Temple, Trichy

CARE College of Architecture, Trichy

Cheetah Camp

Cheetah Camp likes on the eastern most edge of the island of Mumbai, in Trombay. It was created in order to make space for the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) during 1976. It is said that the people of Janta Colony, who then occupied the present day site of BARC were evicted rapidly by a large police force. The last patch of Janta Colony remained within the BARC colony until 1980s, as one of the residents informed us. 

The Headmaster of the Cheetah Camp told us that the people who live in Cheetah Camp originally came as labourers from Kerala in the Docks of Mumbai in the south and used to stay lining up the streets off the dockyard. Eventually, they moved to the Janta Colony in Trombay.  Presently, about 84% of the people in Janta Colony are Muslims, 3% Christians and remaining are of different religions. The settlement is thus predominantly Muslim, and has grown densely over the years. The land has been made habitable by the sheer effort of the community. The name 'Cheetah' got associated with the camp due to its proximity to the military field nearby. 

The camp is organized through a network of wider streets and narrow lanes. The wider streets are used for vehicular movement and parking whereas the narrow lanes interconnect these. The houses are densely packed along these extremely narrow lanes. Some of these less-than-one-metre wide narrow lanes are lined on both sides with 100 houses on each side. 

Several local institutions have grown over the years in order to cater to the community. Earlier schooling happened in madrasas for the Islamic community children. However, as they grew, their absorption into the mainstream schools became difficult. Hence several municipal schools were started so that they could aid the transition of these kids within formal state educational machinery. 

These facilities are supported by various kinds of agencies including NGOs, community trusts, local politicians, government schemes and such other channels. The community is a closely knit social space. Over the years, the fabric has consolidated fairly, however, there are constant efforts in order to upgrade and add essential infrastructure within the community such as toilets, medical facilities, higher education schools, etc. 

Sedimented Topologies // Vinita Karim

an essay on the practice of (now) Dhaka based artist Vinita Karim

curated by Shristi Sainani

published by Gallerie Nvya, New Delhi

Sedimented Topologies
in the visual practice of Vinita Karim

by Anuj Daga

In ‘Invisible Cities’, one of Italo Calvino’s most celebrated novels, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo makes vivid to the aging Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan, the life as lived in the lands of his empire that he may no longer be able to physically experience. At the outset, Calvino disclaims that, "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." Polo goes on to narrate a post-factual account of fifty-five cities he has visited that, he reveals eventually, share features in common. My task here is to similarly sit by Karim’s artworks and closely observe the ideas hewn in the palimpsest of her landscapes. In other words, this essay tries to excavate the sedimented topologies in the works of Vinita Karim. Could Karim’s artistic practice be a visual allegory to Calvino’s storytelling technique in Invisible Cities?

Looking at Vinita Karim's visual works in succession is much like reading through the chapters of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the manner of the thematically organized city-titles in Calvino’s novel, Karim’s artworks are kaleidoscopic impressions of various urbanscapes that are created with paints and patches of embroidered fabric, on surfaces flat or spherical. More often than not, their geographies are characterised by an interaction of land and water within which different patterns of life settle in varied forms. Water bodies and landmasses get defined by each other and are sites of active inhabitation in Karim’s renderings – a fact that may be inferred even without the visible presence of a single human being. It is the assemblage of houses, ships, scaffolds, bridges and boats in their vibrant colours and eventful details that remain as key traces of thriving human activity. In the careful orchestration of these elements of inhabitation within her works, Karim mounts the architecture of her own topological manoeuvrings in every artistic iteration.

Karim’s orientation to space has been fundamentally informed through the constant crossover from city to city that happened over the decades by virtue of firstly, her father who kept relocating due to his work in the Indian Foreign Services, and later her partner whose work in tele-communications took them to places. From being born in Burma, schooled in Sudan, Kuwait and Pakistan, studying art (and business) in Stockholm and Sweden, and further traveling with her partner to Philippines, Egypt as well as India until settling in Dhaka in 2010, Karim’s life so far has been about perpetually making home in transition. How does one articulate a common language through which topological diversity of different lands may be hewn together? Further, what could we discern through the visual accounts that fold in the multiplicity of cultural landscapes in Karim’s artworks? Lastly, how does one read the inscription of “home” within visuals that themselves seem to index multiple locations?

In addressing the above questions, a conceptual opening of ‘sedimented topologies’ may serve helpful. In geology, sedimentation refers to matter that has been deposited by some natural process. It takes place when suspended particles settle within a fluid environment due to various forces acting upon them. On the other hand, in mathematics, topology (Greek for ‘place, location’) is concerned with those geometrical and physical properties that get preserved under continuous deformations such as stretching, twisting, crumpling or bending. The visual outputs of Karim’s practice are much like sedimented topologies, that attempt to preserve values of various geographies while in transition. The landscapes in her works are iterative acts of placemaking, where the heterogeneity of encountered landscapes is woven through the continuity of experience. In what follows, I will open up the mechanics of Karim’s artistic language.



Sedimented Topologies

Most of Karim’s works are carefully choregraphed assemblages of place and time. The artist intuitively employs the device of the cross-section that is frequently used in scientific processes to cut through something in a single plane. Such an action exposes to us the simultaneity of events that are visually organized in horizontal or vertical layers. For example, a cross section of the earth shall allow us to observe the different layers of soil deposits as they get placed one above another over time. A similar anatomical approach can be observed in Karim’s representation, where the canvas is visually stacked layer by layer vertically as well as in depth. The viewer’s gaze is grooved into the layers created within these multiple dimensions. In deploying such a visual language, the artist brings the compositional traditions of the East - particularly the Mughal miniatures constructed using flattened perspective technique or the deviating oblique planes of traditional Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings - in dialogue with the planar orthographic projections of the West.

The attributes indicated above can be demonstrated in considering several works across Karim’s career. For example, in her work ‘Offshore’ (2015), the canvas is vertically composed of the horizontal bands of earth, river, banks, city, mountains and the sky. In ‘Alizarin Sky’ (2015), rows of boats, series of bridges, flowing streams, elevated roads, a landscape of mountain crests, a distant cityscape and then the sky placed one above the other create a quiet night-scape. ‘Rhythm of the River’ (2018) yet again plays with horizontally floating masses of boats or lands that make each other within a large river along which an old settlement plays hide and seek between bridges and boulders – all occurring successively in a vertical axis. ‘The Magical Moon’ (2021) literally appears like the cross-section of a large ship that almost carries a city in its different tiers. A multitude of microcosms get created as well as framed within the outlines of the elements within Karim’s layered scenographies. They appear as sediments of time deposited over one another.

What could be the philosophical underpinnings of Karim’s expression and how do we come to experience it? Three specific visual tropes seem to set the coordinates through which the artist navigates her physical and metaphysical world. If the work of art is understood as a reflection of the artist’s inner reconciliation with the events of her life, then Karim’s expressions offer the promise of floating, bridging and dancing as the principal means of mediating a migratory life. These could be methods of meaning making through which the artist makes place amidst the uncertain waves of transition and transformation. Let me explicate upon these three meta-acts as extracted through her imageries:


a. Floating

Water remains one of the key elements in most of Karim’s paintings. Seas, streams, rivers and estuaries hold within them a constantly floating world – from fishes, to boats, to sails, to rocks, to cities and even islands if one may will. Large bodies of land become islands or archipelagos whereas cities seem to have settled over centuries by the water. Through a clever use of shapes, Karim is able to gesture to the many ecologies that thrive in and around water. In the end, water comes to frame the cities as in the eye-view of a distant bird. Swimming is a motif of placemaking in Karim’s world. It allows the translation of the factuality of constant movement into a spatial continuum. Much like migratory species that keep moving to the currents of climate, Karim’s geographical transitions find meaning thus into drifting drafts of time.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has used the metaphor of “flow” in order to explain the process of rapidly changing cultural landscapes in the era of new globalization, characterised by the intensified circulation of media, objects as well as individuals themselves. Implicated into this very phenomenon, Karim’s responses could be read as a practice of immersion, a deep dive into the interrogation of the politics of situatedness itself. These take deeper meaning when her paintings slide from the flatness of the canvas into the spherical surface of the fibre glass eggs. In her sculpture series, Karim coats an object – a symbolic shell contained by, and containing within it the fluid of life - with the very expression of flow. In doing so, the artist suspends the viewer in the soupy scales of the egg and the earth at once – orbs that keep their worlds stable while they float in water and air respectively.


b. Bridging

If floating displaces, bridging connects. Bridging is a constant act in Karim’s work. Long stretches of elevated bridges occur in many of her imageries suggesting crossing over, passing, transgressing borders, passing by, continuities between land to land, and even painting to painting. Bridges are not just physical devices to cross rivers or continents in Vinita Karim's work, rather they remain conceptual means of traversing time too. The sequence of arched bridges appear like film strips through which microcosms beyond are screened and revealed. The visual interplay between the background and the foreground of these bridges produces a pairing of the past and present into loops of time. The frames are spatio-temporal windows through which memories of the transforming cityscape dialogue with each other.

In 2010, when Karim shifted to Dhaka, she sought to incorporate local artisanal dimensions in her works. The aspect of embroidered patterns alongside acrylic paints has since then, remained an integral part in her canvases as an imprint of cultural collaboration. In Karim's works, the embroidered patches seamlessly blend into portions of painted canvas, yet producing their own topology of sorts. They visualise a mosaic of human settlement within the details of facades, fenestration and folds that shape the urban fabric. At other instances, they display floating life-forms within the fluid waterbodies. The stitching of embroidered portions within her paintings, one may argue, signifies the bridging of cultures, merging artistic forms, making place for cultural diversity and preserving heterogeneity. Further, the bridges propped up on semi-circular arches allude to the act of needlework itself - wherein one is able to imagine the work of city as a weave. Combining the mode as well as the material, the bridges come to sew a seamless landscape in Karim’s artworks.


c. Dancing

A carnivalesque energy grips the viewer in the colourful palettes of Karim’s compositions. Such a perpetual festivity is strategically orchestrated through a distinct use of colour and form. Within the overall mood of every canvas, the artist throws the viewer into a plethora of colours that converse playfully with each other. They appear as refracted landscapes in their fragmented topographies. Karim’s landscapes are not composed of hard straight lines, rather, they fold, bend, warp, deflect and deform gently moving up and down. It is these animated undulations between the crests and troughs of the mountains and waves that choreograph Karim’s urbanscapes – as if painted in the image of the gestures of a musical conductor.

The architecture of the scaffold frequently reappears in Karim’s works. Delicate dancing sticks hover over built forms and become frameworks for tents, pandals, drying or mounting stuff that sustains everyday life on the one hand, whereas they also take on structural forms of the jetties, decks, walkways, or even infrastructures for repair and renovation of settled urban fabrics. The standing and swaying of light infrastructures mounted onto these otherwise settled forms strike a lyrical chord to which we begin to dance in joy. They produce a gliding tension in the juxtaposition of the permanent with the temporary, the heavy with the light, in materiality as well as content – in effect producing a phenomenon of lively buoyancy – the ballet of the eye.


Floating, bridging and dancing is the process in which sedimented topologies of Karim’s artistic landscapes shape themselves. Following the above discussion, one is now compelled to wonder if the Mineral Series (2020-21) in which Vinita experiments with various pigments and minerals on canvases could be a material proof for such a conceptual proposition? In releasing the solidified rock-forms into her visual expressions, Karim presents to us an elaborate annotation underlying her extensive artistic practice. In studying these works, one finds crystallization of the elementary vocabulary as well as the grammar of the artist’s visual language.

Beyond material analysis however, could the three ideas also serve as poignant metaphors for a way of negotiating a transitory life, those that may be the quiet proposition of Karim’s art? Sitting by these artworks then may offer hope to the nomads who may never have the luxury of settling, or to the likes of Kublai Khan who may never have the chance to travel into the expanses of his entire empire. Karim’s paintings must be read as spatio-experiential maps, that offer comfort to both such minds. The artist has certainly covered as much as created a vast geography in the probability of finding a site for a home.



*****

images from Vinita's works in the archives of Gallery Art & Soul, Worli, Mumbai.

Working Notes

Rituals

Sometimes, life throws you in an unexpectedly beautiful spot - one that you secretly desire and deny at the same time. For some time now, I had been feeling the fatigue off the city (Mumbai). I kept thinking whether it is the time to take a vacation, or get out of the madness of the city. There was no situation to think of getting out because I was obligated to attend my terminally ill aunt who was in her deathbed at the hospital. There was a two week holiday, but i was thus tied to be there as physical support alongside my family. In the meantime, on the day of Diwali, we heard of the unexpected death of my eldest uncle in Bikaner. Diwali was anyway low-key this time given the condition of my aunt. We had not even lit up our balconies with the Chinese lights  like we always do. And this soft gloom turned full fledged with the arrival of this fatal news. While my entire family was hoping that my aunt would release herself soon, the news of my uncle's death - a reasonably peaceful one - shook everyone. 

My uncle was 82 (1941-2022) and lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan. He was the only one who stayed back with his family looking after our ancestral house while others, including my grandfather, migrated to Mumbai. He also felt comfortable to be in the Bikaner town for he was not ready to groove into the bustle of the city (of Mumbai) where his other four brothers moved. One moved to Kolkata, while another deceased. Of the seven brothers then, four lived in Mumbai and one in Bikaner. He was the eldest, simplest and the most silent. With little qualification for a formal job in the government sector, he would be supported by his brothers in Bombay. Thus, the responsibility of the final rites naturally came onto the next eldest one, who rushed to Bikaner on the immediate next day.

In the mean time my father decided that I could come here to be of some help - since it was also my holiday at work. I promptly agreed because there was nothing to really object to. I had also not been to Bikaner in the last eight years. There are no real occassions for me to come here otherwise. There began my journey to Bikaner. And to compound it - I was to immediately travel to Haridwar carrying the ashes of my uncle's cremated body to be immersed into the holy Ganges. So an added trip to Haridwar was already ticketed and planned. As soon as I arrived in Bikaner, I freshened up to leave for Haridwar.

The next day I was on the banks of Ganga - the mighty river. The bustling ghat with hordes of people. In full bustle I dipped myself in the river as a part of the ritual and then immersed the ashes. At the point - a strange feeling of the spiritual took over the scientific. All those narratives of the polluted river and these ideas of dirtiness seemed rather pithy. I was trying to tune myself to the belief of the journey that the soul seemingly takes after death and how one could make it seamless. I had to carry the ashes on my shoulder out of the cremation ground where they were stored, and make a call to the departed that we now take you to Haridwar - the gates to Lord Hari, that reach through the Ganges. 

In Haridwar, we met our family record-keepers - the pandaas - as they call them who maintain books on family lineages. These pandaas have a simple indexing system tracked via place, date, names and family linkages. Their records are the only proof for subsequent generations that some physical body whom we call our relatives existed, and travelled to the place to get themselves registered. We found the record of my uncle who visited the place in 1977 when he brought the ashes of his grandmother. The scribe continuing this practice today, was of my age, and made an updated account of the status of the extended family today.

We further proceeded to Ganga to perform the rituals. As I took a dip, my feet were probably in a bed of ash. The water level was very low since the dam gates were not opened. Hence, the river could not really take over my entire body. Yet as a part of the ritual, as I took a dip, it felt like I am offering myself to this cycle of birth and death that is controlled by a power unknown to us, a force much larger to whom we (must) submit without our ego. At the point, I felt of what it would be to become ash and float oneself in this river that has endlessly carried the lives of people after they have deceased for centuries together. 

These are the sands that become fertile beds for foods we cultivate further. These are the bones and marrows, the soils that enrich the deltas of some of the oldest civilization of humanity. These are the lands that produce the crops we consume eventually. Suddenly a feeling of being a product of a much larger cycle of nature occurred while I took two more dips in the low currents of Ganga that kept flowing without questioning. It is a conduit that carries civilizational memory. The immensity of this thought dawned on me in that moment as I saw hundreds of people performing the same ritual. Every clinical and scientific explanation of the river being polluted seemed so insignificant in that moment. 

Rituals, as much as they bring us to realise redundancy of cultural process, they also make us think of history and historical practice in awkward ways. We are told of doing certain things a certain way and often, we follow them without interrogating them much. When, later however, we ask for some discourse, people offer narratives that make it seem very soft and logical in that register of time. The intent of rituals is to preserve a certain form of humanism that existed in a non-scientific world - they offer ways of mediating aspects that are still not explained by science. For example the fundamental question of what after all, is life, and what happens to someone after they die? What force or energy keeps us alive, and what is really the place of humans in the larger energy system of the universe?

Older rituals asked for feeding different species and forms of life after someone has died. From the brahmins, to extended family, community, helpers, beggars, cows, dogs and or ants - all forms of life were to be offered gratitude. When seen thus, the ritual makes one more holistic towards the total system of nature that survives us through our life. These are social, cultural and physical networks within which human life nurtures its sustenance. Such feeding is the offering and closing of gratitude for one life, while also a way of seeding another. These are rather cyclic practices that celebrate circulation of energies while being immersed, yet removed from the everyday-ness of things. In these acts are reflections that people may dwell and absorb in their day to day relationships with other aspects that constitute their environment. 

All in all there are many such things I have come to reflect in the slowness of this unexpected excursion. I am still to spend a week here, and perhaps it is this pace, that the mind yearns from time to time - one that allows you to defamiliarise, deregulate and detox from the demands of industrial urbanity.

Hampi

Planning for Hampi trip a decade ago.

Notes from Tapan Mittal Deshpande.

Diwali 2022

The Art of Spatial Representation

The Art of Spatial Representation
by Anuj Daga and Prashant Prabhu
presented at the Nine Fish Art Gallery, Byculla
16th November 2022, for Art35 event 


The notion of "space" has been central to both; the discipline of art as well as architecture in equal measure. The creation of this framework of space is what essentially gives context and meaning to our material reality and built environment. Thus, the act of representation of this space is crucial in the way we come to perceive and thereby create our realities.

While Euclidean planar geometry in the west produced buildings such as the monumental Pyramids, Greek cultures introduced the principles of ideal proportions in the Parthenon. Artistic experiments in the perfection of perspective drawings during the Renaissance were reflected in the axial and symmetrical urban spaces whereas the development of Cartesian coordinate geometry resulted into the monotony of the modernist building blocks. Alongside in the East, the Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings beautifully interwove time and space into an indistinct continuum with their free form flattened and skewed perspectives while Chinese gardens seem to emerge from their own unique ways of oblique representations.

However in the present day, the predominant form of houses all over the globe appear to be homogeneous and cookie cutter representations of the “notion of a house”. Could this sameness around us be related to the way in which we have come to understand and visually represent space today? Through an overview of different visual traditions of spatial representation across time and cultures, this presentation/conversation attempts to lay out the shifts in conception and creation of the built environment.

How does the nature of representation of space affect the way in which we imagine and intervene within our creative practice? How can the existence of various artistic practices be crucial in order to interrogate the established norms through which architectural spaces get represented today? Conversely, how can artists employ techniques of spatial imagination within the conception/imagination of their own work? This presentation is an invitation to interrogate and rethink the modes and means of imagining spatial realities to locate contemporary practice in art and architecture.

Download Presentation here