Arts Illustrated

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Publisher & Chairman Vincent Adaikalraj

AES+F

Prurshu Arie

Akanksha Redhu

Rasika Dugal

Anushka Meenakshi

Reghunandhan. K

Fernando Garcia-Dory

Sandra Johnston

Sub Editor

Iswar Srikumar

Suzanne Lacy

Vani Sriranganayaki Vanamamalai

Jay Koh

Sylwana Zybura

Copy Editor

Editor

Niharika Peri

Team Sales Offices Chennai

Special Thanks

Consultant Editor

Praveena Shivram

Juhi Kulkarni

Tania Bruguera

Sethulakshmy S Nayar

Matt Lambros

Viji Venkatesh

Design Director

Parvathy Nayar

WochenKlausur Collective

127 T.T.K. Road, Alwarpet,

Latheesh Lakshman

Chennai 600018

Graphic Designer and Administrative Officer

phone +91 82203 08777

Chenchudar Chellakannu

Special Acknowledgements

phone +91 44 4216 5100

Gallery Manager, Art Houz Gallery

Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

sales@artsillustrated.in

Glency Donald Emerantia

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Operations Manager, Art Houz Gallery,

Centre Pompidou, Paris

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Bridget Shibu

Sales Head, South Felix Raju

Regional Sales Manager Anu Sasi

phone +91 82203 08777 sales@artsillustrated.in

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Cineworks GMBH. DakshinaChitra, Chennai Estudio Bruguera, LLC. Flint PR

Columnist

Gallery Espace, New Delhi

Anu Majumdar

Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai

Manoj Nair

Contributors Arti Sandhu Daniel Connell Gautam Bhatia

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Peter Bond

Pune Biennale Foundation, Pune

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#127, T.T.K. Road, Alwarpet, Views and opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of LA 5 Global Publications, its publisher and/or the editor. It is always our endeavour to verify the information published but we do not take any responsibility for the absolute accuracy of the information provided. The publication, the publisher and editor do not accept any responsibility or liability for any investment or other decisions taken by readers on the basis of information provided here-in.

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The views expressed by the writers, key contributors, columnists are their own. The publication, the publisher and editor do not accept any responsibility or liability for any investment or other decisions taken by readers on the basis of information provided here-in.

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For the cover this time, Russian artist collective AES+F give us a fragment of Inverso Mundus, a multi-channel video installation that is based on medieval engravings, re-interpreted by the collective where ‘the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life’. And so, children are in a kickboxing match with the elderly and they grace our cover to induce equal parts spectacle and triumph for how we look at the ‘audience’ today – who came and saw and conquered first: the viewer or the maker?

Publisher’s note

The lines are blurring, the distance is a complex relationship with space (real and virtual), and time is nothing more than an individual construct existing in a collective mind, which makes us – the audience, the viewer, the spectator, the receiver of information, the receptacle of communication – a subject of interest, an evolving project in the aesthetics of art, and a study in the cathartic politics of identity.

This issue of Arts Illustrated, based on the theme of ‘Who’s the Audience?’, tries to understand what makes the audience, what makes its relationship to the contemporary arts relevant, and how art itself reacts to this tenuous yet powerful bond. And, quite particularly, is it even possible to delineate the audience that is constantly shifting, and why artistic impact and its magnitude are even more urgent in today’s distracted world.

‘Who’s the Audience?’ seeks to question the purpose of art – not from the warm and protected realm of the artist but from the unpredictable and expansive space (real and virtual) in which it eventually exists.

Vincent Adaikalraj

Contents

Magritte: La trahison des images. Page 16 Pune Biennale 3.0. Page 18

News & Events

Jeremy Moon. Page 22 Hélio Oiticica: To Organise Delirium. Page 24 Potpourri. Page 26

All for One + One for All. By Praveena Shivram. Page 30 The Conservatory of Consciousness. By Manoj Nair. Page 40 All is Well. By Suzanne McNeill. Page 48 The Ways of Seeing. By Praveena Shivram. Page 52 Watch Word. By Daniel Connell. Page 58

Arts

The ‘I’ of the Beholder. By Peter Bond. Page 70 Striking the Right Note. By Siddhartha Das. Page 78 AI Curates. Page 84

Shorts Shorts. By Manoj Nair. Page 92

Fiction & Poetry

The Spoken Word. By Anu Majumdar. Page 110

The Gallery Architect. By Gautam Bhatia. Page 96

Architecture & Design

Control, Shift, Enter. By Arti Sandhu. Page 102 Design Diaries. Page 108

Close Encounters. By Rehana Munir. Page 116

Cinema

Into the Shot, Quietly . By Praveena Shivram. Page 120

The Beauty & the Bizarre. By Niharika Peri. Page 128

Photography

Who’s the Audience?. By Matt Lambros. Page 138

Editor’s note When we sit down to put together each issue of Arts Illustrated we begin by working on a theme, and when we do that we have a reader in mind — our audience. So it was only natural that one of us asked the question about the audience. Therefore, this edition addresses the question of ‘Who is the Audience?’

Throughout his writings, German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche insisted on a monological conception of art – art that does not seek an audience or ‘witnesses’. The artists we feature in this issue may not wholly agree with Nietzsche’s theories about art. Take for example the Russian art collective AES+F. Talking to us they insist that they do have an audience in mind when they create their works. ‘…

Like in the Feast of Trimalchio, all the food served to the guests isn’t real – they are plastic emulations, and all the drinks are made of cleaning products. Sometimes this does look seamless, but sometimes the viewer notices that something isn’t right.’ So the viewer is, indeed, important.

When K Reghunadhan was invited to take over the task of creating the effigy of a mythical character as part of an annual ritual celebrated on New Year’s Eve in Kochi, he had the multitudes in mind, even if his work would eventually be burnt. He was taking his art out of the gallery space and putting it into a public sphere so that his work would become interactive and inclusive. He intended to have a meaningful conversation with the spectators.

And then there is the audience that rests in anonymity. ‘Obviously, I perfectly understood Vivian Maier,’ writes Praveena Shivram, our in-house critic, when she describes the work of the enigmatic photographer who kept her art hidden from public view all her life. When finally discovered, it was touted as changing the very fabric of American street photography.

As a practising artist Daniel Connell argues that it has become imperative for artists to have the audience in mind because the idea of an audience undergoes a transition from the passive to interactive to participatory to collaborative. Peter Bond would agree, as he writes that the aesthetics of art comes alive only when a dialogue is initiated between what is seen and what is known (knowledge) influenced by time.

In the course of working on this issue, we came across He Will Not Divide Us, a participatory performative artwork by Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö & Luke Turner, in which the public was invited to deliver the words ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ into a mounted camera projected on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, from the day of the inauguration of Donald Trump. On February 10, the project was abandoned, but it made us wonder if art begets the audience or is it the other way around?

Therefore, we invite you to collaborate with us as you engage with each section of this magazine.

As our audience, you are worthy of all our respect because we value your time.

Niharika Peri niharika@artsillustrated.in

Editorial:

Praveena Shivram

Vani Sriranganayaki

Sethulakshmy S. Nayar

Consultant Editor

Sub-Editor

Copy Editor

praveena@artsillustrated.in

vani@artsillustrated.in

With over ten years of experience in the publishing industry, Praveena thrives best when surrounded by words and revels in the power they possess to transform, re-structure and excite.

Vani’s love for art is visible in her perception of architecture.

With a clear adoration for the evolving artscape that surrounds us, she also writes on art, architecture and cinema.

Latheesh Lakshman

Chenchudar Chellakannu

Design Director, Consultant

Glency Donald Emerantia

Graphic Designer and

Gallery Manager, Art Houz Gallery

Administrative Officer

glency.arthouz@gmail.com

A creative director based in Dubai, Latheesh started his career with Ogilvy in 2003.

Since then he has worked for agencies such as Wieden + Kennedy, Ikea Design, DDB Mudra and Wolff Olins. He was also instrumental in branding the first edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

chen@artsillustrated.in

Chen (as we lovingly call her) is shy and extremely kind. A bright and upcoming graphic designer, she has contributed extensively to the making of this magazine.

Be it pruning her way through the written word or running a fine-toothed comb over the printed page, Sethu, with decades of experience in journalism and publishing, has found her happiness quotient.

With an MBA in Finance Marketing, a Master’s Degree in Human Resource Management and a PG Diploma in Public Relations, Glency has worn various hats within the LA Group. She joined the Art Houz team in 2012.

Sales:

Bridget Shibu

Felix Raju

Anu Sasi

Operations Manager,

Sales Head, South

Regional Sales Manager

Art Houz Gallery

felix@artsillustrated.in

anu@artsillustrated.in

With over twelve years of experience across fields, Felix understands the business of creating lasting relationships with clients.

Compassionate to a fault, Anu’s cheery disposition stands her in good stead and lets her count many marketers as friends rather than clients.

bridget.arthouz@gmail.com

Bridget’s expertise in human resource management, hosting skills, and her attention to detail has helped in creating a healthy ecosystem for the arts in Coimbatore.

Contributors

Manoj Nair Columnist

Manoj Nair is a writer, critic and curator. He is the author of Pencil Sketches: a volume of writing on Indian visual arts, cinema, literature and music based on his experience as an editor and correspondent with leading Indian newspapers and magazines.

Anu Majumdar Columnist

Anu Majumdar’s published work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It has also been part of choreographic projects and art installations. She lives and works in Auroville.

Arti Sandhu is an Associate Professor of Fashion Design at Columbia College Chicago and the author of the book Indian Fashion: Tradition, Innovation, Style.

Suzanne McNeill lived in India for seven years, first in Chennai and then in Delhi. She has now returned to Scotland where she works as a freelance writer and graphic designer.

Siddhartha Das is a designer and visual artist who uses culture for socio-economic change, and was the recipient of the British Council International Young Design Entrepreneur Award in 2009.

Daniel Connell lived in Jaipur for three years (2007-2010) and returns to India, North and South, every year. He is a practicing artist, a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia and teaches drawing and painting at the Adelaide Central School of Art.

Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-

Rehana Munir is a Bombay-

Peter Bond is an artist,

based writer/editor. She set up and ran an independent bookshop for a few years, has run cricket websites, and loves ginger tea, plotless novels and The Beatles.

based award-winning architect, artist, and writer. Besides a biography on Laurie Baker, he is the author of Punjabi Baroque, Silent Spaces and Malaria Dreams – a trilogy that focuses on the cultural and social aspects of buildings.

educator and author. His trans-media practice includes performance and painting.

Currently, he is completing, ‘Performance Art, A Guided Tour’, for I.B. Tauris Books – an accessible account of this controversial and often misunderstood medium. He is a senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London.

News Circuit

Magritte: La trahison des images S eptember 2 1 , 2 0 1 6 to J anuary 2 3 , 2 0 1 7, P aris

Belgian artist René Magritte’s 1929 painting titled La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), which usually hangs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, depicts exactly what it says in the title – or does it? An incredibly wonderful, matter-of-fact, absolutely mundane illustration of a pipe sits enigmatically above the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (This is not a pipe). The work is almost reminiscent of object flashcards used in kindergarten classrooms, with the catalogue-style imagery and the didactic script underneath.

And, of course, he is right. It is not a pipe. It is merely a painting of a pipe. But it begs one to question: Where is the authority? Do we believe what we see in the veracity of the illustration – the perfect representation of the almost platonic pipe? Or do we believe the text underneath? What motivates the viewer – the representation of the thing, or the language that denies it? Then again, the word ‘pipe’ is in itself as much an abstraction from the actual item of the pipe as the visual representation. The image and the language, both are simply ways of representing a pipe. Magritte belonged to the surrealist movement and he found clarity within this anarchy – challenging the whole illusionistic history of Western art. It simply proves the timetested fact that there is no easy way to decode a Magritte painting.

His art placidly asks disturbing questions about the everyday things we take for granted.

Offering further clarity to the artist’s works, featuring both well-known masterpieces and other less familiar works, the exhibition Magritte: La trahison des images at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the latest in the series of monographic exhibitions devoted to major figures in 20th-century art, brought together around one hundred paintings, drawings and documents through which Magritte successfully developed an altered view of the world.

Portraying an egg enclosed in a cage, this was the first of his works intended to solve what he termed a ‘problem’. After a ‘chance encounter between sewing machines and umbrellas’ he then went on to formulate a relentlessly logical method that sought solutions to the ‘problems’ of women, of chairs, of shoes, of rain… The exhibition at Centre Pompidou opened with Magritte’s research on these problems, a process that marks and celebrates the ‘reasoning’ turn evident in his art. Magritte’s art is characterised by a series of motifs – curtains, shadows, words, flames, bodies in pieces, and more – which he endlessly arranged and rearranged. The exhibition placed these into each one of the painting’s foundational narratives, further enhancing the philosophical contest between visual representation and the authority of the written word.

In a 1936 lecture, Magritte declared that the work Les Affinités Électives, painted in 1932, marked a turning point in his work.

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René Magritte, Variante de la Tristesse, 1957. ©Adagp, Paris 2016.

René Magritte, Le Blanc Seing, 1965. ©Adagp, Paris 2016.

René Magritte, René Magritte, Les Vacances de La Lampe Hegel, 1958. ©Adagp, Philosophique, 1936. Paris 2016. ©Adagp, Paris 2016.

René Magritte, La Condition Humaine, 1935. ©Adagp, Paris 2016.

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All Images Courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Paris

News Circuit

Pune Biennale 3.0 J anuary 5 to 2 9 , 2 0 1 7, P une

Ulhas Kagde, Installation at the Empress Garden, Part of the participatory project Not Just a Garden at Pune Biennale 2017.

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Founded in 2013, the Pune Biennale began as a citywide event that worked with public art and public spaces. Over the next couple of years, it gained local and national prominence and has now established a strong foothold within the international art scene. The biennale strives to bring the city and its communities together with the purpose of making art more public and accessible.

What started as a joint initiative between the Bharati Vidyapeeth University and the Pune Municipal Corporation has grown with wider stakeholder participations from industries and corporate supporters, including Panchshil Foundation

and Adar Poonawalla Clean City Movement. Today, the Pune Biennale has emerged as an institution dedicated to creating and projecting the global cultural identity for the city of Pune and acting as a vehicle for the social and aesthetic development of the city, while simultaneously unlocking endless possibilities for its creative communities.

And so, this January, the Pune Biennale Foundation, an organisation established as the means to bring together art, architecture and design for the enhancement of visual art in the city, kick-started the vibrant third edition of the Pune Biennale with several participatory projects created

around the theme of ‘Identity and Self’, with the aim of discovering the meaning of one’s existence in different spheres of life through diverse mediums and forums, including displays, installations, workshops, dialogues and seminars.

This section of the Biennale included Inclusive Art – an art workshop with specially abled children from 11 schools in the city; Young Expressions – a platform that brought together artistic initiatives from art schools across the country; and several other projects like Galleria and My City/My Art that catered to people from all walks of life.

Ruve Narang, Performance depicting the struggle of expressing one’s own identity, at the Empress Garden. Part of the participatory project Not Just a Garden at Pune Biennale 2017.

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A key participatory project of Pune Biennale 2017 was Moving Art Spaces, based on the theme of ‘Migration – To Be And Not To Be’, curated by Bina Sarkar Ellias, the renowned editor and publisher of International Gallerie. Here, shipping containers were modified to house the works of international and national photographers, filmmakers and installation artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The works showcased the chronicles of migrants whose histories have been chequered with hope, loss, struggle and, at times, fulfilment.

The flagship exhibition project of the Pune Biennale 2017, however, was Habit-Co-Habit, curated by well-known art historian and curator Zasha Colah and art critic Luca Cerizza. The project, hosted at more than 25 venues across the city, displayed the works of 22 artists from Europe and India, including theorist and architect Yona Friedman, artist Sanket Jadia and some international stars and upcoming talents like Susan Philipsz, Tomás Saraceno, Shilpa Gupta, Sarnath Banarjee, Tushar Joag, Maarten Visser and U-ra-mi-li.

Yona Friedman, Canopy at Sambhaji Park, along with students of Architecture colleges in Pune. Part of the Habit-CoHabit exhibition at Pune Biennale 2017.

Debiprasad Bhunia, Govt.

College of Art, Delhi, Obsesses Identity, Installation.

Part of the participatory project Young Expressions at Pune Biennale 2017.

Massimo Bartolini, Social Sculpture: Mini Amphitheater at Sambhaji Park. Part of the Habit-Co-Habit exhibition at Pune Biennale 2017.

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With a stellar line up of about 200 artists from more than 18 countries and 40 cities, the Pune Biennale, a conscious choice to insert artistic interventions within existing spatial conditions, managed to infiltrate the cracks and rhythms of everyday life, generating a new understanding of our place in the world and the society at large.

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Shubhigi Rao, Installation at Sambhaji Park. Part of the Habit-Co-Habit exhibition at Pune Biennale 2017.

Pune Biennale 2017, Workshop with 50 differentlyabled children from 11 schools at Bal Kalyan Sanstha.

Vaishali Kagde, Fist of Colors, Installation at the Empress Garden. Part of the participatory project Not Just a Garden at Pune Biennale 2017.

Junk art at SSPMS Ground, Shivaji Nagar. Part of the project Moving Art Spaces at Pune Biennale 2017.

All Images Courtesy of the Pune Biennale Foundation.

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News Circuit

Jeremy Moon J anuary 1 3 to A pril 1 6 , 2 0 1 7, N ew Y ork

Jeremy Moon was a British abstract painter from Altrincham, Cheshire.

His father was a lawyer, and in 1954, following in his father’s footsteps, Moon went to Christ’s College Cambridge to study Law. After graduating, he worked as an advertising executive while simultaneously attending evening classes in ballet. Although he had a natural flare for painting, and practised it as a hobby in his spare time, his decision to become a professional artist did not come into effect until after he witnessed the second Situation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1961. At the age of 26, impressed and inspired by the large abstract paintings of Bernard Cohen and William Turnbull, Moon enrolled himself at the Central School of Art, London. Mature enough to have a clear idea of the type of art he wanted to produce, he quit school early and in 1963, presented his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London. This January, Luhring Augustine announced the representation of the Estate of Jeremy Moon with an exhibition marking it the first US solo presentation of Jeremy Moon’s works.

equivalent. His use of the grid as a structural device was central to his working method; its rigid organisation, yet flexible expandability, allowed him to bracket fields of colour in a manner that was exploratory and effectual. Moon shrank, enlarged, skewed and folded the grid across numerous works in his efforts to reveal ambiguity in pictorial space.

At the centre of this exhibition at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, lies Moon’s floor sculpture entitled 3D 1 72, consisting of thirteen parts that fit along the contours of a distorted grid. Completed a year before his passing, this work epitomises Moon’s continued interest in generating movement and a desire to extend painterly space to an architectural

Like many artists of his time, Moon sought a degree of wholeness within his compositions, creating works where painted geometries found affinities with the canvas’s overall shape. And though Moon’s artistic career was tragically cut short in 1973 with his early death at the age of 39, his large-scale geometric paintings that explore form and space through unmodulated planes of colour, possess tremendous variety within the restrained parameters he had set himself – combining intense geometric concerns with a playful wit that rendered their audiences astonished and engaged for generations to come.

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Moon’s singular visual language was informed by his long-standing interest in dance and choreography. His works are saturated with rhythm-generating patterns and shapes with inherent directionalities – forming a perceptible movement that enhances their dynamic quality. Such tensions are evident within his Y-shaped paintings (and many of his other works, too), whose concentric bands radiate outward, only to reverberate back again after negotiating with the canvas’s edges. Moon was also known for deliberately destabilising the unity of his compositions with subtle asymmetries, further challenging the austerity often associated with geometric abstraction.

- News & Events

Signals, Acrylic on canvas, 104 3/4’’ x 121 1/4’’, 1967. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

No 9/67, Acrylic on canvas, 86’’ x 99’’, 1967. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

Out of Nowhere, Acrylic on canvas, 72’’, 1965. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

Starlight Hour, Acrylic and enamel on shaped canvas, 79 1/2’’ x 64 15/16’’, 1965. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

Orangery, Acrylic on canvas, 68 1/2’’ x 68 1/2’’, 1965. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

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At Midnight, Acrylic on canvas, 96 1/2’’ x 120 1/4’’, 1965. © Estate of Jeremy Moon; Image Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

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News Circuit

Hélio Oiticica: To Organise Delirium F ebruary 1 8 to M ay 7, 2 0 1 7, I llinois

During the late 1960s, Brazil found itself in the eye of a storm.

The Cold War and the Cuban Revolution increased the Capitalist Bloc’s pressure on Third World countries and further fanned the flames of conflict in Latin and South America. A select group of artists responded to the persisting state of chaos by trying to shock their audiences into a reaction. In 1968, a country anesthetised by military dictatorship rose to the call for revolution with the word ‘Tropicália’ – galvanising an artistic movement of the same name.

A less known fact is that the term ‘Tropicália’ was drawn from the title of a 1967 artwork by Hélio Oiticica – arguably one of the most influential Latin American artists. Oiticica’s Tropicália brought together a series of clichés associated with tropical-ness – sand, gravel, exotic birds and lush foliage – contrasted with a television monitor that emitted continuous images and sounds. ‘Tropicália’, a name subsequently borrowed by the musician Caetano Veloso for his anthem against Brazil’s dictatorship, became a powerful movement in all the arts – a political position both against the right’s conservatism and the left’s desire for purely Brazilian art.

Offering the first retrospective in the United States of Hélio Oiticica’s groundbreaking and influential achievements, the Art Institute of Chicago, together with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, recently inaugurated the exhibition To Organise Delirium. A distinguished curatorial team (Lynn Zelevansky, Elisabeth Sussman, James Rondeau, and Donna De Salvo, with Anna Katherine Brodbeck) has recreated major installations for the show, enabling viewers to chart the continuities and contradictions in Oiticica’s trajectory, with special attention to links between his work in New York and Brazil. Demonstrating the great breadth of the artist’s work, the exhibition begins with the elegant works on paper from early in Oiticica’s career (1955–1958). These dynamic compositions paved the way for his works that liberated painting from a flat plane. By 1959, Oiticica’s painterly-sculptural Spatial Reliefs and Nuclei broke

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free of the wall and entered the space of the viewer. Nuclei, composed of panels suspended from the ceiling, created areas through which the viewer could walk. His later installations continued to revolutionise the role of the viewer, transforming the viewer from a spectator to an active participant.

It is this energy that To Organise Delirium captures, as it invites its visitors to take off their shoes and walk through sand-filled installations, view Amazonian parrots and try on exhibition copies of Oiticica’s Parangolés– objects he created to be carried or worn and among the artist’s most radical contributions to contemporary art. Throughout his career, Oiticica, a relentless innovator, seamlessly melded formal and social concerns in his art, seeking to be internationally relevant and, at the same time, specifically Brazilian. Above all, he aimed to communicate to his audiences the deep pleasure and satisfaction inherent in creative work.

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Hélio Oiticica. Hunting Dogs Project (Projeto cães de caça), 1960–61.

César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

Hélio Oiticica. PN1 Penetrable (PN1 Penetrável), 1960. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

Hélio Oiticica with P8 Parangolé Cape 5, Homage to Mangueira (P8 Parangolé capa 5, Homenagem à Mangueira, 1965) at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1969. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

Luiz Fernando Guimarães wearing Oiticica’s P30 Parangolé Cape 23, M’Way Ke, at the West Side Piers, New York, 1972. Private Collection. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

All Images Courtsy of the Art Institute of Chicago

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Hélio Oiticica. PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera, 1979. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro.

Potpourri

Headhunters by Fanil Pandya: The Egg Art Studiot

Remembering Steve – Luhring Augustine

Last December, the Egg Art Studio in New Delhi inaugurated its first solo show, Headhunters –displaying the works of one of India’s youngest emerging photographers, Fanil Pandya. With photographs documenting the life and culture of the Konyak tribe – a warrior clan famous for its tradition of severed heads, proudly decorated upon household

An exhibition organised in honour of the life and work of internationally renowned artist Steve Wolfe (1955–2016) titled Remembering Steve is on view at the Chelsea gallery of Luhring Augustine in New York from February 4 to March 11, 2017. At the heart of Wolfe’s practice are iconic 20th century works of literature, music and visual arts, which inspired him and became the subject of his practice.

Fanil Pandya, The Valley of Fear.

Image Courtesy of The Egg Art Studio and the artist.

walls – Fanil, a Baroda-based photographer, was selected by the International Centre of Photography in New York and was appreciated by the Harvard Arts Program. The portraits of people from some of the remotest regions of Nagaland (near the borders of Burma) carried in their layers a unique perspective of life in the past, present and future – a story of a land and its people fast disappearing from this part of the world.

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Steve Wolfe, Untitled (Stephen Crane: Stories And Tales), Oil, ink transfer, modeling paste, paper and wood, 7 3/16’’ x 4 1/4’’ x 3/4’’, 2008-2011. © Steve Wolfe; Image Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Remembering Steve is comprised of sculptures and works on paper from the mid-1980s onwards, spanning the course of three decades.

Along with the exhibition, Luhring Augustine is organising a ‘catalogue raisonné’ of Steve Wolfe’s work – requesting anyone in possession of a work by the artist to contact them (natalia@ luhringaugustine.com) with information, to ensure the publication is a thorough and complete record of Wolfe’s oeuvre.

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Here After Here – National Gallery of Modern Art

Timeless Loop – Jehangir Art Gallery

A major solo exhibition of works by artist Jitish Kallat titled Here After Here, curated by Catherine David, opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi on January 15, 2017.

The exhibition brings together Jitish Kallat’s vast oeuvre spanning painting, photography, drawing, video and sculptural installations, with some works

From February 28 to March 6, 2017, Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai will present the show Timeless Loop – an exhibition of photographs exploring the state of motion and the inherent human behaviour, conceptualised and executed by artist Juhi Kulkarni. Kulkarni observed and drew people in Mumbai and London.

Juhi Kulkarni, Oxford Street London. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Jitish Kallat, Covering Letter, Projection on fogscreen, 86ʺ (width), 2012 CollectionPhiladelphia Museum of Art, Surana Family CollectionBurger Collection.

dating back as far as 1992. Not following any linear chronological trail and juxtaposing works from different moments in the artist’s career, the show projects new meanings and forges a fresh relationship between the different works. The show is on view until March 2017.

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Photography then took the place of these drawings. The final outcome is this series of photographs emulating the experience of Diaspora – a sense of movement. Having previously exhibited in various galleries in London, Mumbai and Nagpur, Kulkarni hopes to revive the lost art of dual and multiple exposures, creatively combining drawings with photographic endeavours.

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Haunted by Waters – DakshinaChitra

PHOTOFAIRS – San Francisco

This January, DakshinaChitra hosted an international seminar and art show titled Environmental Consciousness in Current Indian Art – explorations in art, architecture, heritage and community engagement. In conjunction with the seminar, artist Parvathi Nayar presented a solo show of photographs and videos titled Haunted by Waters – as a response to our many immediate

The inaugural edition of PHOTOFAIRS, San Francisco, which opened to collectors on January 26, 2017, at the Festival Pavilion in Fort Mason, dedicated itself to presenting unique works by international artists never seen before in the Bay Area. Shining a spotlight on key photographic talents from the United States’ West Coast, a nod to the city’s strong photographic legacy and its position as of one the United State’s most

Parvathy Nayar, River Ran Through It (detail), from installation of 9 photographs each 36’’ x 48’’. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Udall, Rio In His Car, 2014. © TYLER UDALL. Image Courtesy of The Little Black Gallery (London)

environmental anxieties, be it the pollution of our rivers or the devastating floods in Chennai.

Based on the intrinsic part played by water in both subtle and immediate ways, Haunted by Waters continues the search for re-imaginings and reinterpretations of the spaces in which we live.

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important locations for the medium of photography, the fair worked with leading galleries across the world to present a highly curated and elegant environment of over 300 works of art, including a selection of contemporary photographic trends, alongside photographic masters like Irving Penn, Herbert List, Edward Weston and Danny Lyon.

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Pichvai Tradition & Beyond – Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016

Ether is all that is: Gallery Espace

As a collateral event at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, Pichvai Tradition & Beyond presented an exhibition of contemporary interpretations of Pichvai works that, for the first time, brought this traditional Indian art form into a new avatar. With the intent to propel Pichvai art to the centre of contemporary artistic engagement and enable new audiences

On January 22, 2017, Gallery Espace inaugurated the show Ether is all that is – presenting the most recent works of eminent contemporary artist G. R. Iranna. Recently, Iranna’s work titled Ash to Ash received an overwhelming response at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Now, he is all set to enthral the audience in the capital with a new body of work which is, subsequently, an extension

G. R. Iranna, The tree disappeared into Ether, Acrylic on Tarpaulin, 54’’ x 132’’, 2016. Image Courtesy of Gallery Espace and the artist.

of the same theme and process. Iranna uses the holy ash or vibhuti as a primary medium in this series of work, which is further referred to as a metaphor for the impermanence of life.

The exhibition is on view till March 8, 2017.

365 Sketch, Size Unkown, Basli, Part of Pichvai Tradition & Beyond: A collateral event at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016

to understand and appreciate the sublime beauty that these works are invested with, curator and founder Pooja Singhai conceptualised the exhibition, which will run through the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, until March, 2017.

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Arts

Q&A

All for One + One for All

AES+F, DĂŠfilĂŠ #1 Digital collage, LightJet print on Duratrans, Diasec, Lightbox 2000-2007

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The artist collective AES+F, currently showing at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, talk to us about the shifting roles of creator and viewer, of why they hope for the widest possible audience, and how, mostly, the audience they create for is themselves

P raveena S hivram

Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou, begins with a man sharpening a blade. He then walks out to the balcony, mechanically puffs at his cigarette as if keeping time, and there is a shot of a woman in between, sitting on a chair, almost listlessly, looking straight at you. The man in the balcony watches slivers of cloud making its way across the sky as it cuts through the moon, which is intercut with the woman’s eyelids that are opened wide as a knife slashes through her eyeball.

human mind’s limitless capabilities and the infinite patterns a set of ever-changing, yet finite, dots can make. It was something that was unhindered, like a caged horse, not yet broken in, suddenly set free.

It was a deliciously shocking introduction to the world of surrealism for me. It shook me up, as it was meant to, and later, in the quiet recesses of thoughts that would eventually bleed into my dreams, it thrilled me, as it was meant to. Here was a movement that allowed you to traverse through the muddied terrain of darkness, that quicksand of vile excesses, with an almost studied indifference that bordered on the casual, even when you were in the midst of a heightened emotional response, making you see that it is only in the darkest corner that deepest hope could be found. It was something I knew even back then, that it was a precious recognition of the

The next time this happened – well, not quite in the same way, of course – I was looking at the Russian collective, AES+F’s works.

It was a similar ‘surreal’ rush of encountering the unknown that instead of resisting you end up whole-heartedly embracing.

In the video project Inverso Mundus (2015), for instance, based on medieval engravings that paint a rabidly dystopian picture (a pig cuts a butcher, a man carries a donkey, etc.), AES+F have taken that and placed it in a contemporary setting – immediately, the unfamiliar, the ridiculous, the unfathomable, becomes the familiar, the recognisable, and scarily, the habitual (some characters take selfies with the Apocalypse).

It is done with such banality that beneath the visual extravaganza you witness, you begin to sense something uncomfortable snaking its way into your thoughts. You begin to sense the essence of that muddied terrain, because you find that it is your feet that fill

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those shoes. Because here, the collaboration isn’t just between the creator and the viewer but in the process itself, and it is in this dance of constantly shifting perspectives that AES+F situates its muse. ‘That’s exactly how it is.

We are the creator and the viewer simultaneously,’ they tell us over an e-mail interview, quick to clarify that they will answer the questions as ‘one’, and not individually. So, perhaps, it would be surreal to now mention that the collective is made up of conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich, multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky and photographer Vladimir Fridkes.

In 2014, for an interview for Inhale magazine, they were asked why it was AES+F and not AESF, when Fridkes joined the collective in 1995. ‘“AES+F” – looks better and is easier to pronounce,’ is what they said, and that extreme honesty, like it is an obvious quality in human beings, is what defines their work. It’s almost as if the sharp edges that kind of candour brings, cuts through your eyes and, therefore, what you get is always more than what you see.

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AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio, Still #2-1-28, 1-channel HD video still, pigment inkjet print on FineArt Baryta paper, 2010 AES+F, Angels-Demons Installation view from Festival Lille 3000, photo AES+F, 2009

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AES+F, Europe, Europe #5, From the series ‘Europe, Europe’, porcelain, photo of revers view, 2008

Excerpts from the interview It is hard to define the ‘audience’ today; access is like an untamed wild beast, and reach/impact a wilder forest, and put into the mix a volatile political climate and you have an equally exciting and debilitating arena for contemporary art. As a collective that looks at an image as a ‘discourse generator’ in a ‘game of aesthetics’, who do you ‘see’ first when you think of an ‘audience’?

And, more importantly, does what you see change with every work you produce?

AES+F: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, there were no institutions or galleries; nobody was even interested in contemporary art. To reach a wide audience, in the Islamic Project, we first produced posters and postcards that were disseminated through mass media, like newspapers and magazines.

From very early on, our method was to reach the general public.

We never try to target a specific group. We always hope for the widest possible audience, and that everyone would respond in some way. The result, however, is that we usually get to see very few interesting individual thoughts and opinions. We generally think of our own emotional triggers when we create the work, so in a way, the audience we create for is ourselves.

When working with the different energies of a collective, do you think that somehow adds more credence to what you create because it isn’t easy for the audience to categorise it into a single source, but rather, the very fact of a collective co-creation makes my reading of the work more inclusive?

gender identity. Contemporary reality is always more complex.

We tend to think of ourselves as possessing a multi-identity, or what we consider to be a contemporary identity. Maybe that’s because there are four of us. Our visual statements are always multifaceted. Metaphorically, while one person has bifocal eyesight and can only look at something from one angle, we have something that resembles 3D scanning, viewing the subject from many sides simultaneously.

There is a very strong subversive element in your works that while leaving it open to multiple interpretations, also makes it visually engaging. How conscious are you of both these elements – of what you want to convey and how you convey it. I ask this specifically in the context of how you mix up artistic mediums as well –image/video/installation/ performance/drawing/collage – that while seamless is also somehow glaringly not seamless, almost as if you want to pull my attention to the irregularities as much as the regularities.

AES+F: It was never interesting for us to create work that possesses an obvious political, social, or

AES+F: The disconnect between meaning and form, the inner and the outer, has always been intentional in our work. This is a property of contemporary society – the surface is always somehow

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removed from the content.

Reality is like a beautiful still life, but some of the fruit is quite rotten, and some made of plastic. Like in the Feast of Trimalchio, all the food served to the guests isn’t real – they are plastic emulations, and all the drinks are made of cleaning products. Sometimes this does look seamless, but sometimes the viewer notices that something isn’t right.

All art is, at some level or the other, a manipulation of the viewer’s emotional response. What remains unknown is from where the viewer chooses to situate himself/herself within that emotional response. But when using multiple mediums like music, performance, camera angles, colours, costume, setting, animation, do you think it ironically restricts the boundary from where you create (and manipulate) art?

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AES, Red Square, from the series ‘AES – Witnesses of the Future.

Islamic Project’, digital collage, pigment inkjet print on paper, 1996

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AES, Rome, St Peter Cathedral, from the series ‘AES – Witnesses of the Future. Islamic Project’ Digital collage, pigment inkjet print on paper, 1996

AES+F, Action Half Life, Episode 1, #6, Digital collage, pigment inkjet print on canvas, 2004

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AES+F, KFNY (King of the Forest: New York), From the cycle of projects ‘King of the Forest’, photograph, pigment inkjet print on canvas, 2003

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AES+F, Allegoria Sacra, Snow Elegy, Digital collage, 2014

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AES+F, Last Riot 2, Tondo #16, Digital collage, pigment inkjet print on canvas, 2007 All images coutersy of AES+F

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AES+F: We think that we don’t restrict the viewer to anything.

Everyone is in the prison of their socio cultural contexts.

The emotional reactions vary widely depending on the viewer’s own worldview, and sometimes these reactions are very interesting and unexpected for us. You could say that, as viewers, we also exist within the boundaries of our own context.

We can’t think of all possible reactions, and oftentimes find other people’s reactions to our work much more interesting than our own.

What do you, as a collective, find more gratifying – the response from a ‘live’ audience, that which you can see and interact with, or the response from a retrospective audience, that which you cannot see or interact with?

AES+F: These are always very different, and we like them both.

With a live audience, you could always see the expression and the emotion. In a retrospective audience, it is always interesting to read some thought-through opinion that nobody would ever say to us personally, even if it were highly negative or positive.

You have mentioned before that ‘mass ideologies, mass mythologies’ are subjects that interest you. I am curious to know which aspect of it excites you more as creators – the fact that it easily lends itself to ‘social surrealism’ or that it allows you to go beyond ‘political activism’? Or, perhaps, both?

AES+F: It’s definitely both. Mass ideologies and mass mythologies are not the big ideologies of the 20th century, like Communism or Capitalism. The contemporary situation is really much more like antique polytheism with a huge variety of myths, gods, heroes, comedies, tragedies, real and virtual.

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This Pantheism is what can be called social surrealism, or hybrid reality, or post-truth, or any of the other trendy terms. We like observing this mutating reality, which is far from political activism, because political activism always supports some ideology or another.

How do you make sense of this information and stimuli overload we deal with every day? Both as artists creating and as artists observing? More importantly, does it ever worry you that the audience’s mind, already overwhelmed, may not respond to your work the way you wanted them to? I understand that this is something that cannot be predicted, of course, but in a general sense, does a weakening of the creative impulse among the social media generation worry you as artists?

AES+F: This is a question that we find very interesting. It is irritating and stimulating at the same time.

How does one stay in the mainstream and at the same time be outside of it? We are always reformulating what art is – it must exist within the stream, but at the same time reflect on it from the outside. The faster the flow of information, the more people need the ‘slow-motion’ that art can give them.

And, finally, what do you think is at the heart of AES+F? Is it like the river swiftly diverging into the many different works that you create, or like the mountain, rooted in one spot, gently changing with time?

AES+F: Metaphors with nature aren’t really applicable to us.

We are neither a river nor a mountain, but probably something a lot more artificial. Maybe we are like a city that constantly changes and evolves.

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Studio Visit

The Drawing of Papanji by Reghunadhan K

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The Conservatory of Consciousness A yearly ritual in Kerala – the burning of the Papanji effigy on December 31 – becomes a mix of tradition, folklore, ideologies and imagination in artist K Reghunadhan’s make-shift studio as he sets about creating this larger-thanlife character, only to watch it eventually destroyed

M anoj N air

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“The creatures outside looked

from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

– George Orwell, Animal Farm

There is a strange custom followed religiously every year in Fort Kochi, Kerala. At midnight of December 31, when the sky lights up to greet the new year, Kochiites gather by the beach ritually to burn the large effigy of a mythical character called Papanji. The origins of this custom are shrouded in ambiguity.

Everybody has a different story to tell.Nevertheless, everybody makes it a point to be there to witness the Papanji go up in flames with much fanfare. For a cosmopolitan place as Kochi with its Portuguese, Dutch and English lineage, it is natural that a secular event as this is its most celebrated one. And the quaint touristy place revels in fantasy.

So it was only natural that the Kochi Biennale Foundation and the Carnival Committee of Fort Kochi, which has the responsibility of the creation of the Papanji every year, called upon local artist Reghunadhan K to produce the Papanji.

Reghunadhan is a lover of fables, and fabulism is the fabric of his creations. His works are tinged with his unique sense of humour and the subtle hints of underlying irony. An irony that is pronounced in the choice of acrylic colours for his works. ‘The belief,’ Reghunadhan tells me, ‘is that there is an old man in all of us who is worldly and so we burn the old man with his vices.’

But he can’t fathom why it is

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equated to Santa Claus because Papanji wears a hat and smokes a cigar. ‘So, I can’t understand why anyone would burn a Santa Claus. But I like the myth of its foreign origins.’ We are en route to his makeshift studio in Fort Kochi. His permanent studio is at Eramalloor, which is not far away from here.

His work ethics and practice are disciplined, though his works threaten to border on the anarchic.

But, he is a radical artist. Literally.

He was one of the founding members of one of the most influential art movements in India. It was the first concerted movement by a group of avantgarde artists, mainly sculptors and painters, majority of who were Keralites. Incidentally, this movement was, in a sense, an extension of anti-caste, antifeudal and anti-establishment movements that erupted during the Emergency (1975– 1977) in Kerala as well as in other parts of India.

K.P. Krishnakumar, N.N. Rimson, Alex Mathew, Prabhakaran, Anita Dube K.M. Madhusudhanan, and Akitham Vasudevan were some of the integral members. While being radically against the gallery system, they took their art to the masses and held workshops for them; made them familiar with their art and modern art practices. Sadly, the movement died unceremoniously following its leader K.P. Krishnakumar’s sudden death.

While being radical, Reghunadhan chartered a different territory. He created a language entirely of his own. Art and music, like religion and language, cannot be everybody’s. Reghu or Reghumash

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(master in Malayalam) began creating works that were beguiling confections, almost preserved science or philosophy and near fantasy. Soon these features became the glories of his practice. Fantasy has helped Reghunadhan develop his trademark idiosyncratic and ironic form of social criticism.

So, he decides to build a very different Papanji, breaking from tradition which he has a penchant for, and give it a comical feel and turn it into a kinetic 37-feet being. ‘I want the Papanji to smile and wave goodbye before he is set on fire; a throwback to the irony – The vices vanish with me, but I’ll come back again.’ His studio sits on a disused land of nearly 2,500 square feet, that had been turned into a dump yard by ‘credulous’ neighbours. The field was cleared and a tall carpeted shed was created that quickly housed the tools, the material and the workers who would work under the guidance of Reghunadhan and fellow artist Anto George who worked with him. Both of them quickly made a breakdown of the budget and meticulously measured everything to the last detail. ‘What I have learnt from him (Reghu),’ says Anto, ‘is that an artist has to be an all-rounder. He has to know not only the finer skills of art but also structural engineering, mathematics, organic chemistry, biology, etc. It is not easy and is a life-long learning curve, but Reghu has mastered it.’

Work had begun in full swing under a strict nine-to-nine schedule.

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Anto George working on Papanji’s hand

Reghunadhan K giving finishing touches to Papanji’s face and whiskers

The scaffolding being put together

The hand being given a final shape

Papanji gets a hat

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“Nothing is built on stone; all

is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

– Jorge Luis Borges Inside his make-shift studio that has hit the ground running, the fantastic has come alive. The surrounding area is lit up by colourful lights and paper stars, festoons and music as the neighbourhood gets ready for Christmas. ‘We have only 12 days to build this thing up. If we are to pull this off within that timeframe it will be no less than a miracle.’ He keeps repeating that his approach to his own work ‘progresses by trial and error’ and is always ‘disorganised and experimental’. They are anything but that.

The way he goes about his work in the hot days and sultry nights, with only the sea wind to sooth the exhaustion of this relentless race against time, is proof enough.

Every now and then he would return to his small iron desk next to the centre top pole of the tent and re-energise himself with a gulp of the magic potion from a paper glass and immediately after that he would return to one of the assistants helping him with the instructions on what to do next and how. The plan is etched in his mind. There is no doubt the Papanji will be there for the world to see on 31st afternoon.

The effigy was divided into sections and he had drawings for each of them. From the limbs to the torso to the decorated face.

This time Papanji would sport jutting white whiskers all around his face, chin down, like the joker on a deck of cards.

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As Reghu revels and thereby regales all of us at the studio with his stories that sound more like anecdotes than fiction, we realise that he is allowing us to eavesdrop not on his secrets but on his devotion to clarity. He is also subconsciously, without any hint of desperation, trying to imbibe his faith in literature as a tool of knowledge, which he sees as a continuous process of approximations, not appropriation, and corrections of mistakes.

In fact, an integral part of Reghunadhan’s practice is the very critical characteristic of his craft. The disarming buoyancy that enables its creator to stay afloat on the turbulent seas of his era; this keeping the geniality and melancholy charm of his work intact. The ataraxia in his demeanour is more Epicureanistic than Pyrrhonistic and not at all Stoic. This has been acquired by shunning politics and obnoxious people, by paying no attention to the gods or an afterlife, and by devoting oneself to trustworthy friends and a simple life. It lies camouflaged by the playful veneer that is echoed in his storytelling. He has a story for every occasion. He grew up on stories from the Panchatantra, Jataka and the Arabian Nights and a heavy dose of folk tales, particularly Chinese, Russian and Italian. Reghunadhan never shies away from admitting his Borgesian leanings. On the contrary, they are diaphanous. But he has weakness for Cervantes. Take Conservatory, the work that was displayed at KMB 2012. It was a cluster of his sculptures made at various periods in his life. If you look at the central figure, it has a

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human-figure riding an animal that is carrying its prey in its mouth conjoined by a yellow rope. The figure is playing a blue wind instrument. You will realise that the figure riding the horse is Don Quixote impelling us to think all of us are Don Quixotes, one way or the other, seeking and dominating our preys. And Reghunadhan is the humble, dutiful, loyal but closeted Sancho Pancho. The range of Reghunadhan’s intellect has its roots in his hard-won freedom from ideology – this despite having close ties with the trends of his time from communism to structuralism.

“So plant your own gardens

and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”

– Jorge Luis Borges Meanwhile, the heat inside the studio becomes impossible to bear but Reghu and his team are impervious to temperature. Talk of literature sometimes leads him to fulminate, especially when he enters the realm of contemporary art criticism. ‘It is funny everybody who passes out of the institute with an art history degree calls himself/herself an art historian.

By that logic, everyone with a history degree is a historian and everyone who has a degree in science is a scientist,’ he says.

Was that a statement or a question? Or both.

Suddenly Reghu breaks into a song (another of his skills) as he is working out the mechanics of the motion of the hand with his team.

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They decide on how to use ropes to manipulate the movement of the hand nearly 30 feet above from down below. This is part of his process. Peregrines have a permanent presence in Reghu’s studio, this one or the one in Eramalloor, which incidentally is one of the most sought after studios for artists from all levels of aspiring students and contemporary practitioners.

The nuggets of wisdom, the entertainment, the scenic locale and the food cooked by Reghu... what more do you need? You also have his infinite vocabulary that sponges its imagery from fish and gourd to petrol tanks, from Nazi history and even Nordic myth, to mythical gods and demons, to philosophy and poetry, and to clay and the spirit of materials.

How is one to unpick such a varied but uncomplicated complex personal sphere?

Reghunadhan himself offers no help. ‘Art really,’ he says casually, ‘is something very difficult.’ But it is also very simple, he quickly adds. One just has to be in the rhythm. ‘It is strenuous to create, and it may not always connect with the viewer. But what’s wrong in scratching your head once in a while?’

He says that during the time he studied art, first at College of Art, Thiruvananthapuram and then later at Baroda, where he did his Master’s, it was as if ‘I was living in the woods or enchanting castles, caught between observation, examination and action’. That could be the reason why his works seem to have parachuted straight from fairyland, where everything ‘that I experienced was magic or metamorphosis’.

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Papanji rendered in Reghunadhan’s inimmitable style becomes part of popular imagination

On December 31, just as planned, the Papanji was aflame at the allotted and anxiously awaited time. The multitude erupted as the fireworks began. As he squeezed his way through the airtight collection of vertical bodies to get himself closer to the effigy and catch the last goodbye up close and personal, Reghumash said – his voice barely audible in the cacophony of screams, whistles and howling ‘You know, this is the first time I am witnessing my own work being gutted.’

Two days later the studio was dismantled.

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Art Heritage

All is Well India’s stepwells, a rare mix of functionality and aesthetic, has in its mix an old reverence for visual extravagance steeped, quite innocuously, into everyday life

S u z anne M c N eill

Dada Hari Ni Vav, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

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A black-and-white photograph taken in 1971 by Raghu Rai, one of India’s most famous photographers, captures the moment when a young boy dives from the crumbling masonry of the Agrasen-ki-Baoli in Delhi into the dark waters of the stepwell. Beyond rise the modern tower blocks of the city. It is an image of contrasts, ancient and modern, shadow and light, and one that disorientates the viewer in another way. To take it, the photographer must have descended the steps into the man-made chasm to stand at the water’s edge, lifting his camera up to ground level. As Rai would have discovered, stepwells are barely visible above ground and their function and aesthetic can only be appreciated on entering them.

From the 11th to 16th century CE, the construction of stepwells – called Vav in Gujarati and Baoli in Hindi – hit their peak, evolving not

only into astonishingly complex feats of engineering but also as stunning works of art, built under the patronage of aristocratic families who sought to earn merit through good deeds. They were built with beautiful stone, the colour of which was reflected in the open pools and wet surfaces as the water level rose and fell in line with the seasons. As with the temple and palace construction of the medieval period, stepwell architecture provided a framework for ornamentation. Hindu artists carved sculptures and friezes that depicted gods and goddesses, celestial dancers and musicians, and heroes from Hindu epics alongside scenes from daily life such as milkmaids churning butter, women combing their hair and royal figures attended by their bearers. There were scenes of battle, fighting horses and elephants, and the columns, brackets and beams were alive with floral, geometrical and animal motifs. Commissioned by Queen Udayamati, the Raniki-Vav in Patan, Gujurat, was built on the now-disappeared Saraswati River between 1022 and 1063 CE. It was designed as an inverted temple, and descends 23 metres through a stepped and tapering corridor to the tank. It is divided into seven terraced levels, each decorated with multiple, pillared pavilions adorned with sculptures of the deities and their consorts. Smaller bands of sculpture show dancing and musical scenes, and girls applying cosmetics. Islam’s more austere traditions contributed filigree-like scrolls of motifs of flowers and leaf-vines to this decoration. The two styles were to synthesise and interact in many of the stepwells built under successive Hindu and Muslim rulers.

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There is a long inscription on the 16th-century Dada Harir Stepwell, part of which reads: “… In the Gurjara country, in the glorious city of Ahmedabad […] Bai Sri Harir caused a well to be built in order to please God, in Harirpur, situated to the north-east of the glorious city, for the use of the eighty-four lakhs of the various living beings, men, beasts, birds, trees, etc. who may have come from the four quarters, and are tormented with thirst … As long as the moon and the sun [endure], may [the water of] this sweet well be drunk by men! … [The lady] Bai Sri Harir by name built this well at great expense, in order to benefit the world.”

This extract reflects the different motivations – religious, practical and public-minded – that inspired benefactors, a significant number of whom were women, to commission stepwells. Described as India’s forgotten architecture, thousands of these magnificent water buildings were built across India from medieval times onwards but they are particularly associated with the arid, north-western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, where there is a profound shortage of fresh water and the seasonal monsoon rains quickly disappear into the ground. Sunk into the earth to the level of the water table, stepwells transformed into huge cisterns during the rainy season, and were designed to give access to the receding water levels during the rest of the year.

Rudimentary stepwells have been constructed since the 3rd millennium BCE and evolved from basic pits in sandy soil to elaborate and complicated multi-storey structures dug deep into the ground. The earliest existing stepwell may be the Jhilani Stepwell, which appeared in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region around 550 CE. It was built of stone blocks that were laid without mortar, an innovation in stone construction that made stepwells possible. Over time, three major elements came to define the stepwell: water fed into it through cylindrical well shafts sunk through the rock, from which water could be drawn in buckets; a stepped corridor or staircase that led down several storeys into the vast excavated and stone-lined trench, ending at the water level of the well; and subterranean passageways and ornately carved open chambers and galleries that offered cool retreats.

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Chand Baori, Abhaneri (near Jaipur), Rajasthan Raniji ki Baori, Bundi, Rajasthan Hadi Rani Ki Baori, Todaraisingh town in Tonk district, Rajasthan Rani Ki Vav, Patan, Gujarat

This fusion is seen in Ahmedabad’s spectacular Adalaj-ni-Vav, built in the 15th century. Over 75 metres in length, it is alive with exquisite sculptures on the building’s walls, pillars, cornices and niches. The Islamic influences can be seen in the upper storeys, whilst the original carvings and idols of the Hindu gods on the lower levels remain. The magnificent architecture is both functional and dramatic, and the stairs, the five octagonal landings, the pavilions, parapets and pools of the Adalajni-Vav appear to present a multitude of platforms or stages held aloft by thick columns. Chand Baori in Abhaneri, Rajasthan, is among the largest and most visually spectacular inverted pyramid stepwells in northern India. Built by King Chanda during the 9th century CE, it is a 30-metre-deep, four-sided structure with an immense palace on one face, built later by the Mughals, that includes royal pavilions and a stage for theatre and music. An incredible 3,500 terraced steps march down the other three sides towards the water in a precise geometrical pattern, appearing to form a never-ending path.

As utility and as a work of art, stepwells became places where people gathered and socialised – they came to drink and bathe in the water of the well, to wash clothes and water their livestock. Women were usually associated with these wells, for it was they who collected the water, and - Arts Illustrated Feb & Mar 2017

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the stepwells would have provided a communal outlet in what may have been restricted lives. Perhaps, they gloried in the aesthetic beauty of the stepwells, simple villagers bathing in magnificent surroundings.

Stepwells were also for prayers, meditation and offerings to the deities whose images formed the backdrop to these activities. Whilst the ‘newer’ gods of Hinduism were enshrined in temples, the deities residing in the early stepwells were related to the divine and semi-divine beings – ancestral gods, nagas and yakshas worshipped at river edges and beneath old trees. Stepwells were also associated with fertility. Women prayed to the goddess of the well for her blessings and offered votive gifts.

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Agrasen Ki Baoli, New Delhi

Some stepwells continue to be used as shrines today. Part well, part temple, the Rani-ki-Ji is the most famous of the more than 50 tanks and wells in and around the city of Bundi in Rajasthan. It was built in 1699 by Rani Nathavati, the second wife of the king. Cast aside after she bore him an heir, she devoted herself to serving her subjects and built 20 wells including the 46-metre-deep Rani-ki-Ji. Two hundred steps descend to the water below, passing under a high, slender gate, archways decorated with S-shaped brackets and exquisite elephant carvings. There are places of worship on each floor. The dual benefits of shrine and water enriched with minerals ensured that stepwells were places of folk healing.

They also offered a retreat in the hot season, as evidenced by the numerous platforms, galleries and ledges, the stone benches with backrests, staircases and circumambulatory passages around the wells.

People took advantage of stepwells as cool havens for the air was usually several degrees cooler as they descended towards the cistern.

The visual drama of these buildings is matched by the legends they have fuelled over the years, the most famous associated with the Adalaj-ni-Vav. The stepwell was started by the Hindu chieftain, King Rana Veer Singh, but he died in 1499 during the war with his neighbouring ruler, the Muslim king Mehmud Begada. Begada fell in love with Veer Singh’s bereaved queen, who promised to marry him only if he completed her husband’s stepwell. Building resumed, and on completion of the well Begada presented his work to the queen who, it is said, walked around it, said a prayer and then threw herself into its depths.

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A new audience is discovering India’s stepwells: movie-goers.

Just as Rai captured the sense of a place lost in time, filmmakers have made the most of these abandoned monuments as atmospheric, sometimes brooding, settings. The Agrasen-ki-Baoli recently featured as a location in Aamir Khan’s sci-fi film PK, and Chand Baori was transformed into the grim prison in the Hollywood film The Dark Knight Rises. Shah Rukh Khan’s fantasy film Paheli used the Hadi-Rani-ki Baori in Todraisingh, Rajasthan, as the stopping point for the separate but related journeys of its hero and heroine: they both meet the same mysterious stranger at the well. Seemingly hidden in plain view, these neglected works of art are reclaiming their role in the communal space.

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Special Feature

The Ways of Seeing ‘Finding Vivian Maier’, the award-winning documentary that catapulted Vivian Maier’s brilliance as a photographer into public consciousness, is a meditative study of where the audience is placed in the spectrum of anonymity

P raveena S hivram

‘The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life’ – William Faulkner

financially sustain her. When she died in 2009, a part of her compulsive need for anonymity died with her, and her images began to speak.

She was ‘discovered’ in 2007 by John Maloof, who was trying to collect material for a history book

he was working on and ended up buying a box full of undeveloped film at an auction house in Chicago. When he developed some of them, he realised he had stumbled upon a street photographer who would eventually be hailed as (albeit controversially) one of the greatest 20th century American photographers, redefining the very texture of street photography with her candid, powerful eye for the unique. There was a ‘rawness’ to her images that somehow found its power in its sheltered existence – because, Vivian was a nanny who obsessively shot photographs that she wouldn’t show anyone. She spent all her life taking images, wooing images, befriending images, courting images and then locked them all away in boxes (at last count, there were 100,000 negatives), some of which she kept in a storage facility, and some that eventually found their way into auction houses to

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There is an undeniable thrill to anonymity that even while it covers you up in a cloak of anticipatory discovery, it leaves behind a state of breathless excitement, at it being yours and yours alone, like the lines etched inside your palms, hidden either in a tight fist or in a casual downward slant, but hidden nonetheless. It’s like a secret, that becomes such an intrinsic part of your personality, that you forget it exists as something separate, till the secret itself becomes your life.

Obviously, I perfectly understood Vivian Maier.

Somehow, as I looked at her images – some arresting, some humorous, some disarming, some depressing and almost all of them hypnotic and penetrating – I could not help but feel a sense of loss, like I had entered a funeral I hadn’t been invited to, and yet I couldn’t leave. It was much easier to embrace the loss and allow it to seep into my skin than not to have felt it at all. My engagement with Maier’s images was like the curious case of Benjamin Button – I was falling in love backwards.

I was mourning its loss even before I could fully appreciate its presence in my world (because ‘life’ would be too limiting a parameter). When we stumbled upon this story – Maloof, along with Charles Siskel,

eventually made this into a compelling documentary ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ that has been widely screened – it seemed like a delicious proposition to understand this often overestimated but really understated bond between the artist and the audience. Vivian, in her resoluteness to keep this under wraps, to keep her identity itself under wraps – some of the best moments of the film are these, when Vivian apparently introduced herself to someone as a ‘sort of a spy’ or when she insisted on giving obviously generic names that everyone knew to be false or her apparent ‘French accent’ – and this wide publicity that she now enjoys are oddly contrasted. The ‘audience’ when it arrived, was not of Vivian’s own making, and to speculate what the audience of her own making would have been, seems like a futile exercise.

through her photographs.

Because, and thankfully for her, she did not belong to our world of hyperlinks and Wikipages.

To be honest, her story is quite fascinating, simply because the clues she left behind of the kind of person she was are entirely to be found in her photographs.

No amount of conversation – and Maloof has painstakingly tried to find her friends and family to interview for his film (and probably for copyright purposes too) – tells you much about Vivian – she almost

revelled in creating different personas: that she hoarded newspapers like Gollum and his ‘precious’ and stacked her rooms up with piles and piles of it that even travelled with her when she moved from one place to another; that she was a ‘pack-rat’ with boxes and boxes of coupons and trinkets and bills; that she played at being a journalist, recording live interviews with people in supermarkets about the political climate then or at events; that she took a year off to travel through Asia; that she was eccentric or ‘beyond eccentric’ as someone says in the film; that she was cruel as one child she looked after reveals, and that she always had the camera around her neck and always took photographs. What did Vivian think about, what did she feel, what moved her, what touched her soul, what made her smile, what were those things that filled up the blank spaces between her breaths are only to be discovered

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In a 2013 interview for Indie Wire, Siskel says, ‘Art has to be seen.

And Vivian’s art wasn’t seen in her lifetime. Her photographs were seen by a wide public. That’s part of what it means to share your work publicly. She didn’t do that, so we’re thrilled to see audiences embracing her photography and her story.’

As Maloof says in the Indie Wire interview, ‘Vivian is one of those people that becomes mythical.

Nobody has moving footage with dialogue out there. Nobody knows her that well.’ And, to me (as with audiences around the world), that is part of the charm of Vivian’s photographs. That I don’t know, I don’t know how this artist’s thought process functioned, I don’t know the life experiences that made up this person, and yet I have this large body of work to sift through, to freely gallivant across limitless imagination and create at will superimposed emotions that resonate with me.

That I am, unwittingly, at the centre of this creation because how I interpret it is utterly my own. There is no one ‘curating’ my emotions, no ‘information’,

other than the peripheral, directing my vision, no ‘interview’ with the artist colouring the landscape of my thought, and no memory even – that of the artist or the subject photographed – hindering my connection to the image.

In the film, contemporary colour photographer Joel Meyerowitz makes an interesting observation.

He says, ‘As she was photographing, she was seeing just how close she could come into somebody’s face.

That tells me a lot about her. She could get them to accommodate her by being themselves. She could generate this moment and then she is gone.’

It is exactly this motif of transience that sticks to you with magnetic precision. And the fact that the camera Vivian used – a Rolleiflex camera – always at chest level, allowed her eye-contact with her subject. You are seeing what the photographer is seeing, you are seeing what the subject is seeing, and within that mix is the realisation that they are both, therefore, aware of what the audience is seeing. What is ironic is that the transience rests with the photographer and the subject – both strangers – and the permanence rests with us – the viewers.

I stumbled upon the ‘Art of Photography’ with Ted Forbes, who talks about the many nuances of photography on his YouTube channel, quite by accident, and discovered there was a lawsuit over copyright for Vivian Maier’s images, with a lawyer claiming he has found the closest next of kin to Maier who becomes the rightful heir to these images – and the money it is making. In one of his episodes

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dedicated to Vivian’s images, Forbes brings up an important point – that every artist reserves the right to edit his or her work.

And that could go both ways – how you want to ‘print’ your photographs, even if you don’t print them yourself, and how you want to showcase them to the world. In Vivian’s context, we are seeing a wide selection of images, printed and selected by those who neither knew the artist nor were intimately privy to the politics of her time. Vivian, herself, it would seem, was completely disconnected with the economics of her craft, though the film reveals there was at least one attempt by her to have her photographs printed and sold. In a letter written by Vivian to a studio in France, she expresses an interest to do business with the printer.

In a 2014 interview to American Photo, Maloof explains, ‘We don’t think anything happened with it.

We know that this person printed her postcards before, though, because I have them. They’re French landscapes, they’re of the era, and they’re not printed by her. So we don’t know if this letter we found was ever completed or if it’s just a draft, or if it just didn’t work out.’ But it is Siskel’s view that probably comes closer to the truth. ‘...But for us it pokes a hole in this very romantic idea that Vivian was an artist creating art for art’s sake, as if she set out from the very beginning to be this mystery woman (as she does describe herself), who would labour for decades creating a huge body of work only for herself, that should never be seen, never be tainted by public consumption.

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That romantic idea is ultimately less interesting than the truth – which for us is more compelling – that Vivian wasn’t able to share her work for a variety of reasons and because life is messy and complicated. She was probably partly intimidated by the idea of sharing her work for the same reason any artist is. They don’t want to be rejected. They don’t want criticism. The cost and labour involved in processing her work would have been significant.

The biggest factor was probably time. Over time she got used to saying, “Well, maybe someday I’ll get around to printing this.” Or “Eventually this will happen, but for now I’ll just continue to take photos.” Years turn into decades and then eventually she has this enormous body of work which she tragically didn’t get to share during her life: tragic not because of the fame – who knows how Vivian would have reacted to that, being as private she was – but just to know that other people have been moved by what she saw through the lens and have come to appreciate her work and that she did find an audience. She didn’t get to experience that during her lifetime, but thanks to John’s discovery, it has happened now and sort of closes the circle.’

Except, I am not too sure of that, because some circles are meant to exist in waves or loops, they are meant to contain as much as they are meant to release, and they are, most of all, meant to know

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the point at which the circle really began. As much as Siskel believes ‘art has to be seen’, I think Vivian’s story might just be that confounding exception to prove that even when art is not seen, it remains – unconsciously and unpretentiously – quite simply, art. Even when hiding inside boxes in storage or inside the boxes of the mind.

All photographs by Vivian Maier, Image credit: via YouTube.

Interview sources: http://www.indiewire.com/2013/09/ john-maloof-and-charlie-siskel-talkresearching-the-life-of-the-nannystreet-photographer-vivianmaier-34992/ http://www.americanphotomag.com/ interview-john-maloof-directorfinding-vivian-maier#page-7

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Art Feature

Watch Word The role of the audience in this Posthumanist world is rapidly changing the lens through which we view contemporary art, as artists re-imagine the audience from passive to interactive to participatory to collaborative models

Daniel C onnell

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After three full days of looking, reading, observing and being a part of the very diverse audience at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, everything seems like it could be an artwork. Do you ever get that wonderful art-induced feeling of heightened observation?

An earnest voice wells up inside my head: ‘Rubbish Bin’, 2017. Site Specific.

Tin fixings. In this work, the artist has placed a rubbish bin in a public space inviting the audience as unknowing participants to place items in it exploring social conformity and capitalism’s excesses.

More wall texts spontaneously emerge in my head. The earnest voice continues: ‘Walking Down the Street’, 2017.

Performance durational work. In this work, the artist walks down a street, on a given day (actually, right now); the work is imperceptible to the wider public. It investigates an enduring personal relationship between body and ground, mediated by the shoe. As an anti-spectacle statement the work is undocumented. A non-specific and un-contacted audience completes the work as they are called upon to trust that the work actually took place.

art is essential work, but I think sometimes an untrained audience may be forgiven for thinking that clever words are all it takes to turn the everyday into (often expensive) art. I know many good people who on seeing contemporary art express a feeling of being conned or confusion, alienation, anger or cynicism.

It hardly needs saying that we are currently in the middle of an unprecedented global backlash against intellectual elitism and multiculturalism.

Those who perhaps feel they have been patronised for too long have chosen populist, anti-education, mean, divisive leaders. The art world is on the intellectual side; the enemy of the people, perceived as irrelevant and esoteric by so many angry marginalised men and women.

Contemporary art is eminently send-up-able. I laugh and wonder, can wall text make anything art? I walk out of the KMB and into the streets and see people I know working hard in the heat to make a living. All these words in my head. How do these good people view my work as an artist? I have no doubt that

Do these so-called forgotten majority voters have a right to be irritated? Are these voters also art’s audience and, if so, how are they considered, or not? This is a question more urgent than ever because we are at the threshold of an era in human history that philosophy has named Posthumanism. This is a distracting term sounding like a world without hugs, but it is actually more about ‘the end of man’ as Michell Foucault declared in the 1960s. That could mean the end of the male, euro-centric hegemony (yay!) or the end of humanity as we know it. Is it possible we could have a different world order or will the angry (white) men wrest

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back control? Right now, it seems our world could go either way.

The issues raised by Posthumanism: a world in which non-humans are considered as equals; the urgency of climate change and possibility of human extinction; robots and trans-humans; technological mediation, and the huge problem of insatiable capitalism which has taken us by stealth into a proxy/ real world war to feed its greed.

These sobering times compel thought leaders and artists to consider what gains we have made and what is at stake.

Optimistic philosopher Rosi Braidotti calls it a future of ‘collaborative moralities’. She continues, ‘What do we need to do to bring the positivity of the future into play right now?…Can we not have the courage to let go of the familiar and embrace the project of collectively constructing a grounded, humble, targeted but absolutely new future?’

It is more important than ever for artists to articulate the relevance and the work of art. Addressing the audience is a way of addressing the much bigger picture of this significant global human change.

Artists have already begun to do this, as we will see below, but it seems leaders who are ‘narcissistic man-baby’, as one US journalist quipped in reference to Trump, of course, mean we need to move faster. We have an important role to play to bridge gaps not just between an audience and art, but between everyone and everyone else, our real audience – humanity.

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The Passive Since the 1960s, despite contemporary art exiting galleries and re-engaging the public as ‘Happenings’, performance, ‘Relational Aesthetics’ and via digital platforms, there are still artists who don’t acknowledge a relationship with an audience. To them, art is not supposed to do that, lest it be accused of being popular, but even these artists are considering audiences, albeit as passive attention givers, to be shocked, confounded or seduced.

Some audiences want this and want only to revere resolved heroic objects without question, but times now are demanding more of all of us.

I once heard a well-respected Australian arts journalist express his frustration with visual artists who declare their body of work ‘an exploration into xyz’. ‘Why can’t they do the exploration in their own time and then show us what they found?’ At the time I chuckled and agreed with him recalling many half-baked, self-indulgent ‘explorations’ but later wondered: is it a colonial conceit that believes an artist should display the captured spoils of an adventure into the unexplored wilderness? Is creative investigation ever complete?

audience an alternative to the ‘I don’t get it so I am not part of this scene’ response to ‘of course I don’t understand it along with everyone else in this’.

This marks the start of the collaborative turn, but the art market which sees obscurity equal to exclusivity equal to valuable may have forgotten to tell the audience.

Theorists Griselda Pollock and Bracha Ettinger’s talk of hospitality supports this notion of the subject (the concept, material, narrative, issue, identity) of the artwork, replacing the genius of the artist as art’s focus. From their refreshing perspective, art is a space hospitable to dialogue with the unfamiliar. This frees the audience from the burden of ‘interpretation’ as Susan Sontag entreated, allowing an audience to join artists on a journey of approaching an unfamiliar subject with openness.

The Interactive

The expectation of many punters walking into a gallery is this very model of the hierarchical masculine tripartite: (1) artist presenting (2) object to (3) audience; however, thanks to Postcolonial and Feminist critique, art has been liberated to be seen via a new model: artist in collaboration with audience to serve subject. Such critical thinking has permitted the

Art historian Claire Bishop said in an interview with Tania Bruguera that artworks have an imperative to be viewed. This causes me to wonder: Does art become art only after it is viewed? Is an artwork completed by the audience? Meaning is constructed not given, Barthes told us; but is art only meaning?

Irish performance artist Sandra Johnston talks of imperceptible undocumented performance works, yes, like my imaginary ‘Walking Down the Street’. In such works, art exists in an honest intent, a collaboration with the self; self as audience, a concept more readily understood in an Indian meditation context than in

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Europe. The aesthetic, after all, includes the noble unseen act as philosopher Sophie-Grace Chappell contends, but interactive work depends on a wider audience.

When process supersedes the object and an audience is invited to change a pre-made artwork, it can be called interactive.

Infinite techniques can be used to activate this: viewer triggered sensors, artworks that can be felt, dismantled, added to and removed. Félix González-Torres was a prime example of interactive or process art at its height in the 1980s and 1990s.

Another mode of interactivity is the Internet. Artworks are presented, then social media as mediator broadens access to them. Social media accelerates the possibilities for intertextualisation, creating new readings of existing works as well as the possibility for more rapid commodification. The ‘post’ in Post-Internet art rightly identifies, however, that this is simply another platform rather than another dimension.

Sandra Johnston, In A/Way, solo performance as part of Performance Platform Lublin (Performance Laboratory Project), commissioned by Waldemar Tatarczuk & Melati Suryodarmo Galeria Labirynt & Padepokan Lemah Putih Indonesia, Lublin, Poland, 2012. Photograph by: L. Skwarski. Images courtesy of the artist.

Sandra Johnston, Let Liminal Loose, 5 interrelated collaborative performances with Alastair MacLennan made on consecutive days, 2 hours duration each day, as part of the 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week: Ritual Body – Political Body, project created by Vest & Page, Venice, Italy, 2014 .

Photo credit: Photo © Nisa Ojalvo 2015. image Courtesy of the artist.

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Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, Decontextualisation of an action, Mounted police, crowd control techniques, audience, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photograph by Sheila Burnett. Image Courtesy of Tate Modern and Studio Bruguera.

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The Participatory The audience comes into a gallery in New York and eats pad-Thai cooked in no special way by Rirkrit Tiravanija. The audience walks into the Tate gallery in London and is corralled by what looks like policemen on horses arranged

by Tania Bruguera. Volunteers follow Thomas Hirschhorn’s guidelines for ‘Presence and Production’ to build a monument to Gramsci in a park in New York. Participatory art enlists an audience, paid or otherwise, to make a work, perhaps, as an event. The audience is part of a work, but is directed or framed rather than consulted.

There are many examples of participatory art. Bourriaud’s

Relational Aesthetics (RA) in the 1990s was one notable form.

Its stated aims were to challenge the alienation of capitalism. It has since been criticised for becoming a packaged spectacle of elitist novelty or tokenistic ‘helicoptering into ‘difficult suburbs’ (Tony Bennett, 2010), but such criticism has helped build a new vocabulary for discussing socially engaged work.

Ellen Dissenayake in her book What is Art For outlines a thesis of art as an affirmation of social relations, a nostalgia for maternal and paternal infant relationships, and rhythms, and of belonging to a tribe, subculture, community or ‘scene’. The particular group/ audience in which belonging is sought dictates the aspect of art which is valued: popularity,

monetary value, transgression, ideology, accessibility or inaccessibility. RA has been accused of handling these precious social relations in a superficial way. It may have gone wrong often but RA seems to indicate a genuine desire to engage audiences.

This desire continues to be exemplified in many examples today of less spectacular but equally profound, socially engaged practices called ‘Art Led Participatory Practices’ or described by Grant Kester as ‘Dialogic’. These employ dialogue and sustained relationships as a valid critical art practice. The artist’s desire to effect meaningful change in response to very visible injustices, is closer to the surface than ever.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, a participatory project dedicated to the Italian philosopher at the Forest Houses, Bronx, New York, 2013. Images Courtesy of Cinework GMBH.

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Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, a participatory project dedicated to the Italian philosopher at the Forest Houses, Bronx, New York, 2013. Images Courtesy of Cinework GMBH.

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The Collaborative and Dialogic Suzanne Lacy builds relationships with senior women across the United States; they form a human quilt pattern in a shopping mall (Crystal Quilt, 1985–1987).

Jay Koh places ads in Irish newspapers inviting Chinese immigrants into art working relationships; Fernando GarciaDory starts a Shepherd’s Union in Northern Spain – collaborative art work consults and responds to a stakeholder. It works by building relationships over long periods to seriously observe and examine collaboration ethically and critically. It is beyond soliciting an audience response to an issue; rather it investigates through practicing solidarity. The WochenKlausur collective of Austria who have been conducting social interventions since 1993 say: ‘the Artists’ competence in finding creative solutions, traditionally utilised in shaping materials, can just as well be applied in all areas of society: in ecology, education and city planning. There are problems everywhere that cannot be solved using conventional approaches and are thus suitable subjects for artistic projects.’

If we see art as a disinterested investigation, either material or social, we suspend the argument between aesthetic versus social outcomes. Such art works move beyond the spectacle. They are sustained relationism.

Suzanne Lacy, Crystal Quilt, 1985-1987, Photograph by Gus Gustavson. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977, Photograph by Maria Karras. Image Courtesy of the artists.

Suzanne Lacy with Meg Parnell, Cleaning Conditions, 2013, Photograph by Alan Seabright. Image Courtesy of the artists.

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Jay Koh, Ni Hao - Dia Duit, a cross community art project, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

Participant preparing a banner inviting local NGOs and the police force to a community BBQ gathering at the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Portland Row campus, 2007.

Image Courtesy of Jay Koh.

Submitted works from Chinese immigrants: Seeing Ireland through postcards, Part of the Reading Self & Reading Others exhibition, Ireland, 2010. Image Courtesy of Jay Koh

Irish youth from another community project visiting the Reading Self & Reading Others exhibition, Ireland, 2010. Image Courtesy of Jay Koh

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Frantz Fanon’s powerful and epoch changing question: ‘What does the black man (sic) want?’ underpins ‘Dialogical’ practices.

This phrase has been adapted to many situations. W J T Mitchell used it in his book, What Do Pictures Want? (1996) but I believe he missed the point.

Pictures, objects, concepts don’t want; they have no desires. They are simply the material or immaterial ‘Other’ that provokes an attitude of questioning. This attitude of open, genuine concern is the Fanon revolution; the inevitable creative progression from representing to asking. This is the ‘I and thou’ of Martin Buber and the primal obligation to the other of Emmanuel Levinas. It is a non-phobic response to the other (Bracha Ettinger). This is difficult to achieve in its purist form, but purity should not be confused with elitism.

Artists don’t make art to change the world but to deepen their perception of it. Perhaps, the world is changed by this humble, useless endeavour; perhaps the world is the audience. And like love, it is for everyone, as complex and mysterious as it is.

WochenKlausur Collective, Language Schools in the Kosovo War, 1999.

Invited as Austria’s contribution to the Biennale di Venezia, WochenKlausur set up language schools in Macedonia for Kosovo-Albanian refugees of the Kosovo War. Image Courtesy of WochenKlausur.

WochenKlausur Collective, Suggestions for District Development, Cologne, 2013. On invitation of the Department of Art and Culture in Cologne, WochenKlausur worked together with local citizens on suggestions for improvements within a specific planning zone on the right river bank of the Rhine. Image Courtesy of WochenKlausur.

WochenKlausur Collective, Language Schools in the Kosovo War, 1999.

Invited as Austria’s contribution to the Biennale di Venezia, WochenKlausur set up language schools in Macedonia for Kosovo-Albanian refugees of the Kosovo War. The group was able to raise funds for the project by holding a lottery in the Austrian pavilion at the Biennial: for 20 Euros visitors could choose from an array of surprise bags containing prizes sponsored by a variety of Austrian and Italian companies.

Image Courtesy of WochenKlausur

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DIGITAL COPY ON MAGZTER

Fernando Garcia-Dory, Shepherds School as Micro kingdom of Utopia, 2004 - ongoing, Student and shepherd-tutor during the practical course. Image Courtesy of Fernando Garcia-Dory. www.fernandogarciadory.info - Arts Illustrated Feb & Mar 2017

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Special Feature

The ‘I’ of the Beholder Between the ‘viewing’ and the ‘knowing’ there is a world of dialogue that exists, and it is within that gaze of the audience perpetually subject to the nature of time that the aesthetics of art comes alive

P eter B ond

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The Indian Holi festival conjures up my past as a painter mixing paint from powder colour. Inert pigment has a special quality; it coats everything and makes the mundane colourful and gets everywhere. In my own painterly learning, I fix the powder colour to achieve permanence. I write from the ‘I’, the performative node of enquiry. Knowledge has no hierarchy and is unnaturally hinged upon a selfish and elite ‘mystical’ academy that is not the only sort of knowledge.

I, the writer, come with a different knowledge, by degree, to the reader. My learning is from a working class beginning, my experiences, and from the academies I work with and teach through. It is not one thing or the other. You will cast your own knowledge over mine and it will connect in different ways; it may be discontinuous, alien, repulsive, warming. An audience is freewilled and this is how it should be.

On ‘The Audience’ the editor asks for a way forward and in response I have ‘brushed up’ on some key thinkers who have influenced my Habitus,1 where I stand or ‘see fit’ in the realm of audiences of creativity. This personal re-visitation is affected by new, and worldwide, contemporaries. An audience will never be the same twice; the nature of time prevents us from receiving the ‘same thing’ in the ‘same way’. Time erodes and revitalises the ‘same thing’ if one chooses to re-visit ‘that thing’; like the Taj Mahal changing colour at different times of the day.

Foster and Pierre Bourdieu unique to my re-visitation.

instinct above any other type of knowledge.

Rancière, in The Emancipated Spectator,2 states that ‘viewing is the opposite of knowing: the spectator is held before an appearance in a state of ignorance about the process of production of this appearance and about the reality it conceals.’ This fact, together with the idea of the spectator being passive and ‘separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act’ is a ‘bad thing’.3 Rancière describes this as an ‘illness of the gaze’, a ‘theatrical mediation’, which ‘prepares the gaze for passivity and illusion.’4 On a ‘media stage’ this prevails. What Rancière calls for is a type of looking that incorporates a community of ‘living attitudes’ of each of its members. My reflections on the nature of knowledge, and of the Holi festival, focus on communities of ‘living attitudes’ with individualised referents.

It is the impossible-to-measure gap between different types of knowledge that divides our knowledge. According to Bourdieu, it is the difference between academic discourse (sanctified knowledge) and other types of knowledge. For Rancière, wanting to know and not knowing is the only key to intelligence. The only entity knowledge has is ‘drive’. ‘… What is involved is linking what one knows with what one does not know.... Like researchers, artists construct the stages where the manifestation and effect of their skills are exhibited, rendered uncertain in the terms of the new idiom that conveys a new intellectual adventure.’5 To begin this article, I visited Tate Gallery London where my plan was to eavesdrop on conversations of people looking at artworks. I wanted a different sort of knowledge about art, one that gave me information outside of theory and history gained from the academy.

However, what happened was quite different; I began to see the galleries as forged from the minds of their curators. This highlighted curators as social mediators to the public viewing art. Audiences, like research, are about cross-referencing, evaluation and being surprised.

New political and religious enigmas grip our ‘new contemporary’. This newness makes thinkers such as Jacques Rancière, Jacques Lacan, Hal

Rancière wants audiences to be active and fearless in challenging whatever is put before them.

Rancière’s work, in this instance, draws me to the sociophilosophical works of Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Bergson.

Rancière speaks of two types of knowledge. The first is established by the establishment, the second is what we assume to know, and which we are unsure about. The former, intrinsically connected to the academies of knowledge, is wrongly assumed to be the guarantor of all knowledge.

Knowledge, or the thirst for knowledge, comes from all angles. Established knowledge, academia, is likely to make us feel inferior. Bergson promotes

Hal Foster, art historian, begins his book, The Return of the Real 6 with Minimalism as going against the grain of the art establishment. He makes two important points: firstly that Minimalism breaks away from art history because of its theatricality; and secondly that

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interaction between the work and the viewer completes the art of the Minimalist. Foster describes this as somewhere between architecture and memorial. Robert Morris’s interactive work, Bodymotionspacethings (1964), when shown at the London’s Tate Gallery was closed after a few days because it was wrecked and loved to bits by the public.

From this moment art became more accessible, and like theatre, less elitist.

This ‘theatricalisation’ of art caught on. In 2011 the Hayward Gallery in London staged an exhibition called Move.

Choreographing You!7 – a series of installations from significant episodes in art and dance history. The public could climb, swing, dress up, dance and experience a play of forms and environments ranging from a gorilla suit to a simulated war zone and live-time delay video.

The most striking thing about this exhibition was that it brought strangers together, where they conversed and exchanged experience and knowledge. It was participatory art as a useful expose of truth. Nicolas Bourriaud, curator and critic, brought to the forefront ‘Relational Aesthetics’, where an artwork would, and always will be, subject to the points of reference within the viewer.

to see and not necessarily what the artist or curator wants us to see. When going around an exhibition we are hooked according to what Roland Barthes called the punctum, the ‘thing’ that ‘strikes’ us immediately about a part, a fragment, of what we are looking at.

According to the artist and writer Victor Burgin, the ‘scopic drive is the only drive that must keep its objects at a distance… (and that) the look puts out its exploratory, or aggressive “shoots” (in Lacan’s expression) but it equally clearly also takes in objects, from the physical space – just as it projects unconscious objects into the real.’8 This power of looking results in the power to exchange individually diverse references.

What springs to mind is the moment that the British artist brothers, Dinos and Jake Chapman decided to buy watercolour paintings by Adolf Hitler. They purchased these, with a viewer’s eye, to paint rainbows on them. To these artists the images warranted an image screen, a projection of a rainbow. Nevertheless, the hidden horror of these works remains ‘unscreened’.

Prior to all of this, Jacques Lacan laid out a concept of the gaze whereby we create an imagescreen, a form of our unconscious imagining of what we are looking at and experiencing.

Lacan’s image- screen is the result of the gaze as it ‘screens off and on’, an oscillation between the viewer and artwork.

It is what a viewer is compelled

Lacan distinguishes between looking and gazing. In a scopic regime,9 where we can look at anything as a subjectivity, we read the object or encounter with an unconscious pre-existence, this is similar to language as fabrication and locality. The gaze, like language and the source material for theory, is situated in ‘the world’ and not in the academy.

Therefore, in Lacanian thought, the subject exists from variable, not fixed, sets of signifiers.

The subject is without a

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predetermined signification.

What we look at is subject to the Gaze as predetermined sets of the signified in the process of objectification.

‘Newness’, seen by an audience, nourishes a new subjectivity.

These types of knowledge potentials are contained in us, and are as individual as every snowflake has a unique shape.

This is why, when searching for something on the World Wide Web, we look for the nearest thing that conforms to our sensibility as thinkers, these become micro-narratives (Jean Baudrillard).

In art galleries we are at the whim and mercy of the metonymy of the curator. This is why a display at Tate London, called The Artists Studio, for example, can appear as a jumble, even though it is clearly not. Whatever the curator says, we nevertheless latch onto the nearest thing to our sensibilities. I once heard a viewer say to a friend upon entering a gallery, of the works of Cy Twombly: ‘Is this joke art?’.

I am sure Twombly would have approved of this reaction.

Lacan said, ‘in the early 1960s that the subject is the subject of the signifier’.10 Therefore the relationship between the signifier and the signified is unstable, subject to an infinite number of meanings. These are taken to be in the realms of symbols or symbolic orders.

This forms the imaginary, what audiences see via the gaze. The signified, the outcome of the signifier, is suspended in the individuality of the subject, like the British are subjects to the Queen of England.

Knowledge is predicated on non-knowledge or the quest to

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find out. The unconscious sometimes betrays us in this as fear of that which is not understood. This can lead to a dismissal of diversity, contained in significations. Therefore, we must normalise diversity through actions and studies of audiences.

1 A term used extensively by the socio-philosopher Pierre Bourdieu on which I elaborate below.

2 Translated by Gregory Elliot, London/New York: Verso, 2011.

3 Ibid. p 2.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. p 22.

6 Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England:

According to Bourdieu, the domain of the individual, the social standing or position, is called Habitus. To me this is a place to reside thoughts that contribute to our supposed or assumed ‘standing in the world’. The fragile arrangement of Habitus produces a ping-pong effect between knowledge of different kinds. Too often the knowledge of the state or the academic institution habitually gains the upper ground. ‘The view of the academic milieu as ‘fair’ and competitive and supposedly charged with ‘pushing back the frontiers of knowledge’, and selecting ‘the best mind’ for the task, is the kind of common-sense orthodoxy Bourdieu’s sociological research and reflections aims to dispel.’11

The MIT Press, 1996.

7 Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.

8 Bergin, Victor, IN/ DIFFERENT SPACES, Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995, p 72.

9 A term used by the feminist poststructuralist philosopher, Hélène Cixous to describe the freedom to look anywhere, as opposed to mediated looking of the camera, screen and so forth.

10 Lechte, John, Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers from Structuralism to Postmodernity, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p 68.

11 Ibid. p 46.

Bourdieu sets up a thesis whereby ‘ham, egg and chips’ has a cultural value equal to say, Hamlet, and each should be curious about the other.

Equal opportunity and social mobility arrive from Bourdieu’s thinking of ‘establishment knowledge’ set against ‘experiential knowledge’ of, say, a lift operator or rickshaw driver.

Knowledge in terms of the latter is subconsciously absorbed and not given credit or formalised. These are merely different forms of Habitus, not set in fields of ancestral bindings and generations of people that are born to perpetuate hegemony.

The spectacle of the everyday is akin to raw sewage; it is not pickled, boxed and packaged in the way that artists make a spectacle of the everyday.

Intelligence is a working proposition, not intelligence per se.

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Art & Travel

Striking the Right Note

Passersby become part of the Chess game in the park. Geneva, Switzerland

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The energy enshrined within a space – be it in its volume, proportion, light or sound – is something that breaks through the barriers of place, people and identity, asking us as we travel the world to ‘listen’

S iddhartha Das

I write this piece, completely sleep deprived, as I try to produce a festival with my team members in Bhubaneswar. At 4.30 a.m., the morning before the festival, I am preoccupied with some existential thoughts: Who are we doing this for and why? Who is our audience and will they care about what we are doing?

Having lived alone for possibly way too long, and working in a cocooned existence, the world seems to have changed a bit too fast for me. I am in denial about malls, selfies and how rapidly Americanised and polarised we have become. And yet, working in the realm of design, spaces and culture, I have to contend with the issues of place, people and identity on a regular basis.

With this rapidly changing world, it makes one think if an object, a piece or a place can exist without an audience. Is the raison d’être to engage, or merely to have a reaction and create a spectacle?

Etymologically, the word ‘audience’ comes from the Latin

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word audientia, the action of hearing, and the verb audire, which is to listen. I see myself as a part of the audience, one that ‘listens’.

But, I think, today we confuse audiences with consumers.

All of us are seduced by different things, and sometimes by contrasting things – by colour or monochromes, ever-changing imageries or stillness, glamour and fame or anonymity. To engage and entice. Seduction, like everything else, is different for different people and wildly contrasting. What do we like?

There is an audience for art, for religion, for sights and sounds, for dating and sex, for mud-slinging and trolling… There seems to be an audience for everything, all at once. There is no space for stillness, for thorough engagement. And, Delhi, the city I live in, seems to be at the bottom of that smogfilled abyss.

Ghalib wrote soulfully and longingly about the same city decaying. Luckily for us, he wrote more emotively about love, not

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too differently from Pablo Neruda, though separated by centuries and continents. Though creating with completely different media – Neruda with words, Tadao Ando with serene spaces or Kumar Gandharva with music – all of them seem to make you fall in love with the idea of timeless beauty, with words, spaces and notes. I work on the design of cultural complexes and museums and am preoccupied with how I can make this love for words, spaces and notes tangible to an audience.

As a practitioner, I had thought that making buildings was supreme among all the art forms, the sthapatis who would create a sculpture or a temple or a township. After two decades of working and intermittently studying and teaching, I realise that for me it is music. That is the innate nature of music as an art form to be able to create a space, that feels limitless, and challenges all notions of finiteness.

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The audience is intrigued by the exhibit. Tate Modern, London, UK An engrossed audience takes in Van Gogh painting. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Ayasofya. Istanbul, Turkey The painted domed ceiling. Duomo, Florence, Italy

Lao Tse, the 6th century Chinese poet-philosopher captured this notion of infiniteness in a way that only the most incredible poets can: Thirty spokes join together in the hub.

It is because of what is not there that the cart is useful.

Clay is formed into a vessel.

It is because of its emptiness that the vessel is useful.

Cut doors and windows to make a room.

It is because of its emptiness that the room is useful.

Therefore, what is present is used for profit.

But it is in absence that there is usefulness.

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One has to merely visit Mahabalipuram or Ellora to know what Lao Tse meant. The tangible always seems finite and the intangible so incredibly infinite.

Sacred architecture often seems to straddle these two worlds of formless infiniteness (if I can call it that), the spiritual being, enshrined and contained by a building. Even as an agnostic, I am always excited to visit historic places of worship. A church, a mosque or a temple or any other sacred building seems to somehow enhance your belief.

And there are others that completely and sublimely elevate the spirit and almost make you a believer, be it the Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, the Duomo in Florence or the Ayasofya in Istanbul. The art in the buildings is tangible and yet seem surreal.

It is a combination of the play of light and form, space and volume, the smell and sight, that somehow makes one a believer.

In the Brihadeeswarar Temple, for instance, it is the unimaginable volume and detailed stone sculptures mounted on one another, and as a visitor, a worshipper or a tourist, one goes from the profusion of sculptures in the temple to the large empty courtyard which contrasts befittingly.

About a decade ago while at the Duomo in Florence, the experience seemed similar. The volume and

the incredible painted ceilings, and especially the dome, were jaw dropping even centuries after.

In Ayasofya in Istanbul, it is the play of light and form, not just the natural light but even the way the large rings of light seem to precariously hang from the high ceiling. In all of these spaces the audience, a mix of believers and tourists, seem to somehow come together. It makes you wonder why the manifestations of belief and religion can divide us so severely.

As I sit in the darkness of night with these thoughts, I rediscover my prized book, J. Krishnamurti’s Krishnamurti on Education, sitting quietly on a pile of books. As a 20-year-old I went back to school to teach briefly and promptly got a copy of it, and while leafing through it, I discover the passages that I, as a hesitant young teacher, had underlined.

‘Since you are young, fresh, innocent, can you look at all the beauty of the earth, have the quality of affection? Can you retain that? … as you grow up, you will conform, because that is the easiest way to live… you will grow up to a different human being, one who cares, who has affection, who loves people.’

That is the audience I want to be a part of, and to create things for.

Krishna Mandapa.

Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu Brihadeeswarar Temple, Tanjore, Tamil Nadu

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Curates ‘I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.’ – Vincent van Gogh They are the works that seem pregnant with action. As if their subjects have just finished their defining movement; or will at any minute, step out of the motionless dream – inviting us to witness the thoughts hidden behind their expressions. Their landscapes are full of presence – some visible and some unseen. No word will be spoken here. Not a thing will be out of place. The flowers, the fruits, the frayed edges of the books – these things exist, perhaps all around us. But the act of painting them makes them perennially poised. Suspended in time and still in life, they become the inevitable truth just fragments away, like the word at the tip of the tongue. In AI Curates, this issue, we bring to you the works of seven artists who understand that a lot can be said, even through silence.

To be part of AI Curates write to : aicurates@artsillustrated.in

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Jatri II, Acrylic on Canvas, 12ʺ x 12ʺ, 2015

Jatri I, Acrylic on Canvas, 12ʺ x 12ʺ, 2015

Born in 1976, Sunita has a BFA from Kannada University, Hampi, an MVA from MMK College of Visual Art, Gulbarga University, and a PhD in Visual Arts from Kannada University. Recently, her works were presented at a solo show titled Jatri at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru. A participant of several art camps and conferences held across the country, Sunita’s works are part of several private and public collections in India, Dubai and the United States.

‘Every alternate year I have had to relocate, leaving behind previous relationships, and preparing once again to form new ones. This existential crisis is reflected in my work. My paintings become a personal journal. I started working on a series of works titled ‘Jatri’ (Fair) around the same time I started my PhD in Badami. I believe that life itself is a big fair. With ‘Jatri’, I started working on forms I found interesting. My mediums were varied – pencils, watercolours, crayons and charcoals. I did these works on 3x3 feet canvases.’

Dr. Sunita Patil

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Still Life, Acrylic on Canvas, 24ʺ x 24ʺ, 2016

With an MFA in Painting from the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru, Shivanand, in 2008-2009, won the National Award presented by the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. His works have been part of several solo and group exhibitions held across the country, including the ones at DakshinaChitra in Chennai, Tao Art Gallery in Mumbai, Veda Art Gallery in Bengaluru and CIMA Art Gallery in Kolkata. An avid traveller and a participant of many art conferences, Shivanand now lives and works from Bengaluru.

‘The amazing quality of the “unpredictable inner being” makes the journey of life a roller-coaster ride!

Mine is no different. My aim is to be a continuous source of expression, delighting in the subjects, as I explore my “self ” at least as much as I explore the world around me.’

Shivanand Basavanthappa

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Tibetan Horn I, Oil on Canvas, 25ʺ x 30ʺ, 2016

Born in 1974 and hailing from Puthucherry, Nadees has exhibited his works at several group shows and art exhibitions across the globe, including the International Watercolour Biennale, 2016, held in Belgium, and the group show titled Qualia at Sublime Gallery in Bengaluru. In 2015, he presented a solo show titled Bridging the Gap at Vinyasa Art Gallery in Chennai. Nadees is also the recipient of the Pondicherry State Artist Association Merit Award presented by the Lalit Kala Akademi.

‘I am inspired by Claude Monet’s art works. With this work in particular, I have rendered an antique Tibetan traditional horn and a few vegetables in soft light to capture the mood and portray an impressionist style. With limited details and limited use of colours, I have tried to emphasise my perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself.’

B. Nadees Prabou

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Memory, Pen and Ink, 18ʺ x 24ʺ, 2013

Born in 1991, Mauli has a BVA in Painting and an MVA in mural painting. She is the winner of the 2013 Nasreen Mohamedi Display Award and the 2014 Woman Artist Award presented by the Kala Pratishthan. A participant of many art workshops, art camps and group exhibitions held across Gujarat and New Delhi, she was part of the September-October 2015 artist residency programme Arts4all at Sankriti Kendra Museum, New Delhi. Mauli lives and works from Rajkot, Gujarat.

‘I perceive my surroundings and my engagement with it through my object drawings. I have tried many mediums in still life drawings – stippling, leaf print, opaque colour, watercolour and pastels. But ultimately, my interest turned to textured surfaces.

My recent work is based on texture. The nature of the material itself makes me curious to explore more possibilities within my work.’

Mauli Buch Piyushbhai

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Untitled, Oli on Canvas, 15ʺ x 22ʺ, 2012

With a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art (BVA) from Stella Maris College, Chennai, and a Master’s degree in mural painting from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, Ruchika has been making oil paintings and recreating the works of masters for quite some time now. Open to learning all kinds of mediums and subjects in art, she is inspired by Indian Classical Art and finds subjects to paint there. Ruchika is also the winner of the J.J. Teachers Award, 2015.

‘I remember during my schooling, I was always drawn towards subjects that had drawings to be done as a part of the academic curriculum. It was then that I found my passion within art. After pursuing my Master’s, I got a better understanding about how creative art could get and that has helped me grow.’

Ruchika Jain

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Untitled, Acrylic on Paper, 18ʺ x 24ʺ, 2015

Divya has completed her BFA in Painting and is currently pursuing her Master’s in the same field at the Andhra University in Visakhapatnam.

A participant of many group exhibitions and art workshops held across the country and beyond, including a group show at the TAGA Temporary Gallery in France and the South Indian Art Show – 2016 at the Lalit Kala Akademi, organised by the Chandra Ilango Visual Arts Foundation in Chennai, Divya creates works that are part of several public and private collections around the world.

‘Simple things make me happy and inspire me to capture them on canvas. My themes are inspired by the old traditional elements and objects. When I look at the surroundings where I live, wherever I go, I am impressed by the traditional and old fashioned objects and I take them up as subjects for my work.’

CH.Divya

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Happy Flowers, Oil On Canvas, 12ʺ x 17ʺ, 2017

Born and brought up in Mysore, amongst people who were aficionados of music, Maadhurya’s understanding of art and its tremendous potential stems from her own interest in music, dance and other performing arts. She started painting professionally in 2010 and was awarded the Best Upcoming Artist at Art Dubai in 2015. Maadhurya has a degree in Psychology, and has been part of many dance shows and plays held across the country. She was recently part of the National Art Festival held in Pune.

‘Having performed at several music and dance events where I combined my interest in painting within the performance, I am drawn towards taking “art” in all its forms to children with special needs as a form of therapy.’

Maadhurya Ramaswamy

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Fiction

Short shorts M anoj N air

Music from the same place The Busker at the Corner I, Acrylic on canvas 36ʺ x 36ʺ, 2016

‘I travel to know the geography of myself.’ – Journal entry of a madman, quoted by Marcel Reja in L’art chez les fous (Paris, 1907) If you look at all the buskers, it adds up to make the face of one busker. Esteban was one of them.

Or, was he that one single busker standing on the pavement from dawn to dusk waiting for the coins to drop like stars from the sky? The fact is that they begin looking the same. Only the instruments they play are different. They are the same wayfarers trying to draw a map of their imaginary lives. And they all begin looking the same

because they all have lines on their faces around their eyes that with time conjoin to became bags under them and expand into the emptiness within them. A yellow emptiness like in the circle of light formed by the street lamp Esteban stood under at night, still playing his saxophone. Every day it would be a different lamppost on the same street. Sometimes, he went from end to end on either side of the busy street.

Sometimes, his choices would be diagonally opposite each other.

He was alone with his sax, had no family, no friends and, therefore, no enemies. He had chosen a life with his music

because he clearly believed those near you, friends or family, are the ones who end up hurting you the most and not your enemies.

Now, he has become such a familiar face on the street that people have begun accepting him as part of the street’s edifices.

And if he were to trace his path from the time he started playing his unobtrusive tunes on the street, it would be a cartographer’s nightmare because the contours formed between the crisscross lines on the imaginary map would only reveal that Esteban had already lost the inevitable argument with time.

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A harp affair The Busker at the Corner III, Acrylic on canvas 48ʺ x 36ʺ, 2016

The wind could not blow Payton’s brown hair across her back as the muffler around her neck tightly bound it. Perhaps, she needed that physical tightness to keep her mind from flowing with the music. She was not playing for money. She was celebrating the resurrection of her marriage by plucking at the strings. The sound from the harp were like new waves on the white sand that had, like the others, failed in their climb. When she first met Peter he struck her as someone who seemed like a safe haven, like a bus coming by on a desert trail. He said he would like to know how the fingers that fondled the strings of a harp would feel on his skin.

And that was the beginning of the end of her 11-year-old marriage with Herman. Nearly. She had met him at a party and the first things she noticed were his eyes and lips. And she immediately asked him if he could come and change the logo of her parlour.

And Herman realised it did not need any change.

Their conversations soon went past music, way beyond when the chords began striking at the

She returned and he opened the doors for her, relieved.

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They hit it off and soon got married and had two children.

One day, Herman brought Peter home to listen to an evening of music and Peter said, ‘Your music floats in a space between sound and silence.’

possibility of a relationship. It did not take long for Herman to realise that something was seriously wrong. Payton had begun to stay aloof and seldom played the harp at home. She looked unhappy and often suggested a separation.

And they did.

As Payton’s marriage began ending, her affair too went south.

She was losing her children and this man used an expression like ‘this is your problem, not mine’.

That shook her up and with each string that she struck, sounds echoed in her mind that stacked up like a pillar of wrongs.

Hound of the Buskervilles

Technically, Christina did not belong to this street in Paris. She was from Florence but had been besotted with Paris in 2005. After working for a few months in a restaurant, she realised that she was becoming fed up with the Parisian way of life – metro/work/ sleep and wanted to try something new. Once she noticed a street musician close to her place and decided to take her chance, too.

She stopped waiting tables and picked up her violin, waiting for visitors instead. She began attracting more and more people and was always surrounded by a crowd. Different from her previous life when loneliness surrounded her. She lived for music, busking in Paris. She became the fiddler in black stockings and a red coat who would pop up at tourist spots in Paris. She was especially excited to play for foreigners, as they made her think about the places from where they came from. She embarked on a journey around Europe. Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona … where sometimes there would be people who would recognise her from Paris. Which made her think.

And she realised that playing in Paris could bring the world to her than going around the world.

The Busker at the Corner V, Acrylic on canvas 60ʺ x 30ʺ, 2016

Christina discovered Montmartre, the ‘hound of the buskervilles’. She was being heard by 500 people from five different continents. Her romantic harmonies drifted to and fro, touching each person, creating a link between them.

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Silent Song The Busker at the Corner VI, Acrylic on canvas 36ʺ x 48ʺ, 2016

On a Wednesday morning Nikolai was contemplating giving up playing the trumpet. He sat on the bench where he sat every day, planning what he would play. He had a loyal following in the city square. They were well rewarded because he had the gift of evoking amazing spaces with a smattering of notes. He always yearned to play his music in open spaces where it could test itself against the limitless instead of competing with the sounds of the street. But his self-respect did not allow him to admit his grief.

‘I like this life,’ he told his cousin Regis who had returned after taking his clarinet on a successful tour of the globe. ‘No, you don’t,’ Regis replied. ‘In fact, you loathe it and sometimes it turns your tunes into an aching melancholy.’

If you sulk so much even the trees would refuse to lend their shadows, Regis reminded him. It was with these thoughts that he got up from his seat and walked back home calling the day off.

As he walked home he threw his instrument far away into the river.

When he opened the door empty handed, he looked up at his portrait that a friend had drawn and gifted to him. He looked young, almost handsome; his eyes hidden behind the rim of his hat and it seemed his eyes were fixed to the painting’s lower left-hand corner, as if looking for traces of bitterness for the very aspect of life that he had nurtured meticulously. In the picture, the trumpet leaned next to him on the bench waiting for his fingers.

The stories are based on Pratap SJB Rana’s Busker at the Corner series, executed in 2016 after he was overwhelmed by the sights of buskers who performed on the streets in the cities that he has visited in Europe. Rana is lives and works in New Delhi.

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Architecture

The Gallery Architect Beyond the public and the private space, the real and the virtual, the artifact and the artifice, architecture’s ‘audience’ has been reduced to a theatre audience of people, their indifference and dislocation an unrecognised threat to themselves

G autam B hatia

City as Planter Box

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In a conceptual art exhibit in New York in the 1970s a cubical house is balanced on a point against all values of gravity and stability, against every conceivable principles of structural order. Its entrance door is at the top of a slanted wall with no possibility of approach. If you managed to make it inside, the chances of remaining there are slim, for the floor slants away at a steep angle and directs you past a window that is on the floor. A table and chair fixed on the wall close to the ceiling…. The whole composition was a dramatic simulation of architectural imbalance and convention, and conceded in its improbable display moments of satire, fetish and, most of all, a self-conscious preoccupation with hope that architecture could be practised as an art.

The endless need to express a private autonomous view, has become a feeble characteristic of a profession wishing to exercise visual control over people’s lives – and in making farcical attempts to the extreme, offering at least, a picture of resistance to conventional codes and practices. But the subjective imposition of these small ideas, inebriated by design, technology or subversion could hardly surpass or impose itself on the natural struggle of construction and the way architecture behaved under the stress of real life and seasonal change.

Outside of the cube in the

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gallery, the temporal framework of the ordinary building retained its intensely humane characteristic.

Buildings stood their ground, they aged, altered and decayed like human skin, and left you aggrieved at their decline and passing. The temporal generational nature of private space made it impossible to alter the memorial space of the home, and reduce it to mere artifact, an object of wonder under controlled condition.

artifact, the space becomes enlarged by event, by encouraging accidental overlays distorting the familiar, and so forging a new language of communication. Such work revels in a changing audience, and calls upon the viewer to be a participant and alter the canvas to his or her own image.

To even begin to define public dimension, the architect needs to alter all architectural definitions and erase boundaries between construction, landscape, domesticity, urban life, sculpture and art. An idea of public cohesion that grows out of planned collision between strikingly diverse realities, the courtesies of reticence and restraint can no longer be practical in an open canvas with its obvious risks of experimentation, especially when an untutored public is its audience and critic. Beyond

The new resident of the city lives in a material gullibility.

A spectator in his own home, sitting before a screen to experience the joys of domesticity. In so doing, the once active participant, only wishes to experience the enhanced view of himself on the screen. Everything is LIVE and tinged with the welcome of a computer download. Data on the net, people on long-haul flights, standup comedy, products bought with COD, bank wire transactions, everything occurred in the instantaneous perspective of virtual time. Only death, destruction and grief kept the body in tune with reality.

A culture that had formed out of images had no need for connection to place or memory.

But a nagging fear stalks the subconscious: the screen may just be a delusion. It may even go blank. What would happen then windows wouldn’t open, the microwave won’t operate, Facebook will disappear with all its friends. Architecture and all its attachments had to operate in a state of induced somnolence.

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The primary focus of the diplomacy also threw light on the nature of public and private space. When the home’s domestic dimension is a measurable personal identity, and seen as personal possession, the public realm is an altogether different matter. Its ambiguous outlines are under constant review, and too often subject to urban forces of memory and archeology.

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Buried Cities

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Window Buildings

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Architecture Gallery

People knew the best architecture was in international art shows and the Biennales, and the long-term resident of shabby streets and broken buildings was not a participant in its making.

So in the eroding structures of participatory activity, architecture took a back seat. With the clamour of every building seeking its moment of fame, its planned noticeability went unnoticed. The unchanging visibility of the new architecture

was a mere record of its inception through its short life.

In its visible and planned difference, everything looked the same, a tireless stream of disjointed images sparked with nervous delight. Architecture’s participants were quietly and without fuss, reduced to a theatre audience of people who moved in and around the featureless terrain, their indifference and dislocation an unrecognised threat to themselves.

Entirely unaware that another

life was possible. In the centre of their own city they went in search of other possibilities, but found instead a large featureless gallery space, containing a conceptual art exhibit, with a cubical house balanced on a point, defying gravity.

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All drawings by Gautam Bhatia

DESIGN

Purushu Arie, Hedonism of Youth, Wearing: Lungi Pants designed by Purushu Arie + DIY crop top, Photograph by KumAr Photography. www.purushu.com - Arts Illustrated Feb & Mar 2017

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Control, Shift, Enter With the Internet offering an egalitarian platform for self-expression and sharing personal style, fashion seems to have a got a digital make over with the advent of fashion blogs and the impact of social media in our lives, bringing the audience much closer than before

A rti sandhu Early last December when Susie Lau’s partner went missing she posted a desperate plea on Instagram for information on his whereabouts. Not usually one to share too many personal details online (despite being a fashion blogger who regularly posts pictures of her outfits and fashionrelated commitments) Susie’s post went viral. Within hours it had been re-grammed, re-tweeted, as well as featured on all the major fashion news networks. Thirty-five hours later she posted an update that all was well and he had been located at a local hospital’s Accident and Emergency ward. The collective sigh of relief that rippled through fashion audiences globally was almost palpable. For those who may not know, Susie is currently one of the most recognisable and globally acclaimed fashion bloggers – well known for her unique and quirky style that she first featured on her blog, Style Bubble. From her current fashion following and lengthy credentials it is hard to imagine that she was able to access such fame and following simply by starting a style blog as an ordinary person from outside of the traditional fashion system.

Indeed, the Internet has dramatically changed how fashion opinion leadership works. In a nutshell, the sheer accessibility of blogging formats, convenience of digital photography and editing, global reach of online content, and the viral nature of social media has allowed you, me, your cousin, mum and aunt – that is, those outside of the boundaries of the fashion industry to literally ‘grab the megaphone’ and call attention to their personal style. Here, wider and diverse audiences can be amassed and harnessed in ways that circumvent older more established fashion systems leading to realignment of power and access.

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Through less formal and more immediate formats, fashion bloggers are able to reach out to readers and offer content that is in some cases more relatable, simple, and as a result so radically different (and more perceivably ‘real’) when compared to leading glossies. Blogger Akansha Redhu (www. akanksharedhu.com) highlights, ‘[blogs] are a lot more real and genuine and so much more personal than a magazine or media. I share my personal life with my readers and I don’t have an army of people airbrushing me to look like a Barbie. On my blog, what you see is what you get. And people connect with something like this on a deeper level. Magazines sell fake bodies and really low confidence.’

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Purushu (www.purushu.com) further sheds light on what he believes sets bloggers apart from the mainstream fashion press by saying, ‘Bloggers provide personal views while magazines provide news… Unlike magazines, we don’t have to force ourselves to churn out content. It’s okay if we’re going through a mind block and have nothing to write about. It’s okay if blogs don’t have expensive photo shoots or themes. Perfect imperfections prove that you’re an individual who’s behind the blog and not a team of employees who decided to write 700 words on a topic suggested by their boss.’

Though both Akanksha and Purushu began blogging as students at NIFT – mainly to share their creative projects – Purushu credits his popularity and audience appeal to his own unique perspectives and thoughts as they relate to fashion and gender. Admittedly, these remain difficult themes in India, but as he states, ‘Alternate ideas open up dialogues, debate, and reforms and it helps in progressing towards a more pragmatic and libertarian society. I don’t have any particular hopes but my art and insights have been influential in shaping larger opinion.’

Akanksha also sees her role as an ‘influencer’ whose ‘job is to influence people into a certain lifestyle or product and have them aspire to a certain kind of life’. From not knowing who would follow her, to now having identified that she has ‘a young [male and female] audience of 18–24 years with medium spending power and a voracious digital appetite’, Akanksha says, ‘I try to be as real as I can and hope to encourage women to be more confident in their own skin and body-shape.’ The responses to her posts affirm this intention as her audience commends her not only on her personal style but thanks her for sharing her experimentation with difficult-towear-garments, colours and accessories. One follower congratulates her by saying how he/she ‘like the way [she] carries off all types of clothes with such elan.’ To which Akanksha responds by

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saying, ‘Thank you so much for the lovely comment!’ Such opportunities for readers to comment and receive what appear to be personal responses, further helps bloggers gain distinction. The same level of personal attention and interaction could perhaps not be possible for mainstream ‘fashion bibles’ despite their foray into generating more digital content.

Interestingly, even when it is obvious that the content featured on blogs like Akansha’s is sponsored or the result of a brand collaboration – a natural progression for a successful blogger – it does not impact the perceived authenticity of the post, nor does it turn off the audience.

As I said earlier, the Internet offers an egalitarian platform for self-expression and sharing personal style, which is also not just limited to the more formalised format of a blog or an individually run Instagram or Twitter feed. A couple of years ago when the 100 saree pact (#100sareepact) first became popular, I was excited to see countless posts pop up across various web platforms from women – many of whom had till then not really come forward through a stand alone style blog. The #100sareepact gave these women the incentive and necessary tools to share their saree pacts on social media and come together not only to make style statements in unity but to also be the audience for the same. This ingenious and organic use of what we tend to consider youth-oriented or Western fashion-centric mediums to remind us about the inherent modernity and creativity vested in traditional dress, in my opinion, is worth highlighting and celebrating.

Purushu Arie, RIP: Genderism, An Obituary for Gendered Fashion, Styling: Purushu Arie, Photograph

by KumAr Photography. www. purushu.com Purushu Arie, The Great Indian Jacket – Sherwani Feat. Paresh Lamba Signatures, Styling: Purushu Arie, Outfit by Paresh Lamba, Photograph by Shrinath Ethirajan. www.purushu.com

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Akanksha Redhu, A Fashion & Lifestyle Blog. www.akanksharedhu.com

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Viji Venkatesh, Max Foundation’s Region Head for India and South Asia, has been a central figure in the saree pact through her regular posts that defied not only the assumptions we make about age and gender on digital platforms but also, as I said above, the stereotypes we attach to the wearing of traditional dresses. Viji, who proudly reminded me that she was in her 60s, said that posting her #OOTD for the #100sareepact on globally searchable social media platforms was never an issue. After everything she had achieved in life, in addition to having been a daughter, wife and a mother, she felt free of personal insecurities and peer pressure and enjoyed indulging in the narcissist streak that we all inherently have within us. She recounted the sense of adventure and joy she experienced through rediscovering and sharing her vast saree collection in tandem with snippets of information about the sarees, her work and her life.

Black saree with a Multicoloured Pallu, part of Unstitched: The Sari Project, conceptualised by Meera Sethi, an international, collaborative performance art project that takes a single unstitched piece of cloth – a 5.5 metre sari – and creates a line of community among 108 South Asians around the globe. Viji was #8. At Bandra Fort, Photograph by Chirodeep Choudhary. www.http://100sareepact. com/?tag=viji-venkatesh

What struck me the most, however, was how much unity and love she expressed for the community she had formed and found through the pact – a community she continues to stay in touch with.

In the case of Viji and her fellow saree pact members, the audience for their fashions eventually turned into a support system that continues even after the pact and the posts lose momentum and fade away. This is definitely what happens when fashion goes beyond its prescribed narrow boundaries and gets to the heart of a diverse audience. I look forward to more instances where individuals can grab hold of the megaphone and enrich us with their style statements.

Viji Venkatesh, Green and Black Chiffon Saree, Photograph by Azim. www.http://100sareepact. com/?tag=viji-venkatesh Viji Venkatesh, Printed Tussar Silk Saree, Photograph by Venky. www. http://100sareepact.com/?tag=vijivenkatesh

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Design Diaries

BALMUDA the Toaster

Livesglass

BALMUDA Inc. balmuda.com

Xindong Che (Jonathan) behance.net/jonathanche

Winner of the good design award, the BALMUDA toaster is unique in the way it uses steam and heat to cook various types of bread.

Simply pour water into the top inlet, choose a toasting mode, and press start. The steam rapidly toasts the outer layer and the heaters automatically turn on/off based on the inside temperature and the mode of your choice. The design concept is influenced by classic woodfired ovens, but is suitably modified to fit any contemporary kitchen.

‘Livesglass’ is an innovative device that provides a low-maintenance, fuss-free way for individuals to have plants in their environment. A concept inspired by the hourglass, the Livesglass planter irrigates itself through drip irrigation; simply water your Livesglass through the mini water tank located at the top. The opening at the bottom enables oxygen to be produced, which is then emitted for air purification.

Frigid Air

Guillaume Jandin ensci.com

Swings Park

City Yeast/Basurama cityyeast.com /basurama.org ‘Swings Park’ is part of the Re-create Taipei initiative for the World Design Capital Taipei 2016 open-call project. The project aims to overturn monotone plastic playground equipments with urban waste resources. Located underneath one of the busiest expressways of Taipei, Swings Park is primarily built out of discarded street lamps owned by the Taipei city government, and wasted tyres and wooden piles. Swings Park also serves as an experimental park example for future urban regeneration plans.

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‘Frigid Air’ is a refrigerator that exploits air thermal insulation capacity – thanks to an inflatable alveolar wall. Its flexibility allows one to change its volume capacity depending on the amount of food stored. A basic heat pump cools the food storage space. The project optimises and reduces the energy consumed by the fridge.

The innovative concept also seeks to modify the typology of refrigerators and tries to reveal some of the aberrations of existing systems.

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Gizem Mut-Webster and Johnathan Webster/ Wool & Oak woolandoak.com With the launch of ‘The Duffle Backpack’, Wool and Oak sets an ambitious goal to completely overhaul every function and design element of the modern backpack. The result is an interchangeable bag system wherein you can zip any of the bags together to make one beautiful bag that takes care of all your travel needs! The magic is when these three individual bags join together to form a more personalised and integrated travelling solution.

EMPWR Coat

Veronika Scott/The Empowerment Plan empowermentplan.org The ‘EMPWR Coat’ is a water-resistant jacket which can transform into a sleeping bag or be worn as an over-the-shoulder bag when not in use. The Empowerment Plan, a Detroit-based non-profit organisation, hires single parents from local shelters and provides them with training and full-time employment to produce these coats for those without shelter across the globe. Since 2012 the project has provided employment to 34 homeless individuals – all of whom have now secured permanent housing for themselves and their families – and distributed over 15,000 coats to those in need across the United States and Canada.

Photograph by MaddieToro.

Image Courtesy fo The Empowerment Plan

The Duffle Backpack

Backpack Radio Station

Iman Abdurrahman/Studio Joris de Groot jorisdegroot.com Indonesian journalist Iman Abdurrahman and Studio Joris de Groot joined forces to create a radio backpack that can broadcast live from disaster areas. This backpack contains a mini radio station, powered by long-lasting batteries and mini solar panels, and a mini database necessary to predict upcoming natural disasters.

Made out of waterproof and fireproof lightweight aramide materials, the ‘Backpack Radio Station’ is designed to be a life saver for people living in remote areas.

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Cuecos Collection

Kaleb J. Cárdenas Zavala/DESIGNO-patagonia designopatagonia.com Influenced by the transformation of matter through time, Argentinean studio DESIGNOpatagonia has interpreted how rocks become pebbles and how water erodes earth through their latest ‘Cuecos’ collection. This unusual set consists of spice containers for a contemporary kitchen as well as storage items for personal belongings. The series has been produced with local materials that include ‘lenga’ wood, with olive oil and turpentine finish, and riverside pebbles.

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Poetry

An ear-cleaner, attending to a man’s ear. Gouache painting by an Indian artist, 17.2 cm x 11.6 cm, ca. 1825. One work in a series showing trades and occupations of India. Another set with the same composition was commissioned by Col. James Skinner in 1825. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London - Arts Illustrated Feb & Mar 2017

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The Spoken Word Through the poetry of Kabir and Tukaram coming back into contemporary culture, the power of the spoken word is a reminder of the many voices of a diverse audience lending credence to the verse, and a promise reaffirmed in the now-diminishing corridors of thought

anu majumdar

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In recent years literary festivals have seen large audiences pack into auditoriums, sit under tents and shamianas, or out in the open, sometimes in the hundreds, to listen, to absorb, to participate in an encounter with the live word. In a sense, it is a merging of an old oral platform with the ramifications of time, technology and the context we live in today. The word communicates not just the person standing or sitting across but also the ideas, arguments and stories that go together with this personality, which are sometimes larger than life, when projected onto giant screens, prompting comparisons with famous rock concerts like Woodstock where the bards came on stage and sang to the imagination of a whole generation.

Kabîr says: ‘As the river enters into the ocean, so my heart touches Thee…’

Interestingly, it is poets who belonged to a predominantly oral tradition in India who have continued to assert their influence over time, have been translated by successive generations to suit the sensibility or urgency of their time. The Bhakti Movement spanned nearly three centuries in the wake of invasions, as religions went underground or grew more rigid weaning out an alternative way for the spirit. Of the Bhakti poets, Kabir, who lived in 15th century India and Tukaram in 17th, continued to influence generations. Kabir has been translated by other great poets, including Tagore, who drew inspiration from him in the midst of India’s freedom movement.

It is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs; For the priest, the warrior, the tradesman, the thirty-six castes alike are seeking for God. It is but folly to ask what the caste of a saint may be; The barber has sought God, the washerwoman, and the carpenter…

At the same time, Gandhi translated Tukaram as he lay in the Yerwada Central Jail.

Saintliness is not to be purchased in shops nor is it to be had for wandering, nor in cupboards nor in deserts nor in forests. It is not obtainable for a heap of riches... Tuka says: It is a life’s bargain and if you will not give your life to possess it, better be silent.

Though both Kabir and Tukaram were great mystics, they were strongly iconoclastic in their poetry, striking a path of the self, free of religious dogmatism, social pressures and the humiliations of caste. Their poems were philosophical, yet satiric of traditional conventions that only served to enslave the individual instead of freeing him.

I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash: Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation….

Kabîr says, “O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.

Born in Benares, Kabir’s life, just as his death, is a tale of controversies. Of being either Hindu or Muslim, both or neither, of being low caste, perhaps even casteless, all of which did not seem to deter him much.

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Were the Creator Concerned about caste, We’d arrive in the world With a caste mark on the forehead…

Nobody’s lower caste The lower castes are everywhere, They’re the ones Who don’t have Rama on their lips.

This is a very recent translation of the Songs of Kabir by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Here Rama is not the one worshipped in temples but a personal signification for god. Mehrotra offers an unusual, almost street rendering of Kabir, the poet who would stand in the market place, a witness, engaging his audience to see the world and themselves differently. Shorn of thee and thou, but full of slang and neologisms, Mehrotra’s translations are direct and possibly convey the shock impact of Kabir’s ‘upside down’ language, and reversals of perspectives, just as it may have to a 15th century audience.

The mind’s a knot, says Kabir / Not easy to untie….

When greed hits you like a wave / You don’t need water to drown…

O pundit, your hair-splitting’s / So much bullshit. I’m surprised / you still get away with it…

Running up minarets / Calling out to the faithful / Five times a day/ What’s your problem muezzin? / Can’t you see you’re a walking /Mosque yourself ?

Marcel Duchamp once famously said that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone but that the spectator brings to the work an inner qualification, thus contributing to the creative act. So even as poets like Kabir and Tukaram gave life to an audience, their presence has qualified and quantified this poetry over time, becoming equal partners of experience.

Tukaram is an altogether different character, honest to a fault about his own shortcomings. Born a shudra, at a time in Maharashtra when Brahmins considered all others but themselves of the lowest caste, he was not allowed to learn Sanskrit, the ‘language of the gods’, nor read the scriptures. Though his family were tradesmen, educated and culturally aware, Tukaram did not start out as a poet. Tragedies in the family and the death of his wife during a famine left him devastated and withdrawn from life. He began spending time at the shrine of Vitthal, singing songs of great saint poets like that of Namdeo. At this stage he had a lifechanging dream, told with disarming candour:

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I was only dreaming, Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.

“Your job is to make poems,” Said Namdeo, “Stop fooling around.”

Vitthal have me the measure And slapped me gently…

“The grand total Of poems Namdeo vowed to write Was one billion.

All the unwritten ones, Tuka, Are your dues.”

Of course this was not easy. As a shudra Tuka had no business to be doing such things.

Today I face the toughest test of life.

Whereof I have no experience, Thereof I have been asked to sing…

Says Tuka, my time is running out.

Tukaram’s first offence was to start writing in the Marathi of the common man; the second, to sing of god, as one low born. By doing so he gave voice and identity to a wider audience, which made him not just a Bhakti poet, as his translator, the poet Dilip Chitre has said, but the first truly modern Marathi poet by way of temperament, technique, vision and themes. But all this would earn the wrath of the Brahmins who eventually forced him to throw all his manuscripts in the river. But Bhakti poets in their quest for god were a strong rebel spirit, subversive even in surrender.

In response, Tukaram began a fast unto death, praying for the restoration of his life’s work. After thirteen days, the notebooks reappeared from the river undamaged. This miraculous restoration was pivotal, giving rise to a phenomenal popularity, even as his poetry acquired a magic lyricism that attracted people from distant places.

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The word is not confined To one country.

It does not hit one person Or miss another.

My language is of Cosmic being.

One who carries the quiver Just shoots His arrows.

Says Tuka, it is not I who aim: God hits you…

Says Tuka, O God Our names get so mixed up.

Tukaram disappeared at the age of forty-one, but his words have remained alive through the centuries, even getting mixed up with that of his translator, Dilip Chitre, a popular poet, playwright and artist in his own right. It is an audience that keeps growing and merging, building a relationship that resists an erasure of the spirit.

I bequeath to you my fossil and my dossier And I join the saints’ immortal choir Tukaram in heaven , Chitre in hell, Sing the same song centuries apart…

Two faces of the same coin Counterfeit and divine…

Our voices are hoarse with God : He is our scream, our cry, our moan, Tukaram in heaven, Chitre in hell , Turned to the same truth, centuries apart…

Or as Kabir once said: Separate us?/ Pierce a diamond first.

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Cinema

Close Encounters From the breaking of the fourth wall to the breaking out of cinema halls, films and their audience share an increasingly intimate space

R ehana M unir

Artist, Text and Audience. The dynamics of this endlessly fascinating three-way relationship is the stuff of countless cultural theories, media analyses and living-room debates. While the first two categories of discussion make up much of our popular culture discourse, it is often in the third setting that the most surprising and insightful illuminations occur.

A stray comment on the highest grossing Hindi film ever, Dangal, can spark off a raging argument on the intention of the filmmaker versus the expectations of the audience, with the film hovering somewhere between those two strong realities. The first position: ‘It’s a true story and that’s how it happened’ wrestles bloodily with the other: ‘But the filmmaker chose to tell it like this, taking all sorts of creative liberties.’

Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall would view this argument in the context of his encoding/encoding framework – what the filmmaker puts in and what the audience takes away. A film doesn’t merely unspool on a universal screen; it plays inside the unique mind of every audience member. And it is here that filmmakers are faced with the challenging question about the invisible audience that they imagine as being the recipient of their films.

Marxist critics of media assert that the producers of cultures peddle dominant ideologies that are passively consumed by the audience.

Audience reception theories argue that meaning is created at the point of consumption – audiences are active recipients of media, influenced

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by their individual backgrounds, impressions and experience.

And the film does what it does, using all the tricks at its disposal.

For as long as films have been made, they have played around with narrative techniques – even gimmicks – to communicate with their audience in more effective and impactful ways. And one of these methods is the breaking of the metaphorical fourth wall that separates the audience from the action on screen. The lifting of the veil that separates fiction from reality, usually for comedic effect.

Laurel and Hardy and Monty Python, those stalwarts of humour, don’t stop at anything in their attempt to entertain, and peeping out of the veneer of fiction is one such trick.

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Tim Miller, Deadpool, 2016. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox

Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Chupke Chupke, 1975.

Image Credit: Shemaroo studios

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Photograph: John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images

Addressing the audience directly, either with a wink or confession, is not just a great ice-breaker – it evokes instant loyalty, too.

When Shakespeare’s Richard III speaks to the audience, that audience is drawn to the flawed leader like trusted friends are, watching someone’s well-deserved ruin, but never losing sympathy in the process. It’s a similar trick with rakish characters on screen, whether it is Michael Caine in Alfie or Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. The character who breaks narrative convention to speak to us directly endears us to him/her for that reason itself, irrespective of what plot and character might otherwise demand.

Matthew Broderick sends the audience off after the closing credits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, perhaps inspiring the little treats that Hollywood has in store for those who wait right up to the end of copious end credits.

Woody Allen in Annie Hall shows up an insufferable critic type by summoning a bona fide critic from outside of the film and saying, ‘Boy, if life were only like this.’ In The Big Lebowski, we have a cowboy narrator addressing us directly, while in George of the Jungle, we have a character break into a fight with the ape narrator. Even Om Prakash in the cult Indian comedy Chupke Chupke requests the audience not to tell the world outside that he’s been outwitted by his family. The breaking of the fourth wall has been a somewhat familiar feature for film audiences over the years – something theatre audiences have been accustomed to right from the days of Greek drama. Whatever be the

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intention of every filmmaker behind this breach, metafiction is a lively reminder of something (the fictionality of fiction) that doesn’t really need reminding, and is all the more impactful for it.

In the recent past, the shifting relationship between the filmmaker and audience has been triggered by technological advancement.

Short films propelled by the Internet have altered the dynamic between the creators and receivers of ‘content’ – a term that is as widely used as it is reviled. In the era of text as content, the audience dictates terms not just as the intended recipient of a film but also as critic, media machinery and even funder. Clicks, likes and crowdsourcing talent and funds have elevated the audience to prime position.

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John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986. Image Credit: Paramount Pictures

Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975.

Image Credit: EMI Films

Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski, 1998.

Image Credit: Gramercy Pictures

Jyoti Kaour Das, Chutney (Short Film), 2016. Image Courtesy of Rasika Dugal

Lewis Gilbert, Alfie, 1966. Image Credit: Paramount Pictures

Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977. Image Credit: United Artists

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Advait Chandan, Secret Superstar, 2017. Image Credit: via YouTube

With laptop screens and mobile phones replacing cinema halls and television as the preferred film delivery systems, the gap between filmmaker and audience has all but disappeared. The question, ‘Who is the audience?’ is being answered loudly and clearly, often in all caps and unprintable language, by individual ‘consumers’.

When a film goes viral, it’s not just a confirmation of its success – it’s a reinforcement of the viewers’ dominant position. VOD (video on demand) and Most Popular listings further cement the role of the viewer, in a more immediate, even empowering way than box-office collections and television rating points (TRPs) have done in the past. This could be attributed to the democratic workings of the Internet. Success breeds success. And, it is in this context that clicks beget clicks and likes, likes.

Like so many things on the Internet, some films are famous for being famous. Trends appear and disappear. Formats are tried and discarded.

And right at the centre of this sits the viewer – notwithstanding advertising, sponsored content and suggested posts.

An obvious difficulty that arises in this scenario is the amplification of viewers’ voices and the profusion of lessons that they teach. While trade figures, sample audiences and distilled criticism served as useful feedback for filmmakers in the past, the question now is which voices to heed and how? The same medium that promotes and reflects multiple standpoints also has the tendency to throw back conflicting data and create echo chambers of ideas and responses. You can find what you want on the Internet. And that’s not always helpful for those looking for a clear direction.

The analogy with democracy still stands. In the many voices – loud, disparate and varying levels of articulate – lie the answers. They aren’t always obvious or encouraging, but they do reveal important truths. A filmmaker today has at his/her disposal better means and methods of viewer analysis than ever before. She/he also has the ability to reach

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out to, and even create, the ideal audience. What was awkwardly referred to as niche cinema has found a thriving home. Esoteric, extreme, radical – these aren’t forbidding words any more. The online audience, with its exposure to the most eclectic offerings in the world of video, is primed to be entertained and engaged in ways that traditional media could not imagine. A viewer watches, rates, reviews, subscribes, shares, funds. An active audience that demands and deserves responsive filmmakers.

Aamir Khan, that marketing wizard with acting chops, has the last word, as usual. He appears at the end of the trailer of his latest production Secret Superstar, in a comic pop star avatar, directly addressing the audience. ‘Pasand aaya, toh like karo. Pasand nahin aaya, toh taste change karo (If you liked what you saw, hit like. If you didn’t like it, change your taste),’ he commands. A lighter look at the eternal and delicate power balance between viewers’ tastes and filmmakers’ choices.

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Cinema

Into the Shot, Quietly Filmmakers Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar’s U-ra-mi-li project is an experience that breaks down the audience–filmmaker mould in quite unexpected ways, making way for fresh perspectives on how we engage with cinema

P raveena S hivram

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Tulku ji playing Kokpo, Spiti valley, Himachal Pradesh

In ‘Up Down and Sideways’, one of the films of the U-ra-mi-li (‘the song of our people’) project, there is a nine-minute shot of farmers in Nagaland’s Phek village, working in the field, singing a haunting, lilting melody. The shot itself, long and static like relentless summer rain, washes over you as you feel that familiar itch for change – surely, an intercut needs to happen now, a close-up should break the rhythm, maybe more music or editing gimmicks? You let all that pass and the shot is still there, waiting like an old friend, and you find yourself falling into its pace and it hits you, this realisation like lightening firing up the night sky, that there is something untouched you are witnessing here, that you are not outside of the film but inside it – emotionally and physically – as the music, so specific to the region goes ‘up, down and sideways’. ‘I think, as an audience, we are extremely conscious of the pace of a film.

And, as makers, we are conscious

of the rhythm of the footage. This particular nine-minute shot, that comes in the middle of the film, a lot of people have told us it’s too long, but don’t change it,’ says Iswar Srikumar, one of the filmmakers of this ‘two-member crew’ with Anushka Meenakshi that makes up the U-ra-mi-li project.

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I met Anushka and Iswar at a noisy cafe in Chennai, but ten minutes into the conversation I was just as drawn into their world of film-making as I was drawn to their films. The first time I heard about this project in 2011 – it didn’t have a name then – it was via a Facebook post. The post said something to the effect of Anushka and Iswar not being able to find a decent apartment in Chennai for an unmarried couple, and so they decided to travel through the country, filming interesting performances along the way, and invited their friends to support them. ‘It really did begin that randomly,’ says Anushka, ‘and we didn’t have a very clear idea of what we

wanted to do then. We knew we wanted to look at music and performance specifically, but it was only when we received a grant from Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) and worked with them that it really helped us break down the “whys” of our film-making process. And, in the course of our travels, we also went to Spiti Valley, where we first saw farmers singing and something clicked.

In retrospect, I think it was that moment when U-ra-mi-li came to be.’

‘By the way,’ adds Iswar, ‘what you hear in that nine-minute segment is gibberish. The farmers are just making up words and singing it, and we get the maximum laughs there when we screen the film locally.’

There you go. Right there, for me, is what makes U-ra-mi-li significant – that the immersive can be just as soulful as it can be amusing.

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Excerpts from the conversation How do you manage to strike that balance between remaining true to the essence of the songs despite how they are placed in a film – the editing, the shots, the presentation – all of which play on a viewer’s mind?

Anushka Meenakshi: I think we are still trying to find that balance, and increasingly, looking at how you film performance, because it isn’t just about switching on the camera. And, I think, we also go by instinct; there are no set patterns.

In ‘Up Down and Sideways’, for instance, the language of filming reflects the work and the rhythm of the people. We haven’t seen this work before, and spend probably a day or two with one group and that’s all the time there is. And, it’s difficult, because nothing is staged. We are walking around waiting for something to happen, and the reflection of our thoughts is only in retrospect, not at the moment of filming.

Iswar Srikumar: Practically, as well, we don’t speak the language.

So we would always shoot without interrupting the flow or the rhythm of the conversation or the singing. We only had a vague idea of what they were saying with our translator there, so we had a sense of it, but it was only a year later, when the transcript came, did we know exactly what was being said.

Because of the way you went about this project, I get the distinct feeling that you are your first audience. You pick and shoot things that interest you, things that you hear about, and then in one of your descriptions you mention ‘parts of this may or may not make it into the film’, so now here is another ‘viewer’ who has taken your place. How would you describe that viewer?

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Anushka Meenakshi: There are all kinds of viewers today. The online audience is important to us, but what I have enjoyed more is physically going from place to place screening the film. To have people come, and not be distracted for the duration of the film – I know this is a tiny percentage of our viewership, but the feedback we get from such a ‘live’ audience is immensely valuable. And, to watch people watch your film is a great exercise in sensing the mood in the room.

Iswar Srikumar: What moves me is also the non-verbal engagement with the viewer when we travel. We can’t have subtitles for everything, and how many languages would that mean, then? It’s how you feel when you watch the film even when you don’t necessarily understand the language. It’s how we film as well, sensing the mood more than drowning in details.

Horse in horse, Still from the film Opacity, 2017 Mule (working collective) resting between work, Phek, Nagaland Goswami ji, the mask maker at Samaguri Sattra, Mājuli, Assam Yaks, cows, goats, donkeys and sheep are herded home in Dhangkar, Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh

I am also interested in crowd-funding as a process. How does that affect the way you make your film – this need for it to be accepted as much as the need for it to be recognised?

Iswar Srikumar: It’s neither acceptance nor recognition. A lot of the people who fund our work are people who know us as film-makers, or people who have been moved by what they have seen. It’s not raining funds, and we are glad, actually, for the pace at which this project is going.

We do other work as well to keep ourselves financially sustained.

Anushka Meenakshi: Funnily enough, though, the other work we get somehow falls into the U-ra-mi-li concept.

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How do you deal with the unexpected as a filmmaker? And how does that change you as makers?

Iswar Srikumar: The first thing to keep in mind is that labour has a lot of dignity. They are working, and there is a reason they are doing what they are doing. We are very conscious of that when we enter that space, and we mostly just let them be.

Anushka Meenakshi: I think I am a lot more thrown by the unexpected, by not knowing.

Iswar Srikumar: I think it also has a lot to do with how you interact with them. It’s about drawing them out, to take the attention away from the camera, and sometimes that means giving them the camera to play around with, to keep moving around, so that after a while, they will go back to their work because they need to work, and then they are a lot more relaxed about having us around.

I was completely taken in by the ‘Li’ music, and while watching ‘Up Down and Sideways’, I couldn’t make out what was making me fall in love with the film – the music or the film itself.

Which made me wonder, between the story and the song, which one completes the other, you think? Sort of like the chicken and the egg question. For you, which one comes first?

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Paddy fields in Phek, Still from the film Up Down and Sideways, 2017.

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Anushka Meenakshi: I think it’s the song or the rhythm that comes first to me. If we find an emotional energy or react at a gut instinct level to the rhythm then that’s the core of it. Though I do worry a lot about the ‘story’ of the film, and what we are going to make of it, I think the song comes first for me.

Iswar Srikumar: It’s also really about the relationship with human beings who allow you into their work. In our 37-minute work-in-progress film, we have this bit with Goswamiji in Majuli Island, Assam, who makes performance masks. We spent four to five days there filming and we would just shoot him work, without interrupting him, and there was very little conversation.

Just him and the rhythm of his work, and suddenly he would ask us something – if we had monkeys in Chennai and if they were big as well – he was curious about us, and this is what makes the process exciting for me.

The advantage for independent film-makers today is that you will always have an audience for your film, and the flip side is that kind of open landscape/opportunity can also become overwhelming. So, my question is, how do you, as makers, decide this is something that will ‘stand out’ in this deluge of images? How ‘different’ or ‘offbeat’ does something have to be?

And, therefore, did you choose Nagaland’s Li music as your first U-ra-mi-li full length feature release?

Anushka Meenakshi: Not at all.

It was entirely by accident that we found ourselves there. And it was one of the few places where work songs existed as work songs.

In the other places we had filmed work songs, we found that we had to egg people on a bit, but here it was a natural process. And by then we knew for sure that we wanted to focus on movement and rhythm and look at more everyday songs, not performances, even if they are folk performances that are performed on stage Iswar Srikumar: A month and a half into the project, we cut our first 17-minute film from the footage we had till then. When we continued to travel – mostly through the North East – and showed the 17-minute film, it allowed us to engage with people and see our process better.

In fact, it was during one of the screenings in a school in Nagaland, that the children, who saw Spiti Valley farmers in the film singing, told us about farmers singing in their Phek village.

how it is unfolding.

Iswar Srikumar: For me it’s like theatre. I fell in love with theatre, and U-ra-mi-li affects me the same way. It’s filming a certain kind of engagement with people, of watching the rhythm of work, of a job being done, and there is so much beauty in that, so much focus that it could well have been the beginning of performance, of where theatre began, as a collective, and I could watch this rhythm of work for hours.

Harvest time in Phek, Still from the film Up Down and Sideways, 2017.

Paddy fields in Phek, Still from the film Up Down and Sideways, 2017.

Cattle in Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh Fish Tree, Still from the film Opacity, 2017.

Rewben Mashangva and Tshampang yongonpokpi, Manipur All images courtesy of U-ra-mi-li

And, finally, U-ra-mi-li, as a concept, can be never-ending. Does it scare you, sometimes, that this may become a life-project?

Anushka Meenakshi: No, it doesn’t scare me at all. When we started out, we would say by next month we should do this, or in six months this should happen, and now it’s been five years, and I think we are quite happy with

U-ra-mi-li’s ‘Up Down and Sideways’ is now it is final stages of post-production. The film is partly funded by a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. Otherwise, it is entirely crowd-funded.

If you would like to support the film, write to uramili.project@gmail.com

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Photo Feature

The Beauty & the Bizarre

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Horn, Dream Sequence, 2014

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Sylwana Zybura, equally delights and shocks us with her carefully constructed images where dream-like realities engage the viewer in a never-ending dialogue of creative excesses and contemplative restraint

N iharika P eri

‘Dandyism is not...an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance,’ wrote Charles Baudelaire in 1860. ‘For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.’ Sylwana Zybura surely has that aristocratic superiority in mind when she makes her very distinct images. Sylwana is no ordinary photographer. In her own words, she is an ‘image maker, constructing my visual language from a plethora of subversive elements’. In an exclusive interview she explains why her figures or objects, as some may see them – to be precise, otherworldly objects – are what they are. Character design is at the centre of her work because documentation is not necessarily what she is looking at in photography. On the contrary, it is more theatrical and traverses a territory of hybridisation where every possible facet of photography is explored. ‘Originally,’ she says, ‘photography was a tool to document my process of creation.

In the intro to Dream Sequence, a project that Sylwana did in 2014, Sharon Loyd writes: ‘The characters that inhabit Peripetie’s world are exemplars of the contradictions of our society, and are rather like fashion’s uneasy dream-image of itself. By involving the spectator, the horror of her images compresses our lived contradictions into perplexing, unforgettable, iconic images, in just the way that dreams do. Peripetie admits that she “terrorises” her models

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It didn’t matter that the life span of the sculptures was very fragile and brittle as they only had to survive a few releases of the shutter. Slowly, it transformed more into an experience both for me as a photographer and for the person in front of the camera (a less arduous process). They became more and more visible, still fusing with the objects and garments but becoming more human in their form. Today, I see the process as a convergent collage of disruptive realities.’

through the arduous application of make-up, products, materials, costumes and prosthetics (often this takes several hours), and the result is that the viewer is permitted to delight in the trauma of being consumed by their own desire for the physical embodiment of beauty.’

But then, one wonders if she has an audience in mind when she turns her subjects into otherworldly beings. Whether they are creatures from science fiction or phantasmagorical? ‘Are they really phantasmagorical or did we forget to dream,’ she asks in return. The fact of the matter (and it is not just a dream) is that in her mind Sylwana subverts reality or tries to explain that what she shows in her images is the reality. In this time when we are talking about post-reality, Sylwana’s works are not searching for a viewer. It is the audience that seeks them.

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Jellyfish, Dream Sequence, 2014 Supernova?, Dream Sequence, 2014

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Excerpts from the interview From Man Ray to the surrealists like Dali, Bunuel or Ernst to the plays of Robert Wilson…one can find traces of them in your work. Can you explain their influences on your work or the influences in your practice?

The fascination with surrealism and the grotesque – Dadaism negates conventions and puts assemblage on a pedestal, surrealism transcends the borders of reality and introduces an automated process of creation by which one proposes to express, either verbally, by writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. All these elements immensely fascinate me and infuse my work subconsciously.

Illusions, hypothetical theories and unorthodox technical solutions were always of my great interest. Robert Wilson, often working with Philip Glass, dissects time and space in a spectacular performance of visual pleasures that is rather unforgettable for any image maker.

Your work fluctuates in and around the portraiture of unconventional fictional figures that goes between fashion, photography, performance and art.

Has it always been like that or is it a later entrant in your work since you became an active art director?

story behind each work and the viewers may keep wondering what that story is?

The involvement in a process of dreaming, of story telling, of ungraspable moments, and of the uncanny sublime that creates new intriguing conversations. If the image is a very straightforward one it doesn’t necessarily leave any room for your imagination to wander, discover the unexpected, look into the murky corners. It is like a naked body that might excite and embarrass the viewer when seen for the first time but after a while it becomes just a shell stripped both from intellectual and hypnotic fascination, becoming easily interchangeable. For a very long time I thought it is about a perfectly orchestrated image, but very quickly discovered that the in-between, the almost-unwanted, bordering-on-error accidental moments are the ones emanating the most power.

You like to embrace the bizarre and the weird. Is there any reason for that…?

Your childhood, the environment you grew up in, the stories you heard.

Anything from the past that you reflect upon…?

Your works are also open ended and keep the viewers constantly guessing. Is that deliberate because there seems to be a

For me, this is the reality. Day by day we encounter bizarre situations, glitches in the system, intrusions, discolorations and juxtapositions that feel more real than life itself. It is about the sensibility of seeing and subsequently interacting with them in an unorthodox way.

I used to be a Science Fiction nerd ravishing both the written word and the imagery of the non-existent, sublime, utopian versions of the human and the alien, the illusory perception of society and the individual.

There, the mind can wander and immerse in various visual delectations. There are no precise iconographic technological or

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For me, the starting point has always been an image of the human body and subsequently the idea of character design, both historically and in correlation to art. It is closely connected to the tradition of costume design, and surely to social interactions.

And through that process, a highly performative aspect that resonates with the audience even if the ‘living sculptures’ are static.

biological limits; you are allowed to hallucinate and dream. I learnt that the most intriguing part was always hiding in the fringes of reality, where the light is slightly dimmed and where the enigmatic hypnotism can flourish. Citing Kurt Vonnegut ‘I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center (...)

Big, undreamed-of things the people on the edge see them first.’

Multiple possible realities seem to co-exist in your works – something that is meant to make the viewer more aware of how he/she reads an image and what the preconceptions are. How do you approach the changing conditions your work is seen in from the pages of a book (a private affair) to the gallery space or advertisement billboards (a public engagement)?

It is vital to be aware what the final output of the work is, and who is the receiver. Still, I strongly believe that it should not be diluted (which unfortunately, especially in the commercial context, happens, as often the presentation of the ‘product’ overshadows the actual ‘feeling’ of the brand) and the audience should be introduced to ideas that have a fresh contemporary approach to current affairs.

Often, the brand and clients usurp this position of assuming that the end consumer is too simple-minded to comprehend anything more abstract or not ‘matching the norm’, whereas the audience is way smarter than we often assume. My personal projects are created in a frame by my self-imposed constraints and rules (to fuel the creative process) and it is not only an interplay of research, enriching collaborations, but also a constant active conversation with the audience.

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Panopticon

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Portraits, 58W, Sayaka

Portraits, 58W, Taylor

YOURFACEISMYFACEISYOURFACE, 2016

First Date, Climax

First Date, Sexual Encounter

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First Date, Foreplay/ Sex Machine

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How much of the linguist in you appears in your works?

Considering the fact that linguistics has everything to do with communicating with the audience, does your expertise with the language help in deciding the matrix in which you would want your audience to be in with respect to your works?

Ejing Zhang, Campaign SS16 Sylwana Zybura

The visual language, as much as the spoken language, consists of a visual syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax is defined as a set of rules in a language (such as grammar or word structure) that must be followed in order to make the sentence meaningful. If the rule of syntax in language is broken, it loses its informative value. This can be applied to the visual as well, making colour, textures, shadows and certain interrelations of objects as part of its grammar. The visual will lose its meaning if the visual syntax is broken.

Done subtly it can create some unexpected connections (unusual combinations of colours, perspective, fusion of textures, light and shadows, etc.). Semantics applies to the meaning of signs.

It is concerned with how the viewer reads the visual information in the image and the interpretation of it. A profound knowledge about symbolisation and connotations is needed in order to be able to skillfully rearrange, glitch and create unconventional – sometimes radically different and abstract – meaning that will still communicate with the audience or will put their idea of reality slightly off-balance. It is closely connected to pragmatics or the context of the sign and how it might change its meanings in different situations. The moment we experiment with the context we can change the message of the image substantially. So, as you can see, all these elements are crucial for the iconography of communication and knowing their usual role helps to induce a certain disruption to an idea of what fashion image, portrait or still life should be.

I feel I have achieved the expected result if I manage to skillfully break the syntax, catch my client or my audience off guard and give them a new perspective on what they thought is set in stone.

Would you like each of your characters to stand alone in the minds of your audience or would you want to be seen as a collective whole, a single entity?

There is a certain connection between them on the subliminal level. They are all intertwined through my exploration and dissection of the human body, their theatricality and disruptive fragments of (non)-reality. It is up to the viewer to decide which characters and images she or he chooses to interact with. It is a proposition, not an imposition.

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Photo Essay

Who’s the Audience?

M att L ambros

Empty, abandoned theatres bring with them a certain sense of surreal viscosity to how we understand performance – without an audience there can be none, and yet the echo of performances past persist. Matt Lambros, an architectural photographer who began photographing America’s abandoned theatres over ten years ago, captures those forgotten yet compelling stories, like this and more: “Loew’s Canal Theatre opened in September 1927 in New York. On the morning of September 10, 1932, an explosion rocked the front of the Loew’s Canal, throwing the ticket booth into the street and shattering windows on a number of neighboring buildings.

No one was injured in the blast, but Edward Brown, the theatre’s night watchman, was thrown down a flight of stairs by it. A similar explosion destroyed the entrance of the Loew’s 46th Street Theatre an hour earlier. Both bombings were thought to be connected to the Motion Picture Operators’ Union Local 306, who were on strike at the time and protesting in front of both theatres, but nothing was ever proven. It is currently used as a warehouse.”

Loew’s Canal Theatre, New York

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The Adams Theatre in Newark, New Jersey Originally opened on January 12, 1912 as the Shubert Theatre, it closed on March 31, 1986 due to a 400% increase in the insurance rates, which also caused the nearby Paramount Theatre to close.

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The Warner Theatre in Huntington Park, California Opened on November 19, 1930, it was sold to Pacific Theatres in 1968. They later twinned the Warner in the 1980s, separating the balcony and orchestra levels, and renamed it ‘Pacific’s Warner 2’. The Warner closed in the early 1990’s after a brief stint as a Spanish language theater.

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The Uptown Theatre It originally opened on February 16, 1929 in the North Central neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The 2,040-seat theater was designed by the architectural firm of Magaziner, Eberhard and Harris. Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, The Temptations, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and the Supremes all have performed at the theater.

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Loew’s Kings Theatre/Kings Theatre Brooklyn, New York It opened on September 7, 1929 and closed almost 50 years later in 1977. It was restored and reopened in early 2015.

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The Capitol Theatre in New London, CT Opened in 1926 as a vaudeville theater, it closed in 1974. The current owner is investigating a number of options for the future of the Capitol.

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The Liberty Theatre, Youngstown, Ohio The theatre opened on February 11, 1918. It was designed by architect C. Howard Crane, later known for designing the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan. It closed in 1976, and was demolished in 2013 after few failed restoration efforts.

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The Pantheon Theatre, Vincennes, Indiana It opened in May 1921. Red Skelton, who was born in Vincennes, Indiana, performed at the theater when he was first starting as a comedian. The theater closed its doors in the mid-1960s and the current owners plan to reuse the space as a lecture hall/training center.

All images courtesy of Matt Lambros

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published by vincent adaikalraj and owned by vincent adaikalraj and published from #127, TTK Road, Alwarpet, Chennai -600018 and printed by Srinivasan K at Srikals Graphics Private Limited, #5 Balaji Nagar, 1st street, Ekattuthangal, Chennai - 600032. Editor - Niharika Peri rni reg no. tneg/2013/51944