PERSPECTIVE SHIFT www.ishitabiswas.tumblr.com
PERSPECTIVE SHIFT Art in Transit Ishita Biswas
About
Prior to entering the realm of Art and Design, I have been interested and involved in dialogues on the condition of life on earth. To further this interest, I pursued an academic training in Sociology. I experience an urge to express what bothers me about the functioning of society and curiosity to understand how a change can be initiated. With this urge, I chose the pathway of Visual Communication Design to develop a creative expression of my opinions. My primary interest lay in drawing and illustration. This led me to explore colour theory and acquire knowledge about it with a brief practice of painting. At this point in time, my illustrated narrative project, “Park & Pause�, played a crucial role in directing this interest towards Art. Thereafter, project Art in Transit served as a platform to further this interest and develop a process of my own and take myself seriously in practicing Art.
Preface
During my project “Park & Pause”, I began going out into public places and observing urban life through drawing. I would maintain a visual journal to pool these observations in order for a concept to emerge. Initially I tried to draw from topics from my knowledge of social theory in order to arrive at a concept. After struggling with this method, I decided to let my naturally emerging ideas guide me towards a final body of work. I attempted to illustrate a narrative that captures moments when people pause and park themselves to take a breather in our fast moving city life. When I began with Art in Transit, I was looking forward to ‘public art’ for the ease of attracting an audience to whom I could communicate my opinions on certain social issues. Since public art is more accessible in comparison to an artwork displayed in a gallery space, the idea of communicating my concerns easily to the masses appealed to me. I started with drawing in public spaces and engaging with communities through this process. This was with the intention of creating a public intervention as an output of this collected information. At this point my response to site was output oriented. There was an urge to create an immediate impact among the audience, and therefore the final output was of most value. Eventually, this burden started reducing with the transforming notion of an artist from being the saviour in a social phenomenon to
being an intervening participant. With this, process gained precedence over visible output. Any act in public as part of the process, such as observational drawing, became an intervention in itself. Now I am treating any large-scale intervention in public as a part of other smaller interventions as a sequence in whole. An intervention now for me is one of the ideas in the whole process rather than a form displayed in public. This clarity emerged from my personal tension between site and studio where the site acts like a pool of data to be brought into the laboratory of the studio and thrown into a generative apparatus. This brings out the importance of private space in public art. This also challenges the degree of site specificity in any particular intervention since all information is being put into a common apparatus without bias because of the general relativity of different sites. In this book, I am talk about how my relationship with site began and evolved and the future prospect of site specificity in my artistic process.
The Journey
Drawing has played different roles at different points of time in my process. With Art in Transit, I continued the practice of drawing in public places. Since my first visit to the Peenya metro station, the presence of life has fascinated me more than structural details.
Sketches from first visit to Peenya Metro Station
In order to map and get a sense of the place around the station, I entered the area where the local community resides. This is where my engagement with the community was initiated. I started drawing in order to observe and understand the tangible and intangible characteristics of the space. Here drawing was also acting like a shield to resist my awkwardness as an outsider. Drawing turned into a tool for interaction by attracting the people’s attention and also helped me transcend the language barrier. It was like a passage into the life of the community. This way I gradually became comfortable with engaging with people and public places.
Interacting with the people living next to the Peenya Metro Station.
Chikkuthaiamma, one of the people who initiated interactions.
Experience in the community interpreted into a map.
I investigated the elements that constituted the life in the space and I formed my own assumptions. In the process, certain themes like cooking, water and electricity emerged. I worked around the concerns of water availability and usage in the community to create my first large scale intervention in Peenya. The idea was to communicate a social message representing the issues of life around water in the community and bring the essence of the seemingly neglected community inside the metro station. I was using drawing to form a mind map and juxtapose elements into a concluding image. Basically, I have been constructing a structural framework for my process of interventions through drawing. The reaction of the commuters towards the art work made me question this method of trying to convey a precise message that narrows the scope of interpretation. I also felt like I was trying to force my opinions making the scope of the work very rigid. This also made me question the preciousness of the intervention in its visible form. Nevertheless, I had taken a step further in terms of expanding my scale and understanding application.
Sketches from the community space.
Drawing more inspiration.
Site sketches composed into a drawing.
First large-scale intervention in Peenya Metro Station.
After this intervention I moved out of Peenya to a place that is familiar to me, S.F.S colony. Here I attempted my first mural. This turned out to be a radical experiment. I wanted to take my process a step ahead. I decided to respond to site more closely and put myself in a vulnerable situation where instead of going to the site of work with a pre-defined composition, I started with a basic idea on the wall and allowed the form to grow and be affected by my experiences and the nature and happenings onsite. I knew that by doing this I was taking a risk in terms of my final outcome and the reaction of the people, especially since it is out in public where I don’t have any choice to hide my flaws before displaying. And the idea of bringing a meticulously created precious composition from home completely dissolved. This way I dedicated my focus primarily to my process and kept the form under the risk of scrutiny and even failure. I think my form here fell short of communicating a story and I was questioned on the basis of that. I had made an attempt directly on the wall free of any structural framework and perhaps my process at this point had not matured enough that I could make informed and impulsive decisions onsite.
Mural in S.F.S colony
During my next visit to Peenya, I did not enter the familiar community space. I drew Peenya from a distance and tried to perceive the character of the place with a larger perspective. When one looks at the larger picture as a whole, the way they perceive it is different from when they are in close interaction with an element of the whole. As human beings, one can’t be completely free of judgments. Working in the Peenya community, I was in close and personal interaction with the people and perceived the difference between their way of living and mine as an economic problem. I had made judgements from an assumed position of superiority towards the people in terms of my economic status assuming that these people needed help and I could be a medium to communicate this to the other sections of society. The world outside the community was very blurred to me. My perception changed when I came out of the community and looked at the larger landscape that consisted of high-rise habitats & industrial establishments. I realized that my concerns were naive and they were a micro element of a larger picture that is driven by basic desires, temptations, aspirations, competition etc. And these concerns cannot be dealt with merely through a problem-solving approach. This idea of macro and micro was a vein I wished to pursue at this stage to further my inquiry and find a merger between my Social and Artistic inquiry.
Sketches from the next visit to Peenya after a long gap.
I decided to stay away from Peenya for some time to understand the nature of my inquiry within my larger process. I went to specific places in Bangalore to draw. I started looking at this act of drawing in public as a form of intervention in itself as it involved engaging with people’s curiosity which led to establishing an exchange where, as a response, I showed my own curiosities to these people. I was seeing this series of regular interventions on the basis of this exchange of curiosities containing potential that at various stages might lead to larger interventions. At this stage of my process I was moving from conveying social messages to facilitating a social dialogue and seeing more value in the latter. My idea was to stir thought processes, both of others as well as myself through these interventions: evoking questions around why and how we function as we do and if there is a need for any change. For instance, if we look at consumerism as a part of our lives, we could approach it by questioning how we are accepting being consumerists out of temptation instead of talking about how advertising is building a consumerist society. My method of conducting these inquiries started becoming more and more subjective. I started viewing social change as a gradual phenomenon not external to an individual, not even myself. I realized that I am a part of my subject and participating equally in these social phenomena I am investigating.
Sketching in different public places in Bangalore.
Another realization was during this latest visit to Peenya, i.e., when I was developing certain themes by going to a public place and understanding what I saw through these themes. Now that I was focusing on building a process of creative thinking, I was becoming distant from meaning which felt like an imbalance. I was rigorously going to public places and sketching but was not able to track where it was leading to. This is when I realized the role of studio in my process. I listed down a set of these emerging themes, for example: desire, structure, aspirations, fantasy, chaos, motion, abandonment etc., and started working on recreating them through a series of drawings. Hence I began bringing these interventions on site into the studio to extend this practice of observation and create/recreate meaning. I was using these themes as a catalyst to bridge the connection between site and studio. After having established this relationship with studio I continued going on site to bring in more information. This time I noticed something different. Unlike earlier, this time when I was drawing in a public place I was already filtering information and forming narratives on site itself. I understood that here I had begun to extend my private space into public places and I was not seeing the domains of “public” and “private” as contrary any more.
Thematic recreations
Building narratives on site.
At this point there was a leap in momentum with a public art project in Kandivali, Mumbai. This project was in collaboration with a group of architects in Mumbai called The Urban Vision. Being in a city that is completely new in my experience had a fresh impact on my thought process. I was thinking through certain known factors in a place that is unknown. Before going to Mumbai I have been obsessed with the phenomenon of construction and composition of urban life around it. Hence I went to Mumbai with a certain thematic understanding of urban life. Mumbai added another layer to this perception of this developing life. The site in Kandivali was an epitome of construction and deconstruction complimenting each other. Walking down the road, on one side there were rapidly rising towers and on the other side there were modest looking houses aspiring for growth. I thought of our aspirations in this grand urban laboratory, our aspirations to play an ideal role and acquire the ideal spaces. At the end of the day I learned that the chosen site, the house was slated for demolition within a period of three months.
Process for Mumbai intervention.
I was left with the dilemma of whether to continue with the same site and work with its reality or change my site completely. I realized that by then I had developed a certain intimacy with the site and felt a stubborn urge and sense of adventure to stick to the same site. This future reality of the site was aptly complimenting my chain of thought. I was questioning our aspirations even more, the seemingly fragile nature of them. What if the very basic structure is weak? What if we are banking on nothing? Through the form of a mural I attempted to ask these overarching questions, and ask whether it is something we would like to rethink or something we would rather ignore. This was my second mural and third large scale public intervention so far. I started with that basic idea and composition and let the form grow and transform gradually on the wall. I decided to use the rough texture and dark, old look of the wall to my benefit and play with it, treating it as a contrast. I had started with a rather graphic style of lines. While rendering with colour and giving the forms volume, I experimented with a play of basic tones and patches. The foreground colour of rust was symbolic of the concept I was talking about. The experience of working in public was quite different from Bangalore. The people looked interested in what I was doing but let me have my own space. Generally it was a friendlier atmosphere than any other public place I have had worked in.
The Site.
Work in progress.
FRAGILE ASPIRATIONS The finished mural.
Post Mumbai, I moved towards making a collaborative intervention with my classmate Devika Shah. She has been working with the deconstruction and dissection of architectural structures and as mentioned earlier, construction or “the act of building� has been a major fascination for me. With this common element in our processes we automatically selected a structure at a construction site on Yelahanka New Town road. The structure is supposedly a guard house which was being used as storage for building material. Our common ideas were to do with the construction of new structures where simple modest structures get overshadowed with time. This intervention was an attempt at merging our visual languages and finding commonalities and differences in our thought processes. With this intervention I discovered a consistency in what appealed to me in terms of choice of site.
The Site.
Construction on site.
Finished Mural.
The building is getting constructed rapidly.
After this collaboration I made my final move towards Peenya. I chose a neat indoor wall near the entrance above the ticket counter. This space is very contrary to the kind of sites I have been fascinated with so far. This time the contrast between the nature of the site and the nature of my ideas is what appealed to me. I started thinking along the lines of construction and the act of making because I was introduced to the station when a part of it was in an unfinished state of construction. At this point I felt saturated with the same thought process, so I decided to move on from this theme. On one of my initial visits I drew the indoor structure of the station in its true form, as is, without abstraction or interpretation. This helped me understand the structure in ways I had never thought of.
The site/space in Peenya Metro station.
Sketches on site.
Understanding the space with its structural composition.
A prominent realization here was that I was drawing everything around the wall, things that compose the environment of the site but I wasn’t able to find any interest in drawing the wall itself. This reminded me of a similar situation in Mumbai where I was drawing everything around and near my site but wasn’t able to give complete importance to my site itself. Through this I understood that the way I perceive site had changed. Instead of looking at site as a wall where an image will be created, I was now looking at site as a space where an experience will be created. It is now that I started acknowledging site in its 3 dimensionality. Also, I do not see a site in isolation, I perceive a site in relation to the rest of the space or structure around it that compliments it and gives the site its identity. I wanted to take this approach forward. I decided to conduct an experiment. While thinking about the relationship of the wall with the experience of the rest of the station as well as the experience during the journey in the metro, I thought of myself as a traveller making videos of my journey in the metro from Mantri Square to Peenya, from the road outside the community area to the Metro Station and from the Platinum city apartment complex to the metro station. While making videos inside the metro, I had set up my camera and was drawing simultaneously to compare the video and the drawing later and see the pattern in what I processed. By now I had realized that my work so far had been of creating a narrative in series.
Sketching in the Metro.
Snapshots from videos.
After making these videos I brought all the data back to the studio and set up a system for myself. I played the video on loop and drew with that reference. From these drawings I tried to extract some commonalities and recognize the patterns. Now from the reference of these drawings as well as the reference of my memory I created another series of drawings. By now I had created a stock of drawings that were jumbled up if put together. I could see a storyboard forming out of this series. Thus I decided to treat these drawings literally as a storyboard to move towards a visualized image for the site in Peenya station.
Drawing from video reference.
Drawing from video reference as well as memory.
While making these drawings I realized that my interpretations were becoming symbolic in nature.
Looking at this space in the station I was having a flashback of my whole journey in Peenya. I was thinking of this structure as a system in itself and how it stands in relation to other systems/ structures around it. So far I have been trying to question the one dimensionality of development, but I myself have made narrow judgements in the past. I have understood things in black and white for a long time and I wanted my change in perspective to come across in this intervention. I created this visualization in order to have a basic structure to start the mural. Thereafter this image would grow on the wall in scale and depth through a rigorous engagement with the space. Since it is my first experience working at this height and I have the infrastructural constraint of a scaffolding, it was even more important for me to have a mental scaffolding for the form. I have used the visualization as a mental framework and I am letting the image modify itself by instinct and experience. Before going up on the scaffolding I have done some application tests to start getting an understanding of scale, colour and rendering. This mural is crucial also in terms of evolution and understanding of colours, lines and application.
First visualization.
Another iteration of the visualization.
Application test on site.
Final mural in progress.