Pratap Morey at Tarq

measure | decipher
A Review

Mashed-up images of development trapped within webs of urban visions define geographies of Pratap Morey’s perspectival landscapes. Morey assumes the dual role of an architect and a surgeon in crafting the tumultuous landscape of Mumbai. He demonstrates in his works the nature in which erasure of old urban fabrics is brought about by simultaneous processes of imagination and operation - an imagination of the “clean” and “beautiful” often projected through perspectival visionary drawings by architects and developers on one hand, and the surgical “removal” of the old & “resurfacing” it by the new built form on the other. In doing so, the pinched protruding beast-like building forms on the flatly imagined cityscape almost announce an organized war, bulldozing and consuming the older neighbourhoods.

The tension between the old and the new is primary to all of Morey’s works. Metamorphosed photographs of emerging buildings seem to engulf the fragile outlined memories of older environments. In another series, a web of perspective fabric entraps hallucinations of perpetual construction activity. In yet another, scaffolds, reinforcements, unfinished framed structures inscribed within the ordered perspective create a fractal-like space, at once lending the ungraspable process a measurable dimension. Such overlaps reorient the coordinates of former living conditions.

One particular image within the polyptych, ‘Superimpose V’, is extremely poignant – it shows the outline of a man seated in his older space overlapped over an unfinished metamorphosed building skin. Within the logic of artist’s current work, the viewer is compelled to read the narrative of the replacement of the older domestic setting by new standardized spatial products. However, on another view, the outlined man seems to be trapped within the dilemma of the old and the new, literally as if the building-skin was a cage. Further, the man could also be working out his wilful transition into the new environment. It is the ‘wilful’ that finds little place within the heuristics of Morey’s works. The city seems to be an imposition within the antithetic vocabulary of black & white, order & disorder, drawing (unfinished) & photographs (finished), clean & busy, or on the other hand then & now, before & after. Narratives of several lives that inhabit the in between space of aspiration, creation and even appropriation of the ‘new’ and ways in which the city gets owned yet again shall lead to the loosening of Morey’s perspectives, perhaps resulting into an abstract sensuous medieval cartography. 

Landscape and the City

Landscape and the City
18^th December 2015

Concept Note

It may not be incorrect to say that all cities came to inhabit a landscape – a setting that was a given, a space that was to be tamed and a resource that was negotiated for productive purposes. The historical response of cities to their natural settings has undergone many shifts – influenced by the evolving social, political and economic forces. The relationship of a modern city (as a phenomenon) with (its) landscape is worth a close examination. Modern processes lent cities the confidence to reorient the course of nature and landscape. These “natural settings” were thought of as entities that could be reconfigured within the imposed logic of the city. Thus, cutting off hills, redirecting rivers, reclaiming waters, erasing forests, altering terrains and reimagining geography was merely an exercise in the process of city building. These aggressive moves were always looked upon as permanent solutions to immediate crisis.

Landscape’s centrality to growing urbanity has come to be realized and emphasized only in the recent past, triggered by the dissatisfaction in the environmental leveling that urban environment has attained with respect to its natural resources. In the case of Mumbai, this new leveling is seen in several scenarios – whether it be the leopards invading and attacking human settlements, the flooding of the city in 2005 rains, the changing patterns of fishing along the coasts, etc. It is clear that these events have brought to the forefront, time and again our carefree handling of the urban natural settings. We are at a juncture where several physical alterations are being imagined for Mumbai: the proposal of coastal road, the redevelopment of the Eastern waterfront to name a few. The discomfort with the present “equilibrium” has brought us to critically consider these new imaginations, this time, with landscape as priority.

The recent Chennai floods, or the not-so-old Sabarmati overflow hint to us that more or less, every city is now facing an environmental crisis that is embedded in the question of how cities have engaged with their landscapes. In other words, it may be possible to find some directions to reimagining urban life in considering questions interposed within the theme of “Landscape and the City”. This seminar aims to address the mediation of landscape by cities, and vice versa. In this exchange, we aim to contemplate what are the channels through which a landscape practice can be streamlined within city processes? What are the attitudes through which issues of the city can be approached through a landscape perspective? Further, how do we find methods in which such attitudes can be instilled within our everyday living? Through the individual expertise of our panelists, and their past engagements, we aim to gain an understanding about what challenges lie ahead of us if landscape was to become the primary framework through which we intervene within our cities.

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This post shall be detailed soon over later posts.

Poster Design: Anuj Daga

Shilpa Gupta & the Roundness of her works

presented at Colloquies, Art India
for Abhay Sardesai's curatorial theme
This city reminds me of another

Most of Shilpa’s works turn semiotic relationships imagined in objects upside down. The spinning doors never close, they perpetually keep opening. The microphone itself doesn’t speak much, but almost completes its story through the photograph. The electronic LED signage equivocally announces one’s east as another’s west. The fragmented queues queued together into a reel merely combine many people. The safety airplane straps don’t tie one down, they bind themselves into a ball that may freely roll on. This conceptual and often formally observed circularity that Shilpa employs in her works essentially emphasizes her dialectical method. It allows us, rather, pushes us to turn the questions back to the objects (and their materiality) that they would otherwise pose us.

The everyday of a city is phenomenologically experienced in its roundness. In its repetition, revolve and regularity, the urban environment embroils us within a structure of the round. (To be sure,) did I not do today, what I exactly did yesterday? Woke up by the alarm, swung the door and stepped out, queued up before the travel, walked the same journey along the shop-lines…and all again in reverse until I am back home? Shilpa’s works in fact seem to question this ritualistic roundness of city life by ceasing the objects from encrypting their performances within our bodies and lives. In her reconfigurations, she challenges the memories through which objects we encounter regularly end up driving us.

It is perhaps in this physical winding and the conceptual unwinding through which new spaces are perceived and habituated. The dialectical play constructed by these objects shift and slide us into multiple geographies, physical or mental, reminding us about our experiences in different places we may have been. While these phenomena and objects define the experience of most cities, the carefully configured rearrangements loop us into a process that triggers a comparison between one geography versus the other. It is through these instruments (apparatus) that one city reminds me of another.

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Shilpa's works:

http://www.shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/157/2652-1

http://shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/215/Untitled

http://www.shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/205/Untitled

http://www.shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/180/Untitled

http://www.shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/97/100-Queues

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Abhay Sardesai invited me to respond to Shilpa Gupta's work recently for an art event organized by Art India at Jindal Mansion. The program for the curatorial theme "This City Reminds me of Another" was jointly organized by the University of Warawick, UK and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. The event aimed to look at works of five different artists whose works intersects with the above theme. I was a respondent to contemporary Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta's work. Other artists amongst the presenters were Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel and Tushar Pandey. Hema Upadhyay who was also invited wasn't able to make it.

The event aimed to challenge the conventional setting of a panel discussion through which art often gets discussed. For yesterday's evening, Abhay interfused artists' works with poetries and structured responses. About two poetries and two respondents were put together with each artist's work. The respondents were from different backgrounds of art (Sahej Rahal), architecture (myself), anthropology (Rashmi Varma), literature (Brinda Bose), film (Anjali and Jayashankar Monteiro) and social sciences (Shekhar Krishnan). One got to listen to different views on the artist's works.

It was a treat, as always, to listen and observe the works of artists Sudhir Patwardhan and Gieve Patel, as much as Shilpa Gupta. Sudhir showed a series of paintings, and perhaps one of his new works trying to extract the idea of the "other" within the city. Showing his series of paintings on Ulhasnagar, he went on to say, "The city can surprise you in many ways". Showing images of everyday environments being taken over suddenly by new developments, the city brings to us a surprise. This change makes you experience otherness. Sudhir kept on bringing paralles betweenthe imagery of his work with different artists in other parts of the world. For example, his invocation of Edward Hopper's work, Canaletto "Grand Canal" in Venice, Andrea Mantegna - all attempted to reinforce the theme of the talk. The impressionistic frames of paintings made by him and the other artists pushed him to imagine that he was certainly thinking of other cities (through his experiences of images) while producing his own works. Sudhir's third proposition was that the city surprises you in "its projection of the future". All such aspects of change, surprise and projected imageries make us experience otherness within our own city. He said that the fear that this city (in which you live) could become another place, is another otherness that one experiences.

While Anjali and Jayshankar pointed out in their response that Sudhir's work is gentle and yet seen through a non-sentimental gaze and if one could propose that Sudhir is performing a "critical radiology" (Jayashankar's take through his knowledge of Sudhir as a doctor), Sahej brought out that there was no "cinematic time" in his images. It is that in-between time which most of us have seen the city in. It is the city which we all experience in between our commute, while traveling, moving. The light doesnot dramatize or change the space we see, rather places us within it in a critical way.

Gieve Patel presented his works exploring the "street as home". One of his works captured two men standing against a wall with a blue patch behind them. The patch, Gieve mentioned, was meant to show peeling paint. However, what he got interested in eventually is that the shape of the patch looked like a map. This juxtaposition of the two men against a map of "no-place" gave another dimension to the thematic of the evening. Gieve showed his famous "Letter back home" speaking of the labour from Andhra who during those days of the '80s would ask the educated to write  their stories to send back home. He ended with a beautiful story/painting of a man holding a peacock. The story goes that the peacock must have climbed down the Malabar Hill over the night and landed in an office lobby at Marine drive by the morning. When the keeper of the office opened the door, he was pleasantly surprised to see a peacock in the office. He immediately called up his boss to say "Sir, there is a peacock in our office!" The boss's response was much urgent. He directed him "Call the Times of India" - and so he followed. The Times of India published in 1960s, a black and white picture of the man holding a peacock in his office lobby standing against the sea framed by the large window (as directed by the boss over phone!). Gieve's painting is merely a colour rendering of this picture/story, a story, which Gieve thought, would probably never happen in the city again!

Shekhar Krishnan and Brinda Bose responded to Gieve's works in unique ways. Shekhar, in the spirit of Jayashankar's spirit called for Gieve's paintings to be medical/biological poetry (again invoking Gieve's profession as a doctor).

Shilpa showed a lot of works, many that I was aware of, but hadn't included in my short review. She informed how the period of her learning art, between 1992-97 was a contested time in the history of Mumbai city - with the communal riots and the ingress and foray of new ideas and technologies during the period when liberalization began to affect the city and its people. Such politically sensitive environment finds poignant expression in Shilpa's works that uses different media to bring out several layers of meanings. Shilpa however explains that the media she uses is not central to her works, rather, the content of what she wants to express or evoke, is. I must appeal that people must look up her work online to get a better understanding.

It was followed by my response already shared in the beginning above. Rashmi Varma graciously added to my response reinforcing some points, and reading out Walter Benjamin, a quote that befit her works quite well but I fail to remember!

The evening ended with Tushar Pandey's performance. He explained that in order to think through the theme "one city reminds me of another", the relationship with that "one city" was extremely important. While the thematic assumed that everyone would have that strong relationship, Pandey said that he was not able to have a consolidate relationship with any city. Thus his idea of the city, and hence the other, itself is fragmented. This threw a new light on the discussion, but also encapsulated the spirit of the times we do live in - a city which is increasingly becoming a no-place, a city that is losing its memories to "surprises" as Patwardhan brought out...

Untitled

I have been writing, just not on the blog. I have been noting in my notebooks, tonnes of notes from things I hear from colleagues, friends. I have been recording conversations - many that need to be transcribed. I have been drawing, ideas that can be hopefully executed. I have been photographing, images that need to be spoken about. I have been thinking, of themes that need to be elaborated. I have been documenting, projects that need to be curated and exhibited. I have been reading, works that need reflection. I have been listening, lectures that can be archived.

How, in the midst of so much activity can one find any time to put things down in coherent manner on a blog. This place requires serious updation with all of the above, and I just have to find a strategy to make it happen. Perhaps in the coming weeks, I could put together something that is worthwhile - something that I will like to come back to in future and read again, smile, and applaud myself! 

Traces from Romila Thapar's lecture on Secularism

Romila Thapar, eminent historian of India, was in Mumbai for a lecture this Monday where she spoke on secularism in India.

Following are traces from the lecture:
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Without secularism, people in India will have to imagine and identify themselves through religion, caste, class, language, etc., she began elaborating. These parameters will become primary in establishing one's identity.

At the outset, she went on to distinguish between the terms "secular", "secularism" and "secularisation". "Secular" is that which relates to the world that is distinct from the religious. "Secularism" demarcates that boundaries for the social institutions to exercise control over how people should live and conduct within a society. "Secularisation", finally, is the process by which a society recognises distinction. 

The observance of law is strengthened when people know its purpose. 

Religion had emerged as a social and personal need. This eventually became an organised instition. Thus it became important, and authoritarian. 

The control of religious institutions over the social, which secular wants to keep distinct.

Religion has its sanction from faith

Social laws are the spine of the society. They protect the rights to live. Education is one of the things which socializes a child into the society.

Civil law - how people conduct within the framework of rights and duties.
Social law - must prescribe the absolute minimum - things like standards of basic health and education. 

Secularism helps keep a negotiated distance between the religious and the social.

Religion should not dictate / prescribe the civil laws. Social essentially tries to entail the right to live.

Indian definition of secularism just talks about the "coexistence" of religion. however, secularism is not just that, said thapar.

"Is secularism a western concept?" some argue. But so are the ideas of nationhood, democracy, etc. Certainly, more contemporary ideas of liberalization are western imprints. 

Colonial views of indian religions have been almost  internalized today. These were constructed as monolithic projections of the hindu and the muslim nations - without registering the finer nuances within them. Not everyone within "hind" or the "muslim" behaves and believes in a singular ideology or manner. Evading the nuances,  the English made the two appear hostile to each other. They did this for they wanted to control. Such a move was clearly political. However, there have always been fights and aggressive negotiations between the two religions throughout history. this image was imprinted on india distancing the two religious. This was thus a colonial construct.

Hindu and muslim, both are not monolithic religious entities, they are themselves composed of different caste, class, and sects. The interaction between caste, sect and religion with the state was the way in which indian society moved forward. Sects allow the less orthodox to assimilate new ideas. They are not as rigid aand monolithic as religions. This allows, and is thus, fluid(ity)

All forms of arts literature, music, classical art forms were positively hybridized and even patronized by courts and sultans. This evidences the constant negotiations and dialogue between the two cultures.