imprints of process
peers 2023
The heat has been taking us out, one by one and then, all together. Delhi’s noise, we’re at least mostly free from/spared, but the heat swells, engulfs and persists, in sweat. Gopa, who rises almost with the sun, to tend to her paddy and wheat, the rest of us, stretch our waking hours late into the night. Mahesh curled up on his studio floor, headphones on, a broad barometer of how long we’ve each stayed up. His constancy is a better time-keeper than any clock, watch, or ticking thing. As Shiv paints through the wee hours of the night, his plastic cups full of paint water seem to spawn almost as fast as Celin’s spring and steel-ball caterpillars. It’s really something to watch it all come to life, the delicately painted watercolour images and the flickering lights illuminating the screens of the second-hand tabs and phones he fixes them onto. They are a physical manifestation of his memory, a drive of what he’s thinking about and the images going through his head at this point in his life. Shiv’s work has the most comprehensive scope and public-facing look out of all the pieces being worked on, but it’s also arguably one of the most intensely personal.
All of the six of us actually come from somewhere other than Delhi. I’ve lived here the longest, but in many ways, I’m also new to this Delhi - polluted beyond belief; the climate crisis is not something people just talk about at school Earth Day celebrations, not this smothering, choking, dusty reality. I can feel the change, but I’ve not experienced anything diametrically different in this city than this city. Gopa has, though. She has these memories of fertile green abundance and open skies, this communing with nature that she’s bringing to life here at Khoj. A massive roll of gorgeously textured handmade self-pulped paper that she spent days composing out on the hot terrace. Fast-growing paddy and wheat bloom all over desks, chairs, and tables, taking over her studio walls and spreading across the courtyard. Ever since she moved to Delhi a few years ago, she’s had to recontextualise and often re-scale her land-based practice. Translating her art to the space constraints of Delhi has grown her ingenuity and tenacity, but this past month, she (and her work) have been able to really take root and spread out. She records this spatially-imposing work in a sketchbook where drawings, paper scraps and dried natural elements form a layered, tangible memory artefact. Because of the moisture levels in her studio, she has to tend to this book almost like it is alive, carrying it everywhere with her, keeping it safe in the room we share at night, and thinking about the temperatures it can survive in. This interplay of scale and commingling of what elements are protagonists of the Anthropocene keeps sticking out to me as I interact with and learn from this cohort of Peers. Celin’s work tends to centre what she calls ‘small creatures’ - a varying cast of lizards, ants, caterpillars, worms, dragonflies, rats and other visitors to the studios and homes she’s lived in. They spill and wriggle across the space, reflecting what she says about
life in Khirkee Extension - buzzing, crowded, and so vitally alive. Except now, as a visitor herself to Delhi, she’s been meditating even more on the concepts of homes, rooms and abodes. Her delicately-crafted terracotta recreations of rooms she’s lived in question what constitutes one’s habitat - is it a physical place, a kind of air quality, the beings you share it with, or is it what it takes to live and survive there? I’ve been thinking a lot about migration and of Delhi as a city of migrants, as opposed to the Rajdhani or some kind of official centre of a certain legislative power. If a city runs on migrant labour and influence and cultural exchange (and appropriation), aren’t the pulsing phenomena of immigration and emigration the manifestation of its breathing? In and out, on and out… From the day the peers accessed the studios, the idea of opening them up internally was on their minds. At that point, we’d spent barely a week together, but time and friendships were moving in that hazy summer camp way, movie trailer speed. Cut to the middle of the residency when not only were the partitions between Fileona’s, Celin’s and Mahesh’s studios removed, but Fileona’s NonNative Lament: Vilayati Kikar incorporates this interleaving of multi-authored processes. So much of what constitutes an art show follows the norms of self-publishing. There’s only so much external oversight dictating what the Peers can or cannot present or produce for this Open Studio, particularly for this residency where they don’t have to complete a work. But at the same time, the nature of the ways and timelines according to which these works are being envisioned and constructed reveals that the interaction with the public prints them. The elements can be moved around, increased or reduced, debated over and changed until the public sees them, locking them into place as the completed or presented ‘work’. So if each artist
is an independent publishing house, churning through their slush piles, exploring manuscripts, debating and discussing ideas that together form a body of work, a multi-media ever-changing practice, is a particular show, an imprint? NonNative Lament is almost entirely composed of imprints Vilayati Kikar leaves, big bodies and gears, and screws presenting her impressions of Delhi in cool blue sheets. Shiv’s personal drives, which he thinks of his work, make up his memories and impressions of these times. It has less to do with Delhi and more with the freedom that Delhi can offer him now. He recollects news clips, memes, and conversations with his family into his paintings pasted on second-hand screens to depict luminous but flickering portals and ensure that his work, his memories, won’t be forgotten - or will be remembere. Two days into the Peers, Mahesh was already comparing Hyderabad and Delhi. Walking around Chandini Chawk, we spoke about the differences in how people eat street food in both cities and the noise. Of course, the sound is his preoccupation, and Delhi is a rich audio archive in the most invasive and all-encompassing ways. The precision with which he approaches his practice keeps it distinct and slow-moving. From profound observation and an intensive study of movement and machinic structures, Borne created his own noise and told his own stories. In the third week of Peers, we got to do a workshop together, which outwardly looked like it was going o thrust us into a situation where we’d all be on the same page, for once, at least in our mutual inexperience with the craft of book-binding. The colourful, noisy afternoon that culminated put paid to that idea at once because even when learning a new skill or climbing further information, it’s clear that muscle memory is something that you can’t leave behind. Even when sewing in a straight line or making
neat cuts, it was obvious who the trained artists were and more apparent that the body kept the score. Mahesh’s pin-straight lines and even calculated stitches, not to mention the hammer he brought into the Project Room, marked out his set of notebooks as flawless and technically perfect. Technical skill is central when dealing with materiality because the work manifests the artist or art practitioner’s intention. Text can only provide external context. Ultimately, it is less than a map, barely even a compass in art. And when the material is something as membraneous and sticky as memory, skill and form become even more essential because the canon itself is fading, changing - a former fact that unmoors you the more you look at it. Memory is all about connecting, maintaining, working through, and using. And connectedness is something that all the Peers grapple with through their practices, from Shiv’s nostalgic watercolours to Celin’s three-dimensional memory models. That’s where the heft of their individual works is from, through these links to collective archives and drives, whether they be scrapbooks stuffed to the brim or screenshots of family video calls or internal mechanisms of dismantled machines. - Mithran Critic in Residence, 2023 Peers