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.

Hetain Patel / at Chatterjee & Lal

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

Dance of Life

Hetain Patel’s video installations provoke Anuj Daga to think about performative worlds and their complex anxieties.


One notices the laborious pace of Hetain Patel’s quasi-photographic video work The Jump exhibited at Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal from February the 1st to March the 10th. Dressed as Spiderman, Patel stages a scene from the Hollywood film – he leaps like the superhero in his grandmother’s house as family members watch by in amazement. In the video of the jump stretched to about six minutes, projected in two settings back to back – one in the living room and the other against a neutral background – the act sets a strange dialogue between the wondrous and the absurd. As the viewer shuttles between two staged and carefully overlapping slow-motion videos installed back to back, the referentiality of the supernatural and the domestic begin to interchange. It is in the constructed lapse of time that one comes to terms with the spectacle of mundaneness as well as the ludicrousness of the spectacle.

Patel is a UK-based artist of Indian origin and his works explore these two worlds in close contact with each other. These works were recently also shown at Manchester Art Gallery. In a well-crafted performance that takes place between two individuals before their marriage alliance, Patel proposes a setting in which personal relationships get forged and the dance of life gets underway. Presented in order to question the boundaries of rituals, race, class, physical access and language, Don’t Look at the Finger opens up ways where bodies communicate and connect beyond words.

If only the story had not resolved itself neatly towards the end, it would have left the viewer moved and intrigued by its cinematic setting, pace and choreography. Patel makes the film accessible but also inaccessible – moves and gestures do not always add up predictably. Patel’s strategic experiment with narrative refers to Hollywood and some of its tropes but also destabilizes our expectations from time to time.

A Pritzker for India

Many think it's too late. Many also feel that the committee almost missed the opportunity of felicitating Charles Correa. And given the fact that both these architects - Charles Correa and B V Doshi have served the Pritzker committee for much time, it's hardly possible that they are unaware of their works, or their contribution. Much of the West, especially America remains obvilious of the architects from the South Asian subcontinent. When I was studying at Yale, many of my colleagues or professors had never heard of Charles Correa (who has his buildings in MIT campus in Boston, as well as in the city of New York). I wouldn't expect them to even know of B V Doshi either. India has, after all, never remained an interesting place to study contemporary architecture for the West. Rather, unfortunately, it still remains the land of the exotica - of "maharajas, elephants and snake-charmers" - as they popularly say. The West has always valued India merely for its rich past. My essay has this binary in the head, because it is indeed the way in which the West has categorically overlooked South Asia in both -  historical or modern architectural scholarship.

I have plenty of anecdotes to prove the above slippage. I rather not get into it. Meanwhile, we all in India (must) agree that the Pritzker came to Doshi rather late. He's almost 90 years old, has not been actively building over the last decade, and has contributed significantly to the architectural discourse of India over the last 50 years. How do we reconcile this delay then? Doshi, as much as Correa, has always been a revered architect in India, and it would be incorrect to consider the Pritzker as a validation of his contribution. Infact, architects from the eastern "developing" countries have become Pritzker winners only in the recent past. Wang Shu was the first architect from China in the East to win a Pritzker in 2012, and now Doshi. For long, it has been the Aga Khan award that has held high regard in this region, one whose winners have maintained a low key, sustainable, egalitarian and humane architecture rather than the flamboyant, formalistic and high tech approach to buildings. It has been observed rightly, somewhere, that we see a trend in the Pritzker awards towards valuing a more humane Architecture in recent past. But is this "human" turn a mere tactic in foraying a more subtextual geopolitical move?

Let us consider; if we may; the possibility of Doshi designing buildings outside India after his Pritzker status. Will the coming home of Pritzker bring Indian architects any desirability or attention in contributing to the world Architecture scene? At the most, like my colleague Prasad (Shetty) said over a conversation, an Indian Architect would be invited merely to build an Indian or Indian-looking building (embassies, Indian international centres, etc.) outside India. Never shall Indian architects have as much value as our longing for other Pritzker winners like Maki or Zaha (or even starchitects like Holl) would, to come and design for us. Largely, we have still remained underconfident and direction-seeking followers of the West. Our craving for validation from the West is undeniable. Yet, I don't disregard their superiority, for they have invested infrastructures and systems towards architectural scholarship and research. But how can we claim these for ourselves? In much regard, Doshi's constant recollection of Corbusier and the rhetoric of the "Indian" in his post-Pritzker acknowledgements almost works against claiming confidence in our contemporary modes of thought. We have forever been stuck in the identity question, to an extent that we seem to imagine ourselves incapable of articulating a world outside our own. 

But supposedly, these are "Indian" values - precisely those that make us exotic and traditional. We can continue to celebrate these as the Pritzker finds place within India. The ideas of "modern", "Contemporary", "traditional" and so on require new articulation in our part of the world, specifically if we must come to value the architecture we produce. Such a revised framework for above terms is essential because we have not invested in institutions like museums or archives through which we can really assert a progression in thought. It is true that much of what we produce today is borrowed from floating imagery. But could we perhaps initiate a dialogue on the productive process (and even the creative effort) of constant hybridization that we constantly demonstrate in our built environment? Where else would you find so much experimentation? My claim may sound a bit shallow, but we do hope that in his acceptance speech, Mr. Doshi will lead us into a world where we come to sharply interrogate the existing notions of the above instrumental terms such as the "contemporary" or the "traditional" - amply explicated in his own work. It is thus, we may begin to claim some world architectural ground for ourselves.

MMRDA Entry Register

If you look closely, you will understand the inventiveness of this book. Expand the image and look at the first and last columns.

The above idea was put in place by the security staff of MMRDA (new block) so as to avoid the constant turning of the book in 180 degrees for taking details of the visitors.

Visitors notebooks have become a common place after the millennium in most public places as well as private housing complexes in cities of India, particularly Mumbai, as a manner of keeping tab on anyone who enters within their premises. Security guards are required to take the details of visitors that include their names, addresses, contact details and signatures. The entire affair is quite strange for over years, the act has almost become perfunctory. Both parties - the guard as well as the visitor is casual about the register, seen in the material condition of the book and the instruments (pen). No one knows who finally checks this data, and when? What happens of these countless pages of information at the end of the book? If one sits with these registers after their completion, they could provide us an interesting geography of visitors to a single place - the flows of people and objects precisely.

This is indeed a valuable cultural product - one that indexes the manifest of (in)securities arising due to certain events in a certain time in history in urban areas, taking a unique form along with its assisting infrastructure of security scanners (in public places) and acts of body-frisking!

In an age where rubberband and paperclip are personalising the object of a note book, how does one think of book as a communal entity within which several people write at once? In the above case, for example, the book is filled in by numerous individuals, from different directions and multiple handwritings. It is these engagements in space and time that give the book its ultimate form. The above example is exceptional as it helps opening up so many dimensions of use, regulation, aesthetic, record keeping, sharing, space - and so on. The construction of the register is simultaneously regarded and disregarded. 

What is a home?

I realised today how I have come to reserve my entire life to my bag pack that I carry everyday, everywhere, most of the times. My bag has the ingredients that make my world. It contains my laptop, its related accessories, a little stationery pouch, some note books to write, basic amenities like my medicines, cards, keys, etc. One section of my bag is merely reserved for lunch boxes that my mother prepares for my day. On some days, that section remains empty. The other things I need are stuffed in my pockets - my vollet, kerchief, and mobile. What else do I need over the day? Practically nothing. I can perhaps live by this set of things.

As I come back from work, I recluse into my room. Still in my own virtual world of people and material accessed through my mobile or laptop, I don't feel the need to make any contact to the physical reality of my home. i exhaust myself of this virtual Life and eventually go to sleep. Nothing more. Nothing less. This has been my everyday over the last four years. 

The place where I stay - my parent's place - is hardly a true reflection of me - in any way. I store my parapharnelia there - the objects that I have created over my lifetime, and the objects that I have meaningfully collected over the thirty two years of my life. Those remain closed in boxes, baggages or cabinets. They come out when I am digging into memories of my own. My surrounding physical space - my room - is not me. I cannot claim ownership over anything that's built in this house. I don't live by my rules here. These rules are those of my parents. What time to get up, to eat, to behave - literally everything. I am a constructed body in my house. A body that conveniences my parents' existence. I do not write this with any ill feeling. I write this towards the understanding of what we come to be. How we come to become what we do. I write this to suggest that human condition which we perhaps try to escape while still being within it.

And here my wise, bold friends would suggest me to snap out in order to find a space of my own...a space that can become the physical expression of my psychological inner being. And to that, it takes so much mental effort, for I will need to fight the cultural codes that make up the social structure here. I have tried it in the past. It's easy to think of living alone by yourself, however, it lands you then into a strange circle of loneliness...slowly making you  into an  island. To make one's own microcosm against the expectational environment of those closest to you must require some amount of courage and clarity. I am not sure if I have it yet.

But we all live in these weird in-between environments of the negotiated self. Some of us realize and stay back to observe. Some of us act to experiment, exercise and experience that (desired) change. I meant to also suggest how the mind thinks within certain frameworks in such places like an others' home. A house that you have grown up in but is no longer yours. A house which makes you feel an other even if it accommodated your growing body. A space that changes its meaning with your own inner self realization. A place which tells a story that shall no longer represent that way in which you would want yourself to be identified. A house that no longer reflects the values that you have come to live your own life by. What kind of expressions do these homes become then - discordant, disconnected, strange environments that have mashed up their expressions into diverse ideologies that remain insular to each other. What heterotopias are these?

I am able to write this post from home because I am completely alone today - and I do not have the pressure to behave in any particular way, or abide by a time schedule (even at home). And this is not to say that there's a fixed time schedule to my life. But we all know that domestic life is that of a routine which is set by hundreds of other parameters. In the social context we live in here, it will be the morning chores that have to be attuned to the maids, the sweepers, the news paper wallahs, the hundred incidental things that keep your house going! These are needlessly further entangled into rules that every household sets for itself. And your life ends up getting inscribed in these impositions leaving you with no time to get deeper into your thought pools.

How does home happen? When does it happen? A home will also not happen being alone. And a home with people will always be these negotiations. How does one reconcile? How does one be?

Tujhse Naaraz Nahi / English Translation

Song: Tujhse Naaraz Nahi

Film: Masoom

Singers: Anup Ghoshal / Lata Mangeshkar
Lyricist: Gulzar
Music Director Rahul Dev Burman

Hindi:

तुझसे नाराज़ नहीं ज़िन्दगी, हैरान हूँ मैं
तेरे मासूम सवालों से, परेशान हूँ मैं

जीने के लिए सोचा ही नहीं, दर्द संभालने होंगे
मुस्कुराये तो मुस्कुराने के, क़र्ज़ उतारने होंगे
मुस्कुराऊं कभी तो लगता है, जैसे होंठों पे क़र्ज़ रखा है
तुझसे...

आज अगर भर आई है, बूंदे बरस जाएगी
कल क्या पता किनके लिए, आँखें तरस जाएगी
जाने कब गुम हुआ, कहाँ खोया, इक आंसू छुपा के रखा था
तुझसे...


--

Tujhse Naaraaz  Nahiin Zindagi, Hairaan Hoon Main
Tere Masum Sawaalon Se, Pareshaan Hoon Main

Jeene Ke Liye Sochaa Hi Nahi, Dard Sambhaalane Honge
Muskuraaye To, Muskuraane Ke Karz Utarne Honge

Muskuraauun Kabhii To Lagataa Hai
Jaise Honthon Pe Karz Rakhaa Hai

Aaj Agar Bhar Aai Hain, Boondein Baras Jaayengi
Kal Kyaa Pataa Inke Liye, Aankhein Taras Jaayengi
Jaane Kab Gum Kahaan Khoyaa, Ek Ansuun Chhupaake Rakhaa Thaa

Zindagi Tere Gam Ne Hamein Rishte Naye Samajhaaye
Mile Jo Hamein Dhoop Mein Mile Chaanv Ke Thande Saaye

--

English Tranlsation

I am not upset, just surprised with you, Life

Your innocent questions keep me unsettled

It never occurred that in order to live, one will have to preserve (one's) pain

That smiling may come at the cost of repaying its debts 

Whenever I smile, I feel that someone has burdened my lips

If today, they are brimming, the drops will now fall

Who knows, tomorrow, (one's) eyes will crave for them all

When did it disappear, where did i lose that one tear drop that I had preserved

Life, Your sadness has taught me the new relationships

When received, we got the cool shadow of shade in harsh sunlight

C Bhagyanath

A student/friend had asked me the author of the artwork on my current blog header. I hadn't noted the name of the artist whose work I photographed from the Kochi Biennale 2016. Here I came across the work again, and thought it must serve a useful record:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBnUm7F4bPE

Kanhaiyya Kumar's Political clarifications

Politics becomes a medium to change social norms.

Political issues however are different, and social issues are different.

Time creates circumstances that bring out work from you.

sub-altern = alternative readings (of history)

Our society is gradually becoming an aspirational society.

post truth societies: societies for whom truth doesn't matter at all, where perceptions establish the truth.

We are not able to filter from the overwhelm of the information in this age. Information has its own problems. That doesn't mean we shouldn't even try.

'Welfare State' concept has been demolished to bring in neo-liberal concept.

One no longer knows what is the base and what is the super structure. Are Modi's decisions political or economic? What is the base - economic or political?

Reservation is kept to resolve the already existing inequalities in the society. It's not meant to bring in new equalities. So many people are born into economic backgrounds, through which they have access to facilities. Reservation is meant to revise this.

The bad people are shouting only because the good people are silent.

\\ more later

Young Subcontinent 2017 / Goa

Over the last six months, I had been traveling with Riyas and putting together the team of young artists from the different regions. The project involved two advisors - Amrith Lal, who is a senior editor of Indian Express and Dr. C S Venkiteshwaran, an award winning writer and film critic who helped frame the entire project within the regional politics of the Indian Subcontinent. Each of the advisors travelled with Riyas to one or two countries in order to understand the cultural tectonics through field research. I accompanied Riyas to Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Kathmandu (Nepal) and got a sense of the region of South Asia and the state of its cultural infrastructure. The travel gave me a completely new perspective of India as the superpower within the region, as opposed to what you imagine of it from the West. It also opened me up to the relationship of India with its neighbours more closely. We are often consumed only by the India-Pakistan political tension, however, there is much to be discussed with India's relationship with countries of Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Srilanka.

I spent the last month putting up the second edition of the Young Subcontinent project for the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. This year, we selected 21 artists from the six countries: India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Pakistan had to be left out due to the political tensions between the two countries. However, in future, we do wish to include not only Pakistan, but also countries like Myanmar, Portugal, and other countries with whom India has shared historical and cultural links.

Communication was the most challenging aspect of the overall project. Firstly, the artists came from different countries of South Asia, speaking different languages. The non-confirmity of English on one hand, and the regional absorption of the foreign language produced a new dynamic of interactions where one needed to build patience towards understanding each other. I was perpetually conscious about the hegemony of English and the ironical way in which it still bound us together. (We may wonder if colonisation that once separated us on regional lines comes to bring us together today). Secondly, several artists came from regions with limited connectivity, with whom, communication could be established only intermittently. Lastly, what added to it all was the different schedules of each artist, who were all traveling to places for their own works. With different platforms of communication, different languages and their shades and lastly their incongruous and multivalent translation in English simultaneously brought us closer and repelled us apart.

Often, dealing with different temperaments and cultures becomes tricky since you can never understand or know the extents of being polite or rude. How does one gauge the amount by which one can be within the limits of being offensive? When does one break one's temper? How does one draw moral and ethical boundaries? To some extent, my teaching background helped, but being a teacher was the last thing I expected while on ground. My concern, however, was to enable all the artists (despite their language hurdles) access to as much parts of the festival as I could. I may have certainly failed in much parts, since one can not lend as much patience to every individual given the numerous crisis that emerge on site during all hours. Curation, as I understand by now, is an artful administration of people and space in a manner that things fall just in place for every one involved. One needs to take note of the scale of operations and expand the team judiciously. As much as one thinks of it to be an intellectual process, it all boils down to executing those stories in space in a manner that everyone, almost everyone involved is happy in the end. The curator literally, through the act of story telling, manages people and space.

I have come to learn how many ideas change shape as they touch ground. Such changes happen when real objects arrive in a given space and begin their dialogue with the place they inhabit and create an environment with the material around them. Our exhibition planning often doesnt give a clear picture on the computer screen. A lot of softer, invisible and subversive stories are hidden in the strategies and politics of display. A conscious viewer will be able to decipher them, and many more connections embedded in these unsaid and inexplicit decisions made by the curatorial team. I am however, sure, that established art institutions may not leave any exhibit/display decisions to site conditions, or do they? There is some surprise and excitement in working with space as material, and ways in which it prompts to talk to the objects of display. Some resonances occur, others create oblique manners to think of showing works. Spatial conditions often fold in new stories and reveal to us the artwork in novel ways. Since most artists selected for Young Subcontinent at SAF didnot have an opportunity to visit the site beforehand, the contents, anxieties and tensions kept on. The site was new, and wasn't available even to the curators until they arrived! Thus, the exhibit was a productive negotiation over the five days before the festival.

All in all, it was a successful show. It opened up several avenues for the selected artists and created a new geography of the subcontinent - that of friendships and new networks and openings. It allowed artists from the subcontinent to understand each others' cultures and forge new associations. Artists from the last edition of Young Subcontinent have already begun to plan newer programs and visits. It is quite fulfilling to see so many of them draw confidence in each other. For many of these young artists, coming to Goa is their first international visit, and the exposure of the city, navigating a new geography and culture offers them a lot for their future. I often let them to negotiate their difficulties and crisis; their freedoms and limitations - for it allows them to find their own selves.

There are several other aspects of the exhibition that I will include over a longer essay that I shall spend time writing for Serendipity over the next few days. I will update this space with more pictures soon.

Kaushik Saha at Gallery Mirchandani+Steinrucke

Tyres, Nails and Nozzles

published in Art India, January 2018

The overwhelming greyness of Kaushik Saha’s landscapes in Order of the Age at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of October to the 4th of November carries a lament for the side-effects of development and modernity. . Vast patches of human-operated natural territories get framed onto Saha’s canvases by means of flattened tyres.. In seeing his artworks, the viewer can imagine resource-rich landscapes of oil fields, coal mines or stone quarries that have driven the nation’s development, but have also been sites of exploitation of labour and land. The narratives of development are mirrored onto the lives of materials that go on to occupy and lend meaning to these landscapes. In juxtaposing these surfaces with iron nails,metal nozzles and delicate scenes of everyday life, a unique commentary on the state of development emerges in Saha’s artworks.

Saha’s work can be experienced and understood in various proximities. The abstract compositions soon begin to disintegrate into different textures and narratives over a prolonged gaze. On going closer, one is able to observe strange activities in these obscure landscapes. As one steps back, a layer of invisibly inscribed words and letters – almost like a substructure of survey, information and data that not only regulates but also establishes repression – becomes apparent. Narrative subjects within Saha’s artworks are thus entrapped within both – the physical geography of the terrain as well as the virtual bounds of infrastructure. His experiments leave the viewer to imagine the grim futures of a leftover landscape after its intensive extraction and exploitation.

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