First Questions Exhibition at Nehru Science Centre

In Process

Building Ruins

BUILDING RUINS
RISD India Alumni Exhibition 2020

The RISD India Alumni Club was founded in 2012, with a growing network of 70+ practising artists and designers across India.

Building on the legacy of the Rhode Island School of Design, which has produced some of the most notable names in contemporary art, film, architecture and design, the club’s mission is to support its Indian alumni and through its events and programming, enriching the landscape of art and design in India. Through a variety of programming that includes talks, exhibitions and mentorship sessions the alumni hope to build a strong creative community, facilitate collaborations and enable social impact.

In February 2017 the club organised the inaugural ‘RISD India Alumni Show’ in Mumbai to much critical acclaim. The opening night was inaugurated by Rosanne Somerson - President of RISD. The show featured art and design works of Indian alumni, including Durga Gawde, Anjali Modi, Ishrat Sahgal, Malvika Vaswani and Dhvani Behl amongst others.

Building Ruins marks the second edition of the RISD India Alumni Show. It puts together a curated display of contemporary art and design by India alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design. The show serves as a platform for Indian alumni to share the richness and diversity of their practices with the larger art and design communities and the general public. It highlights the relationship between art and design and the common foundations of both disciplines. The show is organised by volunteers from the RISD India Alumni Club in collaboration with curator, Anuj Daga.

19 artists participated in the exhibition, showcasing 18 works from about 10 different design disciplines. India-RISD ties run back to more than five decades. Over these decades, close to a hundred graduates have returned back from RISD to India and continued their practices in various forms. The curatorial ambition of the show has thus been to represent RISD alumni in India from across space, time and disciplines. At the same time, it was important to dissolve the illusory boundaries between art and design, and pose their dialogue with each other. While there is a concentration of the alumni in the cities of Mumbai and Delhi, the exhibition brings experiments from RISD practitioners in Kolkata, Pune and Indore too. Practitioners with different spans of experience share a common roof in this curation. In the pursuit of showcasing disciplinary diversity within the spatial constraints, the present selection comprises of creative practitioners, from painting, sculpture, illustration, industrial design, architecture, interior architecture, graphic design, photography, sculpture and lighting, who productively feed off each other’s processes. Several conversations with the artists and designers helped expand upon their original note and fine tune them towards creating fresh works. Each of the final 19 participants interpreted the curatorial provocation through their own practice which lends the overall show a unified, yet diverse character – one that must truly represent RISD.



Participants

Aahana Miller, Aditya Dutta, Akshat Raghava, Ananya Tantia, Aparajita Jain Mahajan, Ayushi Gupta, Cynthia Director, Dhvani Behl, Ishrat Sahgal, Malvika Vaswani, Mehr Chatterjee, Mekhala Bahl, Nishita Mehta, Raghvi Bhatia, Rahoul B Singh, Shonan Trehan, Srishti Srivastava, Tanvi Maloo Mehta, Vikramaditya Sharma

Read full Catalogue here

Link
https://issuu.com/risdindia/docs/building_ruins_catalogue_final_a5_web



Process:

Images of the final installation

Review for VAICA festival

published in Art India, January 2020

A Record of the Changing World

Anuj Daga discusses some of the videos he sees at the VAICA festival.

Even though the moving image format has been frequently used by visual artists in contemporary art-making, one does not find many public archives or exhibitions planned around video art in India. The VAICA (Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists) festival rightfully fills this void and hopes to make video works accessible to anyone interested in looking at experiments within the medium. Artist Bharati Kapadia and documentary filmmaker Chandita Mukherjee have brought together 67 video works by 35 contemporary artists practising in different idioms across India. Distributed over the five Saturdays of November and screened across different cultural venues in Mumbai, the event opens up multiple commentaries with curators, artists, students and other curious minds. VAICA opens at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in December.

While films – short or long – may follow a linear narrative logic or yield messaging, video art often departs into formal and imaginative abstractions. In redefining the reception of the image, music and text, video art nuances and broadens the interpretative dimension of the medium as well as the message, beyond the realm of entertainment. While independent tools for video recording became available across the world only by late 1960s, in India, they were available outside the state-owned broadcasting only from the 1990s. This was the time when portable video recording equipment could be privately imported into the country, which explains the growth of video art in India primarily after the phase of liberalization. In tracing the history of video art in India in the VAICA festival catalogue, Mukherjee explains that “[t]he first significant video art that one can remember was done in 1993 by Vivan Sundaram as part of the Memorial Show, after the Bombay riots of 1992-93 that followed the demolition of Babri Masjid. Soon after that, Navjot Altaf, responding to the same events, showed Links Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994). Then came Nalini Malani’s Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998) taking off from Saadat Hasan Manto’s story set against the backdrop of Partition.”

In their videos, artists push the imaginative aspects of the medium and ways of seeing on the one hand, and raise questions about numerous social issues around gender, colour, environment, displacement, consumerism on the other. In doing so, many artists enhance their respective visual languages. For example, Archana Hande finds a mid-way between painting and video, achieving an animation-like quality to speak about the politics of colour and the transformation of the city in the two videos shown at VAICA. Her works All is Fair in Magic White and Of Panorama present a cross-section of several histories at once – from Mumbai’s urban past to world art. Sumakshi Singh brings us to wonder about drawing could draw itself in video. In Halfway here! she collapses the represented space and the space of representation, taking the viewer inside the drawing, disorienting our perception. The labour involved in putting the work together is revealed in the purposefully induced glitches where the disconnected lines drawn over three-dimensional surfaces, perceived coherently in the strategic videographic framing, become apparent to the viewer.

A large number of videos in the curation call for a reflection on the social issues within our country. In the restless breath-space of sound in LOC, Surekha stages the movement of a tiny ant restrained in the outline casually drawn on paper using a ballpoint pen. Over an approximately four-minute video-clip, viewers begin to understand boundaries and their metaphorical meanings. Shakuntala Kulkarni’s works principally address issues of patriarchy. In Through the Door, Kulkarni employs her experience from theatre into creating a dreamlike entrapment – a nightmarish void through which women repeatedly struggle to pass through. The troubled female body manifests the tension felt in breaking away from social impositions in this disturbingly silent video. Role I would like to play and Is this Just a Game Part I-IV theatrically enact the inner experiences of women by invoking the metaphoric capacities of popular games. Similarly, Vidya Kamat’s Wish I had stayed at Home tries to weigh the outward veneration and worship of women against their everyday objectification, assault and molestation in the public sphere. 

The politics around urban architecture is closely read in the videos of Meera Devidayal. Through spectacular shots, Devidayal takes us into the otherwise restricted, ruined landscape of shut-down Mumbai mills in A levelled Playing Field that is provisionally used by locals as a cricket ground. Soon however, as the artist juxtaposes / screens capitalist aspirations of the state onto the mill’s large open window-frames, one gets a glimpse into the kitschy Disneyland of dreams that the space may eventually become. However, in her Water has Memory, such a contested consumerist urban transformation is offset by the soft, yet ironical existence of the sea. Buildings allude to paintings as Devidayal captures the reflections of seawater sharply onto their glass facades, contrapuncted with the sounds of each other. Such a sonic editing invites us to contemplate upon the experiential relationship city dwellers of Mumbai share with the edge of the sea. Viewers are misled into thinking of rhythmic bat strokes as repeated hammering in Paribartana Mohanty’s Trees are stranger than Aliens in the Movies that unpacks moral and existential questions while being revealed into the hollow shell of Pragati Maidan Expo building in Delhi. While the building has been demolished despite fierce protests and appeals, Mohanty poses questions about architectural heritage and collective memory in the face of development.

Mithu Sen’s Unpoetry and Bharati Kapadia’s L for… work through motion typography and make letters dance as well as evoke plethora of inner emotions through the written word. Unpoetry is the artist’s diary that brings us into the space of constantly flickering, unstable nature of human thought. The screen of social media becomes the platform through which Sen voyeuristically stages to the viewers her poetic and literary world of thoughts. Dynamic appearances of letters in typing, cutting, pasting, undoing, striking off on the screen that quietly define our everyday micro-visual cultures in Sen’s imaginative rendering and recreation of the screen. In her L for…, Kapadia brings viewers to swim in a range of emotions through which she charts a topography for the landscape of LOVE. Dismantling it as an acronym, Kapadia creates a glossary of words indexed in the four letters L, O, V, E, that realize their emotions visually through gesticulating typography. A quick counterpart of the same script in sign language enacted by dance practitioner Avantika Bahl, directed by Kapadia offers an expanded reading to the definition of love.

Video remains a crucial medium through which several art / forms are able to survive as documentation. Performance works of artists like Muskaan Singh, Manmeet Devgun or Jeetin Rangher essentially mount the body or (its) installation as the material for visual consumption, risking the ambient evocation of the act that centrally impacts the reception of such work. It is here that the question of what constitutes ‘video art’ surfaces, for in these, the medium is then harnessed merely in its functional radius rather than teasing its audio-visual potentials. A new visual culture emerges as mobile phones today have lent almost everyone the capacity to be a producer of video, furthering the question of when, after all, does video become art? In the concluding panel discussion, art historian V Divakar alarms us of his concern over the canonization of the medium, successfully challenged in the proliferating democratization of the means of production of video. What do we then anticipate as the opportunities and / or pitfalls of the emerging video culture that is produced and disseminated independently? We hope that the festival will grow in the future to shape critical discourse around video art, and involve audiences in thinking about the ways in which they craft and consume an environment increasingly encompassed in moving images.

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.

Structures

Building Ruins: RISD Alumni Show 2020

RISD Alumni Show 2020
Building Ruins

If we were to agree that our present is a mere left over of yesterday’s time-space and memory, we are merely engaged in building ruins. In the perpetual transformation of every now into a past, we produce in our present, the ruin of the future. Like sites under construction or swamps growing in decaying fields; building ruins characterize the simultaneity of creation and deterioration. Making and breaking is an integral part of growth. Much like child’s play, these opposing forces keep our curiosity in the world. It is through the process of doing and undoing that we find meaning within things around us and make them our own. Yet, trials, tests and experiments are often forgotten to end products. How do we write the biography of objects that are frozen into their state of becoming? Conversely, can objects find completion in their biographies?

In its constantly (d)evolving meanings, Building Ruins aims to generate an archive of objects and ideas by RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) practitioners that demonstrates the inherently interrogative nature of artistic endeavours. Through the archive, the curatorial ambition of the show is to present enquiries embedded within the practices of RISD alumni in India. It takes a closer look at their investment in the range of materials, techniques and processes that they constantly engage within their everyday. Building Ruins offers the possibility of exploring the play between the complete and the incomplete, permanent and impermanent, assembly and dismantling, fragments and wholes or even preservation and decay. The project inevitably demands a fragile tracing of a past into the present, yet maintaining its interpretive dimension for the future, invoked in its precautionary reading that too much building might lead to destruction.

Expanding on the notion of pure art, the project has consciously chosen a multidisciplinary approach that gathers not only artists, but also architects, graphic designers, textile designers, industrial designers who constantly engage and expand the boundaries of artistic thinking. This is uniquely enabled and evident in the RISD approach, where strict distinction between art and design is constantly challenged, blurred and redefined. Secondly, the exhibition stages novel experiments from unseen young designers alongside established practitioners of art and design. Not only does the show foreground absolutely new names in art, it also offers an opportunity for different generations of art practitioners to share values that still remain relevant and concerning to their practices. It promotes cross-pollination of ideas, knowledge and skills thereby promoting future collaborations and intellectual exchange. Lastly, the exhibition introduces design as an important function of art – one that cannot be separated while thinking of everyday environments. Thus, it demonstrates the promise of making our functional environments more artful.

Through a carefully crafted selection of ideas and responses to the curatorial theme of Building Ruins, the exhibition shall showcase about 20-25 works including (and expanding the limits of) paintings, photographs, books, installations, objects of art or designed artefacts, as well as ideas about living and environment. The curation, in its display, shall emphasize that art and design hold power to infuse meaning into otherwise mundane spaces. This shall be achieved through a careful interplay between objects within the exhibition, as well as the way in which they interact with the chosen spatial setting. In bringing together these fragments from art and design, the spatial design shall thus provoke the viewer to delve deeper into the potential of building ruins. The exhibition asserts the interdependence as well as the centrality of art and design in our everyday lives.


Anuj Daga
Curator

Listening to Lata

Some of my friends vehemently argue that Lata Mangeshkar became popular only because of the volume of songs that she got to sing. And ofcourse, there must be many, and even legitimate accounts of how she must have monopolised the music market. The more irritating problem to me however, is when people begin to judge someone (as populist) based on whom (here Lata) we listen to. Now, many know that I am into music, that I have learnt it, and also that I can reasonably sing well. When I listen to songs, I mostly listen to them very intently and carefully. Some performances of Lata (along with many others) have left me stunned of her acumen. The effortless manner in which she is able to glide through musical notes, the clever ways in which she plays with the beats, her ingenuity in taking aalaps - sometimes devised on her own that have become the signature of so many songs - are all admirable qualities. All of this, at a time when we didnot have technology where music can be punched, tone can be autocorrected or music and singing is recorded separately.

I often engage myself with covers of songs I like. These are mostly by Lata or Asha, or such other singers from their generation. Mostly, these are to understand the true potentials of an average singer. One often is able to notice in these renditions, the actual limitations one faces - because often, these covers are recorded using very low end, home bound technology. The appreciation of their original singers thus takes full meaning for one realises they were able to do much more in the limited technology back in the day. Further, these are moments which make you realise why precisely you like a particular rendition. I also listen to the male versions of Lata songs that I often end up disliking. (not giving a list here).

By and large, the argument is that we are socially conditioned to listen to Lata Mangeshkar. The questions that must be raised then are as follows: When people go to listen to Lata/Asha/Rafi songs in contemporary concerts, do they listen to the original, or do they listen to a version of the original? Having attend several of such concerts, where halls are full, it is obvious that audiences consume a mere second-hand version of the song, often imitating the voice. What aspect, in such a situation gets consumed? Do the listeners imagine the original Lata singing? Or are they appreciating the reproduction of the songs one has heard through the performer at hand? We come to consider here, that the listener, necessarily listening to the contemporary performer, takes pleasures in the nuances that he/she has registered in his/her own listening of the song - moments through which they make a mental map, or a diagram of the song, or more accurately, a diagram of pleasure within the object of music. These diagrams are difficult to challenge by contemporary musicians.

The shift of music register, or listening practice, from melody to voice texture took place only after 90s, when new assertions through global capital were enabled in India. People began to identify themselves in these new kinds of voice cultures, that shaped new listening cultures. Many old Hindi  songs where dubbed into remixes by newer singers, many of which were not successful. One can see how easily they lose listenership over the original counterparts. Voice casting almost overshadowded any need for melody, with the extended technological aid of autotune and electronic voices. Thus, music could virtually be produced without the need for singers. The first decade of the millennium saw a range of voice casting that created a new value for types of sounds, not necessarily melodies. Yet, these were all more often than not, easily forgotten. I would go on to say that post 1990s, music in Hindi Film Industry also was readjusting to the new instruments and recording techniques that were acquired from the west. One observes that the industry takes time to settle into the earlier melody-oriented music-making in the country. Thus we have very crude experimental music productions, even at the cost of perverse lyrics sometimes.

Even in times such as these, people find themselves going back to the older melodies sung in the simplicity of musical score in the early 60s-90s. In my opinion, one cannot simply relegate this music-listening as a populist act of consumption. And while one listens to Lata, one is equally sensitive of all the developments in music (atleast in the Hindi Film industry). Could then, the recent fetish for introducing and consuming new textures of voices, infact, be considered populist? I have been thinking about what critical frames would one consider in evaluating or appreciating music in the context of listening to songs produced in the Hindi Film industry. A friend recently pointed to me a music analyst who performs across stage shows. It's time I turn back to her and hunt this person down!

Wadiyar Centre for Architecture