Reading…un reading

Reading…un reading published by www.mattersofart.com 2007
Rahul Bhattacharya reads Sabrina’s ‘Fragments Of Fading Memories’ by Sabrina at the Art
Heritage as a site where one can locate challenges to contemporary skills of consumption and
analysis.
‘Fragments Of Fading Memories’ an exhibition of assemblages and collages by Sabrina at the
Art Heritage (Triveni Kala Sangam) showcases a body of work located between two very
attractive but (probably) misleading tropes, which almost premeditate our viewing. The tropes
referred here are those of the artist gender and her use of materials. Indeed most readings and
interpretation around Sabrina’s work assume a primal importance for these tropes. Of course
Sabrina can be looked at primarily through the category of a ‘female artist’ (or placed within
such an interpretational space), and the thematic nature of her work encourages one to see her
works through a ‘woman artist’s autobiographical mode) and establishes linkages with the kind
of narratives we have learnt to employ for artists like Frida Kahlo. It is also true that her rich and
diverse use of material provide an enchanting perching point of the viewer….from where an
‘entry’ into her works seem obvious.
At this moment let us pretend that Sabrina’s gender is invisible. (Even though one must admit
that analysis through Kantian hierarchies will lead to the body of works displayed at Fragments
Of Fading Memories being read as ‘feminine’). And conversations with the artist reveal that (by
and large) her use of materials is deeply incidental (but highly integral) to her practice. It comes
from her reaction to the ‘academic’ insistence on the ‘hand painted’ and that there is hardly ever
a symbolic association with materiality. Thus there is enough elbow space to squeeze out into the
realms of two (alter) tropes…to look into the concaves of her gender and the materials that she
uses and in such a temporarily suspended space try to reengage with the installation / collages
constructed by her.
Sensual, tranquil, vulnerable, fragile… were words that came to mind as one began an initial
engagement with Sabrina’s works. It is a relief to realize that there is no gender ‘intrinsically’
built into any of the above four sense categories. However at this juncture one is confronted with
certain methodological doubts… how does one deal with such personal readings of a body of
work in an era which is extremely hesitant about notions of ‘authorship’ ‘biographical’ and the
‘narrative’. The immediate context of this body of works provokes one into the bio-narrative
mode (2005, visit to Leh in a self declared peace and calmness rescue operation; her encounters
with vastness, tranquility and other such sense metaphors) Indeed one can look at ‘objects’
constructed by the artist as montage re-memberings of her Leh experience. At least now the
artist’s gender has ceased to matter (a significant break within the biographical mode?); her
camera (may have) shot Ladakh through the lens of a transgender tourist, traveling out…
searching answers to questions dying within.
Of course one learns to connect ‘montage re-memberings’ with Dadaist techniques especially in
the manner in which Sabrina uses her (mixed) media,” methods of combination, accumulation
and chance relations” (as observed in Rubina Karode’s catalogue essay, unedited, unpublished
version. However it is also possible to realize that the process through which ‘accumulation’ is
trans-montaged into ‘combination’ is done in an internationality ridden process, and the resultant
‘chance encounters’ just do not have the same ideological significance in Sabrina’s artistic
practice as it enjoys in Dada-Surrealist ideological frameworks.
The artist’s ‘found object bank’ is a crucial point of entry into her works. Objects ‘just picked
up’, memorabilia, discarded objects and ‘bought objects’ are headings under which one may be
able to archive Sabrina’s object bank….bought objects forming a sizeable part of this imagined
archive. It is conventional to underplay the section of ‘bought objects’ in an artist’s object bank
(even though painters ‘can’ – obviously – buy paints and brushes), as though a structural void
will be created if we start saying “this artists buys objects and sticks them on the surface”. It
seems to be more appropriate to assume that he/she has certain personal relationship with the
objects. Somehow a twig picked up because (it probably) engaged the artist aesthetically seemed
to be capable to carrying more cultural capital than a small piece of something the artist has
bought (picked up through a financial transaction) even though (possibly) the reasons were the
same (aesthetic engagement). Similarly a fabric having a memory significance (associatiable
with childhood/marriage or other social metaphor) seem capable of carrying more cultural capital
than a piece of fabric that the artist just ‘bought’ from the market.
Sabrina challenges the autobiographical in her works by blurring boundaries between found and
bought objects, using them ‘equally’ towards the construction of her object-images. [It must be
admitted that there are pockets within Sabrina’s body of work, which deploy polemic usage of
‘personal objects’]. Sometimes, it may be useful to bypass a direct engagement with materials
used and concentrate on the ‘gestural’ that inform the construction of her visuality. Gestural as
an analytical category is primarily used in the context of painting, performance, drawing or
sculpture… rarely used to engage with object installations constructed out of found objects and
digitally manipulated imagery. Sabrina’s object images are primarily constructed out of ‘acts’
like sewing, sticking and cutting. These techniques and their possibility of encoding gestures
play an important constructional role in Sabrina’s art and the nature of lines and patterns that
bind her works Formally (here one is not dealing with lines and patterns in the images, materials
and fabrics used). It is these gestures that are at the performative core of Sabrina’s practice…
deeply informing how the artist visually (re) constructs her image and object bank into
enchanting, fragile image objects.
Even though over the decade Sabrina has struggled with the technical challenge of attaching
objects, images, fabrics to surfaces… very often a lot of her artistic energy taken up by the need
to introduce some degree of permanence to the (sometimes) extremely fragile objects used,
Sabrina has chosen to stay within the realm of the ephemeral. The ‘decision’ to not work within
the realms of the ‘archival’ has to be seen as a certain resistance to investment/ market demands
for everlasting and permanent. It is a pleasant change in our schizophrenic times when artists
imagine and celebrate the ephemeral be works produced on archival paper.
In fact, initially it seemed problematic that Sabrina’s brittle, fragile, ephemeral object-images
had to be housed within glass frames to make them (quasi) permanent …fit for exhibition
display. However, when one got to see her works post framing, it seemed a new semiotic
dimension had got (unwittingly?) layered on her works… fragility encased and protected within
glass boxes. Suddenly one gets reminded of her visit to Leh and her discovery of / fascination
with the pristine protected spaces offered by Buddhist monasteries… her repeated use of the
ovular form (as a symbol of enveloping and hence protection….).
The last observation is of course completely arbitrary.

Critics Essay for Khoj 2006 Performance Art Residency

The residency details are available on http://www.khojworkshop.org/project/1275
"It is easy to gather a crowd in India what really matters is what one does with them" - Diane Torr

At one level, there is the agency of the curatorial project, however there is an intangible limit to this agency. Somehow the energy that invigorates experimental curation simultaneously undermines the curatorial agency. "Experimental", because it plays with the urge to define, consciously making an effort to loosen the structure, making room for the curation to take its own form, and perhaps develop a critique on the intentionality of the original curatorial idea. The structure of programming of KHOJ workshops and residencies, have over the years upheld the curatorial practice of programming with a definite agenda; while structuring the program loosely enough to ensure a free space of operation for the participating artists.
The 2006 Performance art residency was curated with the intention to bring together various practices within "Performance" and "live art" and create a potpourri of talents, aiming to re-energise and redefine the concept and practice of "Performance" in India. Nalini Ramani, Rumanna Hussain, Sharmila Samant, Pushpamala, Monali Meher and Anita Dube have been recurrent names when one talks about "performance art in India" there is a need to discover new talent, renew energies.
The objectives of the residency demanded a substantial involvement on the part of the Indian artists, and engaging them with international artists coming from different understandings of Performance. To be able to pursue this direction, the residency was expanded to include seven artists; four international: Diane Torr (Glasgow/NYC), Paulo Nazareth (Brazil), WuYe (Shanghai), Oreet Ashery (London), all belonging to cultures which have a strong tradition in Performance Art. The three Indian artists in the residency were; Anusha Lall (New Delhi), Sonia Khurana (New Delhi) and Sushil Kumar (Delhi). Each artist came from diverse trajectories, and each through their practice worked towards opening up newer spaces within the dominant trends of "Performance".
Mapping the Artists
Diane Torr is a performance artist, writer, director and educator who developed her career in New York over a period of 25 years. In the past three years, she has taken up residence in Glasgow, where she was invited to teach an interdisciplinary course at Glasgow School of Art, and to work with the company Mischief-La Bas, Glasgow, in a new devised production, Painful Creatures. In teaching her gender transformation workshops, Diane has worked extensively in the gay and trans communities in New York, and Glasgow. Over the years she has evolved into a global drag king ambassador.
Sonia Khurana, is a Delhi based artist whose work occupies the intangible cross disciplinary space between video and performance. Over the years she has emerged to be one of faces contemporary cutting edge work in video. A video artist whose practice has always been focused on her body, this was her entry into the performance residency. Sonia's works are increasingly informed by the encounters with her own class, gender and sexual identities.
Oreet Ashery is a London based artist. Her work encompasses live art, video, sound and photography and has shown internationally in various contexts. Oreet is interested in the slippage between art and life and further mutations of current art practices. Her work uses politics of the body in relation to culture and location. She works across a range of media including digital video and image manipulation as well as live art, writing and Internet-based projects. Ashery's work deals with identity, and more specifically, the relationship between personal politics and social politics where the two merge, contradict and intersect.
Paulo Nazareth based in the town of Melo in Brazil, carries the fire of Latin American Performance Art. A radical new generation performance artist, Paulo is the new generation Brazilian performance artist, working and redefining a style first mastered by Danniel Saraiva.. His body of work is an ironic commentary on schizophrenia of lower middle class existence in Brazil. Using a calculated impromptu approach, Paulo uses re- contextualised gestures as his principle medium.
As a dancer who has trained in, and has been performing Bharatnatyam, Anusha Lall has had complex dialogue with the orthodoxies that control the discipline. She has also trained in contemporary European dance, once again negotiating with the classical orthodoxies embedded in it. Anusha's journey into Performance has been through these negotiations with the disciplinary orthodoxies within various realms of the Performing Arts. Over the last few years Anusha has moved on experiment with new media performance art trying to carve out a space of "greater artistic freedom".
Sushil Kumar's has been a long running radical voice in the realm of Performance Art in Delhi. Taking inspiration from absurdist philosophy, Sushil takes great delight in nonsense, at the same time successfully playing in the realms of our histories and memories. Claiming a subaltern position within the mainstream artist circle, Sushil Kumar lives his ideology performing in the "theater of the absurd".
Wu Ye is one of the new names coming out of Shanghai's performance art circle. Wu works outside the deeply "political" expressions of Performance Art in China. Earning his bread as a graphic designer, he struggles as an upcoming but understated Performance artist. He uses his body and the medium of video primarily to express his heterosexual anxieties. His expressions are "still" and poetic.
The Artists in Residence
It has been a challenge to map seven artists, with such diverse approaches to artistic practice, and each possessed of a strong personality. In this period of six weeks, they exchanged ideas, collaborated in workshops and explored the city. Three city based artists helped, there were visits to the qwali evening at the Nizamuddin darga, Sufi nights at the Lodhi Gardens, and various such rich cultural explosions that exemplify the late winter culture-scape of Delhi.
In a six-week international residency, it is important to introduce a system, which ensures that the artists coming from different backgrounds find a working chemistry, and get a feel of each other's practice, from the point of view of the in-house programming, it was also important to impart a feel of the various strands of Performance Art as they have taken shape in India.
In the introductory meeting a consensus was generated that each of the participating artists would lead workshops at a pace the group felt comfortable with. The workshops were essentially done in the mode of the workshop coordinator doing pre-deciding improvisation based exercises, which were either team base or individual, and helped the participants to grasp each other's artistic flavors. The first three weeks witnessed one workshop each lead by Diane Torr, Anousha Lall, and Oreet Ashery. Beyond that point the workshops became redundant, having served their purpose as stimulator's facilitating the initial exchange of ideas and personality clues.
By the third week of the residency, the resident artists had already begun to work on their concepts/ideas around the work they would be doing in the residency, and how they would be structuring the display on the open studio day.
Wu Ye and Paulo had been busy walking around the city and video documenting, primarily concentrating on people and public spaces. By the end of the second week Wu had decided that his work would be centered on his video experience of people and the city, for Wu this residency was his first venture outside China and he was looking forward to articulate his feeling of being present in this strange city (with which he was increasingly falling in love with), and yet not really belonging. At that juncture Wu had decided against doing an actual performance, and wanted to primarily present a video work using his body as a metaphor.
Sonia has been a leading video artist, who has increasingly used her body as a site for articulating metaphors. Being a part of a Performance art residency generated a desire to use her body as a live medium. Humour and self have always been an intricate inspiration for Sonia. Sonia had not been able to come to KHOJ and participate in all the meetings and discussions, which had generated various degrees of unhappiness among the other participating artists. Sonia wanted to play on this and work around the theme of presence and absence. Sonia was pursuing another idea, that of playing a bag lady outside an up market place, getting a friend to video-document the performance and play the footage on the open day.
Anusha wanted to carry forward her experimentation combining performance and new media. By the second week, among all the participants Anusha, had the most clearly formulated notion about the display she wanted to put up. She wad already shot a rendition of the Japanese "dance of womb" (by Lee Swee Keong, an Malaysia based artist) and was deciding a display strategy wherein the recording of the dance would be sound edited to traditional Sufi music and reflect-projected on the ceiling. Instead of performing in the traditional sense, Anusha takes great delight in creating sites wherein the audience is made to perform (and in that sense her work has begun to occupy the transient space between live and space art). Anusha wanted to design her space in a manner that that the image of the audience would be caught by a camera and transferred on to a screen and transferred on a screen (via a DVD projector) and each person entering the space would get to see the images of the people visiting the space before, thus being (suddenly) being made aware that he/she would be viewed by the next person entering thereby imposing the performative onto the audience. She also wanted to capture and simultaneously project the audience as she/he was leaving the room creating an illusion that that the person is entering the room just at the point when she/he is actually leaving.
Diane had decided to carry forward work of being the drag king ambassador she however let the pedagogic in her take over and, was experiencing concern as to how language divide coming between the artists in residence and a sustained intellectual interchange/exchange, borrowing an idea from Oreet, Diane decided to get a table tennis board, and develop a non-hierarchical version of ping-pong, thereby making the table tennis board as a site for meeting and exchange. In continuation with her role as a drag king ambassador, Diane had begun conducting Drag king workshops in the National school of Drama. For the open studio day Diane wanted to choreograph a "chain dance", involving the people from the neighborhood of KHOJ (Khirkee village and extension) whom she wanted to train over a fifteen-day workshop.
Sushil, keeping up to his radical absurdist stream of thought, refused to plan meticulously in detail, even by the third week “I will do anything was his standard reply to any body asking him as to what work he wanted to execute. However if one spent more time with him one would get to know that he had an anarchic act coming up. Sushil had decided to perform as a temple shoe keeper, collect the shoes of everyone who came in as an audience on the open day, and then eventually to suddenly up turn the shoe rack, and generate a chaos leaving the standard art viewing audience crawling and hunting through a disarrayed piles of shoes trying to retrieve their lost ones. Sushil wanted to execute three such radical interventions, however the rest two he was yet to develop.
For Paulo visiting Delhi and India was a rare experience, he had never been outside Brazil before, and he could sense that this cultural exposure would have a significant impact on how he viewed intervention. In his work for the open day, Paulo wanted to create a room for himself, constructing a utopia where he would live and work. Right at the onset Paulo was clear about the specificities, he wanted to construct his utopia with. In an attempt to communicate his own lived ambiance, Paulo desired to construct his space with some lime paint, a hammock, a radio and certain items of daily use. Within that space Paulo wanted to build in a narrative sealing up the rooms window with ply board, Paulo wanted to structure his performance around using a rudimentary cutting tool...and through the evening of the open day breaking the ply sealing open.
Oreet wanted to carry forward her long running engagement with the Jewish masculine identity(s). Her research and interaction with Shuddha from Raqs media-collective, informed her about Jews in India, including the mentioning of Sarmad the Saint. Oreet had decided to base her performance around her journey as she hoped to explore and discover more about this fleeting community its legends, its saintly hero, and the questions around their identities. As is characteristic about Oreet's approach to work one could sense that it would be very methodically worked out with a great attention to research and would be located within the realms of cultural identity and cultural anxieties.
As the third week drew to a close it soon became apparent that a new work mode was emerging, a mode more focused into giving shape to what the mind had abstractly conceived in the preceding weeks. However even within the work mode there were differences in approach and how the artists showed their various approaches between process and finish.
The kind of display Anusha wanted to execute ensured that she was neck deep in her pre production mode right from the word go. A lot of what she wanted to execute was outside her domain of technical expertise. Naturally her work began with researching expertise and technology, on the other hand she idea was also trying to device means to solve the most nagging technological problem in her construction...the projection illusion of the audience leaving as they were entering. Eventually she had to leave the idea and concentrated completely on getting the project in place.
Paulo's approach was more process oriented and he spent his days devising strategies for newer kinds of interventions. Paulo started writing a pamphlet through which he wished to express his meeting with India. For Paulo India was this land that was so different yet so close to his country. Among the foreign artists, it was only Paulo who treated India with so much familiarity quickly realizing the overtness of the differences in language and food habits. Of course there was also the historical accident of Columbus discovering the Americas in his quest to find an alternative sea route to the fabled India. Paulo wanted the pamphlet to be printed in Portuguese, Hindi and English. Soon the text was finalized, and the process of translating and designing the pamphlet began.
Oreet by then was neck deep in research on Jewish communities in India. She discovered a colonial period synagogue, and visited it. Faced with conservative apprehensions about a middle-aged woman touring India alone made Oreet feel like an outsider in a cultural space she had anticipated being an automatic insider. So I visited the synagogue with her, disguised as a Jew and performing the role of her husband. While performing my wife Oreet soaked in the easy acceptance. As the week passed Oreet began to find more material on Sarmad. Evenings were spent going through the Urdu narratives aided by Anusha and Sushil. Oreet also discovered Sarmad's tomb and was pleasantly surprised to find it is still visited by many worshipers. By then she had also started being very clear as to how she would stage her performance.
Wu Ye too by then had begun to be to walk round town with his video camera and locate the spaces he would be using in his work. Sonia was enacting her "bag lady" outside PVR Saket as she was fine tuning strategies of executing her display strategies. Diane conducted drag queen workshops in the National school of Drama; she had also put up posters in the neighborhood of Khirkee advertising the dance workshop leading up to the performance. The posters generated a lot of excitement it offered the exotic opportunity to attend a dance workshop conducted by a white lady culturally it also offered the possibility to step into the "other". Very soon the workshops started, very few people actually showed up, and the workshop threatened not to take off. It is at point Diane decided to change her strategy, and work only with children. Using the inroads made in to the community through KHOJ's community outreach program, the workshop was re-formulated to work with kids valuable days were lost and Diane needed to speed up her training mode. Sushil spend this time developing two more ideas and trying to source a temple shoe rack for him. Uncharacteristically Sushil wanted to do something involving a heavy use of technology and was trying to generate a self-awareness as to how he wanted to execute his concept.
The Open Studio Day
The open studio day was scheduled for Saturday March 25, 2006. Positioned as the show case climax for the residency program, KHOJ's open studio day has over the years become a much-awaited event in the city's culturescape. The performance art residency's open day even more so as there has been in a lot of latent interest in the concept and practice of Performance Art in India without there being adequate opportunities to engage with cutting edge Performance art. By the time the open day approached there was already a significant shift in the intentionality behind the Performance residency.
Initially conceived as a residency which would rejuvenate the practice of "Live"-"Body" Art in India, by the time of the Open day, KHOJ had re adjusted it aims and was looking at the Open Studio Day as an event through which one would attempt to explore prevalent notions of Performance Art encapsulating the shift from pure body art to utilizing mediatic interventions to create a platform for audience interactions within the peripherals of 'body communications'. This shift was primarily because of the encounters with the resident artists, who were by and large at a point wherein they were dissatisfied/concerned with the manner in which Performance art as a discipline was being formulated and were committed to re engage with it in a completely different manner.
The following are the list of list of Performances lined up for the Open Day:
OREET ASHERY -Imagining Sarmad
ANUSHA LALL-Homes 4 the Absent + Blind Date
SUSHIL KUMAR-Lesson 1... Lesson 2... Human Chain
DIANE TORR - TTT Adventure + Pass Along + Almost Hidden
WUYE -My Religion
SONIA KHURANA- "Don't Touch me when I start to feel safe" + Volga + Bag Lady
PAULO NAZARETH- Pure Water for Secular Men / Agua Potauel Para Homeng Profands / Saada Paani Dharmnipreksh Admiyon Ke Liye + What Do i Make With India / O Que Faco Con A India / Main India Se Kya Karta Hoon + What India Made Do With Me / O Que A India Faz Comigo / India Mere Se Kya Karta Hai
A lot of initial conceptualizations were modified substantially, where as certain new ideas had taken roots. Sushil Kumar had developed two more ideas, Lesson 1, which mimicked a punishment given to lower castes and students in India, which involved crouching in the "chicken posture" and hopping a distance, crouched in that posture. He also developed the idea for a "Human Chain", which involved the artist sitting nude on a chair with his boots on his lap, there was a chair positioned in front of the artist which stood as an invite for any member of the audience to come and sit on it and establish visual contact with Sushil. There were two video cameras attached to two television monitors facing diagonally outwards into the audience. Sushil and the person seated in front of him held hands and looked into each others eyes, each time one of them blinked, the chain was declared broken and the person had to get up and make way for another member of the audience to come, sit and take the chain forward.
The open day evening began with Paulo enacting his performance "Pure Water for Secular Men / Agua Potauel Para Homeng Profands / Saada Paani Dharmnipreksh Admiyon Ke Liye" the performance involved Paulo walking down the narrow lanes of Khirkee with a wooden water container tied to his chest and armed with some glasses he walked around distributing clean drinking water free to people. As usual Paulo evoked a strange sight, and baffled his audience with his play of contexts. As Paulo finished his walk and returned to the KHOJ building, Sushil began his Lesson 1, from outside the Sai Baba Mandir, through the lane leading up to KHOJ. Sushil attracted a huge crowd as he took up the physically exhausting task mimicking and parodying the demeaning punishment. Sushil's first performance smoothly flowed into the next one (Lesson 2), as he entered the building of the KHOJ studios, he asked the members of the audience to remove their shoes, and putting them on the shoe rack borrowed from a temple. Before people could realize what was happening, Sushil had upturned the rack and sent the shoes tumbling down in chaos.
By this time an unprecedented number of people had gathered inside KHOJ, and the gates had to shut for the purpose of crowd control slowly the rest of the Performances got under way. Diane Torr's TTT Adventure, was designed entirely an audience interactive performance involving a as a Table Tennis board which was kept for the members of the audience to come and play a new version of the game which involved people running around the table and playing a non hierarchical no win no loss version of ping pong. Her "Pass Along" along was the showcasing of the dance workshop conducted with the children from the neighbourhood of Khirkee, this was staged just outside the KHOJ gate and involved the children dancing to a song of their choice. The dance had been evolved through a collaborative process, wherein each participant had evolved a set of steps and taught them to the rest of the group.
Paulo's "What Do I Make With India / O Que Faco Con A India / Main India Se Kya Karta Hoon + What India Made Do With Me / O Que A India Faz Comigo / India Mere Se Kya Karta Hai" was setup in one of the upstairs studio spaces, and was a fantasy recreation of his visit to India living, working meeting and experiencing. It was the most open-ended of all the performances; anyone could come in and interact with Paulo as he enacted "living" inside his installation sleeping on the hammock, craving away the sealed window, or just adjusting the things around. Wu Ye's piece for the evening was primarily a video. "My Religion" showed the artist dressed in an white (monkish) flowing garment, standing in various spaces in the city, suddenly Wu would disappear from the frame as if he was never present. It was an extremely poetic take on presence absence and identity. Later into the evening he did a naked performance inspired by his experience at the Khirkee Masjid, however the performance did not really hold because the strain of being tied to ropes and suspended in space was too much physical strain.
Oreet's "Imagining Sarmad" was a two show performance based on the stories of Sarmad the Saint and his lover, a young Hindu man called Habichand. The performance was an adaptation of the story told in eight letters written by Sarmad to his imaginary sister. In the performance the artist lay in the middle of the space on a box and "embody" the story through drawing, clothes and other props, whilst eight people from the audience are sat around me and read the eight letters. The performance was very strong in its narrative and formal engagement, both the shows left the audience spellbound. Sonia's "Don't touch me when I start to feel safe" was staged in a partitioned room and also involved a video camera with a projector. Sonia sat behind one partition and as people entered her space, they could see her through the projection, she could be seen sitting engaged with herself, and periodically coming out carrying a paper in hand, the paper was an invitation for members of to come join her in her room for a glass of wine and some light chat. For Sonia it has a significant performance, the first time she crossed the divide and actually performed live. The Bag Lady video played in a small television screen in a passage outside Sonia's studio space.
Anusha's installation was so big in scale that it could not be accommodated inside the KHOJ building. Luckily her studio was right next-door and big enough to accommodate the structure necessary to execute the installation. One entered through a narrow circular space, and came across 15-inch monitors, showing all the residency artists doing a performance piece inside the constructed space. Then one would step into a big domed enclosure, where dance of womb Lee Swee Keong "dance of the womb" was reflected off a water container and projected on the dome. In front one could see a blue projection screen, and as one approached the exit door one could see a projection of their image projected on to the screen. It was a highly poetic construction of space primarily using video imagery, even if one notes that Anusha was not able to execute initial conception.
Dian's performance "Almost Hidden" was a subtle exploration of voyeurism,and the liminal erotic. The artist recreated the experience of the forbidden glance where a secret intimacy is publicly revealed, generates a fantasy in you that continues long after the car has passed over the flyover, and occupies your imagination as you travel along the highway.
Late into the evening the programming drew to a close, leaving us dazzled by all the crowd all the new articulations of Performance and for me it was a reminder of how much theory had to progress if one had to critically engage with such range of artistic practices.

for more details one can see http://khojstudios-performanceart2006.blogspot.in/

Rahul Bhattacharya

Report on: Colouring Outside the Lines:

        Held at KHOJ International Artist’s Association between 1^st to 7^th April 2006

The workshop was conceived and coordinated by Saba Qizilbash, an artist, and art educator with a long running engagement in community arts programming, in collaboration with KHOJ International Artist Association, which has over the years shown emerged as a key platform for promoting experimentation and exchange in contemporary art practice. Saba Qizilbash wants to develop ‘Colouring Outside the Lines’ as a model visual arts workshop series designed to pedagogically intervene, and introduce inter-cultural conflict management strategies between ‘demographies’ that have had a history of shared culture, yet live in a conflict torn present, which have resulted in minimum inter-cultural accessibility and creative exchange.

The first workshop of the series was framed as a weeklong collaborative residency, which brought together art students from Srinagar and Lahore to work on collaborative art projects at the Khoj Studios in Delhi. The workshop attempted to include artists from Kashmir within the frame of current processes of peace and creative exchange between the artist communities of Delhi and Lahore, and engage them in a progressive dialogue on contemporary issues in art, media created myths, stereotypes and preconceived images of the ‘other’. In the course of the workshop, issues surrounding identity, culture, demarcations and freedom were raised, hotly debated and eventually left open ended. Seven students from the School of Visual Arts, BNU, Lahore, were paired with five recent graduates of Institute of Fine Arts and Music, Srinagar. The two groups of students spent one week in Delhi sharing ideas, meals and living spaces.

As a workshop orientated towards the partnering of young art student communities through first hand communication and exchange, a critical evaluation of the workshop necessitates that one   engages with the pedagogical value of the intervention rather than be limited by the lure of judging the finished art works that were displayed on the open day.  As a pedagogical intervention the workshop faced certain critical challenges.  The two groups of students came from two very different kinds of art school backgrounds, and from very different age groups.

 The students from BNU Lahore were second year undergraduate students of a very elitist art college, exposed to a very contemporary definition of artistic practice, at an early stage of their art education they have been exposed to ‘new media art’, and have begun to understand art almost entirely as a ‘play’ within contextual frameworks.   The students from Kashmir on the other hand were post- graduate students exposed almost entirely to the traditional academic definition of artistic practice, and their art education has been centered on sharpening their skills in old media. It soon became evident that more than the cultural differences regional lines; the lines of differences were much sharper in the realms of class, exposure, and understanding of art.

From day one the differences were played out. Reflective of their training, the students of Institute of Fine Arts and Music, Srinagar, showed a keen interest in making paintings, collages and similar traditional mediums, the BNU students flashed ideas involving inter-disciplinary approaches - combining film, installations and performance art. The articulation of differences finally emerged in the portfolio sharing session in which questions on originality, contextuality and appropriation were raised. The Kashmiri students questioned: “How is it your art if you have used references of ready made objects and popular images?” this question emerged as the ‘keynote’ for the pedagogical intervention of the workshop.

Though it was clear right from the onset, that an in-depth understanding of such divergent approaches was something which could not be accomplish within a short week, but the ability to accept non-traditional modes of art, as ‘art’, and acknowledgement of the older academic approach as still being relevant, was definitely a step ahead. That set the platform towards developing an orientation in working collaboratively across ‘the lines’.

However, the workshop was framed so tightly around the Indo-Pak- Kashmir issues that a narrow understanding of conflict resolution marked nearly all the artworks produced in the course of the week. A simplistic use of colour symbology and a naïve understanding conflict and conflict resolution reflected in the work produced. Somehow one gets a feeling that Saba Qizilbash imagined that the aims of intercultural conflict management could be achieved simply by putting in two groups from diverse cultures together and pushing them towards working collaboratively.

Though this modus did succeed in generating important pedagogical dialogues art practices, it generated only a superficial understanding of the specific inter-regional conflict, which was the contextual location of the workshop. One can claim that the conflict resolution is beyond the narrow definition of politics, and that it can be achieved through strong ‘people to people’ contacts, however it is also easy to generate a ‘feel good’ seeing two groups of students working together and sharing fun. A critical engagement with the ‘value’ of the pedagogical intervention will be possible only if one maps the ‘take home quotient’.cross posted from : http://www.khojworkshop.org/node/2886

Report on ARABIAN NIGHT- Presented by Zuleikha Chaudhari and Performers at Work

By Roland Schimmelpfennig
Presented by Zuleikha Chaudhari and Performers at Work

Direction and Design: Zuleikha Chaudhari : Translation: Rajesh Tailang physical preparation and Instruction - Rashid Ansari Cast: Manish Choudhari, Mandakini Goswami, Jitender Kumar, Supriya Shukla, Sujith Shankar.

Venue KHOJ Studios

Funders: KHOJ International artists Association, Max Muller/ Bhavan

One of the most significant questions that come up when open tries to develop a critique for Zuleikha’s rendition of Arabian Nights by Roland Schimmelpfennig is to be able to locate the play in the programming structure of KHOJ. The last one-year has seen KHOJ concentrating and giving a lot of attention to Performance Art. KHOJ being an organization, which has its roots in experimental practices within fine Arts, one can contextulize its engagements with Performance art, as the discourse around performance has always claimed its origins from practices emerging from the avant-garde within visual arts. However, over the years KHOJ has very carefully chosen not to program around a generalized notion of Art, consciously choosing to program around practices in visual arts, considering it to be a much needed focus in its quest to challenge boundaries. Institutions and individuals, positioning themselves on the margins, often realize that ‘the edge’ often is an un-definable space and margins, and working with inter-cross disciplinary practices often lead the individual/institutions to cross disciplines in their own practices too.

When one sees a staging of an experimentavite play at the premises of KHOJ, one begins to question whether the agenda to explore boundaries from within the confines of visual arts has been expanded to include and support various ‘cutting edge practices’ across boundaries within the larger realm of artistic practice. However, Zuleikha Chaudhari renders the play more in the manner of an installation using the cast and set to transcend the descriptive category of theater. Therefore at the end of it one sees a theater artist, working in (essentially a ) visual arts space and both complimenting each other...helping each to transcend disciplinary frontiers.

The play as such (Performed on the 21 – 23 April, 2006) was an adaptation of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Nights, a heavily loaded text greatly influensed by European readings of the oriental heat and sensuality, though Zuleikha’s rendition of the play subtantially subverts the Orientalist bias. The format of the script is centered on constructs of ‘laid down and available oriental woman’ who is there to be obtained by the ‘active mail’, provided the ‘HE’ goes through his assigned journeys, and encounters with ‘fantasy fate’.

The narrative revolves around five characters (two women, three men), a high-rise apartment building and the male gaze. Heat, water and brandy are the recurring motifs in this play about mystery, lust, love, agony, ecstasy and hallucinatory visions. However what really arrested me throughout my many viewings of Arabian Nights, is how the core narrative centers around an ancient story telling tradition about harems, jealousy, revenge, curse and redemption; yet attempts to contextualize it in a contemporary urban setting...not letting go of the ‘oriental fantasy’ that informs and inspires its root narrative.

What also intruged me is when the essentially ‘male’ script is used and appropriated by a ‘female’ director how she handles the   male gaze and sexualization of the female body.  Zuleikha does a brilliant job in subverting the male gaze without changing the script...but by using entirely formal devices. The gaze is still a motif of sexual desire but is stripped off its sensuality. However, am still not able to pinpoint at what point does the subversion of the gaze happen...does Zuleikha ride on the element of ‘torture’ that the script in-builds and formally exaggerates it in a manner that disallows it to settle in, and combines other formal devices? or is it through a different take all-together? The voyeurism is subverted within the narrative by the manner in which adultery is punished...without any empathy to whether it is intentional or not...perceived or real...in this play breaking sexual barriers lead to death.

Certain uses of formal devices stand out in the play.... first thing that struck me that there was very little acting in the traditional sense of it. The play is more choreographed than directed (in the manner theater defines direction). The play begins with a sanitized all white setting.... and gradually unfolds into the white being disturbed by the grime and sand, which the actors pick up in the course of the performance. This parallels the loss of sanity and the increase in the ‘muck’ that unfolds in the lives of the characters.   

Like all Zuleikha’s plays... this work is hyper pitched and seeks to maintain a (nearly) one and a half hour crescendo. The result is there is very little room for modulations, resulting in the ‘high’ tending to ‘plateau’ and become an extended flat. This necessarily put a lot of onus of modulation on the acting...requiring them to be high energy throughout...but still be very careful about how they pitch. As it is as an actor it must have been very difficult to employ the traditional modes of maintaining cues as Zuleikha consciously broke the ‘traditional’ links between actions and words...having the audience sitting so close to them. One must admit they did a brilliant job.

Poetic Terrosism

Performance art is a concept metaphor usually used to tag avant-garde/conceptual art which grew out of visual art practice and locates the body and space as the as the subject and the actual material for the artwork. Traditionally it is viewed as an interventionist challenge to Painting and Sculpture, and located in the realm of ephemeral artistic practices which resist the "commodity status" of art products. However Performance Art is also a resistant to main stream practices in theater, and has enacted the resistance through positing the performer as an artist (as against a character) and working in the margins/outside of the traditional understanding of plot or narrative and often actively subverting them.
Over the last two decades performance art has largely gained from trends towards dienchanments about the objecthood of art. There has been a significant growth in interest towards the process; performance art often highlights 'process' as an anti-thesis to the 'celebrated  finished hood', often situating itself in an anti commodity protest. However it has also diversified into being a 'new art' which transcends boundaries of recognized media, encompassing those that have not been previously identified as artistic media....especially within fine art practices.
Although performance art claims a inter media status, it is still claimed from within a particular framework of visual arts practices. In its workings to create an 'other' vis-à-vis performing arts, performance art tends to become more comfortable with it's another 'other' i.e. 'fine arts. The KHOJ 2004-05 November December International Residency was a step towards discovering, locating and showcasing newly emerging practices in an attempt to challenge the concept metaphor called 'performance art in India'.
We have been exposed to various possibilities in performance through the various KHOJ worhshops where over the years a number of artists have worked with performance art. Even outside KHOJ, artists like Nalini Ramani, Rumanna Hussain, Sharmila Samant, Pushpamala and Monali Meher have been exploring possibilities and re defining performance art. In 2004 we decided to put it all together in a residential 'process and display' format and give performance art a new critical impetus through practice. The residency was a significant exploration of 'performance' within visual arts.
There is a need to challenge the 'trans media' claims of performance art and to interrogate the comfort it enjoys with a certain kind of 'high' within visual art practices. If performance art has to engage with allegations about it being a derivative practice, it has to it has to constantly rejuvenate it self ....possibly through pushing boundaries of performing and video. The KHOJ 2005-2006 residency is curated towards putting together artists from across the board in an attempt to rejuvenate the concept and practice of performance art in India.

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rahul bhattacharya

Joint Secretary
Performers Independent
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let the river flow

a report on vdo show and presentation by paulo nazareth

 

We were treated to some very good vdo footage of brazilian avante-garde performance art.

two works of daniel saraiva...in the tradition of 'latin american and chinese perfomance art' saravira's works are heavy textual. in the first vdo the artist played out the role of a catalyst. he kick-started a question, frame a point of consideration,he used the raw untreated cow hide both as a camaflouge and as a metaphor. in the spirit of relational art the artist dramatically crawled....dragged himself into a cowshed and waited........waited for responses from 'random stranger'. his strangers were cows....they crowded around his crouched/lying figure...confuse beteen familiarity and a stranger...

saraiva's second vdo was a take on the violence of branding in which the again uses the raw untreated cow hide both as a camaflouge and as a metaphor. situated in an rainforest river bed the artist swims ashore...... we encounter a bonfire....and see a pile of metaphor and camoflouge collapsing in front of it....still in anticipation....the audience is stireed as the romantic imagary of a romantic river side bonfire is tranformed in to potential scene of torture as the camera zooms in a branding iron.....the sizzling sound of the iron brandin the raw hide...threw up for the the brutal side non-vegitarianism and animal husbandary......that many of us are party to .as if to ensure there is no complacence...or to mock or relief about the artist not getting hurt......the next act of branding was on the artist's body itself.......even through the relative distance of a vdo...daniel saraiva managed to hit us hard on our stomacs....

daniel saraiva makes his comments specifically from the context of brazilian modernity and its impact on the value for animal life .....and ecology. focusing on the body of the cow.....the artist comments on how the animal is increasinly turning into a staple diet.....and how duing the dry season...families are forced to kill the animal who are otherwise their friend...

Comapered to saraiva work.....Carolina Cordeiro's vdo on focussing on the body....failed to pack a punch.....the context was ambiguous...one wonders why a stereotypical 'perfect' body was chosen as the site of work...even the formal value of the vdo was not captivating.

the our resident artist paulo nazareth showed vdos of his works.....like saravira paulo works in the realm....of contextual art. in the first vdo we witnessed paulo walking into a crowded resturant blind folded ( i use the word for the lack of a better word....blinded would be misleading....though blind folded contains within it the metaphoric value of 'blinded'). he wears two slabs of meat over his eyes....at a time when only the very rich could afford to have more than one helpin of meat in a resurant.....eveen that was prohibitively expensive.....'a meat is gold' slogan was coined in brazil to to able to capture the distance of the commn man from the commodity...blinded by money....na na that is a way to simplistic metaphor.

in the discussion that followed paulo commented that subsequently the prizes of beef have fallen to a huge extent....and now beef is strruggling it out with soya to emerge as the staple food of the brazilians...........and this developemen has largely changed to naurescape of brazil...with vast stretches of the rain forest transfrmed to grazing grounds

paulo next vdo showed him in near ragged clothes wwakkin down the streets melo.....one soon noticed that red was a ddominant colour in his dress and was left wonderin if it stood as a motif for something diffrent........his feet were also coloured red abd apart from walking his other 'act' was that of constantly fixing his rubber slippers.......

paulo told us this story about the people from the rural areas comming into the city for work did not have access to transport....hence had to walk really long distances.....they were known as 'red footed' people as their feet woluld inevitably swell up and become red......

both the was a dark critiqu of the developement model of brazil.....done with a playfuluse of context....yet heavily loaded with the textual...a treat for the mind.....butstuff to shake up some slumber.... :-)

first posted in:
http://khojstudios-performanceart2006.blogspot.in/2006_03_12_archive.html


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rahul bhattacharya

Joint Secretary
Performers Independent
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let the river flow

with what degree of transversing would one be satisfied.

oreet...angelia and me...out on last sunday

 

Dressed as a conservative....slightly shabby nearly middle aged jewish lower middle class male.Oreet was out being tourist in delhi. early summer sunday.....great light for a photo shoot....and certain delights Oreet went through...i could only sense..but could never be a part of. the act of gender crossing had shielded Oreet from the male gaze ...'letting her be' for a while. By the time we arrived at the delli haat, angelia (oreet,s friend a practising psycologist from london who has teken a holiday and come down on a holiday to assist oreet in the final week of the residency) were already high on some grass.....tripping and looking forward to some nice photo shoot. it was fun vdo shooting oreet having her potrait sketched...one could see that the potrait artist had taken oreet to be a male...a sharply depicted angular jaw line sealed this observation. people dropped in to see what was going on...drawn in by the odd looking jewish man and the cameras. Some lunch...some shopping later we came back to the potrait guy....this time with oreet having an palestenian scrarf over her/his head...... This time s/he attracted much more attention. The catchy

red and white pattern....and the scarf giving her gender identity an interesting twist. some of the onlookers could actually sense that it was a difficult potratit to sketch...and soon a small crowd gathered around the artist to watch him render the potrait. it was apparent that the artist was by now completely confused about Oreet's gender identity....maybe even a wee bit disturbed. this infact went on to affect the quality of his work....at the end we got a confused sketch.....disappointing a bit too. However....must admit the guy is very good with capturing expressions of the eyes and capturing a vurnerable expression.

out of delhi haat we went.....had kind of a bad trip when we could neither locate our cab....nor its driver. ........off we went for a drive around lutyens's delhi....the grassy fields around India Gate.......in the evening sun was really inviting. we picked up some beer and got back there........being brought up in india was feling a bit tied up about drinkin around in public spaces...but oreet and angelia cared a heck. ...big time heck. by now oreet's moustache kind of had begun to melt in the sun....and s/he was beginning attract a whole lot of attention. .......As soon as we took our cameras out a crowd had begun to gather and .....hooo soon we were absolutely swarmed. being stared at by a crowd (an interesting collection of kids, toddlers brash youthful men and women of the family) .........my instant reaction to being stared upon was to take out the spare still camera and click away at our 'audience'....this lead to a friendly exchange of random clicking....loads of group photograph.......then peace as the crowd disspersed.

at this point oreet took off her moustash....making her feel more comfortable....and behold her persona comletely changed....suddenly she was transformed into this.....smart sexy jewish boy..... Oreet's change in appreance had a significant impact over our outing....suddenly s/he stopped attracting attention...allowing us to chill and open our beer cans.

as the evening drew to a clso .....some how the clours began to make a sharper imapct (was that due to the beer) ...angelia and i moved into our shutter happy mode while oreet was just lazing around in sheer relish. it had been hard...and fun days work for us and thia was really winding down . light soon started to fade and.....could no longer carry on our clickin spree....it was time to call the day off.....and venture into the evening??? we moved on to the alliance francaise and watthc a movie

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rahul bhattacharya

Joint Secretary
Performers Independent
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let the river flow