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Volume 4 Number 1 Jamini ISSN 1728-5747 www.jamini.com Publisher

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n its three years of publication Jamini has devoted issues to virtually every major art form, but we would not be rash enough to claim that none had been left out. With this issue we try to make up for the most obvious omission, which we hasten to add was not willful. It was pure happenstance. Sculpture aficionados, we hope, will be pleased with the motley assortment of pieces on their favourite art form.

We begin with an interview with Hamiduzzaman Khan, who has specialized in metal sculpture, often working on an imposing scale. That he is doyen of Bangladeshi sculptors at some months under sixty speaks volumes about the relative position of sculpture vis-Ă -vis other forms in our country.

Fortunately, change is in the air, and we can sense a sculptural tradition taking shape before our eyes. We have followed up with a feature on Alok Roy, celebrated for his highly sensitive moulding of clay into terracotta sculptures.

The sculpture of two other Asian countries has been spotlighted. Salima Hashmi writes on a young and adventurous generation of Pakistani sculptors who squarely confront the horrors and injustices so much in evidence all around. Mee Ae Lee provides a thumbnail critical history of modern Korean sculpture, which has already attracted worldwide attention. Gina Fairley explains how the Phillipines have inspired the Australian artist Tony Twigg to look for Asian found objects that go into the making of innovative installations. Jonathon Thompson expatiates on the Asian connection of the American sculptor Richard X. Zawitz, for whom the tranquil mood of santa rasa becomes the ultimate goal of artistic endeavour. Tabish Khair focuses on the postcolonial counterflow that has landed Asian artists in Denmark where, sadly, they have been condemned to a cultural ghetto.

Of 'pure' Western sculpture we have the experimental British artist Brian Catling's recent show 'The Stumbling Block', as interpreted by Shamsad Mortoza. Henry Moore, perhaps the best known of modern sculptors, appears in the role of a graphic artist. The write-up is by Ann Elliot who accompanied the Moore graphics that were recently brought over by the British Council and exhibited at the Bengal Gallery.

As usual, we round off with varied notes and reviews. Our indefatiguable antiquarian Mahboob Alam lovingly presents aspects of Company drawings in Bengal. Syed Manzoorul Islam descants on the Recherche du Temps Perdu that characterised Rafiqun Nabi's recent exhibition at Bengal. Naeem Mohaiemen has contributed a lively piece on the on going exhibition of anti-war art in Italy, System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. Two articles bring to life the last photography biennale organised by Drik: Fariha Karim captures the excitement of the discussions, while Hana Shams Ahmed and Nader Rahman take us on a guided tour of the mammoth show that was spread all over town. By courtesy of the Swiss government comes an informative article on the current Swiss art scene.

Work on our next issue is almost complete; once again we will spotlight a form unintentionally scanted so far: Architecture.

Abul Khair Editor

Luva Nahid Choudhury Executive Editor

Ziaul Karim Chairman of the Editorial Board

Anisuzzaman Editorial Board

Fakrul Alam Kaiser Haq Syed Manzoorul Islam Editorial Assistant

Syeda Samara Mortada Chief Graphics Designer

Shamim Chowdhury Marketing Executives

Kamal Mohammad Wasim Lucky Begum Published by Abul Khair on behalf of ICE Media Limited, Kushal Centre, Plot 29, Sector 3, Uttara C/A, Dhaka- 1230 and printed at Binimoy Printers Ltd., 37/2, Purana Paltan, Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh Editorial and Commercial office: Bengal Center, Plot 2, Civil Aviation, New Air port Road, Post Khilkhet, Dhaka 1229. Bangladesh.

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Cover

Cover: Playing with Innocent Bird, detail black terracotta, 1989, Alak Roy

heavy metal Kaiser Haq

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back to nature Syed Manzoorul Islam

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the stumbling block Shamsad Mortuza

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breaking the mould Salima Hashmi

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a twist in time and a line in space Jonathan Thomson

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tony twigg and the asian found object Gina Fairley

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modern korean sculpture Mee Ae Lee

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company drawing: bengal chapter Mahboob Alam

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contemporary swiss art in perspective Lorette Coen

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essay the art of eastern parts in the west Tabish Khair

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exhibition reviews keeping focussed with an open mind Ann Elliott remembered images Syed Manzoorul Islam these guys are artists, and who gives a damn Naeem Mohaiemen

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celebrating photography Hana Shams Ahmed and Nader Rahman

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beyond boundaries Fariha Karim

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an interview with hamiduzzaman khan

heavy metal Since the death of Abdur Razzaque at the end of a long and distinguished career, Hamiduzzaman Khan has become the doyen of Bangladeshi sculptors. At 59 he is at the peak of productivity and has just mounted a garden show on the British Council premises. Kaiser Haq talks to him about his life and work and aesthetic preoccupations

Nirban (Speechless) Carrara Marble, Summit Centre Dhaka, 2005

Kaiser Haq: The fact that you are the senior most sculptor in Bangladesh today tells us something about the position of the art form in our culture, doesn't it?

Hamiduzzaman Khan: Yes, it does indeed. Our art tradition is much stronger in painting and graphics than in sculpture. Except for Professor Razzaque and Novera our senior artists didn't show much interest in the form. Professor Razzaque's recent death is a great loss, since he can be called the founding father of the tradition of modern sculpture in the country. Novera has deservedly become a legend. She showed remarkable courage and energy during her years as an active artist in Dhaka. Her disappearance from the scene and her reclusive existence somewhere in France are perhaps the most intriguing episodes in our brief art history.

K.H.: Your own interest in sculpture seems to have developed rather late. Could you tell us the story of how you became drawn to sculpture?

H.K.: My first degree, from what was then the Dhaka Government College of Arts and Crafts, was in painting. I finished my degree in 1967 and then for two years freelanced in order to save money to go abroad for treatment. You see, I had suffered a serious traffic accident that fractured my skull and literally left me with a hole in my head. There was a bit of skull that had been severed and even after I had been patched up in hospital I only had skin over the place where I had lost skull bone. Even a slight injury in that place could now be fatal. I needed reconstructive surgery, which couldn't be done in the country. Dr Asiruddin, who was a high-ranking physician in the government health service, helped me go abroad. I went to Edinburgh, whose General Hospital has a worldwide reputation. As I was a student from a Commonwealth country, the hospital authorities waived all fees and I went through successful reconstructive surgery. The money I had taken with me, I spent on travelling for five months. I visited the museums and art galleries in Britain. I was particularly fascinated by the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National and Tate galleries. I felt drawn to sculpture, especially Henry Moore's work, of which I saw a lot. Then I went to Paris and Italy, and there too the sculptures I saw were an eyeopener. I realized what potential lay in this form to create an aesthetic effect that would be accessible to

Hanging Sculpture, 2003 SS Pipe. Brass and Copper World Bank. Dhaka

all. Most paintings are private possessions or housed in museums and are not seen by the majority of people. But throughout Europe I saw stunning sculptures in public places. They bridged art and ordinary life. People and traffic swirled around masterpieces that had withstood the depredations of the elements for centuries. I felt impelled to try my hand at this robust art form.

K.H: Was it only Western sculpture that attracted you to this form?

H.K: No, no. On my way to Britain—I went by ship—we stopped for a few days at the port of Dakar.

There I was impressed and charmed by traditional African sculpture. There were exquisite ebony figures.

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K.H: What about subcontinental sculpture?

H.K: Unfortunately, sculpture was conspicuous by its absence in this country. I am exaggerating of course. Like everyone else I have seen the classical sculptures in our museums, and among my teachers we had a distinguished sculptor in Professor Abdur Razzaque. But at the Art College the dominant activities were painting and drawing, and then graphics. I needed the exposure I had to a large number of sculptures of varied styles to make me feel that sculpture was what I wanted to devote myself to.

Of course, later on I became well- acquainted with the subcontinental tradition in sculpture.

K.H: So how did you switch to sculpture?

H.K: When I returned from Europe with my reconditioned skull—this was 1969—I began to work at sculpture, concentrating on clay as a medium, under Professor Razzaque. This was not part of an academic course, but something arranged informally with the blessings of the Shilpacharya, Zainul Abedin. The following year Abedin Sir, as we all called the Shilpacharya, appointed me as a lecturer in sculpture at the Art College.

K.H: That was a volatile phase in our history: political unrest, a terrible cyclone, elections, and then came the Pakistan Army crackdown and the Independence war.

H.K: Yes, our national struggle left a profound impression on me. I was picked up by the Occupation Army, but luckily they soon released me. Then I made my way to Kishoreganj, my ancestral home, on foot.

K.H: You first made a name for yourself with sculptures depicting the war and the Pakistani atrocities. But it was a few years before you could process the painful material into art.

How was the process of transmuting the agony of history into art unfold?

H.K: It took a while. I needed to improve my technique before I could think of doing justice to the subject.

K.H: And the opportunity to improve your technique came when you got a scholarship to study in India?

H.K: Yes, in 1973 I was awarded an Indian government scholarship to study for a two-years MFA

Painted Steel, 2003. Sculpture Park, South Korea

Painted Steel, 2002

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Untitled, 2003, Copper and Brass, World Bank Dhaka

degree. Abedin Sir chaired the interview board and gave his decision in my favour without even asking me any questions. It shows what a no-nonsense personality he had; he knew my work well enough to decide that I should get the scholarship.

K.H: You chose to go to Baroda rather than to Santiniketan. Why? H.K: I was offered admission to Santiniketan but an Indian High Commission official advised me to go to Baroda, which had a very dynamic faculty at the time. But as the admission quota for the year had been filled up I had to start my studies at Baroda the following year, in 1974.

K.H: Could you describe Baroda's impact on your career?

H.K: The Fine Arts department at Baroda had been founded by the dynamic Sankho Choudhury. It also had celebrated figures like Raghav Kanaria, who had taught at the Royal College of Art in London and is now teaching in New York, Mahendra Pandia and Subramanyam. Kanaria's influence on the development of my technique in handling metal was profound, especially in the use of wax casting.

Subramanyam inspired and encouraged students to be innovative, to trust their creative spirit and try out quirky new things. Once when I was working on a bronze sculpture he suggested that I leave intact the runners through which the molten metal is poured.

Normally they are removed when the casting has been completed. You can imagine how letting the runners remain added strangeness to beauty. I must say it opened my eyes. I began to develop a more flexible idea of aesthetic significance and value.

K.H: Tell us something about the work you began producing after Baroda.

H.K: By the time I finished my master's degree in 1976 I had started producing work that was radically different from anything I had done before. Some of these were exhibited almost straightaway. For instance, at a show commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Baroda Fine Arts department, which was held in Bombay, I had two bronze sculptures and one in plaster. They were all depictions of the terrible experience of the independence war, and were laid on the ground. At the time sculpture that was not upright was hardly ever seen in India. M.F. Husain came to

Installation, 2006. Pipe and Acrylic, Untitled Hospital Dhaka

the show and on seeing my work wanted to meet me; it was a great honour for a young artist like me. Then I came home but was invited back to India the same year to participate in another group show.

K.H: So one could say that your Indian training really started you on your career.

H.K: Yes, India was a seminal influence. After finishing my degree there I had the opportunity to assist Sankho Choudhury and Kanaria on some largesized sculptures that they were working on.

Meanwhile, sculpture as an art form was also gaining increased exposure in Bangladesh. The first national exhibition of sculpture was organized by the Shilpakala Academy in December 1976, and I can proudly say that my works in bronze were widely admired.

Untitled, 2005 SS Sheet

K.H: And from then on you have been a prolific artist, in your major medium, which is sculpture, as well as painting and drawing.

H.K: Yes, I always work hard, and at different sorts of things. I began producing large, or at least largish sculptures. In 1979 I did a 13-foot one which is now

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Boat, Welded Brass, 2005

located in Sylhet. I had my first solo sculpture show in 1982. That year I was also commissioned to do the sculpture at Bangabhaban. Then I went to USA and spent a year and a half on a scholarship at the Sculpture Center School in New York.

K.H: That must have been very different from what you experienced in India.

H.K: Yes, naturally. America is America as the

K.H: Can you be more specific?

H.K: American technology enables sculptors to do things a lot faster than it is possible in this subcontinent. There all you have to do is prepare a maquette, or miniature model, and hand it over to technicians who can blow it up to any size you want in any medium you want, whether bronze or steel or stone or whatever. I had the use of a studio for which the fee of $4000 was waived, and I could try out new techniques just as I pleased.

whole world knows! It has both negative and positive sides. But as far as my work as a sculptor is concerned, America taught me the usefulness of technological advancement. My scholarship wasn't meant to make me work for a degree. It gave me full freedom

K.H: Towards the end of 1983 you came back.

H.K: Yes, and I have been stationed at home ever since, teaching at what is now the Dhaka University Institute of Fine Arts.

in using the Centre and its resources to develop myself professionally. My interactions with American sculptors taught me a lot.

K.H: What is the most conspicuous outcome of your American sojourn?

H.K: I would say a growing interest in stainless steel as a medium for sculpture. It is virtually imperishable, extraordinarily malleable, & makes work of any size possible. Since my visit to America most of my works have been in stainless steel. I began working directly on metal, welding it and using car paint to get a good finish.

K.H: You have also been travelling a lot.

H.K: Not quite a lot let's say, quite a bit. And my travels always have a direct connection with my art.

During the Seoul Olympics in 1988 I was invited to work at the Olympic Park, a sculpture park, the fifth largest in the world. 180 artists participated from the world over, and each had full creative freedom and practically limitless resources at their disposal. Since then I have made several more visits to Korea. I have enjoyed working there and have been stimulated by the interaction with sculptors from diverse backgrounds. I also visited Indonesia in 1992 and studied Balinese wood sculpture, which is really quite exquisite and possesses tremendous expressive power.

Bird Family, 1981, Brass Pipe And Sheet, Banga Bhaban, ( President's House) Dhaka

K.H: Your wife, who was once your student, is also an established sculptor in her own right. How has your marriage affected your art?

H.K: Hard to say. But we have intense and meaningful discussions related to our work. My wife has worked in both wood and metal and is very sincere in her endeavours.

K.H: I believe you have done the largest number of large and conspicuous sculptures in public places: in Ghatail Cantonment, at the World Bank offices, at Acme Laboratories, the crossroads near the American Embassy and many other locations. Clearly, you find it meaningful and very satisfying to do this sort of work. Would it be right to say that you are aiming to bring art close to real life?

H.K: Precisely. I like the idea of people of all walks of life seeing my work as they go about their varied tasks or loiter and try to relax a little. It is far better to have this contact with people through one's art than to produce things that patrons will keep hidden from the popular gaze.

K.H: Do you have any philosophy of art? How do you relate to tradition and what is more important to you, form or content?

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Smritir Minar ('Tower Of Memory') 2003, Painted Steel, National University Campus.

H.K: That's a barrage of questions, but I will try to answer them unambiguously. Since Bangladesh itself lacks a strong tradition in sculpture, I feel free to take from whatever attracts me in other traditions. At the same time I am always studying the forms, shapes, textures and colours in the world around us. If I see an old house, with mouldings and wrought iron railings, I will study them, draw them and try to use them in my work. As for a philosophy of art, I really don't have one. I am pragmatic. But I use abstract as well as organic forms because I feel the dialectics between them captures something essential about the human world.

K.H: Yes, you have just published a marvellous book of drawings of different parts of 'Rose Garden'.

H.K: And I am constantly doing such drawings wherever I go. As for form and content, I never allow them to come into conflict, because both are equally important and, indeed, in a truly successful work it becomes impossible to tell them apart. I should also mention that in addition to sculpture and the drawings that go with it, I do a lot of paintings. I have been exhibiting in all three genres fairly regularly.

K.H: That is indeed very impressive. What about your contemporaries? Do you feel confident about the future of sculpture in this country?

H.K: There are a number of sculptors who deserve praise, and each of them is distinctive as regards medium and favourite subjects. Aloke Rai has done fine work in terra cotta, which is the oldest and most widely used medium in Bengal. Two sculptors started as amateurs but are now splendid professionals: Firdousi Priyabhasini, whose favoured medium is wood, and Rasha, who has an interesting experimental bent.

K.H: Now for a bit of criticism. You must be aware that a number of critics, including myself, have argued that your earlier work in bronze is far more satisfying than the more recent work in steel. How do you respond to such criticism?

H.K: I respect all such constructive criticism. I know what a wonderful medium bronze is, but it is relatively expensive and doesn't withstand the elements as well as stainless steel. I admit that steel tends to repel the aesthetic gaze, as you have pointed out, but I also believe that the problem can be

Rose Garden, 2006, Pen and Ink

Untitled, Bronze, 2006

overcome, at least to an extent. There are many kinds of stainless steel available in the world today and it should be possible to import varieties that have a different sheen, and even interesting textures. I think if I keep on struggling with this medium I will be able to produce interesting work that will last.

K.H: Let us end on that confident note. We wish you all success in your endeavour.

Kaiser Haq is a member of the Jamini editorial board

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Continuity, detail, clay and wood, 2005

a conversation with alak roy

back to nature

By Syed Manzoorul Islam

Alak Roy (born 1950) belongs to a generation of artists whose sensibilities have been shaped by momentous political events and social upheavals, both leading up to, and deriving from, Bangladesh's war of independence. The war itself was a cataclysmic event — a nine-month-long bloodbath that, on the one hand, showed the flint and the steel of the Bengali character, its capacity to endure pain and suffering, and on the other, the cruelty and rapacity of those who helped the enemy carry out its atrocities. After the country became free, its political leadership failed to live up to people's expectations. There was widespread deprivation and want, resulting in a famine in 1974. Given the devastation caused by the war to the economy, particularly the infrastructure, economic depression was perhaps inevitable. But people could not believe that their dream of a Golden Bengal would evaporate that quickly. The subsequent political and social history is thus underlined by that initial disappointment and desperation

The sculptor: Alak Roy

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lak Roy, who passed out from the Institute of Fine Art of Dhaka University in 1973, like many others of his generation, had fond hopes for his country. Attracted to leftist ideologies early in his life, he dreamt of a progressive and truly secular society where people would live a life free from hunger and want. Political developments, however, charted a different course, and the killing of the country's founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with many members of his family in 1975, reversed much of the gains of the 1971 war.

Secularism was discarded as a state principle; so was socialism. Pakistani collaborators were rehabilitated while freedom fighters were consigned to neglect and oblivion. In the aftermath of the revival of a Pakistani style political philosophy and the involvement of the army in the day-to-day governance of the country, cultural freedom was restricted. It suddenly looked as if, except for a new geographical identity, nothing substantial had been gained. If artists despaired, it was for good reason.

The above picture of the political and social situation of the 1970s is important for an understanding of Alak Roy's art, for it provides a background

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Martyrs, detail, black terracotta, 1989

against which his artistic philosophy took shape and helps us identify the constraints within which he had to begin his career. Sculpture, particularly iconic sculpture was frowned upon by the conservative Pakistani society—a fact that explains the rather narrow range of activities in this area before 1971.

The war of independence changed that landscape and, instead, encouraged large, outdoor sculptures of freedom fighters. But, in the late 1970s, conservatism was back again. This time round, however, artists were not willing to give in, and they persisted. Thanks to their efforts, sculpture today has become an integral part of the artistic landscape. Indeed, it has more practitioners and patrons now than ever before.

Alak was never politically active, but his pro-people beliefs and views naturally inclined him towards social protest. For his sculptures, this protest translated into a questioning and often rejection of 'academic styles' pursued in classrooms, and an incorporation of social, and later, environmental themes in his work. From his early days as a sculptor, Alak began to redefine mass and volume: he experimented with materials but took care that the finished work did not succumb to their defining power. He rediscovered the magical properties of terracotta and found new ways to accommodate his constant need for change and his love of

experimentation. In place of the illusion of permanence and substantiality—to which most sculptural works tend to aspire—Alak has celebrated the temporary and the insubstantial. In a recent series, Alak has laboured to make sand and clay sculptures on a stretch of sea beach for hours only to watch rising waves flatten them and wash away all their traces.

If we look for the distinguishing marks of Alak Roy's sculpture, the list won't be too long, but each will certainly stand out for its uniqueness. Alak's early terracotta work shows both his predilection for installation-like arrangements (his work, indeed, is a precursor to that recent art form in this country) and his sharp eye for detail; his site-specific sculptures reveal an intimate understanding of what the Chinese call feng-shui, or the spirit of the place; and instead of working solely on the outside of a sculpted object, he often starts with its interior spaces, slowly reaching outwards, so that the work progresses much like a bird taking flight. This necessarily invites the viewer's gaze both to the exterior and interior of an art object, thus eliminating the restrictions of mass, volume and dimensionality.

Alak's work varies in size and dimension. He is equally challenged by the verticality and horizontality

of his work. Some of his works are tall pieces, resting like columns on their bases, while others stretch horizontally, their full length hugging the ground.

Shapes too, are as varied as there are ideas going into the sculptures, but overall, round and smooth shapes, rather than angular or sharply edged ones predominate.

Alak teaches sculpture at the Department of Fine Art of Chittagong University. Until recently, he used to live in the city while his studio was located at Choudhury Hat, a village about 10 km away from the city. He has since moved into his studio complex which has spacious indoor and outdoor working places, a gas-fired kiln, and storage facilities. The move has been very helpful, since Alak can now save the time commuting between his city apartment and the studio. Besides, he now lives right in the middle of a sprawling countryside with paddy fields, large ponds, jungles and thick bamboo groves which host a large colony of birds and animals. Alak's recent work attempts to reach out to nature. 'I want my sculpture to bring back the feel of nature that once we took for granted,' he says.

power of nature to protect itself. It is after all, a living entity, and has been there longer than the homo sapiens.

In the Inner Eye of the Earth series, Alak celebrates this latent power of nature. Large earthen bowls lie halfsunk in the ground, and from the hollow of the bowls, large eyes stare at the sky. He also made a similar composite sculpture for the last Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka. Five eyes in the sculpture represent the five main continents of the world. The world is

Inner Eye of the Earth, terracotta and glazed terracotta, 2006

His words, taken out of context, would sound a bit like clichĂŠs, if not pretentious, and politically correct.

But as I caught up with him in his Choudhury Hat home cum studio one autumn afternoon for a chat, and sat on his 2nd floor terrace roof, sipping coffee, I could feel how genuine was the ring of his words.

Alak, indeed, is going back to nature. 'I'd like my works to remain in their outdoor settings for as long as they last, and eventually become part of nature,' he says. To accomplish that, he has planted saplings around, even inside, a few of his sculptures, hoping that these would grow and eventually claim the sculptures.

I asked Alak to explain what role nature plays in his work. For an answer, he referred to some of his recent works where the world is seen to possess eyes and ears—an anthropomorphic projection of sorts, but one that also accommodates a muted spirituality as well. The world, which for Alak translates as nature, also has an inner eye with which it can clearly see the shape of things to come. If the spread of technologydriven, engineering-based urban civilization confines nature only to reserved forests and national parks, laying waste all its other vestiges, then humanity will have to pay a huge price. Alak however, believes in the

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Martyrs, detail, black terracotta, 1989

Martyrs, detail, black terracotta, 1989

watching us, the humans, and we too should watch out, the sculpture seems to suggests. Alak made another series of sculptures for an installation on an island beach in Vietnam, which are shaped like giant ears. He titled the work Listen to the duet of wind and sea.

In a variant work, he substituted the word 'forest' for 'the sea.'

When reminded that his recent works are assuming a tactile quality —both through their smooth and rounded feel and their celebration of the sense of touch—Alak said, 'any satisfactory sculptural work should possess both visual as well and tactile qualities.

It should invite the viewer to touch it, to feel it, and start a dialogue with it. If a sculptural work persists in its cold detachment and measured isolation, it ceases to generate that sense of intimacy which allows the viewers to have an ownership of it.' None of Alak's work is heavily or weightily at rest; they indeed have a material weight and dimension, but the material appears to have been softly drummed together, as indeed does a potter when he makes a clay subject.

Another recent series, The Potter's Fingers brings into focus how, through the feeling of touch, a potter shapes his object. Alak has always marvelled at the way potters make pinched dolls. These dolls carry the

Untitled, ceramic, 2003 Continuity, clay and wood, 2005

imprint of their makers' fingers which appears to animate them. Alak is an admirer of Helen Keller, the celebrated American essayist and memoirist who, despite her blindness, could 'see' with her fingers. Alak believes that fingers can indeed see, and that each of us have eyes inside our heads. Unfortunately, we never know that they exist.

Elaborating on the tactile aspect of sculpture, Alak mentioned a 2001 project he did at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. Loosely titled The Art of Touch, the project invited schoolchildren into a room in the museum, and gave them each a box of soft clay. The children were asked not to look inside; all they were supposed to do was to use their hands to make some shapes with the clay. After the children had finished making their sculptures, they were asked to leave the room. The sculptures were brought out of the boxes and put on a table on display. Amazingly, when the children returned, almost all could identify their own works.

Alak's recent works are also becoming engagingly experimental. He now makes sculptures which will naturally interact with the elements and grow or wither as natural objects do. In some of his works, water is an implied presence. In another series, bowl-

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shaped compositions are placed outdoors. As rainwater collects in their hollows, inlaid forms and objects are submerged, and, after a while, moss begins to gather. The beauty of the works lies in their changing colour and texture as the elements keep working on them. Alak feels that in many countries, such as Japan, public gardens have existed for centuries and any garden sculpture is also guaranteed a long span of life.

In Bangladesh however, gardens are the most endangered places, and most die in infancy. Yet he hopes that once a tradition is started, sculptures genuinely rooted in the environment will gain in popularity.

I asked him about his 'back to nature' philosophy.

He referred to the Gadani Beach workshop in Balochistan in Pakistan in 2006, where he made sculptures of eyes out of sand and clay. Many of these had the hidden eye motif. Alak also painted them—indeed followed all the procedures of ceramic sculpting except kiln firing. However, after these works had remained on display for some time in all their brilliance, they were claimed by the rising tide.

Back to nature!

This one-off variety of art work which is nonownable and transient is akin to installation art. But the difference is, here art pronounces its own demise.

Dust to dust!

In a composite sculpture for a forthcoming show at the Alliance Française at Chittagong, Alak's politics of protest take a tangible form. The work is huge and quite intricate. There is a sprawling chessboard whose 64 squares are filled up by 64 clay birds. On two sides of the chessboard are a black house and a white house —the white one, with two ominous looking snakes curling around has obvious references to the house that George Washington built but chose not to live in.

The other house is ironically called the house of Living together with Nature, terracotta and wood, 2001

Living with the Earth, terracotta, 2001

peace. The house breeds fanaticism and religious extremism. The symbolism is elaborate, and a bit laboured too, but the message is loud and clear: the world cannot allow duplicity and hypocrisy to reign for too long.

I asked Alak about his exhibitions abroad. He mentioned the work he had done in Korea and China.

In a composite piece he did in Kunming in 2005, five huge human heads in stone in five colours were joined by a bronze casting suggesting a tree, with a seed placed at the end. Five is an important number for Alak—it symbolizes the five continents where human beings live, five senses that make us up, and so on. His entry in the sculpture exhibition organized in connection with the 2008 Olympics in China, Love, Friendship and Peace, which received a citation, elaborates on his

inner eye theme. Then the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu, Japan, included a piece by Alak Roy for its show on 100 years of ceramic art. Titled Waiting for the Light, the sculpture tells the story of man's long relationship with nature. Alak used the technique of ring wells in rural Bangladesh for the work, and it received wide acclamation.

experience of the significance of life.' And that significance can best be derived from one's interaction with nature.

Alak's sculptures, within the movement of their composition, are always related to the adjacent space of nature. Material is important for him, but experience outside the material concerns is equally significant, which may range from a sense of alienation that the modern world generates in an artist to a sense of fulfillment when one discovers the eternal rhythms of life in nature. For Alak believes with Henry Moore that sculpture is 'not a decoration of life but an

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Previously unseen images from the video work Bird & Fire Cycle, 2001.

brian catling's scripted sculpture

the stumbling block

By Shamsad Mortuza

This essay is a critical commentary on British artist Brian Catling's celebrated work The Stumbling Block A ghost is being built from the more solid things.

-Brian Catling

T

he Stumbling Block is a written sculpture.

The Stumbling Block is sculptured writing.

Put simply, it is a book that stood on a pedestal to pose as a sculpture; and it is a piece of a poem that continues to shape and generate its own spatial structure in its recto-verso form. In other words, it is a strategic confrontation of tangible substance and intangible

ideas. Its existence in both three dimensions and two dimensions redefines what we deem as sculptural space. It signals the end of sculpture in tune with Mallarme's famous utterance, 'Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book'. Concurrently, in a post-Mallarmean world, it announces the beginning of sculpture by redirecting our position regarding all its regular attributes: form, process, material, scale, meaning and so on.

The maker of The Stumbling Block is Brian Catling.

He is a poet, sculptor and performance artist. He is

House No 3/A, Road No 28 (Old), 15 (New), Dhanmondi, Dhaka Phone: 9116057, Fax: 880-2-956-4312

www.farzanashakil.com

professor and head of the department of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford. Catling leads an international performance group, 'The Wolf', and he has been commissioned to make solo installations and do performances in countries like Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Holland, Norway, Germany and Greenland. Recently, one of his sculptures was installed at the site of execution in London Tower. This resume indicates Catling's influence on the contemporary art scene. However, he is not what you would call, if I may suborn the bogus label, a 'mainstream' British artist. (Hear and judge for yourself. Catling posits, 'The history of British art has been founded on a lot of boring people who did one thing continually. Very good and interesting people are looking over their shoulder, and becoming more neurotic than they've ever been'). In the early seventies, Catling, along with his sparring partner, the novelist Iain Sinclair, was involved with the British Poetry Revival (BPR). The BPR was helped by the appointment of the radical, and avant-gardist Eric Mottram, a Professor at King's College, London, who was briefly made editor of the Poetry Society's magazine Poetry Review in 1971. During his short stint, Mottram gave a platform to the underground small presses, promoting the oral, spoken, performance of poetry. Poets of BPR experimented with the various potentialities of audience involvement, mixing various art forms with poetry. Sculpture was one such form.

It is no surprise then that Catling describes his work, The Stumbling Block as 'a direct attempt to write sculpture, to focus on an invisible shape-shifting mass, to try to see its contours, its material, its volume, in the different light of its manifestations.' The poem as a scripted sculpture informs Catling's fascination with language and suggests the materiality of his works and his treatment of writing as a strategy to produce and enhance conceptual resonance. As a literary piece, true to its title, the poem opposes the idea that a text can be consumed like any other commodity. The title makes a direct reference to the Bible, momentarily opening up a possibility for a hermetic discourse. But the idea soon gets entangled in a series of Gnostic references and occult rationality mentioned in the text. Catling situates himself at that juncture of time where both past and future can be made visible. In fact, like his other works, the text stretches the limit of knowledge to such an extent that apocalypse

becomes visible. Apocalypse, for Catling, is not millennial hype; it is an acknowledgement of the end of the beginning. He suggests this idea through invoking not only the past but also the future by assuming occult powers that can be described as shamanic. But Catling's shamanism does not include the primitive as was the case with artists of Picasso's generation. It does not treat magic as something exotic and distant. It makes magic an act of will, a matter of intention. The intention of the poetsculptor is clear: he wants to use magic to counter the magic of capitalism, the grand spectacle of modern time. It's a homeopathic process of curing like with like. So Catling's ultimate objective is to free art from its fetishtic connotations and reveal the human relationships involved in the creation of his work.

What is The Stumbling Block anyway? It is a book, and the hard cover of it is made out of letterpress reject. Even by the look of it you get the feeling that if you touch it the murky ink will get to your hand, if only to remind you of the work that has gone into its making. This 125 x 255mm scripted sculpture has 48 pages bluish waxy paper that renders a series of definitions of what Catling considers to be the stumbling block. Bound in a hard cover with graphite boards, the book/sculpture looks like a solid metallic block: the block here does not stop the thought process; instead, it goes on to evoke a series of other thoughts. The title indicates that it is only an index of a stumbling block. Its use of carbon from office waste in solid grafted form alludes derisively to another form of carbon, diamond--the prime symbol of consumer culture. As a piece of sculpture, this can be a luxury item or trash, depending on your definition.

When shown at the 1991 exhibition in Rutland, UK it was titled by the curator Iain Sinclair famously as 'Shamanism of Intent.' Sinclair described the work in terms of potlatch in an indigenous community where the excess is abandoned as a gift or a sacrifice. The exhibition catalogue, included in Sincalir's Lights Out for the Territory, is now considered a 'retrospective manifesto' for shamanic artists. Catling's sculpture is not merely recycling office waste; he is also restating the reject as a work of art. And he is presenting it as a generic hybrid: a mixture of sculptural and poetic forms.

Catling's sculpture is intent on its process-based outcomes. It does not represent or model the

stumbling block. The Stumbling Block is not a physical manifestation of an obstacle. It simply reverses art's relationship with words. When we go to an exhibition or a museum and look at the brief text that is attached to a work of art, we expect the brief label to tell us what to expect from the particular work in a linear chronological fashion. But here it is the other way round. The text has replaced the visual form. Instead it has become an event for unleashing a fluent artistic process. It is an artist's studio in itself, and the audience is invited to join in. Here, as Aaron Williams posits, 'questions of chronology, of the temporal structure between what is presented or represented, does not necessarily apportion a traditionally separate role for writing. Instead, the material act and resulting text are also made subject to an exploration of the dynamics between presentation and representation.' In addition, it defies the idea that art can be consumed like any other commodity and resists immediate gratification.

Catling's political commitment aligns him with Marxism. The Stumbling Block thus becomes a statement against the idea of commodity exchange and fetishization of art. The index claims: 'The Stumbling Block is not a coffer, disguised by a wig of artifice. […] it will not simper for admiration or love, it will not beg blind or inert for ownership. It has no hollow to be filled by promise or paper. Its currency is elsewhere. It offers itself in totality, without a price; an obstinate gift to the imagination, a curve from the seclusion of possession.'

We are dealing with the emperor's new clothes then. We are dealing with a sculpture that does not exist. (But surely you can buy it through the internet.

In fact, search the Amazon.com and you are likely to find some limited availability of it for £25. Trust me though, after a few days you will be told that they could not find the item!). Or maybe it exists like a ghost that is made out of solid things, to borrow a phrase from one of Catling's poems. The imagery in the sculpture poem is surrealistic. For example, the stumbling block is described 'as an atlas swallowing its tongue' or as something that 'dreams from its impossible paper heart of the forest of his origin.'

Admittedly, Catling plans to have clashing ideas that will startle his audience/reader. In an interview Catling mentioned, 'You cannot have one sentence like that, with a lot of grey drivel on each side. You

have to listen to what it's saying, […] like a sounding board, to bring out the rest of the poem.' He aligns with another British artist, Wyndham Lewis, in his ideas of vorticism: image opening the floodgate of other ideas, and text becoming the source of energy.

The poetic merit of The Stumbling Block is justified by its inclusion in Keith Tuma's Oxford Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry (2001) and also in Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1991), published by Picador. As already mentioned, the title alludes to the Bible. Both Old Testaments and New Testaments make frequent references to the stumbling block, generally to refer to something that people put between themselves and God, or that God put before the disobedient. But the most likely source for Catling's title is Ezekiel (7:19): 'They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be as an unclean thing; their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of Yahweh: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels; because it has been the stumbling block of their iniquity.'

The allusion evokes a possible connection between the Bible, the canonical book and Catling's book. The Book (the Bible) is at the heart of western culture. It is the centre of the Logos. If God is the grand sculptor, according to the gospel of Saint John, he made the world from words: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' The flesh of Catling's work is the word, the carbon-made cover is its fossilised bone. In conventional sculpture, the world is perceived through a direct correspondence between the observing eye and the observed object. But in Catling's wor[l]d, the connection is indirect. The words in the poem are signs prompting a series of signifiers. There cannot be any fixed meaning then. There is no affirmative meaning of the world that can be foretold from a divine authoritative tone. In contrast, Catling's wordsculpture captures the dynamics of language, and records how it mediates the perceiver and the perceived, the audience and the work of art. Catling does not want to represent the stumbling block: he wants to start the process that will start a dialogue between what the perceiver thinks as the stumbling block and what is conventionally perceived as the stumbling block.

Instead of following the Bible literally, Catling does

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St Bartholomew. Cadmium plated steel, perspex, steel, 3' x 3'x 8'. St Bartholomew was played alive and is traditionally seen carrying hi skin folded over his arm.

it 'letterally.' It seems he is trying to ambush the sacred. His works are not devoid of spirituality though. In order to address the loopholes in the western logic of rationality, of which the Bible is an icon with its link to Renaissance and Reformation, Catling has formed his own book. This formation of a book is done more out of a paranoia and fear than anything else. Etymologically, the book (bok) stands for a tablet. There is one Jewish legend in which a Rabbi in Germany created a creature to protect the community from the Christian miscreants who were smuggling dead children into the Jewish village to taint the Jews with a ritual murder during the Passover. The Golem, a prototype of Frankenstine, St. Ferome. An installation at South Hill Park, Bracknell.

was created with the word 'emeth' written on his forehead. The Golem knew that if the Rabbi removed the first letter from his forehead it would mean 'meth,' his death. The Golem had no inclinations, either good or bad. Whatever action he performed he did under compulsion and out of fear lest he should be turned into dust again and reduced to naught once more. The Golem is not just a matter made of form, but a materialization of spiritual disturbance in the community. This cabbalistic idea informs much of Catling's works. His works are a reaction to social disturbances.

He is like the Golem who acts out of fear and paranoia against a capitalist machinery that is going to usurp every little bit of us that is humane. The Golem is the Other of the western man, the Frankenstein of its own making. This is related to his most known performance, the Cyclops cycle, where Catling rediscovers the Homeric pariah at the heart of the British Library and goes on to project him in Japan, Leipjig, Paris and other metropolitan cities. Thus in Catling's scripted sculpture we stumble across a site of intertextuality that deals with the economics of meaning, the production, consumption and distribution of art in society.

In his other works also, Catling tends to eschew the boundaries between genres. His installations

accompany written hints that become part of the sculptural space. For example, for his installation in Soundings, A Tractate of Absence in Matt's Gallery, London, 1991 he describes 'a misshapen mass on the floor. This object was made at the Trollhaugen ... it was deep winter, the lake locked solid, the dark ice steaming in the night. The lead was cast on the peak of the full moon, poured into its frozen reflection, the heat biting into the ice, the cold reforming: the exchange of heat and solidity. Dug from the stiffening water and returned to the gallery, it bears the violence of its change, a paradoxical object, alien.' The detail here is ritualistic, transporting the reader to an alternative source of knowledge. The tone is sombre, and it does not pretend to casually throw a 'found object' into the gallery as a work of art.

Because of his closeness to the conceptualists, Catling is often dubbed as the English Beuys. He is really interested in the Fluxus and their actions. But it needs to be mentioned here that ink is not the only medium of Catling's work. In fact he uses every form of organic and mineral material to give shape to his sculpture. But what prompted him to defy the traditional boundary of sculpture? Let us hear it from the horse's mouth. In an interview with Simon Perril, Catling contends that the problem with sculpture, in its strictest sense, of course, is that it is not willing to accept its failure.

'This is why sculpture started to wear down. They were always much more about frailty and translucency than about solidity or the monument. I never made those. Even though I used steel, they were never about their own solidity, their own form. One of the problems I have with sculpture is that there's a tremendous amount of fundamentalism about. I don't believe in sculpture. I don't believe in writing. I'm not interested in proclamations that the clinical manipulation of any language is any greater than the idea, or than what may come about unexpectedly. To make something without a balance of existence, that just sits there inert and dead, is of no interest at all. And then when people stand on their pedestals and soapboxes and say what can't be made, I get really angry. As if there's anything called sculpture that can't be trespassed and diluted, as if it means a shit.'

(Tending the Vortex p 13)

of classical sculptures as it was conceived by Leonardo da Vinci in Paragone. Leonardo goes on to assert that sculpture is worthier than painting because of its permanence and due to its better resistance to the elements. Modern man cannot afford to relish such durability. At the same time, Catling's reservation about the permanence of art foregrounds issues involving the autonomy of an artist. After all sculpture, like its sister genre painting, is possessed. In an insightful essay, William Tucker sums the situation up brilliantly: 'This inevitable characteristic of being and belonging has thrown doubt on the genuine capacity for freedom of the sculptor or painter in modern western society. The greatest artist can be depicted as servants of the rich and powerful, implicitly supporting the social and political structure in which they lived, however much they protest it in their work.'

Catling's venturing out for a new mode of expression and new materiality is ultimately an exploration of failure. Consequently, his work insists on an urge to transform and transmutate. Having said that, I must point out that the connection between poetry and sculpture is not entirely new. In works of poets like Holderlin, Rimbaud, Yeats, and Rilke, we find vocabulary and imagery that verge on being sculptural. Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1906) is a notable example: We knew not his unheard-of-head Wherein the eye-apple ripened But his torso still glows like a street lamp In which his gaze merely turned down low Persists and gleams. Or else the curve Of the chest could not bind you, and in that twist Of the loins there'd be no smile, returning To the centre of virility, Or else the stone would stand short, disfigured,‌ You might as well remember Shelley's 'Ozymandias' or Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium.' It is not uncommon for poets to resort to the idea of carving, design, outline and relief of the sculptors, and graft them in their own works. But Catling the poet is not approaching the imagery in sensual term. His repository is entirely conceptual and he shapes his ghostly

Catling is challenging one of the conceptual roots

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Cyclops painting, 2000. Egg tempera, approximately 7"x 9".

sculpture purely out of ideas.

Let me end with two lines from the Italian sculptor Arturo Martini. After a long 40-year career, Martini derided his own works in 'Sculpture Dead Langue' (1945). His final lines were:

with the audience and exist in the matrix of the mind of his audience/reader. In other words it will become a part of an energy network, which is at the heart of Catling's vorticism.

'That I should not be an object, but an extension That I should not stay three dimensional, for death can hide within.'

Maybe, Catling is driven by the same desire to transmutate the dimension and change the scale and form of his work. His use of letter as the material ultimately manifests a process that makes 'The Stumbling Block' a sculpture. Catling's work does not want to be an object, but an extension that will plug in

The writer is Chairman, Department of English, Jahangirnagar University. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis, 'The Shamanic and Bardic Traditions in Contemporary British Poetry,' at Birkbeck College, University of London

Tangail Sharee Kutir Head office: 143/1 New Baily Road, Dhaka-1000 Phone: 88-02-8314567, Fax : 88-02-8312928 email: emdadhaq@bol-online.com 2nd Branch: 2/23-36 Eastern Plaza, Sonargaon Road, Dhaka-1205, Plone: 88-02-9660137 3rd Branch: 212/213 Mascot Plaza, Sector 7 Uttara Model town, Dhaka, Phone: 88-02-8914125-213 4th Branch: Bashundhara City, Level 4, Block-D Shop no. 102, 13/Ka/1 Panthapath, Dhaka-1205 Phone: 88-02-9130321-404102

World Plane, Jamil Baloch

new sculpture in pakistan

breaking the mould

By Salima Hashmi

Today a whole generation of artists in Pakistan has dispensed with 'received' notions of 'sculpture' and are in the process of assembling an idiom of 'work-in-the-round' which will be dramatically different from anything which preceded it

Stage 2, Durriya Kazi

T

his 'new wave' of sculpture sparkles with ideas; it is witty, insubordinate and ebullient. Ranging from the intensely personal 'craft' objects of Ruby Chishty and Masooma Syed, to the overly political statements of Duriya Qazi and Jamil Baloch, the works of the new wave artists grow out of their engagement with life.

Sculpture itself has been a site of contention during most of Pakistan's six decades. Religious ideologues have vociferously rejected both its presence and its practice. This, in spite of Pakistan's extraordinary sculptural heritage dating back to prehistory. While museums and archeological sites are repositories of objects of great beauty and historic significance, the teaching, learning and professional practice of sculpture have often been arduous. This is not surprising, considering the fact that the State has interpreted and re-interpreted the relationship between religion and art practices over the last sixty years. Multiple issues involving national ideology, religious dogma and artistic canons have been debated in both private and public domains. Sculpture has

often occupied centre stage in these discussions.

After Independence in 1947, many artists preferred to skirt the problems involved in making sculpture, and opted to work with two-dimensional surfaces.

Not that painting escaped disapproval or disparagement from the orthodoxy, but the teaching and practice of painting proved too well-entrenched and widely accepted to be curtailed. Nevertheless, Pakistan's social and political uncertainties, especially during the military regime of General Zia ul Haq (from 1977 to 1988) transgressed into every sphere of cultural expression.

It was during this decade that sculpture came under severe scrutiny. The newly set up Council of Islamic Ideology considered banning sculpture in educational institutes and there was a call for removal of antiquities from museums. This was accompanied with much nitpicking about the study of the human figure in classrooms and studios, resulting in diminishing private and public patronage for art works incorporating the figure. Not surprisingly, the ranks of artists, especially sculptors, thinned fast to the point of becoming almost invisible!

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There were of course significant exceptions--there were artists who steadfastly taught and practiced the relevant skills keeping the activity alive and in the public eye.Among such teachers were Anna Molka Ahmed, Naseem Qazi, Taufiq Ejaz, Anwar Afzal and Jalees Nagi in the first decade after 1947. They worked in the Fine Arts Department of Punjab University, the National College of Arts and the Lahore College for Woman, all in Lahore. While adhering to the curriculum, they were able to introduce modelling in clay, plaster casts and molds and the mysteries of carving in wood, gypsum and marble. In Karachi, Ozzir Zuby dabbled in portraiture, rendering well-known faces for collectors and patrons. At the Karachi School of Art, founded by Rabiya and Hajra Zuberi in the 1960s, a more sentimental academic regimen was followed.

Sculptors Saghir Ahmed and Anjum Ayaz worked intermittently at their craft.

Mother and child 1, Humaira Abid

The first sculptor to make a significant contribution to the development of the Bangladeshi truly contemporary idiom of sculpture was Novera Ahmed. An influential, though fleeting presence in the 1960's, Novera made her mark with the award-winning piece titled 'the Child Philosopher' in the National Exhibition held in Lahore Museum in 1961. Her solo exhibition held at the Lahore Arts Council shortly afterwards was riveting for the younger generation of artists and art students of the city, who had yet to encounter the materials and vocabulary she employed.

Novera disappeared from Pakistan as if she was a meteor and it was not until Shahid Sajjad appeared on the scene a few years later that sculpture in Pakistan found a profound and individual voice once again.

Sajjad's first solo exhibition in 1964 at the Karachi Arts Council was the outcome of three years spent living in the forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in what was then East Pakistan. Living in isolation, he worked with materials, i.e wood, found around him.

His subject matter was drawn from the gentle tribals who inhabited the hill tracts. The simplicity of those who lived on the periphery of civilization stirred Sajjad, who had an affinity for what was the 'essence of humankind'. It was here that Shahid Sajjad found his vocation and made an unflinching commitment to his craft. His work encompasses a lifetime of meticulous practice with bronze and wood, and is tethered to an equally unwavering exploration of life's many avatars. His recent works in wood (mostly yew and

Stage 4, Durriya Kazi

mulberry) are monumental in scale, and are imbued with both the sweetness and the poignancy of human relationships. The sensuousness of the surface camouflages the strenuous process of carving out interlocking forms from a single log. The wood is smoked and polished, revealing veins and often testimonies of age. The technical virtuosity, however, never intrudes into the poetry of form or detracts from the palpability of the feelings embodied in the work.

Shahid Sajjad's artistic career has been a gruelling and lonely one. With little or no patronage, he has struggled to survive without compromising his aesthetic principles.

However this absence of discerning patronage has impacted on the urban landscape in curious ways. The attitude to sculpture being ambiguous, the approach to public monument design becomes even more complicated in the Pakistani context.

While public monuments in cities and town have received a great deal of attention, their execution has been erratic, their forms haphazard and frivolous.

Fabricated and financed by both public and private

money, these edifices are designated to reflect national aspirations and reveal aesthetic norms of officialdom.

Public monuments in Pakistan have been overwhelmingly militaristic in nature, and sparkle with calligraphic flourishes. Fighter planes, bombers, antiaircraft guns, missiles, submarines and tanks occupy traffic islands, railway stations, parks and city squares.

The piece-de-resistance some years ago, was the huge fibre-glass replica of the mountain at 'Chagji', the site of Pakistan's first nuclear test. Lit from within, the simulated rock glowed pink at night, presumably inspiring exultation at Pakistan's arrival in an exclusive comity of nations. Each city once had its own 'Chaghi' monument! However these 'markers' of membership of the world's nuclear club were surreptitiously removed from public view in many places as a result of an equally mysterious change in State policy. The longevity usually associated with public monuments are not necessarily guaranteed in Pakistan since they are often subject to the vagaries of political circumstances!

Nevertheless, calligraphic monuments have a longer shelf life and have grown in number consistently.

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Some of these display technologically advanced features, for instance lighting up and flashing while rotating.

Since these two kinds of monuments- the militaristic and the calligraphic- are prevalent, it is tempting to dwell on the interconnections, subliminal or otherwise.

The urban landscape being occupied by such works, the professional sculptor who wants to share his or her work with others, falls back into a narrower space, i.e the art gallery or any extension of the domestic arena. The sculptor who desires to address a wider audience is compelled to be adventurous and occasionally audacious.

Shahid Sazzad

Against this backdrop a new generation of sculptors has emerged. Surrounded by the incongruities of living in a volatile environment on the one hand, and an archaic social order on the other, the artist has a fertile territory to work for. For him or her, conventions are there to be challenged, formal modes to be transformed and a new direction to be constructed.

Duriya Qazi and Jamil Baloch comment with insight on the growing violence inside and outside the country. Jamil refers to the menace of the hardware which appears from heaven to maim and kill before it becomes part of the landscape. This is a far cry from the eulogy to invincible aircraft in visible public spaces. Duriya Qazi comments on the silence of those dying daily—victims of conflicts, internal and global.

They die unsung, unnamed, these unknown citizens of our world, in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq or closer home, and it is for them that she sculpts.

The span of current sculptural practices highlights not only political issues, but social, environmental and personal concerns as well. The lively popular visual culture throws up oddities of image, belief and behavior. Artists engage with urban phenomena, like art on vehicles, posters, billboards, the culture of the Sufi shrine and the wrestling arena. They relish both texts and images, striving to reinvent and reshape their intent. As subliminal texts are explored, many facets of the social fabric are revealed.

Adeela Suleman looks at the needs of the city housewife, perched precariously on the back of her husband's/brother's motorbike. In her installation 'Salma Sitara, Behnen Workshop' Suleman designs motor cycle 'gear' for the woman. Helmets, child seats and travelling armour, are crafted out of tiffin boxes,

Adeela 2

stoves and cooking pots. A tongue-in-cheek humour is an ongoing ingredient of the work of many artists.

It is only recently that the boundaries between the two and three-dimensional have blurred and overlappings have become common in studios.

Traditional definitions of 'sculpture' have become obsolete, as art works are enlivened by time-based media. Objects are painted, embossed, or even vaporized!

Site-specific works take advantage of the environment. Munawer Ali's 'paper boats' refer to childhood memories and the fleeting surface offered by moving water. Distance gained when residing in the Diaspora can work to the sculptor's advantage, providing him or her opportunity to explore materials and ideas in an altered context. Khalil Chishty uses the lowly plastic bag or 'shopper' as it is known in the bazaars at home.

Studying and working in California, he returns regularly to share his work with his compatriots. The plastic carrier bag by its very nature is peripatetic and achieves materiality in any given space shaped by the sculptor's hand.

Adeela 1

If one is willing to allow art to act as the 'scrim' through we can sensitize ourselves to both our inner and outer worlds, it can be a profoundly enriching experience. In Roohi Ahmed's 'Lifeline' a figure made of delicate textile fibres undulates and moves across our field of vision. We too, soar with the image of the suspended figure.

Art in any society reflects multiplicity and the dense layerings of life, which hopefully is a testament to its vitality and range. Surely, the diversity in sculptural practice in Pakistan today provides an insight into the elusiveness of our many existences.

Salima Hashmi is Dean of the School of Visual Art at Beaconhouse National University at Lahore. She is the author of Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan ( 2002)

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Tangle 3

the sculpture of richard x. zawitz

a twist in time and a line in space

By Jonathan Thomson

The American sculptor Richard Zawitz seeks, and finds, in his work the serenity and spiritual tranquility of Shanta rasa

I

n his essay 'The Theory of Art in Asia', Ananda Coomaraswamy confirmed his reputation as one of the twentieth century's most erudite scholars of the sacred arts of both East and West. He expounded on many different issues from the nature and meaning of representation in Asia, to symbolism and convention, originality and novelty, intensity and energy and the nature of art itself. He concluded his essay with an examination of rasa as a central part of the formal theory of art in India. In Sanskit, the term rasa means the sap or juice of plants. In this physical sense, we can readily grasp what this essence may imply, be it orange or lemon or any other flavour. But when the word is applied to Indian art and aesthetic experience, it also refers to the state of heightened delight produced in the viewer's mind by the emotion and experience of a work of art. The term was originally applied to the performing arts of dance, drama and music, but, as pointed out by Coomaraswamy, it is immediately applicable to all the arts. The principle of rasa can be subdivided into nine distinct sentiments, each arising from or embodying particular subjects and situations. These comprise the erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odius, marveleous and the quiescent or tranquil sentiment. This last sentiment, known as Shanta, comes from knowing, or at least approaching, the utter serenity of spiritual tranquility.

It is this same quality that American sculptor Richard Zawitz seeks, and finds, in his work. Zawitz began his studies in Asian philosophy and art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with Chan Wing Tsit. Chan was a consummate scholar, teacher and mentor, and a living exemplar of the Chinese philosophical tradition.

Of all the leading figures in twentieth century Chinese philosophy, he was among the first to make his home in the West, teaching and publishing in English and Chinese, but always in touch with Asia. During the years of the Cultural Revolution that was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and which sought to overthrow 'the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes' and declared that 'Mao Zedong's Thought is the Guide to Action in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution', Chan played an important role in helping to maintain and foster traditional Chinese values in the West.

In practice, the philosophy elucidated by Mao set the stage for the imposition of an aesthetic and ideological hegemony that stifled tradition in order to

deliver a style of art that met the ideological demands of the times. But what China lost, or perhaps more accurately misplaced, Zawitz gained. From Chan he learned about Chinese philosophy, and most importantly, the Tao Te Ching. He was also convinced by Chan to further his studies at the University of Hawaii, where Chan himself had started his teaching career in the United States and where he began, in 1939, a series of conferences on Asian and comparative philosophy which later gave rise to the journal Philosophy East and West.

The literal meaning of the word Tao is path, or way.

The term is generally used in three ways: giving a name to the ultimate reality that surpasses human experience; describing the observable rhythms and patterns of the universe; and describing the way of human life when it is in harmony with the Tao of the universe. An important aspect of the Tao is its state of perpetual motion. 'All things, as they come into being and develop, progress through a series of changes moving persistently to a return to the state of non-being, the primal unity and source of all things.'

The basically circular movement of Tao confirms the idea of heaven as round, symbolized by the circle.

The pictographs and ideograms of Chinese writing may often themselves encapsulate their meaning.

Thus the character tao combines the character ch'o representing a foot taking a step or moving step by step, and the character shou, or head. The combination of head and foot symbolizes Tao as an inner way; it also illustrates the circular, complete and perpetual course of Tao for a circle's beginning and end are the same and the movement around its periphery is unceasing.

These two pictographs also illustrate the Taoist idea of Tao as both unmoving and continually moving, as Tangle 2

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Tangle 1

the path lies motionless on the ground yet goes somewhere and so has movement. This aspect of Tao is the basis of the concept wu wei, a phrase which translates literally as inaction but in Taoism means actionless activity or pure effectiveness. Another interpretation is that the concept describes creative quietude, being that state when a certain dislocation of the conscious self takes place, and which frees the resources of the subconscious mind to engage in pure creativity.

In Hawaii, Zawitz began a two-year period of independent study with Prithwish Neogy, who was a student of Coomaraswamy and a renowned scholar of Asian art and aesthetics in his own right. In Hawaii, Zawitz encountered the writings of Jacques Maritain and Sigfried Giedion and began to develop his own philosophical pluralism, drawing on primitive art, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, tantric art, Indian aesthetics and comparative philosophy to help articulate his understanding of the fundamental underlying principles of art and creativity.

Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher who advocated what he called 'True Humanism', saying that the human person is both material and spiritual, and can become more than a merely self—interested individual by acquiring and practicing the habits

necessary to actualize his humanity. In his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry Marutain describes creativity as naturalistic in the sense that it does not rely on any extenal source or Platonic muse. He distinguishes two stages in the creative process, the first of which occurs below the level of consciousness in the 'preconscious intellect' in which are found 'sources of knowledge and creativity, of love and supra-sensuous desire hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul.' It is in the preconscious intellect that the artist's soul ceases to be controlled by the external world and his creative intuition begins to germinate. In the second stage the creative idea is clarified for consciousness and is expressed. In an age that is essentially practical, and which posits praxis as the ultimate truth, he advocated the primacy of the spiritual.

Maritain's revelations about the importance of intuition are reiterated by Sigfried Giedion. Giedion is perhaps best known as an architectural historian and author of Space Time and Architecture. However, in his book The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art, originally presented at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1957 as the AW Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, he examines theories regarding the origins of art. Giedion notes that art is a fundamental

experience, born out of the urge for elemental expression. 'It grows out of man's innate passion to develop a means of expression for his inner life.

There is no difference whether the basic impulse for these feelings rises from a cosmic anguish, the urge to play, art for art's sake, or—as today—the desire to express in signs and symbols the realm of the unconscious.'

The key to Zawitz's philosophy is pluralism, a subtle melding of Eastern and Western thought. This is not as straightforward as it might seem. In his book Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy, the philosopher Arthur Danto notes that while 'the East has always held the promise of a deeply alternative existence, satisfying and pacific and exalting… It is nevertheless an aim of this book to discourage the hope that a way through our moral perplexities may be found in the Orient.' For Danto, the problem lies with the inability or unwillingness to put one's own cultural assumptions at risk. But Zawitz was able to take risks and to 'unlearn' his western aesthetic bias. For him, the key that opens the doors to perception is the nondualist interrelatedness of all things. It is this that for him links the art of Asia with that of the West—from the humanism of Michelangelo to the inventive genius of Da Vinci and the pure form of Constantin Brancusi.

Zawitz's graduation work was a stone carving called First Twist. In this work a cylinder of white marble rises from a trapezoid wooden base. At about half its height, the cylinder bends sideways and turns up over itself completing one full turn. At its apex, the cylinder tapers and ends in a roughly spherical shape.

It is a remarkably allusive work, suggesting at times either an Indian figure in a pronounced tribhanga pose (where the figure is oppositely bent at waist and neck to form an 'S' shape), or a Tang dynasty figurine of a Tangle 5

woman with her hair piled characteristically high. As an abstract image, the essential elements of the sculpture have been distilled in order to simplify and concentrate the composition. Abstraction in the Greek sense of aphaeresis refers to 'the process as well as the result of the withdrawal from the particular, accidental, inessential in order to obtain the general, inevitable, essential. By bringing together essential characteristics in one artistic concept, abstraction offers us our most important means of systematically arranging the boundless multiplicity of objects which approach us in our perception, our imagination, and even in our thoughts.' This work presages the artist's mature work but further development was required.

On his graduation from the University of Hawaii, Zawitz went to live and work as a sculptor in Kyoto, Japan. He became interested in the story of Enku, an itinerant Buddhist monk who lived in Japan in the 17th century in the early Edo period. Enku is known as a shugendo, a devotee of a form of religion that is a conglomerate of Taoism, Shinto and Buddhism.

Shugendo means the path of training and testing and it centres on an ascetic and nomadic life. Enku travelled all over Japan and everywhere he went, he would carve an image of the Buddha. During his lifetime he was extremely prolific and is reputed to have carved some 120,000 images of Buddha. No two were alike and most were crudely fashioned from found timbers with just a few stokes of an axe. These images were not made as monuments or for selfaggrandizement but for their spiritualism. Enku left these simple expressions of prayer and devotion as a reminder of enlightenment in hamlets and villages all over Japan.

The notion of a cheap, simple and widely available evocation of enlightened creativity was to have an enduring impact on Zawitz. However, it was not yet evident in the work that he produced at this time. A work of Zawitz from this period is a rather bland wood carving representing Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk traditionally credited with having introduced the Taoist influenced Ch'an (Zen in Japanese) Buddhism to China. Traditional representations of Bodhidharma depict him as an ill-tempered, bearded and wild-eyed ruffian.

In Japan Zawitz worked with the calligrapher Morita Shiryû who had played an important role in developing a hybrid art that fused Japanese calligraphy with aspects of Western expressionism. Morita

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theorized calligraphy as having three properties: time (the duration of reading and of creating a work with the brush), space (including the formal qualities of composition and line quality), and literary value (the moji). The moji is the character or other component of the written word that was regarded as the irreducible unit of calligraphy. In the 1940s and 1950s Morita advocated focus on the formal qualities of calligraphy.

In an essay about Matisse he enthuses about Matisse's extreme reduction of all form to pure and simplified line and, as calligraphy is also an art of line, imagined these two art forms coming together like a rainbow with one end in the East and one in the West.

Morita's own calligraphy is avowedly illegible. In a theory of expression influenced by the Zen Buddhist principles taught by the Kyoto School of philosophy which argued that while the West was tied to dualistic thinking and approaches to art, the East pursued a path of nondualism, Morita understood the given conventional forms (the moji) as attaining utter sameness with something profoundly internal to the calligrapher. 'The character is revered as the timeless product of centuries of language use, but at the same time it is intuited at a level so deeply interior to the calligrapher as to undergo a massive upheaval when brought forth as an expression in brush, ink and paper.'

Zawitz also travelled to India, Nepal and Tibet. In Tibet he encountered the Tibetan infinite knot, the pattern of interwoven lines without ending or beginning that is a symbol of infinite life and creation.

Zawitz returned to America in 1975 and built a studio in Waltham, Massachusetts, in Boston's western suburbs. Here he began the process of unifying and reconciling his myriad influences and experiences into the creation of a four-dimensional universal energy form.

The result was a line in space, a wave, a curve, a circle. A line without beginning or end, solid yet supple, immutable yet capable of constant change, a delight to both hand and eye. Zawitz called this sculpture Statue of Infinity. It is comprised of a series of linked quarter-round curves that can each be twisted around its central axis into an infinite variety of new and different shapes where every new shape is as smooth and graceful and as aesthetically pleasing as the last.

Visual reality is transitory at the best of times as objects seen under natural conditions change in appearance from moment to moment owing to

changes in light, atmosphere and the relative positions of object and viewer. Zawitz's line in space gives physical form to things seen only in the mind's eye.

Together the interlinked curves allude to many things.

They may be a waterfall or the movement of water through a series of shallow rapids, rushing around and tumbling over rocks. They may be clouds, tendrils of vapour blown by the wind. These are powerful images that have important associations in Taoism.

Water is an important Taoist symbol, always taking the path of least resistance, finding rest at the lowest point, making a level surface over irregular depths, infinitely supple yet incomparably strong and having no shape of its own but capable of being infinitely accommodating. Water also attains clarity through calmness—'muddy water let stand will clear'. These are the virtues of wu wei.

The linked curves also make an outline enclosing nothing. Emptiness is a key Taoist concept as emptiness is Tao. Space is filled with meaning as it is filled with Tao. Tao cannot be defined but it can be alluded to. Thus the Tao Te Ching notes that the inner space of a jug is its essential part, not the pottery, and that it is the space within four walls that comprises the usefulness of a room. The purpose of Taoist meditation is to empty the mind of all distracting thought and emotion so that it is more conducive to quiescence and receptivity and better able to reflect on the Tao. In Indian art, this is also the Shanta rasa.

The twists and turns of the sculpture have an organic quality, and seem to reflect the moment where coherent patterns of flow emerge from the discordance of turbidity, the point where vortices, eddies and ripples emerge out of chaos. In this work we can see not just the interconnectedness of all things but also the double helix as the building block of life or the cosmic spiral form of the galaxy.

Most often when we appreciate a successful work of art we share its rasa - the state of heightened sensation produced in the viewer's mind by the emotion and experience of the work itself. But with Zawitz's work we can go even further because we are the artist. We are responsible for the kinesthetic action of creation and can take pleasure in both the instinctive, subliminal act of creation itself and in the form that we create. It was while watching visitors to his exhibition manipulate this art work and take great pleasure in it that Zawitz had an epiphany. He realized that this object could be accessible to millions of people—like Enku and his thousands of wooden

Tangle 4

Buddha, but it could do more. It could allow all of them to clear their minds, to find clarity and serenity and to participate and interact with both the process and the product of sculpture. The work itself seems to foster multiple intelligences. People with strong left-brain traits are drawn to the logical linearity of the sculpture. People with right brain dominance appreciate its allusive qualities and its ability to spark visualization, imagination and intuition. Manipulation of the work seems to allow us to link the powers of both hemispheres.

rafts of bubbles, held together by surface tension. In fact they have been laboriously carved out of alabaster. Their combination of spherical forms allude to problems of space - just as bubbles have the smallest possible surface area for any given volume and will always find the smallest surface area between points or edges. And they capture temporary, transitional, ephemeral moments—the instant of time between one state of being and another—which is after all a metaphor for life.

By some measures this may be the most successful work of art ever made. Zawitz patented his work in 1982 and began manufacturing and distributing it commercially. Known and sold as a Tangle, there are today over 90 million editions of this work in homes, offices, institutions and playgrounds all over the world.

In his later works Zawitz continues to explore the nexus between being and nothingness. In works such as Flying Stone, Mind Over Matter and Cosmic Stone he uses stone to capture the fizz and spark of effervescence—the moment of transition when gas is freed from an aqueous solution. These works appear like

Jonathan Thomson is an art historian, curator, critic and consultant. He lives and works in Bangkok and Hong Kong

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accidental artist

tony twigg and the asian found object

By Gina Fairley

Tony Twigg's decade-long engagement with the Philippines has led him on a journey from figuration to abstraction. Turning to the found object and bamboo, Twigg has defined a personal style that sits beyond geographic borders. His timber constructions take us on a discovery of 'art' in the accidental and everyday

T

ony Twigg (b.1953) first visited the Philippines in 1993 while returning to Australia from a screening of his film Parade at the Cork Film Festival. Since then, he has divided his time between Manila and Sydney, recently extending that engagement to Malaysia and Singapore. The cadence of moving between locations has become the latest buzz in visual art circles, where artists are described as 'border jockeys', as slipping under 'ethnicity radars' or 'dallying in transitory migration'. Twigg sits outside this fashion. He falls within a long lineage of Filipino artists who have engaged with the found object, environmental installations and a modernist aesthetics, artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan 'Daing', 2003, Inaugural International Eco Arts Festival, Daet, Camarines Norte, Philippines, slippers, bamboo, wind generated sound, Image Gina Fairley

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such as Junyee, Roberto Villanueva, Alfredo Aquilizan and Lao Lian-ben. But where does that tradition point today, and how do artists such as Tony Twigg sit within an Asian dialogue through the found object?

Lupao, Junyee, 1987

Twigg coined the phrase 'accidental art' to describe the intuitive construction of an urban infrastructure and discarded everyday objects that, when examined in spatial terms or as patterns of line and surface, are as true to the definitions of modern art as a Robert Rauchenberg assemblage or a construction by the celebrated Australian collage artist, Rosalie Gascoigne. It was the barong barong, spontaneous Filipino shanty architecture, which provided Twigg with the inspiration for his early drawings and constructions. Made from the seemingly random collections of found wood and metal sheeting, these anonymous shelters have an intuitive, raw aesthetic that appealed to Twigg.

In his eyes, they had the spatial order of contemporary installation and evoked the cubist space of George Braque.

filipino installation

MT Madras (postcards),Tony Twigg, 2005

No one knows for sure when installation art in the Philippines began. The term itself gained currency in the West in the 1960s and 'referred to temporary assemblages that physically dominated an entire interior space ‌ a synthesis of sensory impressions that overwhelm[ed] the spectator'. Emerging through a kind of tug-of-war between the attraction of International Style and a search for cultural identity, the trend to use indigenous materials started modestly in the sixties when artists began incorporating found objects into two and three dimensional works, building to its pinnacle in the 1980s.

It is a history ushered by artists Junyee (Luis Yee Jr.) and the late Roberto Villanueva, renowned for their use of bamboo, seedpods, bark and vines -essentially found materials. It was a different way of approaching art making and was deeply charged with social and political connotations, asserting ideas of identity and celebrating traditional art forms to counter the incursion of global art activities. It is a familiar story across the developing world, and one that has contributed to the strength of regional diversities.

But what has this to do with Tony Twigg?

Twigg once quoted Junyee saying to him that they were the same because they both wanted to make art out of their own backyards. 'For Junyee this idea

Untitled,Tony Twigg, 1999

Untitled, Tony Twigg, 1999

carries the strong nationalist overtones of a culture emerging from an era of colonisation. I share Junyee's point of view, but in Australia the era of colonisation is being maintained, witnessed by its failure to become a Republic. ‌My engagement with Filipino Art is a step away from that position towards Junyee's idea, and it is automatically reflected in my choice of materials.'

Junyee's pivotal installation 'Extinct Future' 1983, followed a year later by 'Unpath', and Villanueva's huge outdoor sitework at Cultural Centre of the Philippines, 'Cordillera Labyrinth' 1989, a concentric maze constructed from bamboo and runo grass that took its cue from Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' 1970, were pieces instrumental in shaping the acceptance of environmental siteworks and installation as a contemporary art form in the Philippines. Together with a push towards conceptual art during the 1970s and 1980s, led by artist-teacher Roberto Chabet, experimentation through installation was spurred on. At this time, Filipino artist Lani Maestro bagged the top prize at the 1986 Havana Biennial in Cuba for a politicallyinclined installation using found objects and indige-

nous materials , bringing together these two strands of thought in contemporary Filipino art. Enter Baguio artist Santiago Bose, who during the 1980s combined indigenous materials with shamanistic talismans, an edgy 'street' rawness and the wit of popular culture. What results is a framework that shaped the generation of artists that followed. This combination of activities led to the establishment of the Baguio Arts Festival in 1989, a performance / installation based art event in North Luzon, steered by Villanueva, Bencab, Bose and other artists.

Tony Twigg participated in the 1999 Baguio Arts Festival with a work made from bamboo. A kind of environmental screen stretched with a skin of paper that would eventually return to pulp, its grid structure echoed that of urban scaffolding. It was a minor work for Twigg but one that would set him on a trajectory that responded to a Filipino landscape and placed him within this rich and layered history of Filipino found installation.

Today, Filipino installation artists have expanded this language of found materials beyond nature to encompass everyday objects that address

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contemporary ideas—artists such as Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan and Alwin Reamillo. This intersection, or Filipino hybridity, is the place where Tony Twigg's work sits today.

intersections An installation that embodied this hybridity was a piece Twigg made for the Daet International Eco-Arts Festival (2003) in a regional Filipino fishing community. 'We are reminded of ourselves by what we leave behind' was the title of this ephemeral work composed of a single line of 64 bamboo poles that stood erect on the beach, parallel to the shoreline and soaring some 35 feet high. It is part of a tradition of Filipino bamboo installation easily traced through

Tony Twigg, 'Grove', 2004, Installation view, 'Domain' sculpture festival, Woden, Canberra (Australia), Found eucalypt branches and milled wood, Dimensions variable, Image courtesy the artist

Villanueva's bamboo masterpiece 'Cordillera Labyrinth', and carrying the same sensitivity to material and an engagement with space.

The interplay of the structure's physical presence and its shadows cast long on the beach were integral to Twigg's piece, moving it beyond a single dimensional plane. Sitting like a bamboo fence on steroids, its scale threw one off balance, forcing beach-goers to move through the work and experience it on different levels. Twigg individualized the bamboo with objects found around the coastal community - rusted metal, capiz shells, plastic bottles. The objects were transported beyond an ethnographic gesture to embody a community and question the fragility of its environment. Another work, some meters up the beach from Twigg's installation, that also captured that ethos was that by Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, internationally renowned for their installations of found objects at biennales in Havana, Sydney, Venice, Fukuoka and Busan.

For their piece 'Daing', Aquilizan collected all the rubber slippers that washed ashore on the tide, installing them speared on bamboo shards in a kind of flotsam and jetsam hovering waist-high over the sand, returning to the sea metaphorically as a school of fish.

The parallel between Aquilizan and Twigg, apart from their constant moving between locations, is that they both have an intuitive ability to capture and distil the essence of a place into a single object or material. We see these ideas re-emerge in a later work by Twigg, 'Sugar Ballads in Bamboo Sticks' (Pinto Gallery, Antipolo 2003). Just as Twigg used bamboo at Daet, here he sliced the bamboo in a manner that offered a curious intersection between his childhood in Queensland (Australia) and the sugar-fields of Negros (Philippines) where this piece was made. It is a simpatico that connects his work across borders.

drawings in space Twigg's art could simply be described as 'drawing in space'. His pencil is the 'found lines' of an Asian landscape: the lines of a fish trap, the rhythm of a provincial bamboo fence, the density of a field of sugar cane, the overlaid grid of bamboo scaffolding, or the verticality of a sapling forest. He seems to collect these 'natural lines' as a bank of memories, a kind of subconscious dictionary that he draws upon and which meld together with time. As he says, 'Drawing

for me is thinking. When they are completed all that separates my drawings from my installations is their size.'

'Sugar Ballads in Bamboo Sticks' essentially a line drawing in three-dimensions where the gallery space becomes the blank page illustrates this idea. Twigg wedged 38 sticks standing ceiling to floor that, collectively, defined the parameters of the room. It was the scale of domestic architecture and challenged how we think about drawing. Twigg again forced visitors to weave through his installation, but this time in a kind of slow dance, as if passing through an enchanted forest. He had discovered the delightful push and pull of space; it was weightless, whimsical and layered and marked a new direction in the work.

What followed was his installations started to become more animated. The rigid line of the bamboo became totemic, taking on an anthropomorphic quality marching through the landscape. His two installations 'Grove', made for the 'Domain' sculpture festival (Woden, Australia 2004) and 'Sculpture by the Sea' (2004), a festival along Sydney's famous Bondi Beach ocean walk, combined eucalyptus branches found in the Australian bush with milled woods, such as ply and plantation pine. It was strongly geometric. Some have even likened these new forms to Pukamani poles, the vertical grave posts of Aboriginal Australia, but such connections are subconscious and only point to the complexity of our visual heritage, regardless of place. For Twigg, working in Asia such politics of association start to fall away, as 'visual connections' become a shared abstraction, and if anything, take on an Asian sensibility. This is where Twigg's work differs from his Filipino colleagues, such as Aquilizan and Reamillo, who use the visual connections to form a political statement.

tional lesson in how we look at the objects around us, and made us question how we define beauty.

Twigg explains, 'Slowly, I've become aware of how subversively an object can be spirited. Accidental art has a great deal of beauty that I try to emulate by considering the making process rather than considering what beauty looks like. The result is a set of elementary forms that have a certain universal understanding common to places like the Vietnamese river village of Chau Doc, the border town of Pasir Mas in Malaysia or the spontaneity of Manila's urban scape. Put these objects in cities like Sydney or Singapore and they instantly become exotic.'

This re-definition and integrity for the object is superbly illustrated in Twigg's work '24 Fish boxes'(2005). It is composed of eight units each made through the spontaneous joining of three found 'fish boxes', used in the wet markets of Malaysia. For Twigg, these crates presented an interesting proposition as they too were found made objects, constructed from the timber off-cuts of the saw milling process. It was the spirit of a conversation with another maker

Provincial fishing structure, Sagay, Negros (Philippines), 2005, Image courtesy the artist

objects as meaning Twigg's engagement with Malaysia echoed his earlier interest in Filipino barong barong, but was pushed to a new level of engagement—or dis-engagement—as he stepped away and allowed his constructions to be entirely directed by the found object. It reached a pinnacle with the work 'MT Madras' (2005), a discarded crate from Madras found in the backstreets of Kuala Lumpur. Playing only the role of conservator, Twigg arranged the elements of the crate and stablised his 'found painting'. It presented an exciting and instruc-

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Tony Twigg, 'We are reminded of ourselves by what we leave behind', 2003, 64 bamboo poles with found objects, 35 feet tall, Inaugural International Eco Arts Festival, Daet, Camarines Norte, Philippines, Image courtesy the artist

that excited Twigg, a practice he described as, 'an anonymous jam-session'. What is curious in the context of Malaysia, where the hand-made object is all but nonexistent, eroded through a complex social, economic and religious state, is that Twigg re-engages that intuitive process of 'making' that is so completely integral to the Philippines and ushers in an appreciation for the found object in Malaysia. This appreciation is not about 'transposing' cultures but an awareness of the visual intersections.

abstract space Twigg's constructions sit somewhere between paintings and wall sculptures. Visually abstract, they hang on the wall as a painting would, but like a 3dimensional sculpture, they play with positive and negative space and the movement of light and dark across the surface. For him, 'The space between the objects becomes a vital force, as dynamic as the objects themselves, Rhythm develops automatically in the placement of objects, like a heartbeat, as we move through spaces. We are reading between the lines, observing what is defined by objects, rather than what is stated by

an object.

Twigg's excitement and sensitivity for assembling space through the arrangement of found objects, is an abstract notion and one also celebrated by the great Russian-American sculptor Louise Nevelson and father of modern collage, German artist Kirk Schwitters. These artists embraced the expression of modern, particularly urban, life. Twigg's engagement with the Asian found object is about that urban space and is not the space of an Australian landscape. As he explains, 'You and I might see U-shaped canyons walking through the city, but a town planner or crane driver would probably see it differently. In that sense, the way we think about space becomes the system for our aesthetic. The idea of stacking space, and how that establishes illusionistic depth without referencing perspective, I think, is essentially 'Asian'. This is what I am attracted to.'

Essentially, Twigg is talking about the space of an over-crowded city, abstracted and celebrated. Usually when we think of space we think in 3-dimensions, as sculpture. Twigg continues to challenge these ideas.

Recently, he took one of his found object

Barong barong, (urban shanty architecture) Pasay City with Makati skyline, Philippines, 2004, Image courtesy the artist

constructions made from a fruit crate and traced it onto canvas. The painted object became a negative of the real object. It was a different move for Twigg, but one that carried the same spirit of random placement found in his constructions. The new paintings look at the placement of objects: behind, in front, at the side.

Distilled to lines along a horizon, there remains an echo of a bamboo forest or barong barong but viewed from a different angle. This is what sets Twigg's work apart. It is a single coherent conversation over the past decade that transcends medium and location.

While considering Schwitters' work, Klaus Rathert commented 'Looking to the future does not prevent us also looking to the past. If anything, the two complement each other.' Twigg's work epitomises Rathert's statement. As his work moves to a more reductive position - sometimes stepping away as 'artist' and allowing the object to speak, on other occasions meticulously working into the surface with thin veils of paint, or perhaps working with the spirit of the object in a painting—Twigg constantly moves between time and place, operating somewhere on the boundary between art and life.

'By putting the object on the gallery wall—in whatever form—I am given the opportunity to examine it more closely. The end point is a more articulate awareness, and my engagement with the object challenges an examination of myself, and my aesthetic. It is a continuing journey, and that journey through the everyday is the interesting part.'

Gina Fairley is a freelance writer moving between Manila, Singapore and Sydney

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Lee Hyoung Woo Untitled

modern korean sculpture

By Mee Ae Lee

Modern sculpture was introduced to Korea in 1923 by a young artist named Kim Pok Chin (1901-1940). He entered the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1919, and won the entrance prize in a competition which was held by the Japanese government in 1923.

He returned home to become the first Korean ever to be trained in the Western style of scupture. His wood carving 'Baikwha' (1938) and plaster modelling 'Standing Boy' (1940), produced just before his death in 1940, marked the climax of his career.

Unfortunately, all of his work was destroyed by a fire when Chinese soldiers occupied his younger brother's publishing company during the Korean War. Thus, we can only see reproductions of his works published in catalogues

A

few other students then enrolled in the same Japanese institution in order to study modern sculpture. Those artists, including Kim Jong Young, Kim Kyong Sung, Yoon Hyo Joong, and Yoon Seung Wook, soon joined Kim Pok Chin in introducing sculpture influenced by European traditions to Korea. They were mostly absorbed with sculpting portions of the human body such as heads, torsos and costumes in a realistic manner, which they had learned in Tokyo, where academic realism prevailed. These sculptors were active in presenting works at national art exhibitions held annually under government sponsorship both in Seoul and in Tokyo.

One of Kim Pok Chin's pupils, Yoon Hyo Joong presented the wooden sculpture 'Shooting Arrow Woman' at the official exhibition held by the colonial government in 1943. This work captures movement unlike any other work produced by the sculptors of the same generation. Stable proportion, contrapposto and skillful treatment of material are not only the evidence of good training from the Japanese academy but also demonstrate the artist's talent. However, since early modern sculpture under colonialism was extremely weak, the first generation of sculptors had to suffer from a lack of information, new vision and creativity. In this aspect, the mainstream of modern Korean sculpture relied on a representational manner which was often an interpretation of Japanese models.

influenced by the famous sculptor and his works.

Kwon Jin Kyu, who studied in Japan during the colonial period and also lived in this unstable period, represented the existential agony of individuals. His small terra cotta figurative sculptures showed originality. In 1973, he killed himself in his studio out of despair at the failure of human relationships and paranoia. Although he failed in life, in his work the expressive qualities were maximized through a process of the simplification of mass, which embodied an idealism directed towards utopia. His self-portrait bust shows us that he eliminated details in order to present his own spirituality. With a shaved head and a red monk's gown he also reduced the volume of the shoulders and elongated the neck, so the eye of the spectator concentrates on the head, which has a

Paik Nam June- King Sejong

Since Korea's colonization by Japan in 1910, Korea's link to the outside world was largely coloured

by Japanese goodwill. It is from this general perspective that the overall background and development of sculpture as a major aesthetic movement in modern Korean history should be viewed. By the 1930s, however, the national circumstances were far from conducive to lively activity among artists, as Japan was pulling its colonial reins ever more tightly in preparation for World War II. In 1945 Korea was liberated, but the overall situation did not improve and actually became even more hostile for aesthetic creation, as the southern half of the peninsula headed into ideological conflicts and military confrontation with the northern half.

Admiration of Western sculpture breathed some life into the activities of Korean sculptors during this unstable period, however. Yoon Hyo Joong met Marino Marini in Venice in 1952, and was greatly

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gloomy expression but seems immersed in profound meditation on eternity. His stoic efforts towards a search for the fundamental overcame the specificities of his representations.

Futhermore, in 1954, the work of Kim Jong Young was selected by the international sculpture competition which was held in England. It was the first time in the 20th century that Korean sculpture was introduced to Europe. Kim Jong Young, although in many ways a traditional scholar-artist well-trained in the Confucian classics, also became the pioneer of Korean abstract sculpture. He studied modern sculpture at the Tokyo Fine Art Academy in the 1930s; hence, he never participated at any of the artistic events held by the colonial state. Following liberation, he was appointed professor at Seoul National University, and finished his career in seclusion in his hometown. He began abstraction in

Kwon Jin Kyu 1-Hands

1954 with plaster and iron welding after his work was selected at an international competition for the unknown political prisoners held in London in 1953.

His works resemble Arp and Brancusi with the pursuit of purity through the constant reduction of details. However, as his works emphasized asymmetrical structure and respect to the working process rather than results, he did not want to sacrifice the aesthetic for an accomplished finish. He was a man well-versed in modernism and the depths of tradition. He worked as if drawing the Four Gracious Plants or performing calligraphy through the moderation of expression, reduction of shape and mass and stoicism with materials. It is for this reason that he is comparable to a classical scholar.

After the Armistice which brought the three-year Korean War to a cease-fire in 1953, art circles began to regain some vitality. A few large-scale exhibitions were organized by private organizations, and these helped encourage a remarkable diversity in style and technique most visible in the fields of painting and sculpture. Among the exhibitions of notable significance were the annual membership show sponsored by the Korean Fine Art Association, and the Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition for Invited Artists sponsored by the leading daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo. The latter deserves special note for providing emerging artists of Avant-Garde tendencies the chance to display their works.

Modern Korean sculpture became firmly established by the end of the 1950s. As the conflict between the opposing schools of realism and abstractionism was increasing, sculptors began to employ a greater diversity of materials, including assorted metals and stone, thus breaking with their traditional reliance on plaster and wood. Song Young Soo had worked with junk objects from the war such as steel drums, wheels, and wasted iron plates from 1957.

Metaphorically speaking, the seed of experimental art was cultivated at the end of the 1950s, and the seed grew without an incubator; that is without an institutional basis for self-examination and the cultural resource of self-confidence. The unstable situation between the 1950s and the 1960s did not provide a chance for artists to deliberate on the identity of Korean art. The limitations of abstract expressionism were the thoughtless adoption of the belief that this

intuitive as well as contemplative, while Western minimalism was analytic, rational, cool and dry.

Cho Sung Mook- Untitled

trend might be suitable to express the artists' passion, and the continuing acceptance of this style without enough examination of the identity of Korean art. In fact, contemporary Korean art in the 1970s showed an extraordinary maturity while focusing on one aspect of art.

Lee U Fan, the most remarkable minimalist who studied philosophy in Japan and wrote numerous significant articles in Japan as an art critic, was both a minimalist and conceptualist. He was a member of 'Monoha,' the experimental trend in the 1960s in Japan, which had similar characteristics with Arte Povera in Italy. His early work, 'Relatum' which consists of iron and stone, is situated between conceptual art and minimalism, if we accept his concept that; '. . . at any rate, a work of art is neither reality itself nor is it purely an idea. It exists between reality and idea, as an intermediary that is penetrated by both, influencing both reality and idea.' He adopted the policy of confronting reality as a tabula rasa. He pursued the fundamentals of the material itself

Kyon Jin Kyu 2 -Awakening

From the end of the 1960s, the Korean art world has accelerated towards modernization to construct an ivory tower of art. Various experimental trends such as object art, happening, event, performance, process art, land art, installation, minimalism, and conceptualism were introduced under the name of the avant-garde. These trends have emerged out of an opposition to a conservative hierarchy and the previous l'art informel. The artistic movement group for the avant-garde, so called 'Korean Avant-Garde Association'was' founded in 1969 with the theoretical support of three art critics. This circumstance seems to show the diversity of Korean art, but it is merely of the external perception.

In sculpture, there was a transformation from previous traditional figurative sculpture and abstract expressionism to non-figurative, and geometric forms concerned with not just constructivism but materialism as well as formalism. In defining the arts of the 1970s, among diverse flows two tendencies emerged as the mainstream; reinterpreted minimalism and conceptualism. Korean minimal art was somewhat different from the Western example, despite similar features. For instance, Korean minimal art was more

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Kim Jong Young- Legend

to fetishism, as his work was determined by a subtle interrelationship between the purity of perception and the essence of thingness.

Korean minimal art adopted 'theatricality' as defined by Michael Fried. Theatricality, not as a literary but as a philosophical term, was based on a metaphysics borrowed from Lao-tzu and Chuangtzu's ideas. Lee actually wrote an article synthesizing Eastern philosophy and phenomenology in the 1960s in Japan. We can see the intermediate relationship between stones found in nature and the iron plate from his recent work, in which the stone symbolizes nature and the iron plate is a metaphor of civilization.

However, it is obvious that his conceptual and minimal viewpoint pursued pure abstraction, free from all emotional binds and connotation.

Song Young Soo- Totem

Shim Moon Seup can also be classified as a minimalist; his works were more emotional than Lee U Fan's. His shapes originated from Korean folk tools planes, boats and so on. There were, of course, more frequent presentations by other minimalists such as Cho Sung Mook, Kim In Kyum, Choi In Soo and Kum Nuri. Later, geometric and reductive abstraction came to simultaneously dominate the art scene at the end of the 1970s.

Another neo-minimalist, Lee Hyoung Woo who was born in 1954, installed many cubes made of wood, stone and clay at the Korean Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1997. Within a Korean minimal context, his simple and daring forms were different from those of the previous artists'.

Although both minimalism and materialism which relied on metaphysical ideas and fetishism, as well as formalism, were the major features in the art in the 1970s, these trends generated a consciousness of originality and discernment of what was truly Korean art in the next decade. There were extensive experimental attempts in the field of Avant-Garde schools in 1970s including minimal and conceptual art, but they did not get rid of the hierarchic dilemma just yet.

Formalism was a remarkable limitation of experimental tendencies, because almost all experimental artists only pursued the purity of idea and pure abstraction in accordance with a limited view. Sculptors of this vein repudiated all natural forms respected by the traditional school of academic realism. They sought to give spontaneous expression to their emotions through nonrepresentational shapes. In the following

Shim Moon Seup- Opening

decade of the 1970s, this emotional abstractionism faced a strong challenge from another new art movement that opposed its conception and style, called 'sculptural conceptualism.'

Sculptural conceptualism pursued 'pure' abstraction, free from all emotional binds and connotations.

Lee U Fan- Relatum

In terms of style, artists of this movement favoured simple and daring forms in contrast to those of the previous generation of anti-formal vanguardism which tended to be complex and intricate. The 1980s experienced an unprecedented burgeoning of sculptors and sculptural activity. A number of young artists became nostalgic about past trends of a more humane nature, in reaction to the cold intellectualism of the previous decade.

Since the 1980s, Korean sculpture has embarked upon new and culturally diverse trends. Foremost among them is the establishment of a new realistic tendency by artists primarily concerned with restoring the communication between artists and the public.

Genre boundaries between sculptures and other forms of arts were also being broken down. In addition, technology became a very important element in the sculptural art of this period. The video sculpture of Paik Nam June was a starting point for these artistic movements. These trends all reveal the extent to which the traditional concept of sculpture in Korea has been recast by the introduction of new media, which in turn has brought about a newer and more socially diverse relationship between the artist and the public.

Mee Ae Lee is an art critic and curator. She lives and works in Korea

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company drawings

bengal chapter

By Mahboob Alam

In the last decade of the 18th Century, the cultural interaction between local artists and their British and European patrons transformed indigenous Indian painting and led to a unique style that came to be known as the Company School

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his genre of art surfaced in a number of regions in India and Bengal was one of its important production centres.

Company Art of Bengal, like that of other regions, was characterized by its own distinct flavor that evolved out of its older local traditions. Shaykh Zyan--al--Din and Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Bengal were among its most outstanding painters. Their works, according to some critics, compare favorably with European work of the period. Other critics, however, find Company painting realistic, but essentially static. A renewed interest in the Company School has ensued in recent decades following a chance discovery in the 1970s of 230 hitherto unseen large watercolours of an obscure painter named Sita Ram of Bengal. This discovery inevitably questions notions about the Company School being static and decadent.

After the disintegrations of the Mughal atelier and Scene from Eid Procession passing by Begum Bazar Mosque. A richly bedecked palanquin is seen carried by leveried Kahars over which a bejeweled umbrella is held. The painter faithfully depicted the dochala Bangla roofed room on the north and watching people on the rooftop. Attributed to Alam Musawwar, Dhaka ca 1820, watercolour on paper, 24 x16 . Courtesy of Bangladesh National Museum Dhaka. Source: IFIC Bank, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Professor Muntassir Mamun.

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the decline of Dhaka and Murshidabad, artists and the descendants of the court painters of north India flocked to other regions in search of patrons. Those who came to Calcutta found some elite patrons in civil servants and members of the Judiciary. This led to a transformed cultural milieu in Bengal. This new class of British Company servants came out energetically in support of European and Indian artists.

White Headed Ibis, by Shaykh Zayn-al-Din, Calcutta 1782.Media: watercolour on European paper. Size 81.9x55.9cm, Source: Indian and Western Paining 1780-1910 published 1998, USA.

The perceived lack of western ideals of art in traditional Indian painting, such as realism, western style perspective, sense of proportion and the use of light and shade, had led East India Company officials to 'improve' the skills of the local artists when teaching them what they called scientific drawing.

Earlier, the Company had employed English and European artists to good effect. Local artists had been trained to make the architectural, botanical and zoological drawings necessary for the Company's administrative needs. Some of the native artists of Bengal had already been exposed to European art techniques through painters like Solvyns, T. Daniell, Charles D'Oyly and Emily Eden who had employed them either as assistants or copyists. Some were able to study the western prints available and some even received direct instruction from their patrons. They successfully assimilated European techniques and style with their own tradition and skills to meet the demands of the white Nabobs of Bengal.

Watercolour replaced gauche, European made paper began to be used, while light and shade was introduced with soft washes of color. These developments resulted in visual records of Indian life rendered by Indian painters through European techniques commonly known as Kompany Kalam or Company paintings. The style gradually was on view in all the main cities of Bengal where sizable British and European communities existed.

One of the most important and successful Company School series of natural history studies was made for the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir Elijah Impey (1777 to 1783) and Lady Impey. In 1777, Lady Impey commissioned Shaykh Zyan-al-Din, Bhabani Das and Ram Das to paint the birds, animals and plants of her garden. Of the three artists, Zyan-al-Din alone produced more than three-quarters of the paintings commissioned for Lady Impey. Zyan-al-Din flourished during 1770-1790; he was initially trained in the Murshidabad style of miniature painting but probably had very little exposure to European watercolour techniques. He had perhaps received a modicum of

House and Garden, by Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Karaya, Calcutta ca 1840-1850. Media: watercolour. Size: 28x45 cm, Source: Company Drawings, Mildred Archer, 1972, London.

instruction and guidance on the type of drawings the Impeys expected from him. One wonders how he was instructed and what models were put before him by his patrons.

Zyan-al-Din's life-like rendition of birds constitute the earliest dated natural history drawings painted for the British in India. The eminent art historian Toby Falk notes that contemporary illustrations in books of birds published in Europe were less florid and exotic than Zyan-al-Din's drawings on the subject. Most of his drawings show animals in actual size, and details are recorded with great precision. The colours are rendered in different layers to produce an intense effect. 'Of these, almost every watercolour is a masterpiece' writes Toby Falk. His white-headed Ibis reminds us of the work of the famous court painter Mansur of Emperor Jahangir. It may be noted in passing that the work of the greatest of American bird painters J.J.Fougue Audoubun appeared nearly a hundred years after Zyan-al-Din had painted his birds for the Impeys.

staff of British residents in the European style. We also know the name and identity of the patrons for whom he painted his dogs, horses, carriages and syces.

His vigorous rendition of animals brought him favorable comparison with the British painter George Stubbs.

However, it was in Sita Ram's topographical landscape done in the western technique of watercolour that the Bengal Company School reached a distinctive Pony Rider, by Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Karaya, Calcuta ca 1840-1850.Media: watercolour. Source: Company paintings, Mildred Archer, 1992, London.

The influence of European art is clearly evident in the works of the celebrated Bengal Company painter, Shaykh Muhammad Amir of Karaya, Calcutta who was active around 1840-58. His watercolours remind the viewers of the aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell. He specialized in depicting the houses and

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phase. In 1970 an album of his watercolours depicting fruits and plants 'By Seeturam' appeared at a London auction. Four years later, two albums were put up for sale in London. J.P Losty of the British Library, London, acquired the remaining eight albums known as Hastings' Album for the British Library in 1995. It was due to Losty that we finally came to discover Sita Ram and found out about his patrons.

Sita Ram is referred to as 'Bengal draught man' in the journal of his employer, Lord Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal from 1813-1823. It was Hastings and his wife who recognized the talent of their Bengal draught man. They offered him ample opportunities to blossom into one of the most versatile artists of his time. He produced for his patrons a large collection of charming landscape drawings of historical monuments , mosques, temples, rivers , historical ruins, village scenes etc of not only Bengal but of different regions of North India while accompanying the Hastings' on tour from Bengal and Haryanya. In January 1817, when Hastings visited Gaur and Pandua and in 1820-21 when he undertook another trip through Upper Bengal, Sita Ram accompanied him It was possibly during the latter trip that Sita Ram drew his watercolour The Firuz Shah Minar at Gaur which is reproduced in this article. (J.P.Losty) Nevertheless, very little information is available about the life and background of Sita Ram. All we know is that he was at the peak of his career during 1810 to 1822. It is possible that he was familiar with the works of Hodges, the Daniells, and Chinnery.

Initially trained in Mursidabad Kalam, he successfully utilized his extraordinary draughtman's skill to produce realistic effects. The shadows in the foreground and the atmospheric cloud in his watercolour are proof of his ability to blend western landscape techniques with local artistic traditions.

Unlike the Impeys, the album drawn by Sita Ram for the Hastings' was done purely for his personal reasons; these were intended to complement Hastings' gifts to his children. Hastings' patronage led to further enrichment of the Bengal Company School. The trips undertaken by Hastings and his artist widened Sita Ram's views, freeing him from the limited geographic confines of Bengal and exposing him to new scenes, characters, and the Mughal art traditions of Northern India. Due to political reasons, Hastings himself avoided visiting Delhi, but he sent his wife and Sita Ram to the city to observe and record the historic sites there. This opportunity must have enabled Sita

Part of the Muharram procession at Dhaka showing two caparisoned camels and beggars receiving alams from a black robed mourner, circa 1820, watercolour, 24 x18 . Courtesy of Bangladesh National Museum Dhaka

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Part of the Id procession showing the crowd at Dhaka Chawk Bazar around the famous canon of Subader Mir. Jumla called Bibi Mariyam. The half-ruined gate way at the background with peeled plaster established a decadent atmosphere. In the surrounding building of the chawk the usual onlookers are there. The canon is seen placed on a decorated pedestal.

Dhaka C 1820, watercolour, size 24 X 18 . Courtesy: Bangladesh National Museum Dhaka.

Source: IFIC Bank, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Professor Muntassir Mamun.

The Firuz Shah Minar at Gaur (Situated on Bangladesh-India boarder) by SitaRam, Bengal circa 1817-1821, watercolour on paper.

By permission of the British Library, London, ADD OR4888.

Ram to interact with some of the local artists of Delhi and scrutinize their works.

Did Company painting develop in 18th century Dhaka? Banglapedia (published by Asiatic Society 2003) believes that some of the works of Company art might have reached Dhaka in the late eighteenth century. Banglapedia bases its conclusion on the series of 39 watercolours depicting life and society in nineteenth century Dhaka, currently available in the National Museum of Bangladesh, Dhaka. However, it notes that one cannot be sure about this point because of the lack of other evidence to support this claim.

Professor Dr. Enamul Huq, on the other hand, states that 'these paintings representing an assimilation of the Mughal and European styles maybe classified as the Company School yet different'. The series drawn in Dhaka around 1820 by local painters such as Alam Musawwar vividly depict ceremonial Eid and Muharram processions, different sections of people, their costumes, landmarks and buildings in such a realistic manner that the paintings even include beggars, dogs, and snake charmers on the streets of

Dhaka. Alam Musawwar seemed to be a descendant of the Murshidabad guild of the provincial Mughal School. The series is of considerable historical and documentary value for any study of the social life of Dhaka in the nineteenth century.

Company painting did not have time to develop as J.P. Losty declares and become a genuine nineteenthcentury pan-Indian art .It survived the introduction of photography in India in the early 1840s and lingered on despite the demise of the East India Company. But following the tumult of 1857, British patronage declined significantly as English priorities shifted elsewhere. In Calcutta a visible change took place in the taste of the elites in favour of large portraits favoured for decorating their palatial buildings. As the sources of patronage started drying up, the Company school decayed and moved toward a slow inevitable death.

Mahboob Alam is a former ambassador of Bangladesh

Thomas Hirschhorn, Swiss-Swiss Democracy, exposition at Swiss Culture Centre in Paris (04.12.2004 30.01.2005). Photo Romain Lopez

contemporary swiss art in perspective

By Lorette Coen

A survey of contemporary art scene in Switzerland

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mong the artists invited by the last Biennial at Sao Paulo, 49-year-old Thomas Hirschhorn was featured.

There, in characteristic fashion, Hirschhorn erected a monumental display which was called 'Restore Now' - a thoughtprovoking box in the guise of a hardware store full of tools and books made out of rudimentary materials reinforced cardboard, adhesive paper and recycled items. However, he is always on the move for he is also being exhibited in Seville and in Long Island (NY), expected at the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Miami (MOCA). At the same time, Hirschhorn's fellow-countryman, 68 year old

Roman Signer, born in Appenzell and resident in Saint-Gall, is the subject of a major personal exhibition at the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris. The videoartist from Saint-Gall, 44-year-old Pipilotti Rist, is also exhibiting her works at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The duo from Zurich, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 54 and 60 years old respectively, and known under the signature Fischli/Weiss, are for their part guests of the Tate Modern in London. Meanwhile, another fellow-countryman, 42year-old Hugo Rondinone who is being exhibited in Berlin in 2006 and in Paris, is ending the year in Modena where he is showing his 'Giorni Felici' (Happy days).

Here then are five eminent Swiss artists sought

after everywhere and whose value in the art market is rising steeply. Moreover, one could also speak of the Genevan, 58-year-old, John Armleder, alternating between the United-States and Japan to whom the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Geneva, the MAMCO, is making its entire space available to house the giant exhibition, 'Amor vacui, horror vacui'. Among the German-speaking Swiss, one must also not omit to mention the unassuming but renowned sculptor, 65-year-old Markus Raetz, to whom the 'Carré d'art' of Nîmes has just dedicated a major retrospective as well as the rapid international rise of 40-year-old Christoph Büchel whose projects were displayed within one year in Dusseldorf, Salzburg and Marseilles. The list is endless and indicates that throughout little Switzerland there is a remarkable blossoming, or even explosion, of artists.

Given the size of the country, this is a strange phenomenon and one that has continued to gather speed over the last twenty-five years.

As well as the artists, let us also consider the exhibition organisers. Over the last fifty years, Harald Szeeman, the eminent art critic and exhibition organiser from Berne, has decisively influenced the interpretation and display of contemporary world art.

However, if only to quote the Swiss, his death has not left a vacuum, but a framework. We now see MarcOlivier Wahler as the Director of the 'Palais de Tokyo' in Paris and Michel Ritter radiating from the helm of the Swiss Cultural Centre which has now become a place of transversal expression. Simultaneously, in the New-York scene, the Swiss Institute led by Gianni Jetzer is enjoying prominence and is not limited by the small size of the country of origin. It is also playing a significant role whether they proclaim to be of this school or not, in bringing to light young Swiss talent in a cosmopolitan setting.

These few names of artists and promoters are only the visible tips of an iceberg and indicate to what extent contemporary Swiss art has spread beyond national frontiers and how it is making its mark in the global movement of works of art, personalities, tastes and ideas. Hasn't the prominent Genevan businessman and collector Pierre Hubert just launched an arts fair in Shanghai? Consequently, the books, though, few in number that deal with the question, 'Can one talk about Swiss art?' Indeed it is futile and impossible to broach the works of the plastic artists who are so

Thomas Hirschhorn, Swiss-Swiss Democracy, exposition at Swiss Culture Centre in Paris (04.12.2004 30.01.2005).

Photo Romain Lopez

diverse in their expression and the means that they use, with tools designed for creations such as those of Johann-Heinrich Füssli (XVIII), Albert Anker, Arnold Böcklin, Ferdinand Hodler (XIX) or in more recent times Louis Soutter (1871-1942). Even more in the 20th century, when Swiss artists took full part in all Avant-Garde movements, such as Dada which was born in Zurich, the modern movement is deeply rooted in Switzerland.

Moreover, one is aware of a precise, wellresearched output on the part of exhibition directors, gallery owners, international businessmen and collectors created by artists working in plastic materials, be they Swiss or not, sometimes operating in Switzerland, sometimes elsewhere, who are actively exhibiting in situ or abroad. Multiple, mobile, heterogeneous, porous, and global, contemporary art in Switzerland seems to have been helped in its forward surge by its Helvetic characteristics: extreme decentralization, cultural diversity in a very small

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Carmen Perrin, Sponge Space, 2006. Wood and acrylic colour. 7 x 46 x 48 cm. Courtesy Galerie Guy Bärtschi

territory and great economic prosperity. In 1981, an art historian and exhibition director of pivotal importance, Jean-Christophe Ammann, initiated a surprisingly lively interest in Helvetic creations. He had also made a considerable contribution by making the Kunsthalle of Bâle of which he was then the director, into one of the most brilliant platforms for contemporary international art and attractive and stimulating for the entirety of youthful Swiss creativity.

As well as outstanding museums such as those in Basel and Zurich and other numerous Canton museums of quality, the existence of a network of Kunsthallen whose purpose is to inform, to experiment and to discover, has resulted in a sound and solid artistic fabric. This has been reinforced over the last few decades thanks to the proliferation of alternative venues. Art-oriented open spaces dedicated to cross-sectional expression such as attitudes, Geneva hybrids and didactic exhibitions in Zurich have sprung up and asserted themselves. One is also witnessing the re-grouping of different protagonists of contemporary art; thus on the premises of the former Zurich inn, Löwenbräu, the adjacent

Carmen Perrin, Sponge Space, 2006. Detail

Peter Fischli & David Weiss, The Flow of Things, 1985. Super 8 film, silent. Presented during the event Aller Retour 2: Fischli/Weiss (Swiss Culturel Centre, Paris)

Kunsthalle with the private museum Migros, with Daros, a foundation given over to Latino-American art, with various galleries including that of Hauser & Wirth. The latter is an institution founded in 1992 which has acquired an influential stature and is in the leading group of international art business. Finally, De Puy & Luxembourg, linked with auctions, has also dropped anchor there.

Switzerland has more venues for contemporary art in its territory than New York or Paris. It is not surprising therefore that the world art market has established its capital there: Art Basel, the biggest art fair in the world founded in 1970 by a group of gallery operators brought together by the prominent Basel businessman Ernst Beyeler, has become over the years an incomparable international meeting place for commercial transactions. It is similar to an international cultural event and even more dazzling than the most highly valued Biennials. In 2002, Art Basel, which continues to prosper, has created a sister American event, Art Basel Miami Beach, which has become a major cultural and social event aimed at the North and South of the American continent. The

Swiss art scene benefits from the effects of the fair and in consequence derives from it a conspicuous global reputation.

One of its effects has been the revival of the traditional practice of 'collecting' by a number of eminent middle-class families which is growing in popularity among larger and new socio-economic groups. Several large museums have been created thanks to legacies from notable citizens and certain towns owe their new status to these patrons.

Winterthour, already richly endowed, has recently been gifted with a Fotozentrum. Basel has gained the Schaulager, a 'depot' of contemporary art of vertiginous beauty designed by the famous architects' group Herzog and de Meuron. It was commissioned by the patroness museophile Maja Oeri who is connected to the industrial families involved in chemicalpharmaceuticals.

Contemporary Swiss art, however, would not know the vitality that one has observed without the adoption of new techniques for the training of current artists. Created some ten years ago, the 'hautes Ecoles SpĂŠcialisĂŠes', half-way between University and craft

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Roman Signer, Happening in the Foundry, 2005. Puls 5, Zurich. Photo: Stefan Rohner

school, are developing teaching methods in line with current practices. In order to prepare their pupils for the realities of the profession and following the example of the School of Art of Lausanne, they invite artists who are in the process of completing their work to share their methods and their experience with students. One can measure the fruitful outcome of this type of workshop as was demonstrated by the example set by ChĂŠrif and Sylvie Defraoui, a couple deeply involved in research on plastics. Their teachings in mixed media in the 80's and 90's facilitated the birth of some sixty artists, quite distinct from each other. Notable among them is the 53-yearold Genevan Bolivian, Carmen Perrin, who works with bricks and light in her use of public open spaces.

The training mechanism operates through a complex but visibly effective system of encouragement which involve 'communes', 'cantons', and also the federal state as well as private foundations.

Although the emphasis is on young talent in the first instance, there are also several types of 'support' enabling artists of all ages to develop their projects.

This model which produced such fertile ground so beneficial to contemporary art owes much to specific structures of the country. It has its weaknesses but continues to develop and evolve. The artistic fabric

of Germanic Switzerland is not of the same strength or vigour elsewhere in the country. Alongside Basel, proud of its prestigious institutions, Zurich has become an increasingly pro-active centre where one sees the polarization of artistic creativity and the art market.

In 1998, the exhibition directors Bice Curiger, founder and editor-in-chief of the influential international contemporary art magazine Parkett and published in Zurich, and Juli Steiner, currently director of the Zentum Paul Klee in Berne, attempted to break new ground the setting of which was the venerable Roman Signer, Table with Flare / 'Firkart' / Furka, 1993.

Photo: Stefan Rohner

Roman Signer, Table with Flare / 'Firkart' / Furka, 1993. Photo: Stefan Rohner

Kunsthaus. Having searched for a long time throughout Switzerland, they displayed in the rooms of the Zurich institution which was already full of the great works of past centuries and classical modern art. The exhibition 'Freie Sicht aufs Mittlemeer' (Perspective on the Mediterranean) was dedicated to young Swiss art.

The works of some one hundred artists occupied every available space, the toilets, telephone booths, the cafeteria, the street and even spilled over into the town space - and was challenging, thought-provoking, and eye-catching.

The event was an important historical landmark.

Indeed, for once the contemporary Swiss art scene was gathered together to assess, measure and to look at itself. Artists who see each other at a regional and international, but seldom national level, are crossing each others' paths. 'Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer' was a festive occasion for the realization of the diversity, strength and cosmopolitan nature of the youthful creative spirit. Since then, Christian Marclay, Syvie Fleury, Daniele Buetti, Stefan Banz, Eric Hattan, Olaf Breuning, though already known at the time, have asserted themselves. Fabrice Gygi, quite young then, has since that time become well-known for her raw, harsh style. The couple, Gerda Steiner and JĂśrg Lenzinger, have brought enchantment to a countless

number of gardens, such as that of the church of San StaĂŤ or a Venice Biennial or the beautiful baroque library of the abbey of Saint-Gall. Is one witnessing the crystallization of currents and trends in modes of expression? Far from it. The newcomers, for example, 37-year-old Didier Rittener who draws with acute perception, or 29-year-old Valentin Carron, who creates large, rough sculptures, may follow different methods but their common basis is the success which motivates them; and the art market, aware of young talents is heading in their direction.

Lorette Coen is an essayist and cultural projects director. She regularly writes on design, architecture, arts, and philosophy. She is currently President of the Swiss Federal Commission of Design.

This article, translated from the French original by Shahid-ur Rahman, comes to you by courtesy of the Swiss government

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essay

Pablo Picasso, Les demoiselles d' Avignon. 1970, Oil on canvas, 96 X 92", The museum of Modern Art, New York

the art of eastern parts in the west

By Tabish Khair

Let me begin with a personal conviction, put bluntly: the nonWestern artist in Denmark (and Europe in general), like the average non-Western person in Denmark, lives in a state of 'visible invisibility'

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his 'visible invisibility' can be highlighted in different ways. I have known of nonWestern artists—and, for that matter, non-Western writers (including a serious Chinese candidate for the Nobel prize)—who have lived in Danish cities for years without attracting much attention as artists.

Sometimes these artists and writers get some space in the popular media—though more often as 'immigrants' or commentators on 'immigrant issues' than as artists or writers—but the relatively closed world of Danish universities prefers to remain blissfully unaware of them. In any case, it is often the rule that their 'visibility' accrues from their 'otherness', while their ar-t-as contemporary art, with claims to individuality and difference but not to a sweeping 'otherness'—remains largely invisible.

It is not uncommon even today to find nonWestern art exhibited in Danish museums on largely anthropological terms—something that would be a minor scandal in, say, England. Recent art as 'anthropology' is obviously an indication of the 'otherness' that dominates most Danish (and continental European) perceptions of non-Western art. It is, actually, the scholarly counterpart of the socialjournalistic tendency noted above. Just as the nonWestern artist and writer is more likely to enter Danish society as an immigrant spokesperson of a different culture rather than as an artist or writer living in Denmark, non-Western art is more likely to enter Danish scholarly discourses in anthropological terms rather than, say, aesthetic ones. In other words, one is more likely to find a non-Western artist or novelist writing about Bin Laden than about Michael Kvium in Danish papers. Even books by non-Western writers, such as Derek Walcott or Arundhati Roy, are given to Danes for review, while a Denmark-based Caribbean or Indian writer would almost never be asked to contribute a critical opinion on such matters. Similarly, non-Western artists in Denmark are almost never asked to review an art exhibition.

There is—as Rasheed Araeen, artist, critic and editor of the art and theory journal Third Text (Routledge, London), has pointed out in a number of articles—a tendency in the West to see non-Western art in terms of 'tradition' rather than within the complex continuity of, say, modernism. Hence, for instance, Picasso could incorporate non-Western aboriginal elements into his paintings and revolutionise modern art, but an Indian or African combining aboriginal elements with modern forms, techniques and material is, nevertheless, seen as 'restoring

tradition' or 'exploring his tradition'. By definition, such an attempt by an Indian or African is pushed beyond the discourse of contemporary art and into that of 'anthropological' otherness. This tendency, it appears to me, is far more pronounced in Denmark than in the UK. It appears that the non-Western artist can be accepted as an 'other' in many Danish circles, but not as a different contemporary artist with her own perception of art, aesthetics etc. And yet, one of the earliest objective books by a European on Hinduism and Hindu iconography (with its implicit relationship to Indian sculpture and art) was by a Dane. As Partha Mitter writes in Much Maligned Monsters: 'The most impressive work of this genre was written … in 1713 by the Royal Danish missionary, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, at Tranquebar in south India … In Ziegenbalg we have a missionary who refused to go along with the prevailing attitudes and show how the Word of God had been distorted by Fish and Woman, watercolour on paper, 1974

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Quamrul Hassan, Bangladesh, Reclining Woman, watercolour on paper, 1970s

the Hindus. Instead he wanted his readers to make up their own minds with the help of his straightforward, factual, and matter-of-fact presentation of Hinduism … Unfortunately, Genealogy of the Malabar Gods, a work of great usefulness even today, was not welcomed in the eighteenth century. The hostility of Ziegenbalg's colleagues prevented its publication, for it was pointed out that the duty of the missionaries was to extirpate Hinduism and not to spread heathenish nonsense.'

As unfortunately (or perhaps significantly), Ziegenbalg—who, like most respectable Danes of the time, wrote in German—is available in English translation but not in Danish.

The (obscured) presence of German in this short digression returns us again to the ways in which a largely homogenous Danish identity has been created in recent decades. It is this creation of a homogenous Danish identity that explains why non-Western artists—and for that matter, non-Western immigrants in general—are both more tolerable and more repulsive to many Danes only in their essential 'otherness'. Depending on the political sympathies of the Dane in question, this 'otherness' can be seen as a threat or it can be seen as a colourful strength. At one extreme, you have priests and politicians who claim that one needs to be Christian in order to be a Dane; at the other, you have exotic festivals like 'Images of the World' in the year 2000 in Copenhagen. The

former might wish to expel all 'otherness', the later might wish to 'mother' it. In both cases, however, there is a tendency to control and, in the longer run, assimilate the non-native, either forcibly (for the unmentioned purity of Denmark) or lovingly (for the good of the non-Westerner who decides to live on in Denmark). In both cases, the non-Westerner is seen as such an alien presence, that she and her art, literature etc. can only be spoken of in rather anthropological and sociological terms. In any case, an equation can be formulated to express the situation: othering + mothering = smothering.

The extremity and depth of the myths of coloured 'otherness' that pervade all aspects of Danish thinking can be, perhaps, best illustrated with reference to a popular children's book. In 1945 and 1948, Jørgen Clevin wrote and illustrated two books featuring an ostrich, Rasmus, who is captured in Africa and brought to Copenhagen Zoo. The books, which have been re-issued by the leading Danish publisher, Gyldendal, in 2002, are replete with stereotypes about Africans—'neger'—and the Danish state. However, I am not concerned with most of these stereotypes in this essay. What interests me here is the complete otherness that informs the book's narrative of a generalised Africa and a specific Denmark. This can be best highlighted with the help of one innocuousseeming example, though there are many other, more

complex instances of it in the book. Rasmus has been captured and brought to Copenhagen Zoo, where he experiences rainy weather. This, we are told, Rasmus had never experienced before. Here you have a plausible fact, relative aridity in many parts of Africa, turned into an extreme myth of otherness: no rain whatsoever in 'Africa' versus regular, daylong showers in Denmark.

This otherness of the non-West in Denmark—the consequence of historical factors as well as the complex correspondence of the rightist-nationalist and social-democratic projects in recent years— often obscures large stretches of Danish history. Not only the history of Danish colonies and slave trafficking, but also the history of many of the most redoubtable Danish buildings that were built or extensively renovated in exactly these periods of affluence. It strikes me as remarkable that Danish history books have almost nothing to say of the coloured presence in Denmark from the 17th to the early 20th century.

Unlike, say, the UK, where much has been done over the last 20 years to recover the stories of coloured servants, slaves, sailors, mistresses, nurses, soldiers, traders etc, who lived in the UK at least as far back as the 17th century, Danish historians seem to dismiss the coloured presence in Denmark as completely unimportant. This is not a question of numbers, but of significance. After all, there is evidence of coloured slaves/servants being brought to Denmark and of Asian sailors being employed on Danish ships. British historians tell us, for instance, that in 1782, several lascars (South Asian sailors widely employed on European ships) 'who had been hired by Danish ships arrived [in England] from Denmark'—and that, in England, this was one of the factors that led to a rise of interest in the plight of lascars who were often arbitrarity discharged and abandoned by ships in Europe.

But such interesting and overlooked facts do not seem to have attracted the attention of at least mainstream Danish historians. Even in books by leftleaning and highly erudite historians, the coloured presence is relegated to Danish colonies-as if these colonies had nothing to do with the Danish 'mainland', as if masters could never bring coloured servants and slaves back 'home' with them, as if coloured sailors were not employed on Danish ships docking in Copenhagen, as if entire villages were not brought to Denmark for display etc. But let alone the far non-West in the shape of Caribbean families and Indian villages brought to Copenhagen to be exhibited as late as the 20th century, or teams of Chinese

Qayyum Chowdhury, Bangladesh-2001, oil on canvas, 2001

acrobats or groups of Asian lascars, even the near 'non-Western' presence of Greenlanders seems to be acknowledged only grudgingly in most Danish books about Denmark.

In short, with some honourable exceptions, scholars, journalists, critics and politicians in Denmark seem to show a great reluctance to acknowledge the coloured presence in all its complexity. This reluctance extends back into time—Danish history is daily whitewashed—and into the present in which nonWestern artists and writers are often reduced to representatives (or critics) of their own 'othered' cultures. While non-Westerners in Denmark in the past are rendered simply invisible, non-Westerners in Denmark today have to be registered due to their somewhat greater numbers—but by being seen primarily as cultural others (to be expelled, assimilated or patronised), they are largely rendered invisible in their complexity as artists etc. Once one realises this, it is not surprising to come across, say, books on the Cobra school of artists that do not mention Ernest Mancoba, a coloured artist who was an active member of the 'Danish' group.

Tabish Khair is Associate Professor of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His recent Books include the poetry collection, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, Delhi, 2000), and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador, London, 2004)

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exhibition reviews

Lullaby

henry moore

keeping focussed with an open mind

By Ann Elliott

For two weeks in December 2006 the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts in Dhaka hosted a fine exhibition of Henry Moore's Graphics. The exhibition, which was beautifully installed in the gallery, was organised in a close collaboration between the Bengal Foundation and the British Council. The show attracted much interest, and I was fortunate to participate in the accompanying educational programme, by lecturing on Henry Moore and related topics

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he lithographs and etchings that made up the exhibition were loaned to the gallery from the British Council's collection, which had benefited from several hundred prime examples of Moore's graphic work that he presented to the Council on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in l984. These works, like others in the Council's collection, travel the world in touring exhibitions.

Requests for exhibitions of Henry Moore continue to flow in to the British Council, and are also addressed to The Henry Moore Foundation, a registered charity, setup and generously endowed by Moore in 1977 'to advance the education of the public by the promotion of their appreciation of the fine arts and in particular the works of Henry Moore'. There is usually an exhibition of Henry Moore's work showing somewhere in the world at any given time.

In Dhaka I found a real and probing interest in the art of Henry Moore, and in the work of younger British artists. My audiences were full of artists of all ages, as well as students and their teachers. Our discussions were lively and informative to a stranger, and I learnt a lot about Bengal and its culture in just a few days. The very great thing about the arts is that they always generate discussion, with people discovering similarities of opinion and practice, as well as their differences. For me this was a wonderfully positive experience, as the work of Henry Moore allowed conversation to spread out into many topics.

Thinking about Henry Moore's internationality, and the way in which his work speaks across vast cultural differences, one can begin to understand why his sculpture,

drawings and prints are always in demand, and are welcomed so warmly in vastly differing places and spaces around the world. The reason, I believe, comes from his undoubted humanity, which speaks with enormous strength through the constant themes in his work.

'All my sculpture is based on the human figure,' said Moore.

'Most artists have obsessions in their subject matter —some may be mainly landscape painters, some mainly figurative, others may do portraits or concentrate on animal painting.

'There are three recurring themes in my work: the 'Mother

and Child' idea, the 'Reclining figure', and the 'interior/exterior forms.' Some sculptures may combine two or even three of these themes.'

Although Moore professed these allegiances to the human form, from which he never strayed far, he also worked in an abstract way, blending abstraction and figuration through his observation of natural forms—stones, bones, shells, driftwood, and the larger landscape, in which he liked to see his monumental sculptures placed.

In notes at the time unpublished, but now cited in Alan Wilkinson's book Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Lund:

Woman with book

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Humphries 2002), Moore had written in 1937, 'I do not see why an artist should have to be a complete surrealist or a complete abstractionist.' He also wrote at the same time, 'I find myself lined up with the Surrealists because Surrealism means freedom for the creative side of man, for surprise & discovery & and life, for an opening out & widening of man's consciousness, for changing life & against conserving worn out traditions, for variety not uniformity, for opening, not closing— ' Moore's is a story that has been told time and again by many eloquent writers. His is a straightforward biography, one of a man of modest origins; a man with such strength of purpose that

transcended the fame and fortune that was to come quite late in his career.

Henry Moore was born in Castleford, Yorkshire in 1898.

Queen Victoria was on the throne—albeit towards the end of her reign— and Britain was still an imperial power. Moore, however, was born into a working class family. His father was a miner, working daily in the coalmines of Yorkshire. One of eight children, the family lived in a small, terraced house, with two—at the most three—bedrooms. They lived in close proximity to one another.

Moore's father was keen that his children should not go into the mines, and set great store by their education. Moore entered Seated figure VI

Castleford Elementary School, and gained a scholarship to Castleford Grammar School. School holidays and weekends were spent cycling in the countryside around Castleford—wild moorland with rocky outcrops, which were in due course to imprint their influence on his work. His earliest encounters with sculpture were at Methley Church, near his home in Castleford. The church contained several carvings of medieval stone heads, as well as some alabaster sarcophagi with knights and ladies lying in repose, small dogs at their feet.

When Moore was at Grammar School a young and enthusiastic art mistress, Alice Gostick, was a formative influence. He began to consider a career as a sculptor, although at his father's insistence he worked initially as a teacher.

His determination to become a sculptor was not undermined, and dissatisfied with teaching, he applied for, and received, an exserviceman's grant to study at Leeds Art School, and by the end of his second year in Leeds, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, in 1921.

At this time in Britain, art school training was academic, based on carefully observed drawings of the human figure.

This was rigorous, and considered to be an essential discipline before one could move into the realms of personal expression. With these skills absorbed, Moore was ready to branch out on his own, eschewing the tight formality of nineteenth-century figurative sculpture, finding his own voice in robust carvings in wood and stone.

Throughout the Second World War Moore saw no active service, but worked as a war artist, during which he produced drawings of people sheltering in the London

Seated Figure IV

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Reclining figure dawn

Underground during the Blitz, and miners working for the war effort.

His Shelter Drawings were both sculptural and humane. Rows of sleeping figures under draped blankets, closeups of children with their parents; these were moving works, and form a telling record of the time.

In 1940, however, he and his wife, Irina, moved to Perry Green, a small hamlet in Hertfordshire, some thirty miles north of London. He set up his studio, and was to live there for the rest of his life. As his fame and fortunes grew, he added further land, studios and buildings to form a large estate, which is now home to the Henry Moore Foundation.

It was not until 1946 that Moore's long awaited only child, Mary, was born. His career was burgeoning, and he also had his first visit to New York, for a

travelling retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition contributed significantly to introducing Moore to the American public, some of whom became his greatest collectors.

Unlike the British press, American critics held Moore in great regard, and interestingly, his American admirers never wavered in their support, and collected his work for the rest of his career; many still do so.

Moore's working methods have been well-documented, more so than almost any other artist. He collected all kinds of natural materials from the landscapes that inspired him, the forms of which found their way into his sculptures. He drew parallels in his work between, for example, a bone and a head, a flint or stone and an abstract form, a rippled

shell and drapery. Some of these objects he incorporated in his clay or plaster models, or maquettes, before casting them in bronze.

'Besides the human form, I am tremendously excited by all natural forms, such as cloud formations, birds, trees and their roots, and mountains, which are to me the wrinkling of the earth's surface, like drapery. It is extraordinary how closely ripples in the sand on the seashore resemble the gouge marks in wood carving.'

In 1948 Henry Moore represented Britain at the XXIV Venice Biennale, for which he was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture, marking his first major success in his work with the British Council. This also built on his reception in the United States, and heralded a long and fruitful association with the Council, who toured his work to many parts of

the globe, and continues to do so.

From then his fame grew, he worked increasingly in bronze, and in the stone quarries of Carrara, where Michelangelo had worked centuries before. He made more prints, and through editions of his graphics and bronzes, his work became available to more collections and collectors internationally.

Today hardly a public building in most major cities stands without a Henry Moore at its entrance.

Moore was also awarded countless honours and degrees throughout the world, but continued to work as he had always done, in his studios, working clay and plaster into ideas for sculpture, filling countless notebooks and sketchbooks, making prints and drawings, until his death in 1986, at the age of eighty-eight.

One of the most frequent questions put to me in Dhaka was about Henry Moore's followers, Ideas for metal sculpture III

Trees spreading branches

who did he influence? Looking at the sculptors who followed him sequentially: Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, then Anthony Caro and Phillip King, for

example—the latter two were his studio assistants for a short time—one can see that their works bear no relationship to those of Henry Moore. In fact there was no 'School of Henry Moore.' Moore worked individually in areas that interested him, initially from 'truth to materials', and certainly from first principles. He looked to the art of the distant past to find his own way forward. He thought for himself, and this is what he encouraged young artists to do.

He championed personal discovery. 'I believe nothing is taboo—no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to discovery.' This openness has continued to enrich the progress of British sculpture, which generation on generation changes and surprises.

Ann Elliott is a British visual art organiser, art critic and curator who worked for Sheffield City Art Galleries, British Council and was Head of Sculpture at Goodwood in her early career

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Tokai, Charcoal, 2006

remembered images

By Syed Manzoorul Islam

The sixth solo exhibition of Rafiqun Nabi's paintings (Bengal Gallery, Dhaka, 20 November-3 December 2006), was aptly titled Down Memory Lane—as all but a couple of the 76 works done in watercolour, acrylic, oil, mixed media, pastel, pen and ink and lithography are reminiscences of a time spent in the midst of nature, in a village whose homesteads were green to the very door, and among people at work or in repose

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he paintings bring together an incessant string of associations that rise up from the artist's well of memories and create their own patterns on the canvas. The quiet but intense life that goes on in Bangladeshi villages, the sights and sounds of each changing season and the birds and animals that are an inevitable part of any rural experience—all figure prominently in Nabi's work. The impressions these images make on him, despite the filters of time and space through which they travel, are surprisingly fresh and graceful, and often bright and clear. It is as if Nabi has journeyed through time

without gathering any dust or grime, and arrived at his past with a fresh pair of eyes, ready to take on the scenes that he encountered as a child. And these scenes are usually peopled by men and women of various occupations—peasants, cowherds, fishermen, boatmen. Beyond these clusters of people, however, Nabi often places images that fascinated him as a young boy —a train moving at slow speed, a bridge casting its shadow on the river below, fish drying in the sun from lines of rope. The world that Nabi paints still exists, but in a much diminished manner, having lost Fishermen at rest, Oil on canvas, 2006

much to the concrete and asphalt of a persistent urban spread, and he feels the urgency and anxiety to reconstruct the threatened images before they are gone forever. This perhaps explains the frenzy with which, only in six months or so, Nabi did the bulk of the work.

Rafiqun Nabi is a painter and printmaker of distinction, but he is equally well-known as a cartoonist. For more than three decades now, his cartoons have regularly appeared in national newspapers and magazines, lashing out at social injustice with biting satire, and a tongue and cheek humour. The cartoon series

Tokai, where the street urchin Tokai (literally someone who collects scraps from the street for a living) dumbfounds the gentlefolk with his incisive and unsettlingly witty questions and comments, has been one of the most popular ever. Although the subject of an earlier solo exhibition (2004), Tokai doesn't figure in his latest exhibition but traces of his presence are visible in the way Nabi draws his human figures, showing telling signs of deprivation and neglect. As in his cartoons, the line drawings in many of the pen and wash and charcoal pieces are sharp and powerful. Overall, however, Nabi's depiction of the human scene is optimistic, as it is in his cartoon drawings, despite the rather gloomy social background from which they emerge. Nabi puts his faith in the social energy that drives people forward in life, even the most marginalized ones. This is all too evident in the exhibition, especially where clusters of people are seen at work, or idling around between chores. The same is true for his cartoons.

If a concern for a vanishing world where people lived in intimate contact with nature and a celebration of social energy are two important aspects of Nabi's work, there are a few more that deserve mention. There is, for example, the narrative content of his paintings that is hard to miss.

Each painting seems to tell a story—a young man catching some sleep in what appears to be an acrobatic repose (since the depiction of the figure is vertical); a family of three sharing a moment of rest, with the child

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Sleeping figure, acrylic on canvas, 2006

lying on the mother's lap while the father stretches out next to the sitting mother, a girl reclining in bed (probably dozing off while reading a book), a hill woman bathing, birds having a sunbath or a train on a railway bridge. These are not random snapshots, or scraps of memory without any association. These are vignettes of life stories that the artist reconstructs from lived experience. These are ultimately from the world around him, and are therefore tangible and palpable. Nabi's remembered moments are therefore not all lost irretrievably in the maze of time—they survive both in the endless repetition of life stories that daily unfold in rural Bangladesh, appearing to collapse the barriers of time and space.

What Nabi emphasizes, however, is that although the content of these stories has changed, their

form remains pretty much the same. In this reassurance of continuity, for the time being at least, there is much to rejoice.

Nabi's images thus have a metamorphic and balancing quality. They are both remembered and real; the drama they play out is harsh but reassuring in the end.

Nabi is both a dreamer and a man of this world. If his images have an openness of memory, these are counterbalanced by carefully stacked forms and figures from reality, firmly checking the contradictory pulls of a time past and time present.

Another aspect of Nabi's work is an expression of the pure and simple joy of life. This is evident in the way his men and women, birds and animals, even inanimate objects such as boats are placed in intimate association with nature or against a vast field of space where a feeling of openness

predominates. Many of his works in the exhibition, especially the three large oil paintings, have a cluttered surface area—there are simply too many people and objects sharing the available space—but if one observes closely, they appear distinct from one another, each inhabiting an unhurried, personalized space where they are free to do what they desire. For an eye accustomed to seeing frenzy and mad rush in crowd scenes, such separate peace seems astounding. But this is what Nabi looks for in his canvas. His crowds may give the impression of a jostling, struggling group of people from a distance, but upon close examination, each individual seems to be in control of themselves—what makes them so alike yet so separate is their essential humanity and the way they carry themselves, graceful and poised. They are individuals first, with a capacity to feel, dream, and imagine, and yes, fantasize. Nabi, in spite of his modernistic aspirations—manifest in his stylistic range and versatility, and his social content—does not go for surrealism or pure abstraction or any of the abstract modes widely practiced by his contemporaries. His basis is realism, and although its expression often takes stylized forms, he does make use of an element of fantasy whenever he feels like accentuating a sense of wonder, or the happiness which marks out an experience.

If one is impressed by the variety of media and the range of style evident in the solo exhibition, Nabi himself admits as much. He finds it both exciting and

Affection, Acrylic, 2006

Madonna, Acrylic, 2006

challenging to 'bring all these diverse media and the different techniques they entail', as he puts it, 'and place them on an even keel'.

How does one balance, for example, the illustrative tendencies or the two dimensionality of perspective in some of his work with the rigours of the realistic mode? How does one accommodate within the technique-driven lithographic mode the soft tonality of watercolour, or an outburst of loud colours—colour, in this case, being understood as a quality of form? For an answer, one has to look at the careful way Nabi works at achieving the maximum effect of all the techniques and styles that he employs. His line drawing is robust but controlled; he often uses thick outlines and contours to mark off his figures or objects from one another (thus accentuating their separate identities). His figures are often monumental, displaying a sculptured finesse. He plays with perspective, creating optic illusions, and suggestions of depth or closeness or opacity, but at other times, allowing it to stretch to infinity, suggesting openness and freedom. This contrast is important for Nabi, as most of his paintings in this exhibition straddle two different time frames at the same time.

Rafiqun Nabi had his art education at the Institute of Fine Art of Dhaka University at a time when such pioneers of modern art in Bangladesh as Zainul Abedin, Shaifuddin Ahmed, Qamrul Hasan and Mohammad Kibria were teaching and actively contributing to modern art

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Cattle, Drawing, 2006

Landscape, Acrylic, 206

movement—(Nabi passed out with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art in 1964). They have left their mark on his style, particularly the way he goes about his figuration and draws birds and animals.

There is an uncanny resemblance, for example, between Nabi's crows and those that Zainul Abedin immortalized, making them symbols of human greed and cleverness. But Nabi sees this influence more as sharing the same attitude to drawing. Like his mentor, Nabi believes in authenticity and uniqueness. A crow of today is the same as a

crow of yesterday, but the way it is used in creating a mood or ambience differs from artist to artist. If Zainul's crow is more like Ted Hughes', Nabi's crow is a happy creature sharing in the rhythms of life with all the other birds and animals and human beings. The crow—and animals such as the cow or the buffalo—as well as drawings of human figures point at an intertextual referencing at work in Nabi's work.

Given the nature of his work, and the intention that underlies them—which is recounting time past and blending it with time

present for a celebration of life's little joys and moments of respite from harsh reality—such intertextual referencing perhaps becomes inevitable.

Syed Manzoorul Islam is a member of the editorial board of Jamini

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Do-Ho Suh

these guys are artists, and who gives a damn

By Naeem Mohaiemen

This essay was originally published as the curatorial introduction to System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, curated by Lorenzo Fusi and Naeem Mohaiemen, at Palazzo Papesse, Siena, Italy. Featuring the artwork of more than 40 artists from different countries, the show explores the response of artists to the current period of expanded and endless wars jamini

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scenes from a looking glass war 'Play some more Bach. We won't shoot.' [Mikhail Goldstein's concert in besieged Stalingrad] Scene 1: Mufathalle, Munich The weekend event is part of a series called Dictionary of War. Twenty-five artists and academics, presenting themes based on a word they had chosen about warfare. Camouflage, Declaration of War, Desertion, Heroes, Liberation, Mobilization, National Anthem, Negotiation, Resistance, the list was exhaustive (my word: Prisoner of War). As we present our concepts, the Lebanon war is in its second week. There are accommodations made to reflect this rude insertion into our mannered program. Mansur Jacoubi joins us from Beirut for some clunky IRC chat (somebody asks him 'can you describe the situation there?', I wince). Akram Zaatari flies in from Paris to present some earlier work—stranded outside the country, he's available to us. E-flux brings in all their Lebanese videos.

I feel the cramp of anxiety. Will all these well-sculpted words have an impact outside this room?

Somehow I'm missing the codec to transmit all this theoretical, creative energy into real world action. I've been scolded for seeking use-value in art, but I can't restrain this tourette-like impulse.

Back in Dhaka, friends are organizing rallies to protest the war. But they are worried because the main organizers are Islamist groups. I send them the announcement for Dictionary and get a withering response by e-mail 'Sitting in a room discussing war, while the Middle East burns down—a luxury indulgence.'

I try to muster up an appropriate response as to why representation, aesthetics, theory, all of this still matters, even in this moment.

I believe in everything I say, but today I feel small comfort, because the external geopolitical context seems so extraordinary and extreme. In an attempt to band-aid the situation and, yes, insert 'direct action' into the Munich event, I talk to the organizers. Could we issue a statement from the artists calling for an immediate ceasefire? More importantly, there is a peace rally in downtown Munich, perhaps we can take a break and join it. People like the idea in Israel Rosas

principle, although the logistics are challenging. Eyal Weizman is particularly enthusiastic. But in the end it fizzles out. Before too long, the weekend is over, everyone is bolting towards the airport—no rally, no statement. I feel deflated, even though the weekend went as promised. But, is that all there is?

Scene 2: Soho gallery, New York Valentin Manz of London's Vision Machine is very persuasive.

Somehow he has persuaded a gallery, not previously known for patronizing political work, to host his group show. 'I don't understand,' I ask as we start installing

of our friends had kindly assumed—well, from the name of the show—that this was an appropriate venue and had left copies of the IndyMedia newspaper at the front desk. There, splashed out in garish outrage, were images of bloody warfare in Lebannon. A little too much of a reality intrusion, like Linda Blair's possessed Exorcist girl walking in on a party, peeing on the carpet and blurting out: 'You're going to die up there' Enough anecdotes, let's start the rest of our conversation.

Negativland

my piece. 'On what basis did they give you the space? Did they see the title? Rule of Law? What do they think it's about?' According to Valentin, the curators had seen his exhibition of glass pieces in Williamsburg, and that was enough. They didn't comprehend that the gnarled glass shards were exploded Iraqi heads. Perhaps, I suggested, your labels were hazy enough to succeed as illusionists.

As we put up photocopied statements by Alberto Gonzales, neatly labeling them with artist (A Gonzales), media, year, I wonder if there will be a 'freak out' moment before the opening. I've been here at least once before.

Everyone was all smiles until a few hours before that opening, when a museum director made the rounds and read labels. Then came frantic scuffling, a quiet meeting and then the junior curator coming over to me, and with maximum tortured, circuitous prose explaining that, well, you see, I don't quite know how to say it, but, um, there's a slight problem, no nothing big, but we were just wondering if, that is would you consider...

But somehow, this time around, the entire install goes off without a hitch. I'm not entirely delusional.

It is August, 'dead time' to most galleries as their patrons are away.

The opening is, as a result, overrepresentative of the activist community. The same faces I had been seeing at meetings of Action Wednesday, an anti-war group, were out in force. The art crowd having gone on summer break, a different energy permeated the room. The staff at the gallery seemed a bit nervous. Nobody here looked like they had money, and not even in that neo-Factory, lower east side, almost famous manner.

Still everyone is polite to us until two friends start debating Hezbollah's role, liberators or destroyers, very near the drink table. The woman serving the drinks gets increasingly jittery.

Very soon, there is no more wine.

Valentin is puzzled—he also bought a case of wine, that can't be gone too? Then one of the gallery assistants informs us that because it's summer, they have to close the place early. Sorry, the opening is not until 8 pm after all.

It's all very rush rush, almost as if someone broke wind and the room needs to be cleared. As I walk towards the exit, I spot one potential source of trouble. One

permanent war, elusive peace 'Every morning, Shamshad Hussain goes to his rooftop, just opposite Red Fort, to enjoy a cup of tea after the azaan, his ears catching strains of prayers from the nearby Jama Masjid. Today, he carried two cups the second was for the sniper on the rooftop.'

[Kasturi, 'Tea With a Sniper', The Telegraph, 8/15/06] It is almost banal to start by talking about the ongoing Iraq apocalypse. After thousands of lives, and many multiples more of ink and video have been spilt, what more remains to be said about this manifestation of permanent war? Those who marched in anti-war rallies can now feel some schadenfreude at the unraveling of the entire project for a New Century. But at what a terrible price we earned the right to say 'we told you so'. Even after all the interventionist fantasies have shattered, there is no postwar peace dividend. The madness of the Neocon project only replaced by the equally insane Islamist project of the Mahdi Army, and the ethnic cleansing

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and forced partition dreams of the Shiite and Sunni death squads.

The New York Times has just printed the most unflattering and bizarre photograph of Condoleeza Rice. Confronted by a chorus of furious opposition by both Democrats & Republicans (but we all know that this too will pass), Rice looks angry and cornered.

Her hands are raised in martial pose, warding off noxious peaceniks and liberal harpies. A friend remarks that she looks like a Bollywood villain. Her body language spelling out a Gabbar Singh-like threat, 'Mei tum sab lokogo tukra tukra karenge' (all of you people, I will cut you into pieces). We have a good laugh. But a day later, newpapers carry a headline about Rice's threat come to life. Senior administration official Charles Stimson tells a radio show that corporate America should cut off business from all law firms that have represented Guantanamo detainees. He then lists all firms that are representing Muslim detainees. Even after a drubbing at the elections, the war on terror shows no signs of winding down, or opening itself up to logic. The world's largest (for now) superpower is still lost and thrashing around, doing untold damage to the world and, to a greater degree, to itself.

Should we sit silently by? Well, friends don't let friends drive drunk.

It is fatuous to talk of 'since 9/11' as if history started on that day and the current global conflagration is something new or unexpected. The previous century was in fact the most violent in recorded history—ranging from world wars to colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggles, civil wars, revolution, guerilla warfare, urban

war, genocide, and witch hunts.

Simply to hint at the astronomical toll of the Stalinist terror alone, Martin Amis recalls this argument between his father (Kingsley) and A. J. Ayer: 'In the U.S.S.R., at least they're trying to forge something positive.'

'But it doesn't matter what they're trying to forge, because they've already killed five million people.'

'You keep going back to the five million.'

'If you're tired of that five million, then I'm sure I can find you another five million.'

Surveying the post 'Good War' scenario of the other camp, Mahmood Mamdani casts a Shishir Bhattacharjee

cynical eye on the maximalist expansion of the US sphere of influence and destructive interventions in Africa and Latin America.

In the blue-sky rhetoric of the time, countries were divided by the Heritage Foundation into compartments for 'rollback' (Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, Vietnam). The skeleton closet from this period seems endless.

What to do, for example, with the recent admission by Peter Matthiessen that he was a CIA recruit in the 1950s and used The Paris Review as his cover? It has been far too easy for cultural figures to be drafted into larger war-strategy programs, in the past

Birgit Dieker

through active recruiting, and now through silent assent.

Compared to these cowboy interventions, today's conflicts seem to have a slightly finite boundary—a sizable Muslim population is needed to qualify as a threat (Nepal or Sri Lanka never grab as many headlines). This reassures until you start counting the countries, or sizing up the growing internal populations of Europe and North America. With a renewed intensity not seen since the era of 'negros with guns', the state is monitoring the internal 'fourth column'. 'Muslim' serves as an ethnicized shorthand for migrant populations that were in

the past seen as an obedient taskforce (North America) or a non-assimilating welfare nuisance (Europe), but now are seen as a ticking time bomb. During the Vietnam protests, 'bringing the war home' meant gumming up the daily industrial, commercial and cultural machinery that made possible the prosecution of a napalm-orange war in Indochina.

Today, the term has been perverted to mean the shadow surveillance of frantic citizens.

Even in countries that launch ferocious tirades against the new Rome, there is also a move to clone its tactics against their own citizens. After a rash of suicide

bombings, the Bangladesh government passed far-reaching surveillance and enforcement measures, the language of which seemed to have been taken directly from Homeland Security's playbook. The paranoid mindset of endless security checks has now infected Southern nations. During a screening at Dhaka Public Library, a bearded musolli walked into the middle of the screening, blocking the projector. We had already gone through security checks, those same security guards rushed up and grabbed the man, and a tremor of thrill and fear ran through the crowd. Was this it, is this how it all ends? 'Amare chaira den, ami kichu kori nai!' cried the poor man in a feeble voice. It turned out he was the night watchman for the Library. He had been looking for the prayer room, and had stumbled into the auditorium. The madrasa recruits are an icon of fear and resentment for the Bengali middle class, just as they are to xenophobes and power structures in the US and Europe.

For the Dhaka elite, madrasa graduates are people who can't afford to drink Coke, have Josh ring tones on their phone, buy bar-coded fruit at Agora mall, or wear jeans from Westecs; they cannot exist in our consciousness.

A similar frisson rises in the mind of the Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris or Rome pensioner as they see the hijab-clad (over-used cultural signifier), or bearded paan—chewing migrant shuffling towards their bus stop. Why don't these people learn to speak the language properly, they mutter.

The pensioner may not be Goldhagen's 'ordinary German', but he will agree quietly as a national security state is built up to police these undesirables.

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the 'necessary' war and saviors for civilian life ' What, what if they don't even want the sheik, have you considered that? What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing?

And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit?'

[Denzel Washington in The Siege, 1998] There is now the terribly seductive idea of wars as 'necessary' and a force for good.

Paranoia is the driving factor, and the astonishing abundance of flags in today's American urban landscape is one demonstration of this out of control, emotional response. Fear eats the soul, as Kalle Lasn writes in Culture Jam: 'Is everybody crazy? ‌ If you add up all the psychological ailments Americans complain of, the portrait that emerges is of a nation of basket-cases.� Posttraumatic witnesses also incentivize programmes of revenge killing on a micro scale and necessary war on a global scale. Amitava Kumar described this impulse in Husband of a Fanatic, in the context of the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogroms: 'I saw from the way in which he recited the details that, in the name of charity and the need for news, this little boy had been turned into an automaton or an agony-machine. Insert a coin into the slot, and hear a recitation about rape.' Borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell, there is also the idea of the flash point event, whether it is an assassinated

Gemayel, the purloined Prophet's hair in Kashmir, a missing German industrialist, or a racial slur on an Australian beach, that can give rise to the 'justified' response. The results are predictable—justifiable wars inflame things even further. As the antiwar sign in Boston warned: 'Bombing For Peace Is Like Fucking For Virginity' In the middle of many righteous protest rallies, I encountered at least one conflict that truly put me in mind of pre-emptive violence. Like clockwork, another petition arrived in my email inbox, accompanied by a note, garish, vaguely pornographic. A large red target was drawn on Belgrade, and the slogan said 'STOP NATO/STOP US'. No, I have to admit, I could not cheer that slogan. We had been watching the genocide in Bosnia unfold for over two years. 'Never Again' had been mouthed ad nauseum, but nothing had happened. Like the Rwandan and Darfur genocide, the world was watching (as Chicago '68 announced), but also sitting quietly on its' hands. Having read Robert Emily Jacir

Kaplan, they had concluded that 'Balkan ghosts' were 'primeval histories', not a place for modern intervention. In that scenario of stupefying inaction, even the Clinton and NATO bombings, however convoluted their motives, were a relief. At last, someone, somewhere was doing something.

Sure enough, soon enough the Serbs were back at the negotiating table.

This was also the watershed moment when Christopher Hitchens broke with the American Left over its' refusal to endorse limited intervention.

Unfortunately, Hitchens then made the leap to extend the lessons of Belgrade to Iraq.

Operation Infinite Justice was also a 'necessary' war that must be fought and would be won. Like many armchair pundits, Hitchens has neither experienced nor learnt from the brutality and unpredictability of war. His chorus was joined by hawks such as Thomas Friedman (on a break from touring Victoria's Secret factories in Sri Lanka), whose rhetoric recast war as a series of bloodless

analogies: 'You know, honey, the wheels aren't on tight out there', 'It's O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you're driving without one', 'If we don't turn around now, we may just get where we're going', and of course re-quoting Lawrence Summers: 'In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.'

With an avalanche of such bastardized reasoning making the case for preemptive war, low-level strikes, mass detention, secret prisons, and leave-no-marks torture, the idea of ends-justifyany-means has infected other spheres of civilian life as well. We see this now in the extreme prejudice and brute force being applied to law enforcement, which increasingly resembles the dystopian vision of 2000 AD's Judge Dredd or Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. The first time I saw lethally over-armed and cocoonwrapped riot police was during the first major anti-WTO battles in Seattle. Since then, the model of machine-tooled lethal force is a common sight at every demonstration—from Genoa to Doha, and of course always in New York.

Along with a military-level increase in the ability to police, enforce, detain, harass, spy, and attack, there is also a rise, especially in developing nations, of an expanded military role in governments. As democratic experiments fail, the idea of the benevolent dictator is back in vogue. This was evident even in genteel events like the Asia Society's Asia 21, where some Singaporean speakers battled democracy advocates by expounding on 'Asian Values' and 'stability not democracy.' We see this played out in the images that appeared on Flickr after the Thailand coup,

showing people placing flower garlands near military checkpoints-the Vietnam protest image of long-stemmed flower placed inside a National Guard rifle, played in reverse. The army man in (or out of) khaki is a spectre again in countries such as Algeria, Turkey and Fiji, and Parvez Musharraf proves that opposition to military coups is always conditional and opportunistic. Reflecting on the seductiveness of warrior-solutions to the messy business of democracy, the late writer Humayun Azad predicted: 'One dawn morning a General will take over the country. He will call in a judge, that stupid judge will believe that he is the one who is really running the country. Then the general will keep giving the country bootsunglass-left-right democracy. All the famed opportunists (this word is now praise) will come to the shade of his boot. One day that General will be immortal.'

[Rajnithibidgon, Agami Press, 1998]

artist in age of diminished expectations 'Strangely, life was becoming almost bearable. I don the robe of hermit without a cry, he thought.

On the phonograph, music played, quiet and unhurried. Outside, the vampires waited.' [Richard Matheson, I Am Legend, Bantam, 1964] Without devolving into an endless litany of all the soft and hard conflicts in the world (there are so many to choose from), we can conclude that the post millennium world is in sorry shape and in need of many interventions. And so, we can dive into the conversation about the potential, ability, and responsibility of cultural actors. In particular, many

of us have felt a growing realization over the last few years that the visual arts are conspicuously absent from today's contentious political debates. An explosive art market has created a 'Green Zone' inside which we are bubble boys, insulated from external, grim, realities. This is not to place a relative value judgment on artwork that is not (or is) socially engaged.

But we need to fight against profit calculations that marginalize and punish those artists who do choose to engage political issues directly in their practice. Also of concern is a critical impulse that reflexively categorizes such work as didactic. These cultural equations and frozen positions must be urgently critiqued and dismantled.

We live in an age of reduced expectations and diminishing returns, especially in the area of political dissent. In spite of numerous rallies over the last four years against the Afghan invasion, Iraq war, Darfur carnage, Guantanamo black hole, Abu Ghraib horrorshow, and continued racial profiling of the 'other', tangible victories have been dishearteningly rare. Of course, people come out to register vocalized, visible opposition even in the absence of results. But facing an endlessly resilient power structure, the movement faces exhaustion. At the first antiGuantanamo rally of 2007, Pakistani poet Sarah Husain sms'ed me angrily from the freezing streets: 'Where is everybody?' I typed out a flippant reply from my warm apartment. That was the theme and fate for many recent organized protests. Getting bodies on the streets sometimes feels like an exhausted tactic, new methods need to supplement and replace them. I'm vaguely

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embarrassed even by that moment of euphoria when we were chanting 'George Bush Corporate Whore/We Don't Want Your Oil War.' I fear that footage from those rallies will suddenly appear on YouTube—like Joschka Fischer's street-fighting years, we're suddenly embarrassed by youthful optimism.

The role of the cultural producer in these times requires dissection. Richard Huelsenbeck told a 1918 conference audience: “We were for the war. Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt.

There is not enough cruelty.' Of course Dada had a distinct war critique, but others took on the role of creating a fascist mythos that assisted in annihilation projects—Foujita's theatrical wartime paintings, Leni Riefenstahl's paean to the fetishized Aryan body, Syed Ali Ahsan's poetry for the dictator, or Amitav Bacchan's saber-rattling in jingoistic filmi projects. There are also the military dictators who were frustrated artists, famously Hussain Ershad, who wrote poetry, and Idi Amin, who displayed filmmaking elan for Barbet Schroeder.

Beyond critiquing this impulse to grease the military machine, how do we understand and support the cultural practitioner who actively opposes war culture?

Their role may sometimes be direct and confrontational, at other times a quiet, post facto reflection. For those who do take on the role of last man in front of Tiananmen tanks, it is important to understand the structures that militate against them. Looking at an exhibition of Soc-Art (or 'New Red Art') at New York's Orchard gallery, I thrilled at the documentation of blotchy, hand-lettered

'Solidarnosc' slogans jammed on top of a Polish news broadcast. A live, pre-digital hijack of the television signal that gave an electric shock to Warsaw living rooms. I'm waiting for someone to similarly hijack one of the giant billboards in Soho, Times Square or Piccadilly Circus and commit creative vandalism. Why is it only Banksy who still dares to sabotage a Disneyland ride with visions of orange jumpsuits? I keep hoping for gangs of culture jammers, not within the rarefied confines of 'street culture' gallery shows, but mounting full assaults on the warrior-friendly mediascape.

There are of course numerous adventurous artmakers who are tackling these issues head-on, but Artists Against War

there are many institutional barricades that impede their path.

Wishful nostalgia is dangerous, but reading the narrative elsewhere in this book of the 1980s' Artists Call project reminds us that it is possible for artists, even in a go-go art market, to find a space for meaningful political dissent that brings tangible results to people outside the gallery perimeter.

There are several factors preventing a similar impulse and result today, and we can consider at least three of them: i) Fetish 'I heard some rumour that the CIA like, just arrested Lawrence Weiner 'cos of his beard' and I was like 'dude, that sucks. I'm

Sarah Bridgland

gonna grow a beard in protest' and my dealer was like 'dude, that's so cool and it's gonna be real helpful in sellin' your work 'cos collectors are, like, goin' crazy over beards at the moment.' [Satirical letter by Brock Jones, 1/07] First of course there is the problem of politics simply as a faddish layer or category. Just as ethnicity can be a lucrative categorization, so can a sheen of politics—especially if it is the unthreatening, Prada-clad, faux Marxism variety. Can we think of another icon that has been so completely stripped of revolutionary or historical potential as Alberto Korda's photograph, a point only (inadvertently) underscored by Victoria & Albert Musuem's exhaustive documentation of the hundred faces of Guevara. Similarly, when I look at

Marianne Boesky gallery's invite for a show by Donald Moffett, I see a faux sticker with the word 'IMPEACH.' Later I realize it's not faux at all, in one hidden corner is a 'Peel Here' tab. But will the show's visitors leave the gallery and start guerilla stickering all over town? When memorialized graffiti bombing and packaged bohemia is the bleeding edge of gallery-based 'subversive' art, it is a struggle to overcome the commercial instrumentalization of genuine political positions. If political art becomes uber-trendy, the first victim is politics. Bemoaning the deafening silence of the artworld during the most recent Lebanon war, Emily Jacir wrote in her blog: ' I am sure there will be conferences organized, teach-ins and always the 'hero' filmmaker who will risk life to make a documen-

tary, the readings, the art exhibits, and the art world will eat the Lebanese artists like pieces of chocolate.' ii) Dichotomy 'Our friend is an artist and he says his art is political, but he says it is also totally ineffectual and, therefore, is not activism.' [Mike Bonnano, The Yes Men] The challenge for cultural producers is to find a meaningful balance between aesthetics and their desired political engagement.

Okwui Enwezor delineated some of the issues embedded within critiques of Documenta XI when he wrote, 'If we take on board the idea that combining aesthetic procedures with documentary/ethical questions presupposes the corruption of the autonomy of art we immediately face

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problems they each pose to our comprehension of reality in the context of art works, images, and events as they appear in exhibitions and institutions of contemporary art.' Paul Chan solves this by forcefully separating his activism from his art, Dread Scott opts for an extremely conjoined practice. There is a built-in cynicism towards perceived ideological agendas behind a direct approach. When the approach is more elliptical, it is more accepted territory (although here they may be charged with 'trivializing'). An endless questioning can even manifest in negation, as in Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Happen. Some seek space in a continuum between the direct and the poetic, putting into practice William Carlos Williams words: “It is difficult/to get the news/from poems/yet men die miserably/every day/for lack/of what is found/there” All this can lead to a false dichotomy between 'genuine' art and 'political' art, pushing the latter towards some rarefied ghetto. This logic even led to the recent pronouncement of Amiri Baraka as a 'marginal figure' or as Stanley Crouch scathingly observed, '[he] could have been like Saul Bellow, but with his own style and perspective. If a writer goes into politics, he should maintain his independence.' (New York Times, 1/14/07) Forceful political positions have frequently doomed artists to precisely this sort of dismissive indictment. iii) Seppuku 'I was seeing work in studios and I was realizing that this work wasn't being presented in galleries because the galleries didn't know how to contextualize, engage, and

sell it. It's a whole other side of the system, it's a monster, in a way.' [Dead Daderko] Related to the above is also the real risk of politically engaged art as career suicide, especially for the young, struggling artist. Outright censorship comes usually from right-wing institutions, as when the plans for the Drawing Center at Grand Zero floundered over Amy Wilson's Life In A Free Country. The more subtle pressures come because disapproval of (some) political art manifests itself through the quiet sidelining of these artists' careers. Or even more insidious (because selfcensorship is the best censorship) is when the artist starts to move away from direct political work because they realize their careers are going into free-fall. When an artist's more socially engaged practice gets relegated to 'something she does on the side', while her other work is patronized and sold, most would make the logical choice. The starving artist mythos is only romantic to those who don't have to live it. Moaning about money in the artworld has become another tired trope. Of course the market is crazy and overheated, but it has always been this way—people have been predicting apocalyptic collapses since the 1980s (and there was of course one such dip). Anyone with a modicum of interest in the future of the arts cannot possibly be upset that artists are now able to make a comfortable living from their work, at many multiples of what was possible before. Neither is early, hyper-professionalism necessarily a betrayal of some sacred trust. The real issue is not the presence of money, but whether by its' presence it is

neutering politically challenging work. It is essential to carve out a space for continued vigorous thought and dissent, protected from the punishment of the market.

Engage Or Die 'From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.' [Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, Knopf, 2005] In an effort to jolt the hyper art market out of its current juggernaut path, Jerry Saltz wrote: 'The agenda needs to be set by artists, not the market. Supply-anddemand thinking has to shift to production-and-experience thinking. Small communities or cells of artists, curators and critics should band together, take positions, make cogent arguments, and put those things out there.'

[Village Voice, 9/16/05] It is our desire to stake out a clear space for engaged political art that can (once again) fulfill the potential of artists as public activists, intellectuals and agents of progressive, political change.

This show came about propelled by that impulse—not to launch a grand manifesto but at least to lob a small hand grenade into smug paradigms that 'manage' the artworld as if it is a trading floor or investment fund, as opposed to something with potential to shape visions of other possible futures.

This show's title borrows partially from Chris Hedges' book on warlust. The title of this essay similarly came from Casey Kasem's radio rant, as appropriated by Negativland. In the original radio show, America's comforting music father figure is caught in an off-air moment

Francesco Simeti

railing against U2: 'This is bullshit, nobody cares. These guys are from England, and who gives a shit?'

Free-associating between U2's ferocious legal response and the Gary Webb spy plane incident that inspired Negativland's guerilla warfare, I started wondering if this would be the fate of artists making (or choosing not to make) political art interventions. As the world continues to slide towards national security panic, people who do not engage with these issues risk becoming irrelevant to vital cultural dialogue. Recent Biennials seemed to operate in magnificent isolation, oblivious to a world split asunder by violence.

Now that there is blood in the water and it is safe (and fashion-

able) to attack the American Imperial project, they have belatedly started programming political work. Will this be a temporary dip, before the art world resumes regular programming, isolated in splendid art fair echo chambers? We hope rather that it will become a robust trajectory, fostering artists and art institutions active role in deciding political futures.

In an effort to challenge hermetic trends, this show is our small contribution to a dynamic conversation that is already under way in many locations. While a small minority of these artists have exhibited at venues such as the Whitney, Venice and Sydney Biennials, we also discovered many

of these works while attending protest rallies, going to concerts, browsing a comic book store, and surfing YouTube and Flickr.

Within the (soon to be expanded) silo of political art, certain conflicts tend to dominate. So we sought out and emphasized conflagrations that slip under the radar. These include the Beslan school raid, rebranded School of Americas, East Timor library, Oaxaca burning, Darfur refugee camps, Rome assassination, Iraq's managed chaos, 'Safe' Area Gorazde, D.W. Griffith's Night Riders, Vietnam's burning monk, Oliver Stone's 9/11 blockbuster, Jetblue's t-shirt policy, Paris' cat graffiti, Newsweek's Rwanda amnesia, Iranian embassy takeover, Che Guevara's New York visit, Bangladesh's gun culture, and Thailand's rose coup.

The current poverty of what Doug Ashford calls 'responsive, socially active visual culture' needs to be challenged head on. The best response to the question of whether political art can play a viable role in shaping mass culture, world events and politics is to look at these and many other artists who are drawing out plans for their own rebellions—both inside the frothy art market, and also far away from white cubes, in neosituationist art practices, independent pedagogy and teaching, rebellious intervention, aesthetic innovation, street action, and public dialogues interfacing with our daily lives.

Naeem Mohaiemen is an artist working in New York and Dhaka. His projects have been shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (Wrong Gallery), UK House of Lords, Munich Mufathalle, Exit Art gallery, etc.

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Morten Krogvold, Norway

celebrating photography

By Hana Shams Ahmed and Nader Rahman

Forty-seven exhibitions, eight venues, more than 1000 photographs and 23 participating countries easily made Chobi Mela IV the largest photography festival in Asia. It all started in 2000 when the first festival of its kind in Asia was organized under the title 'The War We Forgot'. That show featured the most significant press photographs taken over forty-five years by thirty photographers from about ten different nationalities affiliated to a dozen international news organisations

Rupert Grey, U K

insects stuck on it. The picture mesmerises; one is inadvertently drawn to the picture, much like insects to light. At first one thinks of an abstract shot of the moon with insects flying around in the air, but on closer inspection the real picture emerges. This ambiguity of images is a major part of his craft.

Another picture that comes to mind is the very first one on view. It is an image of bats in the sky, taken from a distance. But initially it gives the impression of a spinal column that hangs unattended in the night sky. It is a truly breathtaking image and it sets the tone for the surreal images that pop up out of nowhere in an exhibition supposedly focusing on realism.

Bats come to the fore again in another case of mistaken identity, where he photographs a large number of bats flying against white clouds. At first, this seems a rather unspectacular image of birds, but when one takes a second look, the thin translucent membrane of the bats' wings become clearer and the photograph serves as another example of ambiguity within pictures and their meanings.

Three of Parke's best pictures are rooted in earthy realism. 'New Year's Eve' is a spectacular image of cowboys in the rain. They seemingly go about their work, not giving the rain a second thought; no doubt 2003 was not the end of an era for them. Their backbreaking work is a constant in their lives. This picture is so extraordinary because every single raindrop has been amplified and resembles almost a thousand shooting stars. The sky is eerily unearthly and that adds a unique dimension to an already dark picture.

Another picture of beauty queen contestants at the annual harvest festival needs to be seen to be believed.

It depicts a number of women sitting on the bonnets of their cars. The cars are lined up on a street that curves away from the centre, so that as far as the eye can see, women are sitting on their cars. The composition of the picture is brilliant, highlighting the images of the women closest to the eye, and simply multiplying that one shot over and over again until it becomes a blur. The women appear to be trophies and the melancholy of their plight radiates from the picture.

Contact Press Images

Gregory Constantine

Patrick Sutherland

All of Trent Parke's images are black and white as they had to be. It is only through the absence of colour that we see the skeleton of an image. He has exhibited a collection of bones and with the last of his pictures, that of his son entering this world, he has breathed life into those bones.

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Pablo Bartholomew

a journey through Pablo Bartholomew, India

unseen india The captivating Indian photographers Pablo Bartholomew's images are also the most famed ones.

These are the series of eight photos that won the Best Picture Story at the World Press Photo Awards in New Delhi in 1976. It consists of a set of eight photographs depicting a Danish woman in a cheap Delhi hotel preparing a morphine fix for herself. In the first photo the woman, thin and sickly, is seen caressing her dog: she is seemingly lost in her own thoughts, and cocooned in her own lonely world. It is as if she takes the syringe in her hand to escape from her loneliness and depression. The focus here is on the syringe; the woman is blurred out in the background, the shot emphasising that the syringe has now slowly but surely taken over her life. She injects herself with the deadly drug and goes on to lie down on the clearly unwashed linen bedsheets on an equally unclean little hotel room. It seems like a bit of a contradiction for a foreign woman to be in such a condition in such an Indian hotel room.

All of Bartholomew's photographs may shock the urban middle class who prefer to keep their eyes away from anything that does not follow societal or religious norms. The photographer has brought to life

Shahidul Alam

happenings on the streets and dark alleys of the cities he grew up in—from the hippies, junkies, eunuchs and street performers in Old Delhi, to the underground opium dens and sex workers of Mumbai and finally to Calcutta where he captures the Chinese community in Tangra within his expert lens. In all the photos, the photographer is consciously trying to focus on the outcasts of society. There is a mood of soul-searching underlying all his photographs, a mood that is reflected in his introduction where he says, 'Changes within me and around me took me into the streets in whatever city I lived in, wandering around aimlessly with my camera.'

many faceted life on our riverbanks from the social, political, economic and religious point of view in his 25 black and white photographs.

His photographs beautifully portray the simplicity of people whose lives are in some way intertwined with the river. A bird's eye view breathes life into the photo of a set of fishermen's boats moored after a long night of inactivity, waiting on the men in the

Abir Abdullah

His exhibition for this year's Chobi Mela is of his work in the late 70s; all are in black and white and emphasize a time long gone. The picture of a smiling man standing stiffly beside his young daughter who is uncomfortably dressed in a sari and has heavy makeup, perhaps taking their first photograph together at a roadside studio, takes up the space of the same wall where the caretaker of an opium den reclines carelessly, reading a newspaper, as if to show how such different lives live next to one another.

the many faces of the river Photographer Abir Abdullah takes us on a journey through the land of rivers, Bangladesh, depicting the

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Mahabub Alam Khan

Momena Jalil

early morning light to hop on board and start work.

There is a contrasting picture of a young boy attempting a somersault on the water as if to show how the river can be both a source of income and a source of recreation. Another photo shows women cooking with firewood on the riverbank. Two overloaded launches are seen crossing the river, as if in an attempt to race each other to the end. Most of Abdullah's photographs show a flurry of activity taking place in and around the river. The title of his exhibition 'Rivers and People' encapsulates the essence of his photographs for even where people are physically absent, there is evidence of their existence carefully laid behind to give the photos life. The most impressive photo on show is that of the early winter morning fog-covered view of the riverside. A man bends over with his pail to collect water while a small boat passes by under a barely visible bridge in the background. Even to the untrained eye, the image is captivating.

In his introductory note Abir explains his exhibition's boundaries, 'The river not only creates a boundary for various cultural and social events, but also creates and changes the dimension of people living around them. From trade to transport, or

Munem Wasif

providing food to sight-seeing tours, rivers and boundaries remain two inseparable parts of the lives of people around them.'

Abir Abdullah has won the Mother Jones grant for his War Veterans of Bangladesh series. He has also won the Asahi Shimbun medal from the International Photographic Salon of Japan in 1996, 1997 and 1999, the silver medal from the 2nd BPS international photo contest in 1998 and Bangladesh's Shilpakala Academy grand prize in 1998. far from ordinary Pathshala is the name of the photographic training school that has changed this form of art in the country. And the exhibition put up by the students of this institution does its reputation complete justice. In every piece of work the lives and livelihoods of the common people of Bangladesh are documented. An old man with wrinkled skin bearing witness to the years of toil and adversity with teeth missing from lack of care and attention still manages to flash a genuine smile for the photographer who records it very proficiently. In fact, it is the people who lead lives under very adverse situations who are at the forefront of the images. One is left to wonder, for example in

one of the photographs, how a woman so fragilelooking can bear the weight of a pile of bricks so expertly on her hand. We have no doubt seen many such images in our lives but seldom have we stopped to think that they are actually worth documenting. In another photograph a young mother sitting on the side of a street is seen cuddling her young child with love that is expressed more through her eyes than through action, while an older child, perhaps hers too, looks on like a disinterested observer. It's the joy of the very simple things in life that gives these photographs such vividness despite their black and white appearance. The elation on the faces of the fisherman dancing with the first catch of the day is surely worth a million words.

on the other side of the war After seeing the photos taken by such the proficient hands one may perhaps be wary about the quality of photos taken by amateur Iraqi civilians. But one would be in for a surprise. When the Iraq War started in 2004, The Daylight Community Arts Foundation thought that giving disposable cameras to Iraqi civilians would lead to a more tenable point of view of the war. The result is a set of very moving images

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Masaru Goto

Saiful Huq Omi

of the new stories behind the war, stories of how life goes on as usual in a war-torn country. There are no photographs of bombs exploding or tanks rolling but there is the imprint of a war that affects the lives of every citizen in some way or the other. From the image of friends flashing happy smiles in the school backyard to a family of rag pickers thoroughly at home on top of a garbage dump; these photographs portray the spirit to live on despite all odds. One of the photographs show two mischievous little boys brandishing their toy guns in a manner that is particularly moving, given the circumstances we know Iraqis are in. Another set of images captures a procession of people mourning the death of a loved one, as some of them carry a coffin on their shoulders. In another, men are seen going about their everyday occupations one of which is digging graves.

one man's fight to overcome the boundaries David Larson of South Africa takes the viewer on a personal journey of his father, whom he evidently admired very much. In his introductory note he describes how his father's life had been defined by

Alon Reininger

Gajaani

Mary Fitz

boundaries. In the 1960s he crossed racial boundaries and served among the poorest in a mission hospital despised by apartheid authorities. The neo-natal mortality had dropped from 68 per 1000 to 25 per 1000 in that hospital. Two decades on he crossed boundaries of personal ambition refusing a professorship at the largest teaching hospital. The images are predominantly of him going about his daily work looking at patients, walking down through his neighbourhood, doing an ultrasound of a pregnant mother and injecting a woman with life-saving medicine. They once again reinforce the overall impression left behind by Chobi Mela: extraordinary images of life lived by people living in boundaries, photographs that testify to the immense power of this art form to document everyday life carefully and memorably.

Hana Shams Ahmed and Nader Rahman are staff writers with the Star weekend magazine, Bangladesh

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British Bolton University lecturer Dave Clark speaking about digital images

the art of storytelling at chobi mela iv

beyond boundaries

By Fariha Karim

The mood was festive in the capital of Bangladesh

D

espite the protests and blockades that left Dhaka air heavy with uncertainty, people were singing and dancing to a brass-band playing traditional folk songs for the opening rally of Chobi Mela IV, the international festival of photography.

The celebrations, in fact, continued till midnight with a boat-trip across the Buriganga on opening night.

The party returned to Dhaka's shores at six o'clock the next morning, bleary-eyed, and still excited because of the way it had spent most of the night dancing on the deck. With more than 1,000 pictures in 49 exhibitions assembled from 23 countries, the

festival was remarkable by any standards.An initiative of Drik, Chobi Mela is currently the only festival in the world to run a mobile version. Rickshaw-vans with samples of the festival travelled to schools, football pitches and bazaars, bringing world-class photography to people who would otherwise never see the inside of a photo gallery. This year's theme was boundaries.

Photojournalists and artists dealt with the concept in different ways. Some looked at geographic boundaries, such as the Indian Swapan Nayak in 'Refugees in their Own Land', pictures about ethnic conflict and displaced people in northeast India.

Others saw boundaries as social barriers. The

Shahidul Alam delivers a speech at Bengal Gallery during the opening ceremony of Trent Parke's exhibition

Photos: Din M Shibly and Drik

Robert Pledge holds a presentation on 'The Art of Photojournalism' at the German Cultural Centre, Dhaka

Bangladeshi Shehzad Noorani's collection, 'The Daughters of Darkness' brought marginalised sexworkers into focus at Shilpakala, the National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts. At Drik gallery, Abir Abdullah of Bangladesh portrayed religious, commercial and social boundaries in shots of rivers and people. And Bangladeshi Shehab Uddin highlighted the barriers he overcame as a newcomer to Nepal in 'These Strangers are Family Now', at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture.

But the festival was made distinctive through the evening lecture sessions. In the first week, festival goers gathered every day at the Goethe Institute to

The Indian singer Kallol Dasgupta performs a song, written by himself for the Chobi Mela at the inaugural ceremony

hear people from various backgrounds discuss photography.

Despite a schedule that had to be kept flexible because of the uncertainty about who had managed to get into the country, who had to leave early and flights not arriving on time, there were at least 17 international participants ranging from British lawyer Rupert Grey to Australian Magnum photographer Trent Parke.

Chobi Mela is one of the few photography festivals that offer such an intimate ambience. As well as offering practical advice on issues such as copyright, speakers gave the audience a glimpse into the lives of

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The participants of the Chobi Mela bring out a colourful rally before the opening ceremony

photographers.

Unlike the more glitzy affairs at Perpignan or the World Press Awards in Amsterdam, Chobi Mela afforded a rare, intimate opportunity for the public to question the questioners, to hold photojournalists to account and gauge whether they deserved the kudos they get from doing their job.

As festival director Shahidul Alam put it: 'When a lot of these people speak in other forums, they're not interactive. They stay with their superstar-status. Here, they were questioned. There was a dynamic between the audience and them. Some then became defensive.

The fact that they, the superstars, are never confronted by these questions makes them that much

more sensitive to any sort of critique.'

The Mela continued despite the tense political situation in Dhaka, which had brought many other parts of the country to a complete standstill.

In the middle of Contact Press Images president Robert Pledge's presentation, Alam suddenly took the stage declared said: 'I'm sorry to interrupt, but I've got

a very important announcement to make.' We've had unconfirmed reports the government has sent the military onto the streets, with instructions to shooton-sight if there's any agitation. I think we'd better let people start getting home.' But interest still refused to wane. Nobody was deterred by the announcement.

On the contrary, viewers faithfully continued to turn up in droves. The sessions were as fascinating as being invited into somebody's home. Through detailed, informal presentations of personal projects, the lines between heart, mind and art became blurred as intrigued viewers discovered that the processes behind photographs were as powerful, as significant, as the final image itself.

Robert Pledge noted: 'It's a long time since I'd seen so many exciting statements, not just photographs.' It was the level of commitment and honesty and passion that everyone showed that really impressed me.'

A highlight of the show was the work of photojournalist Trent Parke. His exhibition, 'Minutes to Midnight', at the Bengal Gallery, made clear that the cricketer-turned-photographer is a spectacular artist.

His vivid descriptions of his 30-something year-old life endeared viewers to him. It revealed how he gave up his ambition to become a professional cricketer at 18 for photography, and took a job at an Australian daily paper. One day he walked out due to editorial constraints and went on a road-trip around Australia with his then partner and now wife, Narelle. Their journey was full of highs and lows, from his marriage proposal to a disastrous expedition which saw their 4x4 plunge into a lake, and left the pair scrambling to save treasured negatives.

Using scrapbooks, old family pictures and photographs of his journey, Trent presented a deeply personal portrait of his life, his family, his love, and his two young boys, one of whom was just weeks old when he left Sydney for Dhaka.

'It's important to push the boundaries of what's been done before,' Trent tells us. He lives and breathes his craft—from the moment he wakes up until he goes to sleep at night he is focused on his work. The audience was spellbound by the story of this storyteller. When his slide-show eventually came to 'Minutes to Midnight', the black-and-white images with their other-worldly quality wavering between the material and the spiritual now seemed to be of a different, magical dimension.

Indian photojournalist Pablo Bartholomew also

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Morten Krogvold, Shahidul Alam( Centre), and Robert Pledge at the opening ceremony

Doli Akhter, a disabled girl, gives her reaction after winning a scholarship to study photography at Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography at the opening ceremony

Rashid Talukder receives the Life Time Achievement Award for his contribution to Bangladesh photojournalism at the opening ceremony

dropping out of school at 17 and taking to drugs.

Before long, he was documenting the 'outcasts' of Delhi slums: drug-addicts and transvestites, hippies and street-performers. He declared: 'It gives me pleasure and satisfaction to know that I followed my instincts to engage with the fringe elements of society at a time when no photographer, artist or filmmaker was interacting with these people in South Asia.' It was the birth of a hugely successful career which eventually led him to cover top political Indian leaders as well as major international news stories such as the Bhopal disaster, winning him his second World Press Photo award.

Afterwards, celebrated Norwegian photographer Morten Krogvold said: 'When Trent and Pablo Bartholomew gave their wonderful speeches, for the first time in a long time, I was inspired by photography and I sat and wrote about UV lights.'

This intimacy, the story behind the story, was the attraction behind 'Contact/s 30: The Art of Photojournalism' at the National Museum.

Curated by Robert Pledge, it featured 30 contact sheets made since 1976. It was the first time people in Bangladesh saw the iconic images taken by photographers such as Annie Leibowitz and Sebastiao Salgado.

Pledge commented: 'As the world has now fully entered the digital age, it is doubtful that a show of

this type will exist in thirty years. Contact sheets…are fast disappearing, destined to become artifacts of photographic history along with tin plates and glass negatives.' The contact sheets are like a filmstrip of the photographer's assignment, providing a cinematic narrative of the situation they face. Like a fine artist's sketchbook, viewers got to see how the photojournalists reach their chosen pictures. Boundaries between forms shift, as behind-the-scenes frames are displayed as exhibits in their own right, equal in status to the final iconic image.

But Pledge's presentation allowed for even deeper insights. The agency that he works for includes the 'maverick' photographer Kenneth Jarecke, who took the World Press Award winning picture of an Iraqi soldier who had turned to ash at the wheel of his vehicle after being incinerated by a US bomb during an attack on retreating forces leaving Kuwait. Out of the entire contact sheet, there were just two frames of this man. Jarecke was working with two cameras at the time, and the earlier frames had been shot with another camera body in black-and-white, but he wisely decided to shoot these extra frames in colour.

The haunting image was first shunned by agencies such as Associated Press who had taken the decision to self-censor, apprehending themas too controversial and uncomfortable for the 'safe' versions of the invasion more commonly seen in the Western press.

Only a couple of papers, including the London Observer decided to print the image on March 10 1991. Even then, it was ignored by the American press, until Jarecke wrote about it himself in American Photo Magazine's July/August 1991 issue.

Now, following the second invasion of Iraq, photographs have again exposed what lies hidden beneath the propaganda of Britain and America's governments which have tried to suppress truths about the brutality of their actions. This time, the media isn't as complicit. The world was left reeling after images of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, saved by US soldiers as 'trophies', were flashed on television screens this year. Certainly there was a distinctly critical edge to the evening meetings.

Bolton University lecturer Dave Clark spoke about Digital Image markets and the Majority World.

According to Dave, the Getty's and Corbis's, superagencies with particular agendas, have transformed photography into a sellers' market, lending a new sense of commercial urgency which has led to stereotypical images of the 'poor, starving', and

Morten Krogvold reviews photographic portfolios by the Pathshala students

subservient, south. As a result photojournalism became more about money and less about looking for the picture that others wouldn't find. Images of the majority world became dominated by negative, disaster-prone representations taken by Western photographers.

This was the reason Drik was set up, and Clark himself became interested in questioning this attitude after visiting Bangladesh in the 1980s. He questioned how he, a white Westerner, was representing the country compared with local photographers.

But despite festivals such as Chobi Mela, or organisations like Drik, many Western photographers are still ignorant of how good most of the photographers from the rest of the world are.

Dave has worked with photography students in Dalian, China, and in Bolton, England. Both sets were asked to submit photojournalistic projects. Without telling them whose work was being shown, they were asked if they thought the pictures that had been taken

by Chinese or British photographers. While nearly all the British students got the answers wrong, nearly all the Chinese students got the answers right.

But the evening sessions also saw hierarchies between minority and majority worlds played out.

Photojournalist Chris Rainier, of the National Geographic, presented his work on 'Ancient Marks', a selection of images of 'tribal', or indigenous, groups of people in Africa covered in ritual tattoos. The black-and-white images were technically striking.

Compelling, even. And it must have been hard work for a white Canadian male who could easily have been denied access into such communities. Some found the images offensive. Contemporary African societies

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Contact Press president Robert Pledge gives a presentation on Contact Press

were exhibited as historical objects in a museum, photographs carrying Victorian undertones of the exotic, dark continent. Shockingly fascinating.

But when it came to critical questions, there were only two. He had said he 'loved' the fact that he went from 'disappearing' cultures to modern societies within six days on assignments, so someone asked Chris what his definition of 'modernity' was. Another questioned the exhibitionist way the people had been presented, with little insight into the culture that had produced the tattoos or stories of the human beings behind the marks.

Arrows of rage were also fired at a little-known Phillipino photographer, Richard Atrero De Guzman, known as Bahaghari, who had photographed indigenous, tattooed Butbut peoples in his country.

Although the photographs were less shocking than Ranier's work, and Guzman had tried to engage more with a culture, he became the target of people's anger.

They asked him probing questions such as: why didn't you get naked yourself if you wanted your subjects to be undressed? How would you feel if your mother or sister was photographed like that? What makes you think you have the right to go in and photograph 'these' people? He answered questions as honestly and as gracefully as he could. Later, he was reported to have said he wouldn't return to this subject and was

going to revise his aims and goals in photography.

But then the representation revealed power structures within the industry: here was a white photographer from a major Western magazine regarded by many as the pinnacle of photography, but he was too unapproachable, too intimidating for criticism. On the other hand, a lesser known, young Asian photojournalist wasn't. He was vulnerable, and the audience knew it.

But while the sessions became, at times, uncomfortable, the formation of new friendships, the sense of camaraderie and the bonds between people who had worked together for years was touching. Morten Krogvold had already stolen the hearts of students at Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography.

They were in tears when his workshop ended.

After showing his film about a Norwegian director who produces Samuel Beckett plays in prisons, he astounded audiences by announcing that two students of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, had been selected to show work at the prestigious Northern Lights festival in Norway.

Pathshala principal Shahidul Alam, who founded the school, was invited to the inauguration. Morten described how Alam had become a good friend of his and how Bangladesh had become so dear to him. He said: 'In Europe, I charge $1,000 for a workshop. But

I come here and do them for free.' He declared: 'Some of the students here are the most talented I've seen. They have a hunger for learning.'

As he left the platform, Morten and Shahidul gave each other a bear-hug. Morten's students grabbed him on stage to adorn him with their gifts of a lungi, shirt, and feed him a cake, declaring 'We love you Morten'.

Through the sessions, people in Bangladesh also got to see exciting projects such as InSight Out, of Thailand, which are often ignored in the mainstream press. Presented by Yumi Goto, the photos were by 119 children from Aceh, Thailand, who had lost their families, friends, homes and schools in the Tsunami and were given point-and-shoot cameras to help process their feelings and emotions.

Yumi said: 'When we started doing this, people said, 'this is ridiculous. Do they need a camera and film at a time like this? They need food and shelter'. But the pictures came out very well, reflecting the maturity of the children. And they showed sides of the disaster that the Western, mainstream press did not cover, partly because the photographers had a unique access which was denied, or not sought, by Western agencies.

Emerging photographers got practical advice from the sessions, like where to get work published. Rupert Grey, Robert Pledge and Philipino historian Jose Maria M Cruz discussed copyright issues and raised the idea of a 'collective memory' through a shared archive.

The 22-year-old photojournalist Cristobal Trejo came all the way from Mexico independently to take part in Chobi Mela. His project 'Windows Experience' viewed boundaries as a bridge between different worlds.

In introducing Trejo, Alam recalled a story where

Norwegian photographer Morten Krogvold is loaded in gifts by his workshop students at Pathshala

he mistakenly thought he was about to be robbed in Mexico. In fact, his taxi driver had taken him to a lonely village so he could find a translator and tell him how much he enjoyed his work.

Alam said: 'I salute your country, where photography is appreciated so widely.' Drik, Chobi Mela and Pathshala have also been working towards a similar aim in Bangladesh, by making the normally closed-off world of photography accessible to all parts of society.

One of the last sessions ended with a short film based on a train journey directed by Joseph Joshy of Drik India. Alam also presented his own work on the Tsunami, full of poignant, powerful images.

There was a slide-show on the final night: behindthe-scenes at Chobi Mela. The audience loved it.

Many of them were watching themselves. But it was also a testament to the hours, days and weeks of hard work the cast of Chobi Mela, including printers, painters, joiners and rickshaw-wallahs, had put in to make it such a fantastic event.

Chobi Mela is sure to continue its unstoppable rise, pushing Bangladesh to the fore of world photography.

It's groundbreaking for a country like Bangladesh, where photography is not taught at major institutions such as Dhaka University, the Institute of Fine Arts.

The organisers seemingly had bottomless reservoirs of energy. From the tense political situation to battling obstructive staff at the National Museum who tried to stop them from working all night to get Contact/s 30 up, the people behind Chobi Mela proved what vision and determination can achieve.

Chobi Mela did not receive any government aid.

By going to Chobi Mela's evening sessions, even people with no background in photography learnt how photography is more than just artistic or technical competence. It's a way to reach the human spirit.

As the great Spanish artist Picasso had said: 'The camera is the photographer's problem!'

Fariha Karim is a Bangladeshi writer-reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. She has been working for the past two years as a journalist for a local newspaper in Greenock on the West Coast of Scotland

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