Stories in Mughal Miniatures

Notes from a lecture on Mughal Miniature Paintings by Prof. Arjun Das
at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya

A Glossary of Overused Terms in (architectural) Academia

Critical
We all want to be critical - and the word is often used as critique, more as a lament. to remain dissatisfied fuels the need to be critical. samira offered a strong explanation in the death of architecture exhibition though, of how critical can be more of a self reflective practice and remind oneself of one's position within the larger dynamics of things.

Relevant
Now, isn't this an extremely subjective term? on one hand, many people debate about how there must be space for all kinds of thought and on the other, it is curtailed by the idea of relevance. How does being relevant hold itself within the liberal space? And what may be relevant to one may be irrelevant to another. Do we assume a notional community in coming up to the framing of the relevant, and how much can we trust this notional constitution in the head?

Emerging
15 years ago, there were conferences that used the term "emerging", and today, the term is still slapped onto many symposium titles. It has become a tautological term for the contemporary. It claims the a faux-desire for being contemporary, and rhetorically wants to define the 'relevant' for today...

Innovative
If not relevant, then innovative! As if, the only way to validate your existence and worth is to produce something new. Are people who follow the past necessarily traditional? Could it be that the past be internalized in a way that offers pleasure to the present existence? Who after all, decides the relevance of innovative, and should it be really left to find its own course of destiny?


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now does this post sound very cynical?

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.

New words I have coined

Technoracism
A phenomenon when people are slot into hierarchies based on the technology they use / can afford. Or when people are put down for using certain kinds of gadgets following "preference hegemony" in technology.

Technoracist
A person who puts down others in feeling superior because he owns better gadgets.

Data Capitalism
The urge for collecting more and more information so as to trade it in any means.

Worlding
The process of meaning-making (often through language) in objects, things and space around you in order to be able to transact with it, and make it a part of your world. World here is understood as the set of things one knows outside of oneself.

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.

The Readers' Rights

courtsey: Alexia Faubert

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.”

What is a Diagram?

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We are often, time and again, posed the question of the 'diagram' in architecture in the course of our teaching. Inspite of the fact that there is generous discourse already available on the subject, even pretty articulate and thought-worthy; in pedagogy, mobilising the notion of a diagram seems extremely challenging.  When teaching undergraduates, to whom architectural methods, tools and terms are so new and abstract, so much of our talk ends up remaining rhetorical. Our use of the term 'diagram' when talking about the abstract relationships within a particular project - architecture or urban may sound rather incomprehensible, for at one instance we may be referring to the hidden formal logic of the building, whereas on the other, we may be thinking of it in a broader urban realm,  (wherein the project may be having a different dialogue). Sometimes, through diagrams, we indicate movement and encounter in a conceptual manner whereas at other times, we suggest volumetric rhythms which characterise a building. Needless to mention, all these are diagrammatic understandings through which we make a project amenable to the student, but all of these do not necessarily overlap into a single consolidate representation. Inevitably, in our discussion of building as a diagram , we keep changing our referential registers that overlap to (in)form, what one could call, an 'architectural composite'. In making sense of this representational multiplicity of such an architectural composite, students may be attributing the value of one diagram to another representation - that may fall short of making complete sense. It is perhaps in such confusion that the students beg the question "What is a diagram?"

Architectural diagrams are different from those used in engineering, economics, electronics, or other such disciplines. Linguistically thinking, 'architecture' and 'diagram' may almost seem tautological - for essentially, architecture is precisely the resultant act of bringing people or entities in a specified relationship. Think of it in terms of software or hardware, where the term architecture is particularly relevant. My father, an instrumentation engineer, would endlessly draw out circuits in drawings, replacing capacitors and resistors, in order to make a machine function more efficiently. There, the diagram was precisely the architecture of his work.  In a simplistic understanding, this singular diagram was the machine. This one to one co-relation of a digram to the real in the practice of electronics, for example, is often not the case for architecture of the built environment, for processes in a building or a city are layered with many systems and functions that have varying relationships. Thus buildings have multiple diagrams that are working together with each other.

We may borrow from the different disciplines to articulate a definition for diagramming in architecture. Each may seem applicable, but often these definitions become so abstract and theoretical to the extent of getting too subjective, and interpretive - and thus even debatable at times. This may happen due to the method in which one chooses to "read" a particular environment, thus removing an objectivity of the process of diagramming itself! But let us get back once again, to that innocent student asking, "what is a diagram" - where he is asking us to weed away our abstract and jargonized readings of a project to come to the point. What is being asked there?

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Let us now move to the architectural studio, in India. The question of diagram becomes particularly perplexing for the discipline at several registers. Diagrams, to be sure, are representations through which invisible relationships between ideas or objects may be explained and/or established. As architecture is far too obvious in its physical presence, often, to think of it as a diagram escapes imagination. (Often for students here, architecture, or building is the physical object in front of their eyes, and it is as objective a reality as it can be. There is certainly, nothing invisible about it!). Thus to think about them as diagram and decipher "invisible" relationships within them does not occur to them.

Secondly, diagrammatic thinking has not been an integral part of architectural education in India, the roots of which may be traced back to the manner of its colonial institutionalisation. Still largely taught in the mode of draughtsman's expertise, the design of building in India has largely remained a matter of aesthetic composition or construction. This is reflected in the kind of courses and emphasis laid on visual processes in most syllabi of architectural programs or teaching in India.

Thirdly, the knowledge of diagrams have primarily belonged to the domain of science and scientific thinking - a branch that explains phenomena that is not necessarily visible. Thus, its discussion and application in architectural pedagogy has been marginalised, even obliterated to a large extent. One may argue that the loss of diagram resulted in the loss of the political voice of the average architect, for he/she never could think of the intent of the building beyond the needs of the client, budget or demands of beauty. Neither thus, could one actualize one's agency as an architect.

But for the studio, diagrams for architecture are not limited to two dimensional representations. A range of things constitute diagrams that can be harnessed for architectural imagination today. These include art objects, stories, models, machines, and so on. This charged space of representation through which students are made to wade through is often too hurried given the constrained mass-education formats of architectural education. In such a scenario, the process of filtering that must take place towards the resolution of any project ends up in a mere groggy experience.

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As academicians, we passionately talk about building and its processes in metaphors using borrowed vocabularies from music, cooking, poetry or art (and other cultural domains). One wonders then, if architecture even has its own language? But it is here that we end up objectifying this fascinating act of architecture. To realise a building, is to realise precisely, how we bring the values in all of these acts of music, cooking, poetry or art in relationship with each other, only in a way that is visible and invisible at the same time for someone to read at yet relish, for someone to only smell and yet have the flower. Diagrams could then be those aromas which make up an environment and dissolve into the air. The only challenge is to bring students to breathe them. But can any one possibly teach someone how to smell diagrams off a building?

It is here that I am reminded of one of our first year design projects where we were to design a home for a comic character in the city. The character assigned to me was Chacha Chaudhary and Sabu - a short wise old man and his giant companion from Jupiter. What followed was a quick working of possible strategies into venn diagrams and their translation into three basic spatial types. When I presented these to my tutor, he was quite surprised at the clarity of my thought, to the extent that he asked me if I had been taught to do so earlier.

Diagrams for A House for Chacha Chaudhary & Sabu, 2004

To diagram is to prioritise, to decide and filter out anticipated redundancies within a given process. Diagraming is thus inducing a project with intent. What values do we read into built environment, and how do we charge them into architectural diagrams? These are aspects that need slow and careful discussions. Diagrams of architecture engineer values within environments. These can be experienced only with an attentive mind, and perceptive body. Pedagogical processes need to strengthen these channels. Diagrams, although, are not a formula, and thus they can not be learnt like theorems. They need to be practiced through observation and sensitivity.

The discourse on diagrams is rather convoluted for students. Perhaps, if students are able to voice their doubts with more honesty and eagerness, we may be able to develop sharper narratives to respond, and at the same time gauge the registers through which they approach the problem of diagram. However, the questions have to be deeper, and come from within them. Until then, we may keep asking, 'what is a diagram'?


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This essay has very little academic value and is written to surface my own doubts as a teacher. All the opinions and expressions are personal. The author is aware of the gross inconsistencies and jumps made through the writing.

Of the Cute and the Zany

will update citation soon!

Intercourse