the mediator of catharsis in one’s role as a patient listener.

Noise composer Raven Chacon’s sound installation remains the most riveting inclusion. Scores of music laid out on standees set a ghost-like stage for a concert that one witnesses on a screen. A disciplined row of gun-shooters fire bullets to the meters and scales of the composition. Although hearing the sonic gunshots on screen dampens the potential experience of the live performance, one can only imagine the lyrical brutality of listening to Chacon’s work in person, simultaneously inversing the notion of both firing and music. Chacon’s work fundamentally and poignantly addresses the questions raised in the curators’ schema. It ‘attacks’ our foundations of listening as practice – physically as well as symbolically.

The question of the ‘listened’ seemingly keeps slipping in the experience of the show, for it is hurdled by the compulsive indulgence in the visual (for an alien viewer), which also includes the read, the language, video or the installation (all functions of the eye). The limits of listening are thus metaphorically extended to mean paying careful attention to the ‘object’ at hand, or even speaking to one’s own silences. A counsellor or psychologist’s principal practice, inarguably, is to listen. The curation brings together multiple dimensions of the artist as a listener, and turns him or her into a psychologist of the self. However, one wonders if the curation imagines listening as a value-neutral act?

It is here that we come to interrogate listening as a possible mode of accumulating power. After all, speech is the material of listening. How does the listener draw power? How does the practice of listening constitute power? To be sure, the listener is not a body without agency, rather the centre of power in a discussion. What then, are the ideological and political underpinnings and pursuits of listening? How do we delineate the ethical-moral codes for the practice of listening? Do the speaking individuals objectify themselves in being listened? Such questions bring us to consider if the speaking body has any real agency, or is it only apparent? However, if we agree that voicing is an important act, then it is listening that enables speech. It is the presence of another body that mediates speech. Listening necessarily means to engage, empathize and think with the speaker. It demands attention and participation in meaning-making. Listening may consciously refrain from inviting any intervention during the act of speech. It thus offers a contemplative space where decisions are delayed and negotiations are sustained. Listening capacitates and prolongs the holding of thought just as it rises into the air.

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

published in Art India, December 2019

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Playing with Light

Through spray-painted sheets, folded foils, marble stones and a nylon fishing net sculpture, Rana Begum explores the interaction between space, form and colour, points out Anuj Daga.


One will be misled if one is merely taken over by the forms that are mounted neatly on gallery surfaces by the Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 19th of September and the 2nd of November. The large spray-painted sheets, folded coloured foils, terraneous jesmonite blocks, rounded marble stones and a fishing net displayed within the gallery are, in fact, quiet dialogues around colour and light. Rana Begum seems to be preoccupied with questions of interaction between shape, space and colour: how does light sculpt forms, what are the ways in which light can colour space, how do we wear the colour reflected off material surfaces, how do colours contour space? The methodical dismantling of colours that Rana employs in her construction of artworks, and its subsequent perception by the viewer opens a phenomenological field within which several such questions hallucinate much like her coloured spray-prints.

Palm-sized leaves of aluminium foil shimmer and mirror colour off their soft coat of paint into their warped micro-surfaces. They create a glow of tinted air within their contoured pockets. The linear grids, however, are the most mysterious lines on the foil surface. One wonders how these Cartesian lines get cast on the undulating surface of the foil? How could one possibly maintain the ordered nature of grids while still folding up the foil into a warped terrain? Rana collapses the smooth and the rough, the linear and the crooked, or even the opaque and the shiny onto each other. In doing so, she conceptually superimposes meridians of the flat cartographic map, the three-dimensional terrain and its subsequent interplay with light while producing a commentary on the experience of colour in space. As one continues to gaze through the works, the saturated hues within the work begin to solidify in the mind as the material of art.

The jesmonite cast works seem to be the solid counterparts of the thin folded foils, those that maintain their conversations with colour – now, bright and liberated. Each mounted contour is read in a distinct dominant colour, as if a de-layered GIS (Geographical Information System) map, isolated into its individual data terrain! When seen thus, the scaled landscapes begin to gesture about vegetation with theirseasonal colours of the fall and the spring. The polished marble pieces, all sets of different colours of the stone, reflect light crisply. They offer opportunities to consider the different colours in which light solidifies into stones. Each table of smoothened stones presents a family of sedimented saturations. Could these possibly have been excavated from one of the above representational sites?

In another section, a canopy of a fishing net spray-painted with rainbow colours splits each colour into thin threads. As one’s eyes traverse through the overlaps of these coloured threads in space, intermediate colours begin to appear. The blending of hues and their perception thereof allude to the dynamic patterns of spray-painted colour sheets. The space between the tautly held folds of the net diffract rays in feather-like delicacy. Further, the net casts shadows that index densities of these colorations on the ground. The dismantling of colour and its reconstitution in space is a characteristic experience of this gentle installation. Placed diametrically across a clear view of the Arabian sea within the gallery, the object begins to speak to the site, albeit in new ways.

Rana’s works clearly extract light and colour (essentially a function of light itself) as an experiential artefact. Primarily working through simple ideas and employing techniques like diffraction, diffusion, reflection and dispersion of light, one understands the pursuit of discovering a new experience in her experiments. Unlike the scientist, Rana works with an artful precision in order to create affective experiences that allow us to converse with light in a playful, childlike manner. It brings forth on canvas the psychedelic rendering of colours we often indulge in and perceive while wilfully closing our eyes. The sheer pleasure and mystery of such hallucinations find a lyrical documentation in Rana’s endeavour. Yet, her work is not divorced from form. Rather than reading sciography as a function of the object, Rana successfully inverts this relationship wherein crafting light defines her forms. This is the principal site of investigation that her works unpack for an artistic reconsideration.

Just Give Me Some Space: Panel Discussion

Transcript of the Panel Discussion organized at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, on the inauguration of 'Just Give me Some Space' authored by architect Suha Khopatkar. The discussion opens up ways of building empathies in academic practice, specially between teachers and students in an architecture school. The discussants include Vandana Ranjitsinh, Rohan Shivkumar, Nisha Nair, Suha Khopatkar, and Anuj Daga (moderator).

published in Indian Architect & Builder, November 2019.

Read full article with illustrations here.

Text as Text – Part I & II curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

Text as Text – Part I & II
curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

Anuj Daga

published in Art Journal, Oct 2019



‘In literary theory, a text is any object that can be “read”, whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block or styles of clothing. It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message […]’ explains Wikipedia. More specifically although, text is understood as written or printed work especially used for manuscripts and books that ought to be “read” i.e. interpreted. It took me some time to understand the invocation behind ‘Text as Text’ in both Part I & II at the ‘Art & Soul’ gallery in Worli, Mumbai, wherein curator and art historian Shubhalakshmi Shukla invites artists who work with “pure text” – those that primarily use alphabets and words in order to create works of art. In such a framework, one is pushed to think of the artist further than a writer, poet, journalist or any other professional who operates purely within the medium of words. In both the parts, the curation attempts to observe the intersection of text with gender, power, aesthetics and identity.

How do we approach text without literary training? Could an artist engage with words in a manner that could be distinguished from other literary forms? How does work of art in turn, inform textuality? These are the preliminary questions I begin to ask. Further, which words do you choose to frame so that you may keep coming back to, time and again? In such recall, the works of text become a painting. The fact that it must be read, and not simply rethought, asserts its lyrical precision, whereas, the multiplicities of meaning that its looped re-readings offer, make it possible to thread different worlds into a single thought stream. Text then is a ritual that ought to adapt to different situations and allow one to evolve in time. Artists use several techniques to work with text in different languages literally and visually within the small size format of the project. The disposition of these works in relation to text within the two exhibition cycles can be discussed through three broad relationships:

1. Text and Space

Text is scattered all around in our everyday environment, essentially encountered in motion. We are constantly reading text on signages, hoardings, bills or pamphlets on the street. These texts in floating space get framed, sliced, blurred, or animated with each other as we attempt to grasp them in the flash of movement amidst objects. Space thus gets inevitably encoded and embedded within the object of text, working itself into its reception and creation of dynamic meaning subsequently. The first cycle of ‘Text is Text’ brought together an exciting array of artists who explored the medium of text in a variety of ways. Of these, Bharati Kapadia’s film ‘L for LOVE’ expands the four letters of ‘love’ into an alliterated field of words within which its emotion gets nurtured. Using motion typography, the artist opens up a spatio-textual dialogue within the film where letters begin to dance in order to speak of the multidimensionality of love. In another work, free floating callout stickers like “Fight like a girl” or “Future is Female” mounted on a transparent partition wall by Vidya Kamat inevitably collage onto the viewers as characters of a feminist conversation within the gallery space.

In Text as Text - II, Nikhileshwar Baruah’s works from the ‘Capital’ series demonstrate some of these spatial aspects quite effectively in using receding font sizes or fading the overall text, at once creating perspective and depth within the reading. The graphical play initiates an assertive reading that turns softer and more contemplative as the letters assume normalcy. On the other hand, Prasanta Sahu’s typographic experiments in the two dimensional extents of paper, presented as diptychs situate us in the macro and micro aspects of agrarian politics through contrapositions of sliced and contained text. One is able to consider the textual grain from far and close, strategizing incomprehensibility in order to draw attention to the subject of agrarian economy. The words layout proximate fields within which several concerns around cultivation and care may be articulated. As one reads through the respective texts in these works, a certain spatial encryption strengthens their reception and offer a deeper reading into its meaning, giving them a three dimensionality. 

2. Text and Vision 

works by Hanif Kureshi

Text is an inherently visual medium; it is an extension of the eye, claimed media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Further, do we ever perceive text devoid of its visual appeal? If text is everything except the surface it appears on, then how does its visuality mould meaning? Legibility and visuality come together in unique ways to lend new readings to any given text. Much fixated like a painting, textual constructs could be quite complex. In Text as Text - I, artist Sanjeev Sonpimpare’s play of text on grains at once reminds of the rangolis that were traditionally drawn in front of house and temple entrances in grain flour, assumedly meant to feed the birds. The finger patterns drawn into food-dust create textual symmetries that suggest a leveling of caste and class in its visual syntax. In the second cycle of the exhibition too, there are several examples that play through the visual attributes of text. The hybridization of two scripts – English and Hindi, in the works of Priyanka Paul as well as Ajinkya Patil indirectly comment upon social attitudes, popular culture, cultural hegemony as well as globalization through gentle humour. Placed amidst poetry on women’s oppression, Paul accentuates class and gendered othering in social space using the lines “Tumhaare paas (maa) hai, humaare paas stig-(maa) hai”.  (तुम्हारे पास माँ  है, हमारे पास stig-मा  है)

Ajinkya Patil opens up multiple interpretations of his phrases through the fusion of Marathi and English words, take for instance: “Sukhache he naam (Audi) ne gaave”. (सुखाचे हे  नाम, audiने घ्यावे) Here, the subtle pleasures of materialism fused into the spiritual produces a humorous lament on the desires triggered within global processes. Here, Audi (the locomotive brand) and aavadi (meaning ‘liking/fondness’, the vocal doppelganger in Marathi for Audi) attempt to achieve a synonymy. Such techniques are frequently used in advertising in order to connect to a diverse mass of population speaking multiple languages. The verbal phonetics however has been harnessed into the visuality of the text in order to produce the desired effect of cultural collapse and acceptance.

It is perhaps its visuality that continues to communicate off text despite its illegibility. Hanif Kureshi presents eight frames of text which do not lend an easy reading to the viewer. Stretched and sliced, the phrases in each pair of frames placed one above the other question our notion of readability and reality. Kureshi compels the viewer to piece the words together in order to make meaning out of his work, which is quite direct and poignant. On the other hand, Nikhil Purohit attempts to introduce us to what may be a kind of machine language. In his grid of ‘NFSDOTCOM’, a series of letters appear like they do, in a crossword. The viewer is forced to wander within the array of letters in order to construct a meaningful word. In his ‘List of Things I Miss’, Purohit seems to imagine a language in which machines could communicate back to humans. Over a prolonged gaze, one may be able to spot four lost letters in a vast field of signs and symbols that machines and humans confound each other in: L O V E.


3. Text and Silence 

One’s engagement with text means one’s close association with silence, for it is a movement from oral to ocular, from the ‘once said’ to the ‘now seen’. Autonomous in its disposition, text creates a range of voices - although within the mind. We orate, repeat, and intonate text in our heads in order to make it mean something for ourselves. In doing so, the body is able to communicate with the mind, and eventually reach out to the world at large. People produce text through reading or writing in order to enter a new world through silence. In a work from Text is Text - I, artist Kim Kyoung Ae from Korea, settled in Baroda for the last ten years contemplates upon the rhythms of silence in her work, through which she mediates the fluency of communication. She explains how ironically, her broken English-Hindi communication with her Gujarati-speaking studio help Kantaben, is more fluent than her English conversations with an old friend. With her Korean friend on the other hand, Kim often able to speak in silences. Wondering if language is thus a mask over muteness, she translates silent frequencies of communication into text in her poignant work ‘P for Perspective’. The viewer is able to tune into different degrees of silences painted in the void of black, white and greys of the Korean word Cheok, meaning - ‘to pretend’. In another work ‘S for Survivor’, Kim expresses her mother’s silent and successful resistance to cancer. Much like the disease, an array of illegible hewn letters assume the character of unidentifiable alien cells within the body of the book. Kim explores the silent struggle of the body to keep its integrity against physical and psychological impediments in a series of paintings that work through Korean and English letters – both languages that she feels equally distanced from, and therefore proportionately silenced today. 

work by Kim Kyoung Ae

Kim Kyoungae-_ [cheok] Auxiliary verb,

You can't pretend forever

The textual articulation of emotions offers consolation to the restive mind. Several works in the two exhibitions demonstrate such tendencies. Further, there are concepts that cannot be experienced except though text. Text is a powerful medium through which another (im)possible world may be entered / opened, described or imagined. It allows collapse of unseeming ideas, surrealities that are difficult to be visualized. Words can become a useful gateway in order to challenge such silenced abstractions that may never be articulated otherwise. The textual medium is thus held in a double bind – of silence and its release thereof. It is the silencing of physical world, but a voice for the untold. Poetries, letters and other such forms of works in the exhibition in essence, speak to us silently. 

In its ensemble, the exhibitions ‘Text as Text I & II’ brings us to the various latent possibilities and expressions of text that obscure themselves in plain print. In some parts, the exhibitions allow us to engage with text in a manner different from encountering it in a book. In doing so, the works create a criticality within the space of text itself. Yet, in most cases, the setup remains extremely traditional, overlooking the contemporary modes in which text is consumed – those on mobile screens, LED marquees or tablets. Thus, the object of text remains static and unflickering, hung primarily on the wall like a painting. Most works lie within the liminalities of text and painting. However, the works installed miss interacting with the spatiality of the gallery altogether. Thus, they are unable to comment on the ways in which text gets inscribed within the body. The works within the exhibition could have been curated so as to talk to each other. In order for the invocation ‘Text as Text’ to become stronger, the curator may like to demonstrate how text can save itself from visuality, a space strongly claimed by painting. Yet, the curator keeps the promise of the textual medium and reserves it as an intimate resource for ready expression.

Catalogue Essay: Shilpa Gupta

That long awaited essay!
Click Below to read:

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Hide


A catalogue essay for artist Shilpa Gupta's solo show at the Yarat Art Gallery in Azerbaijan. published by the Yarat Art Gallery in 2019.

Vasantha Yogananthan at Jhaveri Contemporary

published in Art India
August 2019

Role Play

Vasantha Yogananthan’s painted photographs explore the Ramayana in a modern context and collapse the mythical and the quotidian, the manual and the technological, states Anuj Daga.



In showing photographer Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls from the 14th of March to the 4th of May in Mumbai, the Jhaveri Contemporary makes a gentle political comment. Exhibited alongside the parliamentary elections of 2019, Yogananthan’s photographic prefacing of the Ramayana coaxes a subversive reconsideration of moral values tensioned between a conservative right wing regime and an unassertive left wing and left of centre opposition in India. Yogananthan’s Ramayana offers an aesthetic frame through which prevailing ideologies may be teased out to gain perspective on morality, truth and the role of art.

An androgynous young boy, dressed as a woman wearing a saree, sitting on the threshold of the house against the almost closed door greets the viewer with a piercing gaze. Diametrically behind this door frame, across the gallery wall, is the picture of the same boy combing his hair to perfection. Spatially installed behind each other thus, the photographs call for a queer conversation inter-mediated by attires that essentially differentiate the same person into two characters. In working through such duality, the photographs in the exhibition demonstrate a continuous play between the real and the ideal; the performed, the hidden and the revealed; the physical and the mirrored.

The historicity of the Ramayana has been continually debated. As a travelling epic, it has been recited all across the subcontinent in varying versions. The imagination of its physical settings remains a subject of curiosity. What kind of geography did the central characters of Ramayana inhabit? What was the landscape of exile like? In Yogananthan’s experiment, the land, forest and the sea around which the mythical tale unfolds expend a mysterious quietness, achieved through the hand tinting of black and white photographs. This bringing together of photography and painting collapses several layers and registers: of myth and the everyday, of the manual and the technological or even of the fictional and the real. In its pastel saturations, gently pink skies or misty landscapes, the photographs blur our eyes and traverse us into a space of the imagination.

There is a tendency for the mythical to become fantastical in everyday India, whereas, in Yogananthan’s project, it seemingly becomes so normal that its image can no longer be distinguished as the ‘other’. It is through extreme normalization that the photographs induce defamiliarization. In doing so, the revered figures of Ram and Sita or Luv and Kush are literally divested off their sacred auras, where they no longer live representational lives. Rather, young men wandering in forests and fields, performing everyday activities when identified as such representational characters, at once begin to invert the real into mythical, albeit in uncanny ways.

It is through myths that societies borrow moralities for their everyday existence. Keeping rationality at bay while absorbing these myths helps in building a community that thinks homogeneously. While the virtues of righteousness, heroism and sacrifice upheld in an epic like the Ramayana are institutionalized within Hindu families in India, their internalization is often uncritical, possibly producing societies that exhibit traces of chauvinism. In such a scenario, one is then compelled to think if the ideal is merely a performance? In consuming a staged photograph, does the viewer complete this loop?

In bridging the gap between the representational and the lived, one wonders if Yogananthan’s photographs come to frame the aesthetics of the ‘hypo-critical’. It is the hypocritical perhaps, that accommodates both: the true and the false. The artist’s photographs explore and give form to the seductive power of the hypocritical. The make-believe realism achieved through the process of eventual staging of characters tames the truth as well as the lie, affording multiple realities to co-exist within one frame, one life.

The willing suspension of disbelief bears the seeds of a community that can unite benign bodies to take the form of a large agitation. A deep belief in the mythology of Ramayana as a defining Hindu text has kept the Indian state occupied to a large extent over the last few decades. It is ironical that a story recited to impart values of love and sacrifice appears to have become the agency for othering through religious polarization. The triplet of Longing for Love, Sea Monster and Secret Door could be a representative of such phenomenon, occupying the liminalities of tension and suspension between the land and the sea. Yogananthan’s hyper-normal Ramayana shocks us in its everyday-ness, allowing us to gauge the closeness of stories to our lives. However, Yogananthan eloquently summarizes in an interview with British Journal of Photography, “I realised the distinction between truth and falsehood wasn’t important…This was an important discovery for me, that this is where my photographs should lie – in this in-between world between physical reality and the imagined.”

The Production of Ambiguity / 'Provisions' by Raqs Media Collective

published in Art India
Vol. 23 / Issue 1 / Apr 2019

The Production of Ambiguity

Raqs Media Collective’s show invites us to doubt our political and social bearings while revisiting George Orwell’s life, points out Anuj Daga.



The 3D-printed burnt biscuits individually encased and displayed on the French table at the Raqs Media Collective’s show Provisions at Project 88, Mumbai, from the 16th of January to the 9th of March, sharply comment on the French army’s trial accounts of the Paris Communards. The Paris Commune was a short-lived radical socialist and revolutionary government composed of the working class that ruled Paris for two months in 1871. Later, 20,000 of these workers were said to have been imprisoned in ‘hermetically closed’ cattle wagon-like pontoons with no sign of fresh air, thrown upon a heap of biscuits that reduced to crumbs under them. The prisoners in the dungeons ashore survived only on crumbs of biscuits and rancid fat.

In a continual reading, the lenticular prints To Ask When Empty mounted alongside on the wall seem to express the disorientation of those tortured prisoners. However, in a more general sense, the shifting illusory impressions of verb couplings like ‘To Disobey/When Told’ or ‘To Feed/When Hungry’ jeopardize quotidian causality. They invite the mind to flicker in their stereoscopic bracing of everyday tasks. How is eating/feeding and hunger controlled? When does one pour/ask into the empty/full glass? The variable relationships between cause and effect perceived in the lenticular shimmer as we move across space and time induce skepticism and prepare us to dive into a pool of doubt.

Palimpsests of perforated sheets in varied materials talk of toxicity, and ask if, humanity in the spirit of equity, may share contamination too. How does one map the distribution of decay and pollution, disease and contagion? How does pain overlap life-forms, and what kind of possibilities emerge between them? On another wall, a fictitious conversation between workers and robots in a factory canteen leads us into questions about humanity being reconstituted vis-a-vis artificial intelligence. Narrated in ten screen-printed newsprint panels that embody the act and materiality of labour and mass production, the story simultaneously reveals the inner mechanized lives of workers in confrontation with the enlivening agencies of robots. Over a short conversation, the worker and the robot confuse and confound their lives within each other.

These peripheral, seemingly disconnected distractions, finally lead us to the centerpiece of the exhibition – a film travelogue that weaves the artefacts in the show in the life and work of English writer George Orwell. Beginning in Motihari, Bihar, in British India, where he was born in 1903, the film draws context from his self-initiated inquiries into the experiences of working class people, his clever commentaries against social injustice and his ideological belief in democratic socialism. In its hand-held footage, the film becomes a diary written through moving images. Captions excerpted from various works of Orwell and other sources like the Pali canon appear on the screen as margin notes and allow us to remain close to the journey.

As one sits through the film, remaining artworks in the room uncannily begin to reveal themselves as annotative intersections across time and place. Orwell’s biography indexes several concerns regarding class, caste and self-identification manifested within the exhibition. Born to a lower middle class English father who was an Indian civil servant and a mother with French roots, Orwell’s short life kept drifting within the bounds of a transforming colonized territory. His reflective writings like Animal Farm, 1984 or The Road to Wigan Pier referenced in the film provoke the viewers to contemplate the fate of politics and people, and affectively tease out their sense of ideological bearings in contemporary times. Borrowing from Orwell, the artists ask, “Why not cultivate anachronism as a space time hobby?”

The film screen becomes a mirror through which the artefacts in the room biographically reflect each other in space and time. The choice of Orwell as the central subject resonates at several levels. His birthplace emphatically helps the Oriental subject identify with the issues of labour and land; his writings index subversive alternatives to the dominant regimes of capitalism; his travel alerts us to the risks of communist experiments; but most tellingly, Raqs’s own artistic practice invested in thinking through writing and critical journalism refers to Orwell’s. In following Orwell’s life journey, the artists revisit genealogies of several political ideologies and propose provisions.

Provisions takes us on a spatial, historical, literary and political journey and mobilizes the productive force of ambiguity. They claim, “In doubting, you create provisions for many people to participate.” Towards the end, the curatorial character of the exhibition begins to allude to Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm and the artworks begin to relate to each other within a charged flux of political exchanges.

When does history begin to work itself inside me? What encounters occur within myself?  As I prepared to leave the industrial space of the century-old metal printing press, which is now a gallery, where the artifacts were exhibited, I gave one last glance to the lenticular clock prints titled Sleep Clocks. Are these the objects of industrial time that shape an individual into a worker or a worker into a robot? Do they come to direct further or release me? Inducing a flash of doubt, the hands of the clock moved, and made my world more provisional than before.




Raqs. To Ask When Empty. Installation view. Lenticular. 24” x 12” each. 2018. Image courtesy the artists and Projects 88.