Gyan Panchal / Against the Threshold

published in Art India, April 2018. Volume 22 Issue 1

Object Lessons

Gyan Panchal’s spare works explore the scope of sculpting – its nature, culture and limits. Anuj Daga is intrigued by the show.

Through which art-related category should one begin to understand Gyan Panchal’s works, presented at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 31st of January and the 3rd of March? One enters the gallery to not find any announcement or note. Objects lie discreetly in a state of disorder. Sticking, jutting, leaning, clinging, hanging from different surfaces of the gallery interior, they create an estranged setting. Panchal arrests these objects within carefully chosen moments in their respective ongoing lifetimes. They don’t appear to be too crafted, neither are they absolutely untouched by the artist. Are these found objects? Are these staged? Are these created? Are these borrowed? While they may be all of the above, the effortless art pieces at once make one reconsider the agency of the artist in the creation of these works. How does the artist orchestrate these objects as art, or even as things worthy of contemplation?

Each work indexes an action which is echoed in the titles. Works like beating or leaving transport the viewer’s gaze beyond their physicality into the space of ideas and acts that they embody. Alternatively, human actions acquire a shape in these objects. This is quite evident in the screen-printed wrapping plastic or the aluminum thali pressed along its rim. The flattened vests, the folds of which are resin-pressed and sandwiched between mosquito nets or the crafted theatre mask pressed against the raw slice of a walnut tree bark, make us attentive to the journey of the very materials that make up the works. The stained boiler suit hung upside-down over the sanded bucket peels on the floor begins to reveal untold and overlooked narratives about labour.

One of the consistent inquiries evident in the works of Panchal is about the nature of sculpture itself. In this regard, Heidegger’s meditation on what constitutes sculpture may be quite useful. In the essay Art and Space, the German philosopher proposes that the sculpted body, in fact, brings forth the type of space that it configures around itself. In other words, it delineates ‘emptiness’, in turn, defining spatiality itself. In blurring the space within which, as Heidegger points out, “the sculptured structure can be met as an object present-at-hand”, Panchal generates the possibility of it being re-imagined. This blurring can be physically observed in the (dis)play of artworks as painterly objects; and conceptually, in the creation of a space of ideas that surround these and alter the gaze through which the objectivity of the object is transcended. Panchal frees the sculptural object from purely aesthetic frames to address the discipline of sculpture. In the process, he opens up in-between spaces where several ideas of body, practice, art, society and knowledge can be tested. In assuming the position of the viewer across this transitory space, the show may rightfully be understood, in the spirit of its title, as being against the threshold.

Hetain Patel / at Chatterjee & Lal

published in Art India, April 2018, Volume 22 Issue 1

Dance of Life

Hetain Patel’s video installations provoke Anuj Daga to think about performative worlds and their complex anxieties.


One notices the laborious pace of Hetain Patel’s quasi-photographic video work The Jump exhibited at Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal from February the 1st to March the 10th. Dressed as Spiderman, Patel stages a scene from the Hollywood film – he leaps like the superhero in his grandmother’s house as family members watch by in amazement. In the video of the jump stretched to about six minutes, projected in two settings back to back – one in the living room and the other against a neutral background – the act sets a strange dialogue between the wondrous and the absurd. As the viewer shuttles between two staged and carefully overlapping slow-motion videos installed back to back, the referentiality of the supernatural and the domestic begin to interchange. It is in the constructed lapse of time that one comes to terms with the spectacle of mundaneness as well as the ludicrousness of the spectacle.

Patel is a UK-based artist of Indian origin and his works explore these two worlds in close contact with each other. These works were recently also shown at Manchester Art Gallery. In a well-crafted performance that takes place between two individuals before their marriage alliance, Patel proposes a setting in which personal relationships get forged and the dance of life gets underway. Presented in order to question the boundaries of rituals, race, class, physical access and language, Don’t Look at the Finger opens up ways where bodies communicate and connect beyond words.

If only the story had not resolved itself neatly towards the end, it would have left the viewer moved and intrigued by its cinematic setting, pace and choreography. Patel makes the film accessible but also inaccessible – moves and gestures do not always add up predictably. Patel’s strategic experiment with narrative refers to Hollywood and some of its tropes but also destabilizes our expectations from time to time.

A Pritzker for India

Many think it's too late. Many also feel that the committee almost missed the opportunity of felicitating Charles Correa. And given the fact that both these architects - Charles Correa and B V Doshi have served the Pritzker committee for much time, it's hardly possible that they are unaware of their works, or their contribution. Much of the West, especially America remains obvilious of the architects from the South Asian subcontinent. When I was studying at Yale, many of my colleagues or professors had never heard of Charles Correa (who has his buildings in MIT campus in Boston, as well as in the city of New York). I wouldn't expect them to even know of B V Doshi either. India has, after all, never remained an interesting place to study contemporary architecture for the West. Rather, unfortunately, it still remains the land of the exotica - of "maharajas, elephants and snake-charmers" - as they popularly say. The West has always valued India merely for its rich past. My essay has this binary in the head, because it is indeed the way in which the West has categorically overlooked South Asia in both -  historical or modern architectural scholarship.

I have plenty of anecdotes to prove the above slippage. I rather not get into it. Meanwhile, we all in India (must) agree that the Pritzker came to Doshi rather late. He's almost 90 years old, has not been actively building over the last decade, and has contributed significantly to the architectural discourse of India over the last 50 years. How do we reconcile this delay then? Doshi, as much as Correa, has always been a revered architect in India, and it would be incorrect to consider the Pritzker as a validation of his contribution. Infact, architects from the eastern "developing" countries have become Pritzker winners only in the recent past. Wang Shu was the first architect from China in the East to win a Pritzker in 2012, and now Doshi. For long, it has been the Aga Khan award that has held high regard in this region, one whose winners have maintained a low key, sustainable, egalitarian and humane architecture rather than the flamboyant, formalistic and high tech approach to buildings. It has been observed rightly, somewhere, that we see a trend in the Pritzker awards towards valuing a more humane Architecture in recent past. But is this "human" turn a mere tactic in foraying a more subtextual geopolitical move?

Let us consider; if we may; the possibility of Doshi designing buildings outside India after his Pritzker status. Will the coming home of Pritzker bring Indian architects any desirability or attention in contributing to the world Architecture scene? At the most, like my colleague Prasad (Shetty) said over a conversation, an Indian Architect would be invited merely to build an Indian or Indian-looking building (embassies, Indian international centres, etc.) outside India. Never shall Indian architects have as much value as our longing for other Pritzker winners like Maki or Zaha (or even starchitects like Holl) would, to come and design for us. Largely, we have still remained underconfident and direction-seeking followers of the West. Our craving for validation from the West is undeniable. Yet, I don't disregard their superiority, for they have invested infrastructures and systems towards architectural scholarship and research. But how can we claim these for ourselves? In much regard, Doshi's constant recollection of Corbusier and the rhetoric of the "Indian" in his post-Pritzker acknowledgements almost works against claiming confidence in our contemporary modes of thought. We have forever been stuck in the identity question, to an extent that we seem to imagine ourselves incapable of articulating a world outside our own. 

But supposedly, these are "Indian" values - precisely those that make us exotic and traditional. We can continue to celebrate these as the Pritzker finds place within India. The ideas of "modern", "Contemporary", "traditional" and so on require new articulation in our part of the world, specifically if we must come to value the architecture we produce. Such a revised framework for above terms is essential because we have not invested in institutions like museums or archives through which we can really assert a progression in thought. It is true that much of what we produce today is borrowed from floating imagery. But could we perhaps initiate a dialogue on the productive process (and even the creative effort) of constant hybridization that we constantly demonstrate in our built environment? Where else would you find so much experimentation? My claim may sound a bit shallow, but we do hope that in his acceptance speech, Mr. Doshi will lead us into a world where we come to sharply interrogate the existing notions of the above instrumental terms such as the "contemporary" or the "traditional" - amply explicated in his own work. It is thus, we may begin to claim some world architectural ground for ourselves.

MMRDA Entry Register

If you look closely, you will understand the inventiveness of this book. Expand the image and look at the first and last columns.

The above idea was put in place by the security staff of MMRDA (new block) so as to avoid the constant turning of the book in 180 degrees for taking details of the visitors.

Visitors notebooks have become a common place after the millennium in most public places as well as private housing complexes in cities of India, particularly Mumbai, as a manner of keeping tab on anyone who enters within their premises. Security guards are required to take the details of visitors that include their names, addresses, contact details and signatures. The entire affair is quite strange for over years, the act has almost become perfunctory. Both parties - the guard as well as the visitor is casual about the register, seen in the material condition of the book and the instruments (pen). No one knows who finally checks this data, and when? What happens of these countless pages of information at the end of the book? If one sits with these registers after their completion, they could provide us an interesting geography of visitors to a single place - the flows of people and objects precisely.

This is indeed a valuable cultural product - one that indexes the manifest of (in)securities arising due to certain events in a certain time in history in urban areas, taking a unique form along with its assisting infrastructure of security scanners (in public places) and acts of body-frisking!

In an age where rubberband and paperclip are personalising the object of a note book, how does one think of book as a communal entity within which several people write at once? In the above case, for example, the book is filled in by numerous individuals, from different directions and multiple handwritings. It is these engagements in space and time that give the book its ultimate form. The above example is exceptional as it helps opening up so many dimensions of use, regulation, aesthetic, record keeping, sharing, space - and so on. The construction of the register is simultaneously regarded and disregarded. 

What is a home?

I realised today how I have come to reserve my entire life to my bag pack that I carry everyday, everywhere, most of the times. My bag has the ingredients that make my world. It contains my laptop, its related accessories, a little stationery pouch, some note books to write, basic amenities like my medicines, cards, keys, etc. One section of my bag is merely reserved for lunch boxes that my mother prepares for my day. On some days, that section remains empty. The other things I need are stuffed in my pockets - my vollet, kerchief, and mobile. What else do I need over the day? Practically nothing. I can perhaps live by this set of things.

As I come back from work, I recluse into my room. Still in my own virtual world of people and material accessed through my mobile or laptop, I don't feel the need to make any contact to the physical reality of my home. i exhaust myself of this virtual Life and eventually go to sleep. Nothing more. Nothing less. This has been my everyday over the last four years. 

The place where I stay - my parent's place - is hardly a true reflection of me - in any way. I store my parapharnelia there - the objects that I have created over my lifetime, and the objects that I have meaningfully collected over the thirty two years of my life. Those remain closed in boxes, baggages or cabinets. They come out when I am digging into memories of my own. My surrounding physical space - my room - is not me. I cannot claim ownership over anything that's built in this house. I don't live by my rules here. These rules are those of my parents. What time to get up, to eat, to behave - literally everything. I am a constructed body in my house. A body that conveniences my parents' existence. I do not write this with any ill feeling. I write this towards the understanding of what we come to be. How we come to become what we do. I write this to suggest that human condition which we perhaps try to escape while still being within it.

And here my wise, bold friends would suggest me to snap out in order to find a space of my own...a space that can become the physical expression of my psychological inner being. And to that, it takes so much mental effort, for I will need to fight the cultural codes that make up the social structure here. I have tried it in the past. It's easy to think of living alone by yourself, however, it lands you then into a strange circle of loneliness...slowly making you  into an  island. To make one's own microcosm against the expectational environment of those closest to you must require some amount of courage and clarity. I am not sure if I have it yet.

But we all live in these weird in-between environments of the negotiated self. Some of us realize and stay back to observe. Some of us act to experiment, exercise and experience that (desired) change. I meant to also suggest how the mind thinks within certain frameworks in such places like an others' home. A house that you have grown up in but is no longer yours. A house which makes you feel an other even if it accommodated your growing body. A space that changes its meaning with your own inner self realization. A place which tells a story that shall no longer represent that way in which you would want yourself to be identified. A house that no longer reflects the values that you have come to live your own life by. What kind of expressions do these homes become then - discordant, disconnected, strange environments that have mashed up their expressions into diverse ideologies that remain insular to each other. What heterotopias are these?

I am able to write this post from home because I am completely alone today - and I do not have the pressure to behave in any particular way, or abide by a time schedule (even at home). And this is not to say that there's a fixed time schedule to my life. But we all know that domestic life is that of a routine which is set by hundreds of other parameters. In the social context we live in here, it will be the morning chores that have to be attuned to the maids, the sweepers, the news paper wallahs, the hundred incidental things that keep your house going! These are needlessly further entangled into rules that every household sets for itself. And your life ends up getting inscribed in these impositions leaving you with no time to get deeper into your thought pools.

How does home happen? When does it happen? A home will also not happen being alone. And a home with people will always be these negotiations. How does one reconcile? How does one be?