Open Site Project / Serendipity Arts Festival 2016

This is a small review of street art projects that were created for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016 in Goa wherein we invited 4 graffiti artists from all across the world. The project was curated by Riyas Komu, who also conceptualized two other projects for the Festival - information about which can be found at www.youngsubcontinent.blogspot.in

Reflections

The Open Site project was conceptualised as a welcoming gesture to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. Street art is the most public as well as visible form of art, at our aim was to productively use this aspect towards creating a buzz towards the festival. We invited four national and international artists for this project:

1. NemO, Italy
2. Escif, Spain
3. Faith47, South Africa
4. Hanif Kureshi, New Delhi

Each of the above artists spent 7-21 days before/during the festival painting across Goa.

We indicated possible sites where artists could paint. Although, through their interactions with the locals and they respective interests, artists went across to find more interesting spots where their art would gain more contextual relevance. This is particularly interesting since it exposed us unexplored corners of the city, and at the same time, read existing city spaces in completely new ways.

As an assistant curator on the project, coordinating with the artists, I can say that the artists were thrilled to work in an Indian context like Goa. Unlike other countries, the scale of works in Goa was different, and established through an altogether different cultural negotiation. Except Hanif, the other artists navigated the city through visuals and gestures - of course along with our colleague Sabina Banu as one of the initial interpreters. However, the subjects they chose to paint remind us about how we can take so many curiosities of our city for granted. This is particularly evident in the works of Escif who paints, for example, the thali outside a local restaurant, or an enlarged palm showing traditional methods of counting breaths copied off a pamphlet.

Other artists like Faith47, drew lotuses across different parts of the city. She explains in her afterword: "The lotus, while rooted in the mud, blossoms on long stalks floating above the muddy waters. This ability for something so strong and pure growing out of dirty water is symbolic of our struggle despite the chaos of life to find our own strength and spiritual clarity…” The liminal conditions in which people make their lives in urban spaces of India is the key observation of Faith’s work. In her subtle rendering of the lotus, symbol of the currently ruling BJP, Faith unknowingly brushes on a gentle political suggestion.

For NemO from Italy, the figure of a crippled person along the market entrance spurred an artistic response of a mermaid. Similar to the mutated body of the beggar, the mermaid became a clever motif to symbolise the contextuality of the place as well as the person. Lastly, Hanif Kureshi is a street artist who specialises in typography. He created two interesting works for the festival playing with the idea of the present-age acronyms. He painted the word “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) on the rolling shutters of a dilapidated shed which had become home to a poor cobbler. Such a context brings out the paradoxes in both - the subject and the object of art. One of his other works similarly read “FOMO” - Fear Of Missing Out - in an abandoned space across Foutainhas in Goa.

The above notes on the artists’ work is immediate, and can be elaborated upon.

photocredits: Faith47, Escif & author

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Manisha Parekh / Line of Light - Review

Review / Line of Light
Published in Art India, May 2017

Herscript

Manisha Parekh’s works has Anuj Daga reading between the lines.

Try to look hard and you will see the landscapes in Kanji typographic characters. Manisha Parekh’s Line of Light at the Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, from the 7th of February to the 4th of March, makes this translation quite obvious.

Linguistic studies demonstrate how the symbol for a mountain in the Kanji script is derived from three peaks, while that of a tree is visibly rooted in the ground with a free end in the air. Originally diagrammed from their actual visual counterparts, Parekh’s intervention overlaps these Japanese ideograms with images, pressing us to think of nature itself as a script. Five dark indigo-dipped papers explore this script using Braille-like formations pierced by a sharp stylus. The form and medium dissolve within each other in Parekh’s Gratitude giving rise to a productive ambiguity that emphasizes multiple readings. She suggests we look closely at how in forms animated and static, nature leaves behind a communicative trail to be deciphered and decoded.

These works presented by Parekh were originally produced as part of a residency in 2013 at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre in Japan, built by architect Tadao Ando, whose buildings, as many may know, bring individuals in very emphatic confrontation with nature.

The installation Shadow Garden draws closely from the architecture of fuki leaves – those that stand on a singular stem upright on the surface they grow on. Competing with each other for light, these leaves form a shaded canopy that creates an environment where new microcosms can flourish. Tracing the paths of worms that feed on these leaves, Parekh attempts to map the conversation between different forms of life. Further, the veins of the leaves are suggested by the grain of the cypress wood in the artist’s reconstruction, bringing us to think about the contrasting attributes of young and old, soft and hard, life and death – as thought of in eastern philosophy –simultaneously. Life merely occurs in between these extremes as seen in the punched worm trails on the abstracted substrate.

Within the framework of nature and script, Parekh’s paintings attempt to formulate new ideograms that can expand the limits of experience. Tangled Foot works through three amorphous shapes in indigo, gold and a stippled swatch freely moving in space and frozen into different configurations. If the conceivable world is limited by language, can Parekh’s drawing project open up new environments that can be inhabited though experiments in abstraction? Can their interpretations hint at multiple meanings similar to the manner in which pitch accents change words in kanji pronunciation? Invisible Notes furthers this attempt by presenting to us a hundred possible contemporary Japanese hieroglyphs drawn in a sparkling silver watercolour on handmade paper. The artist’s endeavour to collapse art and the medium of art into each other challenges the distance between the human world and the natural world created and mediated by language.



Manisha Parekh. Shadow Garden. Japanese cypress wood and Indian silk. 100 units. Variable dimensions. 2013. 

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Shanghai - I

First things first.

When visiting Shanghai, be prepared to work with the restrictions that come to be imposed upon you within the framework of a communist government. At the personal front, you will not be allowed to access gmail and facebook directly. So if you think you will keep updating your status on either of these platforms regularly and smoothly, it's not going to work. You will need what is called a VPN - Virtual Private Network - a facility that will allow you to fake your real location and access information on your google or facebook account. This may rather be tedious for the speeds of internet may drop and all VPN sites may not allow you to access every virtual place you may like to reach to.

At the larger level, you will be subject to the Chinese land - which means all sorts of written and oral communication is non-English. There are many perspectives to this aspect, and I am still unable to resolve the pros and cons in my head. It may almost be impossible to communicate in China if you don't know their language. (something similar to visiting Kerala)! The tones, rhetorics, script, gestures - all may be different, including the way we count 1 to 10 on fingers. Thanks to an offline app from google translate, we could convey our everyday basics to shopkeepers and public around. Government officials, police and staff at metro stations etc. will be able to speak to you in English. But thats about it. You won't be able to read menu cards at restaurants, street signage, maps on phone, street iconography, shop names - everything is in Chinese. At once, you realize how incapacitated you are just because of the virtue of language. Think a step further, and you will understand the hegemony of English in the global scene. China clearly slaps the world with its secure and sound operations in mandarin.

I loved looking at the Chinese characters - they looked beautiful to my architectural eye. I particularly liked how contained they are into invisible squares - together forming a neat consistent outline. Their geometric construct appealed to me. Further, the fact that each character could be interpreted in multiple ways in the given context deepened my interest in the way their script must have been conceived. In a brief conversation with a Chinese student about how the script is written and understood, I learnt each stroke of character in Chinese guides the way in which it will be pronounced and spoken. At the same time, these are often derived from its visual counterpart in the real world. That means that the character for a tree would look like the diagram of a real tree. The script is inherently etymological, constantly hinting at the contextual specificity of the written word. Loosely, for example, mist will be written as "water in the air", or a particular fish will be written as "an animal from fresh water lake". Understanding the real world in this manner makes Chinese conceptually sharper.

It's not as if the Chinese don't know English. They use mobile phones, tablets and computers that are wired in English - to type Chinese characters and words. They are fairly fast at it, as one observes on metro trains while they type on WeChat or make a search on Baidu. WeChat is a fairly advanced version of Whatsapp in China which is used for a range of activities beyond chatting. You may hear people sending across snippets of voice messages all the time, as you walk along the streets. Further, the app can be used for announcements, payments, bookings, updating your own status, and so on. It's their mini version of Facebook. Baidu is the Google counterpart in China. It's primarily in Chinese and fairly limited in terms of its search outputs. A few Chinese colleagues informed me how scholarship is so difficult and gets limited through Baidu searches, how commercial it is to be filled with numerous advertisements, and how constrained its reach is. On some occasions, they remained curious about the references I kept mentioning in my conversations, for they had not come across them in their Baidu searches.

China does not support Google maps, so you have to use Baidu maps - where everything is in Chinese. They may not make any sense to you as an outsider unaware of their script! In present times, as a traveler, you can not move around a city without internet connection. If you have to be on your own, you should be equipped with your maps, apps and chaps. For this, you need a smart phone with a reasonable data and calling connection. Data and calling plans in China can be very expensive. However, it is possible to bargain your priorities for mobile plans in China. After being sold a fake SIM card along the street-side shop, I went to a registered mobile store to purchase a new one with the help of a local friend. He was able to negotiate for me a customised deal with more data, compensating on the amount of talk time! It is there that I thought what a brilliant idea it would be for buyers to be able to customise their mobile plans...something like buying vegetables as per your need. What it opened up for me is the lucidity and arbitrariness with which telecommunication companies actually fix prices for its consumers. Wouldn't it be useful to pay only for what and how you use - won't that also manage the burden on telecom lines more efficiently instead of making a population more consumerist?

Having spoken about the limitations, I must point out on the other hand that Shanghai is an extremely organized city. The metro lines make a web while intersecting with each other to connecting different neighbourhoods in the city.  Neighbourhoods in Shanghai are almost analogous to those in Mumbai. Unlike my entry to Manhattan, New York, which was marked by a distinct starkness of the sky scraping buildings almost perspectivally covering up the sky, Shanghai's landscape wasn't really alienating. The scale of buildings and the street life in Shanghai are immediately relatable to an Indian city. One is not funneled between the tunneled sky scraping streets like in New York. Instead, streets are wider, buildings are fairly spaced out, optimally high, and further, the drying laundry & its  infrastructure on building skins remind you of the lives that inhabit them.

Most parts of Shanghai have lanes dedicated for bicyclers. Bicycles have become popular in the city with the coming of rental companies like Ofo and Mobike that lend users the vehicle for as low as 1 RMB for an hour. You can pick and park the cycle in most parts of the city. Motorcycles and bikes on the other hand are electric and they do not make any noise on the roads. In narrower streets, they move effortlessly with pin drop silence. Sometimes, your footsteps are louder than the quietly moving vehicles. Cars don't honk unnecessarily, and roads are rather lively but quiet. Traffic rules seemed confusing to me because vehicles kept turning and passing by even when signals were red. Perhaps there were intermediate rules between slow movers like pedestrians and bikes which I could not investigate into.

Much built landscape of Shanghai that we see today is gentrified. Gentrification is a repeating narrative for its emerging urbanity, bringing a more consumerist dimension to the city. Gated communities and commercial-recreational zones are replacing older communal housing settlements. People who are moved from the inner city to rehabilitation spots are often compensated with money or property. Often, they do not have any right to protest against eviction. Thus, many end up accepting and moving to an apartment away from the city as allocated by the Government. Another dimension to this movement is the cultural fact that owning a house, for men, is a precondition for marriage. Many young Chinese men living in older fabrics await for renewal schemes to be able to own a property and move on with their personal lives. I understand that my explanation above has certainly flattened the complexity of such issues. It is a subject to investigate deeper. It is therefore, that the organizers of Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society were so eager to have my talk on our project "What is a Home?" wherein we had documented the stories of ten sites of rehabilitation and resettlement in the city of Mumbai.

Several young men came for the talk, including a philosophers, engineers, architects and artists. Most of them were interested in the question of "What is a home?" They shared their own stories and contemplations on the idea of a home - intellectual and physical. Some raised questions of existence and what it means to exist. One of them brought to light the etymological understand of the word - he elaborated how "ex" refers to "outside" and "ist" refers to the "inside" - and thus existence is about the movement between the inside and outside. Another young guy spoke about the pressure of owning a house after his marriage, which he contests with the idea of home as a shared social space, not necessarily physical. Several stories and ideas about the home came to light over the discussion, which almost collapsed in the helplessness of the political ideology that Shanghai, as opposed to Mumbai, operates within.

Between Books & Buildings

Contemplations

The text starts behaving in a particular way when it is bound in the form of a book. The book has its own agency. The environment in which the book provokes the reader to be read and the manner in which the body engages with it talks about the body-space dynamic embedded in its form.The reception of text in a given environment - static or mobile - is a function of time. The body space rubric is thus also coupled with time, eventually describing time into the reading of the content. Text of the content has its own time (of reading and of its own place) the way text paces thought, which creates a certain environment. What happens when this transmission clashes or collapses with the time which the absorbing physical body is suspended in? Can the format of the book mediate time?

The table of books 

On books: Discussing with Poonam Jain

Participants making their own books

Participants working on their book projects

Artist Poonam Jain opens up ways of imagining books through her works.

Participants listening to Poonam

The team