Shaheen Merali, The Long Breath

Shaheen Merali

If you cannot put into words what you feel or believe, if you cannot, at the same time, contain what you know about the world, its spatiality or how the whole effects your day to day - then what do you do?

Do you seek the meditative possibilities of silence or gradually stage the possibilities beyond the unsayable?

For many of such a disposition, the possible evolves in encroaching forms, bearing the marks of excavation from untamed imaginations. The results may be described as poetic or paradoxical, solutions, changes or modifications that persuade us to alter the passage of our universe. The much quoted opening line of the profound novel, Metamorphoses by Franz Kafka, is an important example: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” A certain epistemological license further authorised the contemporary Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, to write his metaphysical mind-bender, Kafka on the Shore.

In both novels the tools and means to make apparent were forged innately in the visual; an expanded visual which no longer remains contained in traditional categories of notations that separate the written, the choreographed or the painted. Herein the processes bear witness to the specters of thinking.

The process of making from the intangible, the intransient, the untranslatable, and even the impalpable, results in this form of visualisation. The residual material often forms mental images that help us grasp the frail, visual perceptions from which they emerge in the first place. Not all is possible, but aspects of the visual can sometimes be made more comprehensive during the creative process.

For those able to communicate through such fleeting moments of lucidity, then, what is represented is neither the internal nor the external landscape but a potent mixture of emancipated memory, bridging immense complexities of the imagined as well as the emotional. In forging creatively, visualisations supersede fictionalisation or narratives. In many ways what emerges are sensitive accounts, daring juxtapositioning and dark subversions as a form of expression.

The narration continues, taking its emphases from the visual rather than from an inscribed or articulated transmission. We are, after all, born with the eyes that we die with as all other organs grow and constantly transform from the time of our birth.

For the eternal archivist, Peter Putz, the visual has become a daily practice of recording, organising the recorded and reiterating its place in an ever-increasing composite graphic. This solitary effort has engaged his artistic faith, constructing a bewildering record from the mundane to the extraordinary that crisscrosses his life path.

His lifework, The Eternal Archives, in many ways parallels the release of archived materials by institutions, as in the recent case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, releasing 400,000 images online for non-commercial use or the newsreel archive, British Pathé, uploading its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to its YouTube channel. Putz’s Eternal Archives release and sporadically emit, in the form of booklets, publications, films and videos as well as photographic works, for a public which is never sure of its ambition or how its contents are to be managed as it circulates in the field between documentary and fine art photography, diaries and voyeurism.

The Eternal Archives are a turbulent entity, for they never sit entirely comfortably, ensuring them a cult status in these remarkable times, where, in a click or at a moment’s command, a vast amount is arranged before us by search engines, limiting our horizons by dictating our visual range.

Instagrammed, pininterested, downloaded, usb(ed), Picasa(ed), the list is immense and all these have pervasive rules and philosophies that dictate the way we read the entire visual library that they supply. These rules are often based on security or, erstwhile, on how subjects inhabit truth or imply power over the body or society. Truths create a pool of knowledge in these zones of contact, and we, as viewers, become virtual subjects of visual lands, possessed by all the experiences that we share, becoming familiar with what is offered as much as by what is repudiated. Irrational laws, of what can and cannot be presented in its epistemological limit, heavily influence Facebook as an archive.

In drawing on these conceptual frameworks of the imaginative and the lived realities as a holistic way to encapsulate the world, Putz manages to create his Eternal Archives from daily recordings and frequent sorties, in combination with accidental and estranged encounters. The eternal becomes the entirety of his ability to reconstitute the recorded in these formulaic “pages“. “Pages“ that often contain four to five images from a constituted situation can range from a studio visit to a visit to a florist or, further afield, studies as a tourist. In being placed within a ”page” the images act as a set of hesitative notations for a larger body of images, images that embody both spatial and geographical temporalities but, most importantly, speak volumes about the artist’s inquisitiveness.

One cannot rely on these “pages“ to give us the full picture of those images that remain absent from or present in his private archive – The Eternal Archives present a partially mediated picture. This selective archive is the process through which Putz visualises the whole, the world and his place within it – it is both the taste and the sum of the culled and the framed. Putz has been successful in continually asserting this visualisation by producing both larger format books and smaller edition supplements that testify to his notion of the construct of the eternal. There is no seeming end to his capturing the world around him in daily recordings with his lens-based frolics. The eternal remains to be added to on a daily basis, supplemented by further roving and often-repetitive explorations of the found, confounding the relation to the already archived.

It is both a quest and a journey, which Putz takes with a joy and passion that permeate all the pages, both challenging and giving testimony to the desire to create as Kafka and Murakami have done, the meandering mind making from the mundane a statement of living and thinking in the dark edges of his digital trace.

As Leslie Jamison recently said, “…accumulation, juxtaposition, the organizing possibilities of metaphor. These techniques are ways in which the essay has always linked the private confessional to the communal…”1)

1) Leslie Jamison, ”What Should an Essay Do? Two new collections reinvent the form“, July 8, 2013 http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113737/solnit-faraway-nearby-andorange-running-your-life

Shaheen Merali is curator and writer, currently based in London. Previously, he was Head of Exhibitions, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003-2008) where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by key publications, including The Black Atlantic; Dreams and Trauma – Moving images and the Promised Lands and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation. Merali was the co-curator of the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2006).

Upon leaving Germany he curated many exhibitions in India and Iran and then embarked upon a period of extensive research and consultation on the conservation and production of a major exhibition of the International Collection of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata (2010- 2012). His recent exhibitions include Refractions, Moving Images on Palestine, P21 Gallery, London; When Violence becomes Decadent, ACC Galerie, Weimar; Speaking from the Heart, Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam; (After) Love at Last Sight / Nezeket Ekici Retrospective, PiArtworks , London and Fragile Hands, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Merali has written catalogue essays on Agathe de Bailliencourt, Jitish Kallat, Sara Rahbar, TV Santhosh, Cai Yuan and JJ Xi (Madforeal) amongst others.

www.shaheenmerali.com

Peter Putz DAS EWIGE ARCHIV

The Eternal Archives · ∞ New Stuff

RITTER 248 Seiten · pages, deutsch · english Hardcover, Schutzumschlag · dust jacket Ritterverlag, Wien · Klagenfurt, 2014 www.ritterbooks.com 100 Tableaus: Peter Putz 7 Essays: Shawn Bryan, Gottfried Fliedl Ingram Hartinger, Elke Krasny Shaheen Merali, Peter Putz Johanna Rachinger Extras: Matthias Marx, Johann Promberger Karl A. Putz