BROWNation-e-catalog by sandeep tangri

BROWNation -----------Vishal K Dar ------------

BROWNation more experiments in becoming -----------------------------This catalogue wa s p u b l i s h e d o n t h e occas sion of exhib itio n B R O W N a tio n , at Ga llery Espace , N e w D e l h i f r o m 24th November 201 0 to 2 3 r d O c to b e r 2010.

s iddh a r th a c h a tt e r j e e o n th e w o r k - in - p r o g r e s s o f Vis h a l K D a r

-----------------------------Delhi, 2010

I BROWNation is an experimental ‘state of mind’. It presents a space of reconstituted public ideals in an often impersonal polis. As an evolving process, ‘BROWNation’ manifests a belief that art work, among other productive forms of human work, will not cease to engage with the contested global currency of nationalism and with narratives of belonging. The work in BROWNation draws deeply on decades of recognizable formalism in photography, official iconography and monumental geographies – a vast aesthetic realm repeatedly remediated by populist state media from Delhi, by new media architectures online, and perhaps most potently by a history of cinema out of Bombay, Hollywood and the ‘art house’ alongside.

Speaking before 3,000 Indians gathered at a theater in Johannesburg a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi proposed a strategy of nonviolent resistance to a racist nationalism. ‘Satyagraha’ was born: a ‘truth force’. A century later, do we need to ask if this force is still relevant? South Asia is in a state of flux. Here the personal is perhaps more political than ever. At a moment of unprecedented consumption and strategic misunderstandings within the political ‘art of the possible’, we’re often called on to choose between principles of deconstructive uncertainty and outmoded models of discipline; to choose tactical affinities within constitutive agonisms. Among the countless aphorisms, if not truisms, attributed to the father of the Indian nation is that there are as many faiths as there are individuals. In efforts to find meaning or make sense of our many social realities, can those well-worn ideals of a ‘truth force’ be rekindled within practices of art, or at all reconstituted within a ‘we’, that shifting subset of what the Indian Constitution, among others, imagines as a ‘We, the People’? What practical experiments can be performed in this complex state of indeterminate longing? To what truths and desires do you belong, for now?

As expressed in a short essay from 2007, “we find ourselves thinking about the ‘BROWNation’ of an inherited, fairly ‘continental’ discourse, perhaps even a muddying of a putative mainstream - giving its subcontinental turbulence a more familiar coloration. We find ourselves speaking here of a (racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity of) people potentially pulled together in a reconstituted relation to otherwise ‘colored’ or prematurely identified societies.” As a project initiated by Vishal K Dar and driven by a small group of young practitioners (which then included his architectural studio ARK and my communication arts studio Seechange) BROWNation began in the hope that our collective experiments would travel just a little lighter, farther and possibly wiser.

BROWNation takes an experimental view of experience in contemporary India and the South Asian peninsula. This is a project that seeks to intervene across scales, via the digital to the manual and the material, the mental and the monumental; a process that never separates >> 1

II In conversation with Kaushik Bhaumik and Vishal K Dar - - - - - - - - - - - -------------

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>> spectacular formalism from a realm of ideas, recognizing that these already interact inseparably within in a spectrally-real (or really-spectral) socio-political setting.

A wall in Vishal’s studio carries traces of his process: sketches, digital prints, renders, densely annotated with deadlines, materials and the other marginalia that make a ‘post-material’ practice a reality. This is among the best settings to discuss an artist’s work, surrounded by screens, assistants clicking away, the hum of machines and lingering scent of chai and rain. This is among perhaps half a dozen visits I’ve made to this Hauz Khas barsati this past year, since Vishal and I were part of a short KHOJ residency on Design + Art. We were joined one afternoon by the film historian Kaushik Bhaumik, who for some years has travelled between Delhi and Bombay on work with the Osian festival and archive of cinema and art. This keeps him on his mobile as much as anyone, so for a hilarious ten minutes after arriving punctually, we each cut our deterritorialized circuits across the barsati, stepping around fiberglass sculptures, steel frames, bird cages and pots. An air of accumulated eclecticism and spontaneity adhered to the hours that followed.

This second exposition of BROWNation, a solo show by artist Vishal K Dar, essays a synthesis of the aesthetic and the socio-political to reflect on present conditions. The works include animated videos, print triptychs, photographic postcards, and mixed-media installations that draw on Dar’s richly hyphenated practice as a new-media-designer, architect-animator, Kashmiri-Dilliwala and citizenartist. The titles of the works here begin to indicate this plurality: Khwabistan (DreamLand), Nanga Mulk (Naked Land), C for Cutter, Travels of That Strange Little Brown Man, and I am a Monument. BROWNation takes a few leaps of faith from a transnational nest, finding a whole world at home. As a form of remembering how things are remembered across moving boundaries, it leaps to engage poetically with the politics of public culture. Finally though, ‘BROWNation’ is what you could call a state of mind.

Among the finished works I’d been looking forward to seeing were three short animated video loops (Suicide Chronicles) based on postage stamps that perform a meditation on the nationalist uses of agriculture, military and science. In ‘Jai Vigyan’, the third of this series elaborates on the tiny tableaus of the well-known ‘Jai Kisan’ and ‘Jai Jawan’ slogans from the days that the welfare state valorized the work of farmers and soldiers. Mining a steady shift in subsequent regimes to celebrating Big Science, especially military science, ‘Jai Vigyan’ (Hail Science!) mines the spectacular nuclear tests at Pokhran. A violent geyser of luridly red blood erupts from the blast crater, its plume briefly floating a commemorative stamp that bears Sri Lal Bahadur Shastri, our second PM and successor to the legacies of Nehruvian India. Whether or not this parodies the Manga homage of Tarantino, it does evoke the visceral relationships of militarization to the body politic and of the violence that links land and lives in the name of liberty. The loop returns to the void created around the blast, to begin all over again. Similar surprises unsettle the scenes of a soldier by the sea and farmers in fields.

Here Kashmir, that unfortunate photo-negative shaped hole in the national imagination, burns with a coiled intensity, beset by the projections of too many neighbors.

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Kaushik notes that he’s fascinated by the possibilities of the digital in unpacking a gesture that is always complex and goes in many directions. “Such unpacking could take up the form of heightening one aspect of a gesture to bring it into the fore-front, such as the monumentality of Mother India or one could depict historical associations such as Gandhi dancing with the urchins.” In the stamp works, the possibility of what we see in animated distortion and play is coded into the original content of the stamps. Much the same could be said about the postcards, where history is coded into a context that we all know about, but that take on a value of shock when visualized.

Nadsat is Russian for teenage, among the many words Burgess, a keen linguist, adapted or invented outright for his characters’ novel universe.” No, the father of the nation, widely known for his distaste of films in particular among other flash forms of memorialization, “would not have approved of the many posthumous honours that have been uneasily placed in the lap of his legacy”.

or would he have approved of this latest satirical homage, dubious as it is about a history of dubious honours. Posthumously and so perforce, Gandhi’s face has graced the medium of countless indiscretions, a witness to the garlanding with banknotes of a whole new generation of anything-but-Gandhian politicians. The Work ‘Mera jeevan mera sandesh hai / My life is my message’ plays on ironic imbrications of several moments of symbolic veneration: the flash of a shutter in the 40s catches a man smiling, a Reserve Bank of India press pounds down on a piece of paper sometime in the 1960s, transferring his etched face firmly onto the first of many notes that will be hung in grand photo-ops around the necks of politicians and newly-weds in the 2000s. In the installation itself, a green, freshly-minted mala of fivers with its air of aspiring upper-middleclass matrimony, takes on musty undertones. In the currency works, Mohandas-Mammon-Mayawati merge in what could be described as a bizarrely logical (e) motion-cut. Space-time is simultaneously collapsed and compounded in the director’s cut, releasing both meaning and sensation when met halfway by the viewer: that essential effect of juxtaposition that has come to be identified with cinema above all art forms. In this animation piece, as Vishal puts it “Gandhi takes it upon himself to call the bluff of the Republic of India.” To project intent, rallying the ghosts of present pasts to the cause of the contemporary, is part of the storytellers travelling bag of tricks.

In the postcards, titled ‘Travels of that strange little Brown Man’, the young Mohandas stands behind a goat and finds himself posing with statues of Lincoln, Rodin’s Thinker, Michaelangelo’s David, the destroyed Saddam, and a latter day Mahatma in the Salt March statue on Wellington Crescent. Cropped at the head, these largerthan-life characters from mythology, history and art, tower over the almost fragile young Kathiawadi lawyer, who seems an impressionable young traveler in search of the good photo op, leaving us to contemplate the anachronistic company that his many histories (if not History) will have him keep. Seeing such familiar icons transposed digitally into wholly other but often equally iconic images renders textual or perceptual associations suddenly “all too real”, as Kaushik points out, adding also that “secondary property... the shock of a contrast between Gandhi’s rural persona and the modern.” This series of experiments with a shock of recognition continues with the silent digital animation work, ‘C for Cutter’, which “not only brings out the possibility of considering bank notes as a sort of animation art, but also helps posit a possible absurdity of the scale of the 500 rupee note to the Indian mind, which might make the note a plaything in the hands of characters given to excess and play.”

Much as in the work ‘I Am A Monument’, a virtual monument of Mother India at Google Earth’s India Gate that emerged during the 2009 KHOJ residency, the artist undertakes a certain critical engagement with history as reassembled across a medley of mediatic forms. That complex work played, for one, with a hugely popular cinematic recasting by Mehboob Khan of Nargis as Mother India in his story of the same title, the divine mother-type that had risen to prominence in early nationalist conceptions of Bharat-mata: the nationas-motherland rising to face the goddesses of Britannia and Europe, variously materialized in the modern world

The title ‘C for Cutter’ suggests a recoding not just of the infant’s alphabet, where the cat is cast suddenly into an catastrophic collision course with ‘ultra’ cinematic references and adult entertainment. Vishal here evokes “incommensurable tensions between the ultra-violence engendered by ‘Cutter’ and the pacifism of Gandhi”, as the curator Geetanjali Dang observed earlier. In Burgess’ seminal 1962 novel, the “antagonist/protagonist Alex and his peeps communicate in English peppered with ‘Nadsat’, their own language for an ultra-violent future. 3

as the Statue of Liberty or Mother Russia in the 1960s. Informed by time with Greg Lynn’s computationalarchitecture practice and via Gehry’s bilbao (its ‘postmodernism’ redolent to Hal Foster of 19th century sculpture), Vishal’s ‘Mother India’ is sutured today into a landscape of monumental avenues and nationalist grandeur accessible via the roving eye-in-the-sky of online mapping and wayfinding software. An essay on this and other works-in-progress emerged during that workshop.

that - the screen in which we look at maps and flags is shifting, original configurations are dismantling and are going away from us all the time to god knows where or things are getting superimposed on one another etc. Everything is next to everything else in the modern world... the digital answers the need of modern history’s to produce many associations and juxtapositions but also at rapid speeds because the scene is always changing so fast...already.”

C FOR CUTTER

Single-channel video animation, 2009; 1 min 17 seconds

This digital animation invokes Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962). Alex, protagonist/ antagonist of Burgess’ seminal novel, and his peeps communicate in a trenchant combination of Nadsat – their language for an ultraviolent future – and English. The word Nadsat is the Russian equivalent of teenage. A considerable number of the words that belong to this violent verbiage have Russian roots, some go the French way and fewer still tread the English road. Burgess, a keen linguist, also invented several terms, whose origins have thus far remained unknown. And into this final slot falls the coin of Cutter.

At some point in our freewheeling conversation, we consider how a 500 rupee note is a key figuration of how contemporary aspirations have changed: what was for some a stand-in for quite unimaginable purchasing power when it was first released, today allows a couple a short evening out at a multiplex. The banknote, beyond its essential abstraction of use and exchange value, is also that locus of pleasure, and denial. Beyond its face value, the note becomes the symbolically charged bearer of everyday desires and corruptions of virtually every denomination, often circulated in continual betrayal of the face they venerate. The paradox of Gandhi’s portrait on our national currency becomes a space to see, hear and think about ‘evils’, in a farcical loop of technological surrealism that references the mad Dali-esque eye from ‘Un Chien Andalou’ and ends in the by-now banal moment of assassination. While Burgess’s ecstatic killers via Kubrick’s cult film pursued their ‘ultimate violence’ in ecstatic violation of social mores, this slaying of the Father, over and over-and-over, is far more familiar to many of us from countless replays on national TV and DVD of a film controversially co-funded by NFDC: Attenborough’s Gandhi. The script of the film lends a number of the works in the show their titles (“It takes a great deal more than a pinch of salt…”).

n this show, Mother India reappears as a large digital print, striding forward with her plough against a backdrop we must assume is the Rajpath of the Republic–fighter jets streaking overhead. The first three words of the Indian Constitution project forth with a constructivist intensity that recalls not-so-much Mother India’s agricultural echo of her scantily-clad, militant parallel in Volgograd but more the saturated graphic power of hand-painted signage across the subcontinent. With the English in Hindi, the words seem ironically to counter the marketing-logic of recent moves to Romanized titles in Bollywood movie releases and across shop facades, and to interrogate their own monumentality in a landscape of ambition-writ-large. The aim, perhaps, through all these games with (anti) historical de-signification and resignification, is to convert the symbol into a sign that can be endlessly manipulated. So, for instance they could, says Kaushik ‘follow arrows of desire that the sign is made to embody in coding a certain directionality, in the form of greed for instance.” Here, he continues, Vishal’s connect with Kubrick’s ‘Clockwork Orange’ in the context of the banknote work (C for Cutter) becomes important because materiality in that film takes on a directionality through the medium of violence, greed, madness.

In the book, ultra-violence is occasioned by components such as cutter, vacuity, ennui and misanthropy. By employing the word Cutter as the title of this nuttily

anthropomorphic Rs 500 banknote, the artist evokes undeniable tensions between the ultra-violence as engendered by cutter and the incommensurable pacifism of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is a given that the father of the nation would not have been terribly approving of the many posthumous honours that have been uneasily placed in the lap of his legacy. Needless to say, his presence on the Indian banknotes and coins would never have gone down well. In this animation piece, Gandhi takes it upon himself to calls the bluff of the Republic of India.

There are many ways that our collective pasts, endlessly remediated by a few, do haunt our futures. This territory of possibilities is part of what BROWNation sets out to explore. Prepare to meet Gandhi and Mother India meeting the Oogachaka baby. Think no evil. Enjoy

In our more general discussion on animation, Kaushik speculates that “the digital allows for playfulness to enter into the realm of symbolic at a faster rate. Manual animators were always able to produce juxtapositions but it took time to produce works.” As practitioners of the digital who do marvel also at how relative time is, and how new media and technological complexity may expand to fill it, this is a more complicated point. Speed, however is more than ever of essence. As Kaushik says, this logic of speed is central to the exhibition as it is all about rapid economic change, illusions of power, greed, and the parallaxes that such confusing changes bring about. ‘Khwabistan’ or the flag project are about

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Accompanying the video are three digital prints that utilise the actual size of Rs 500 notes and are titled “Bura Mat Dekho”, “Bura Mat Bolo” and “Bura Mat Socho”, each having Gandhi in various postures of distress and concern!* *title / text acknowledgements – Gitangali Dang The GUILD.

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<< Bura Mat Dekho

Bura Mat Bolo >>

SUICIDE CHRONICLES

a series of 3 animated ‘video-in-loop’ boxes

Soldiers and farmers together form the foundations of our nation. Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!* However, the revered icons of the 60’s have gone suicidal. Peering into a disconnect, we can’t grasp until bridged. On the 15th of August 1998, the addition of Jai Vigyan was made by Sri Atal Bihari Vaijpai. India is now a Nuclear power. Societies and National Skin | gone suicidal? *Jai Jawan Jai Kisan was a slogan given to India by the late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965.

Bura Mat Socho >>

Jai Jawan – 77sec

Jai Kisan – 27sec

NANGA MULK

video sculpture/installation 30sec

The ghostly Oogachaka* Gandhi dances over a large group of naked urchins, caught in a forward-reverse film loop. The film loop is a scene-slice from the cult film Prahaar (1991, dir.Nana Patekar). The video sculpture/installation is constructed on the technical principles of the Pepperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ghost**. * The animated dancing baby, internet phenomenon, 1996. **Pepperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ghost is an illusionary technique used in theatre.

In this print mural, that is a triptych measuring 12 feet x 6 feet, Mother India is charging forward, alone. This work is about the cinematic representation of who we are. Mother India embodies the ethos of the south Asian peninsula. She proclaims ‘I AM A MONUMENT’, reclaiming her rightful space in the colonial golden triangle (India Gate / Presidential Estate / Connaught Place).

I am a Monument

triptych print mural Digital print on Hahnemühle Canvas / Digital print LED light boxes

‘I am a monument’

TRAVELS OF THAT STRANGE LITTLE BROWN MAN

5 photographic postcards Digital print media Epson enhanced matte

This is a series of 5 photographic postcards that take us through the various sites that the little brown man has been to. World-renowned icons like Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo’s David, Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, Saddam Hussein and Mahatma Ganghi in each of the postcard that Mohandas seems to have interacted with much before he became the father of this Nation. Each postcard bears a title that is a dialogue from Sir Richard Attenborough’s GANDHI.

1. bapuji, the whole brownation is moving! 2. he has become quite good at this 3. you’re an ambitious man, Mr. Gandhi 4. it takes a great deal more than a pinch of salt 5.I am a Muslim and a Hindu and a Christian and a Jew and so are all of you

*the title of this work is inspired by Frederick B. Fisher’s book ‘That strange little brown man Gandhi’.

5. 1.

untitled.FLAG

flag on canvas Digital print on Hahnem端hle Canvas

In this 4 x 8 feet work, we see the residue of the flags of the countries of our subcontinent, after all their colours have evaporated and just the symbols remain.

KHWABISTAN

Installation in tin-sheets / concrete board / heater coils

While one side of the installation (reverse political map of the state of Jammu & Kashmir) is blackboard painted concrete board, the other side is fitted with red-hot heater coils on ribbed tin sheets. To many of us, beautiful locations are a strange creature. They exist in our memory that is made up of photographic documentation, literature or as explained by those who have been there. Much like how it happens in our dreams. KHWABISTAN explores this dreamstate a bit further.Â

A Great Deal More Than A Pinch of Salt Installation with salt / weighing balance / sculpture in wood and paper

Desi rock salt, nearly 25 kilos of it, is used to create a 3-feet high mound piled on a 6ft wide weighing balance in fibre glass. Two sculptures of Gandhi, bending down to pick up salt (one sculpted in wood and the other made of paper) are joined at the feet so that one is upright and the other lies on its back, placed on a mound of rock salt. It looks like a mirror image, except that the two hands reaching out for the salt, do not meet. *the title of this work is inspired by a quotation (from Richard Attenborough’s film GANDHI) ‘Mr. Gandhi will find that it takes a great deal more than a pinch of salt to bring down the British Empire’ Lord Irwin.

MERA JEEWAN HI MERA SANDESH HAI embroidered khadi canvas and currency notes

The canvas frame is emptied of Gandhi’s picture, instead using only his message. Muslim karigars embroider in rashm thread, Gandhi’s immortal line my life is my message on a hand-stretched khadi canvas that is then adorned with a Rs5 note garland made of nearly 2000 notes, mocking the moneylaundering politicians of our country, in a not so subtle reference to Mayawati’s mala-saga.

-----------------------------BROWNation( 2007) ------------------------------

xperiments are the strangest creatures. Their beginnings lie often in unanswerable questions. If, as a species, they can claim any consistent success at all, it’s in the fragmentary chronicles they deposit like so many fossils in pursuit of this or that small truth. Should you happen to be following on the tail of a particular experiment’s chase, you may benefit from a few modest insights or the odd trailblazing twist. More likely though is a series of detours through the scattered entrails of other chimeras, imaginary pasts and unknowable futures, tripping over evidence of how much wider and deeper these living mysteries may go.

The ‘civilizational idea’ and political realities of India have been central to modern retellings of this region’s stories. Nationalist historiography has worked to enforce or reinforce a ‘pan-Indian’ identity over contesting regional identity-formations. A ‘pan-South-Asian’ or sub-continental imaginary has enjoyed something of a recent upsurge in academic and popular publishing, outlining broad currents (if often too-broadly painted commonalities) of social organization across the sub-Himalayan region. We find ourselves thinking about the ‘brownation’ of an inherited, fairly ‘continental’ discourse, perhaps even a muddying of a putative mainstream - giving its subcontinental turbulence a more familiar colouration. We find ourselves speaking here of a (racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity of) people potentially pulled together in a reconstituted relation to otherwise ‘coloured’ or prematurely identified societies. We find ourselves speaking to a region tied together in internal conflicts, negotiations and solidarity at the same historical moment at which many that call it home migrate outward into ever more heterogeneous environments.

Quite a lot has been made of avant-garde art and architecture advancing with the vanguard of other disciplines, the sciences in particular, from optics and tectonics to non-linear mathematics and programming. In recent decades, some Western critics of aesthetic production have noted also a ‘cultural turn,’ a return perhaps to the realities of the abstract notion of a ‘public‘, and to questions left primarily to the social sciences in the post-enlightenment academy. Elsewhere, such as here in the ‘Post-colonial’, ‘South’, ‘Developing’ or most broadly ‘Two Thirds world’ (speaking geographically), forms of art have seen a multiplicity of other affirmative trajectories. At different times classified as native, traditional, modern, vernacular, hybrid, contemporary or altermodern, manifestations of art and scholarship evidence their own localized admixtures of philosophical, political, commercial and cultural engagement. Each speaks within, and sometimes for communities of patrons, practitioners and participants. 32

Read as ‘brownation,’ as a word-idea that plays with a self-consciously posed problematic, this is neither a geographically delineated collective of the darkskinned, nor a rarified global network for the region’s diasporic communities; and nor does it propose a catchall concept to enclose the myriad trajectories that ‘brown’ histories of consolidation, migration, opportunity or oppression have taken. Among its reasons-to-be are a spirited commitment to the theory, 33

art, media and critical practice, why and how should we tackle these questions? In looking for answers, can the satyagrahis’ hard-worn ideals of ‘truth-force’ and the ‘just path’ be mapped onto or find place within the practice of art?

aesthetics, politics and practice of such historically grounded yet trans-cultural forces as non-violence and self-organization, reconciliation and cooperation. 2007 was a year for national anniversaries and extravagant official celebrations of the events of 1857 and 1947. A few generations and century after Gandhi spoke of Satyagraha in South Africa, we wonder how we have changed since that rallying call for resistance against injustice. Abroad and later at home, in kinship cemented by systematically violent regimes, modern history’s most famous brown man realized a set of moral principles and action as a way out of endless counter-spirals of oppression. Gandhi and his followers demonstrated how humility, self-control and using peaceful means above all were the recourse of the morally enlightened, ennobling both those strong enough to embody this ‘soul-force’ as well as their victimizers. Like few others before or since, these were times when many were converted by example to a path of mutual recognition, reconciliation and respect for truth.

Vishal K. Dar *1976. Lives and works in New Delhi, India.

‘Snana’, ‘Reflections on Salt’, ‘Punctuations’ and ‘Suicide Chronicles’ are among a handful of art works in ‘BROWNation’, an exhibition that engages these and a growing range of questions that a small group of young artists considers significant to their experience of contemporary India. This is work that has emerged from interaction across linked studio spaces, with materials as varied as wood and silicone, salt and video. Modest in scale if not in spirit, this anticipatory exposition brings a few aesthetic and socio-political concerns together in quiet reflection on our present conditions

Education MFA University of California, Los Angeles (2002) B’Arch Sushant School of Art and Architecture (1999) Solo Exhibitions 2009 Navgunjar (Site-specific Interactive Public Art) British Council, New Delhi.

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2008 Ekant, The Stainless Gallery, New Delhi.

As a forward-looking act of enquiry, experiment and optimism, ‘BROWNation’ seeks to refocus and refract the light of such moments of humanism in action. If nothing else, BROWNation is another imaginary homeland among the other havens and halfway houses we make our own. It is one we hope will be many things to many people and generate a few thoughtful alternatives that work.

Selected Group Exhibitions 2010 By George, Cherry Art Foundation, New Delhi. Move On ASIA, Gallery LOOP, Seoul. TATE Modern, London. Para/site Art Space, Hong Kong.

2007 BROWNation, Experimental art gallery, New Delhi.

2009 IndiaDialogue, Museum Gabarron, Spain. Satyagraha, Casa de la India, Spain. Relative Visa, Bodhi Space, Mumbai. Vistaar, The Stainless Gallery, New Delhi. Dear Jabir, The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai. India Art Summit, Galerie Christian Hosp (Berlin).

2005 Dot-matrix, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi.

2008 Video Wednesdays, Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

Scholorships & Awards

2007 BROWNation, Experimental art gallery, New Delhi.

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The work ahead Exhibitions (as Curator) ----------------------------------

o what does ‘resistance’ mean at this ‘postGandhian’ point of ubiquitous branding, hunger deaths, fasting politicians and farmer suicides? In what ways may we publicly oppose the insolence of tyranny and the sacrifice of innocents? How does mutually assured destruction compare with mutually embraced non-violence as a credible keeper of the peace? What notions of purity and belonging do we bring to our everyday being? How do the ‘creative industries’ address the problems and promises of nationalism, or the potentials of SEZs? How do we memorialize and forget the victories and victims of a nation’s birth and growth? As part of a complex of contemporary

---------------------------------BROWNation (1) was open at the Experimental Art Gallery at the Habitat Centre, from September 30th to October 2nd 2007.

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2006 Promising Artist Award 2006 – Special Commendations, Habitat Centre, Delhi, India. New Performance Art Grant Award, India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, India.

2005 Imagining materiality, Visual arts gallery, New Delhi. 2004 Along the x-axis, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi.

Published in 2010 by Gallery Espace Art Pvt. Ltd., 16, Community Centre New Friends Colony, New Delhi 110025, India T: (91) 11 26326267, 26922947, F: (91) 11 41628057 www.galleryespace.com All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. All Artworks copyright Vishal K Dar Text Siddhartha Chatterjee Concept and DESIGN Akshay Raj Singh Rathore printed aT Archana Printers Acknowledgements Studio Vishal K Dar Sunil Bhadekar Nihal Kardam Vineet Upadhyay Sandeep Tangri Bhupinder Binod Kumar Shalender Singh

A personal note of thanks to My Parents Renu Modi and the staff of Gallery ESPACE Eagleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eye India Siddharth Chatterjee Saumyananda Sahi Kaushik Bhaumik Nilima Sheikh Anuradha Kapur Shireen Gandhy Gitanjali Dang & The GUILD Arvind Vijaymohan & Amrita Varma Pooja Sood & KHOJ Naina Sehgal Akhtar Hemant Kumar