Young Subcontinent 2017 / Goa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaushik Saha at Gallery Mirchandani+Steinrucke

Tyres, Nails and Nozzles

published in Art India, January 2018

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

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

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Stained Geographies / Tarq

Access Catalogue Essay by clicking here
Many thanks to Saju Kunhan and Hena Kapadia for the wonderful opportunity!

Sumedh Rajendran's Work at Sakshi Gallery

Objects and their Alternative Biographies
published in Art India, Jan 2018

Everyday domestic furniture is liberated from its commoditized entrapment in Sumedh Rajendran’s Water without Memory at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, from the 12th of October to the 8th of November. Doors, tables, chairs and grills take an anthropomorphic turn in Rajendran’s re-articulation as they draw inspiration from human gestures. Objects turn, melt, fold and animate themselves as if becoming conscious of their selves. Are they addressing their ontological futures, you wonder? Rajendran’s furniture pieces remind you of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s invocation, “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” His works highlight the phenomenological by challenging our structures of experience and consciousness about everyday objects.

The contemporary urban environment is contested with constant redevelopments, slum erasures and demolitions; the artworks impress themselves upon the viewer as ‘leftovers’ of dilapidated buildings. Are these objects folding themselves in response to the harsh processes and injuries of urban transformation or do they awaken to bend within new outlines in order to reconfigure time and space? Rajendran’s artworks rethink the Cartesian utilitarianism imposed on everyday objects allowing them to write their own alternative biographies. In doing so, they provoke the viewer to reconsider her own relationship with domestic paraphernalia and the way in which it moulds and choreographs our bodies and spaces.

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Notes from Gubbi at SEA

In places like Germany, people are trying to find new ways of bringing land out from the developer's purview. Different ways of land pooling have been mobilized. Although most people in Germany dont live with the hope of owning land or property all over their lifetime. Unlike this, in India, we have a notion of owning something over your lifetime, this is also because there is no other form of social security.
Discussed Chitra Vishwanath and Sanjay Prakash

What are then, the different ways in which social security can be thought of?
asks CEPT Dean

What are the different ways in which the land over the road can be occupied?
asks founder of Good Earth

How can the structure of market and policies be changed by architects?
asks Himanshu Burte

The housing question has been hijacked by the question of affordability. A variety of conditions that are becoming context for housing, e.g. - the IT companies coming and going bringing specific people in the city, two friends coming together in a city - these are not often considered by architects, whereas the market has responded to it in different ways. Where do we thus reorient the focus of housing then?
articulated Prasad Shetty