Reva Diaries- Finalisations..

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Monday, 28 March 2011 at 11:44 ·

• After much brainstorming among curators, coordinators, local support groups and some of the participating artists, we have come to a conclusion that holding a press conference in Indore might be too early and a bit rash. The purpose of this press conference was to share the documentation of the Pathrad camp and refresh journalistic memory about how artists can engage with displacement and people the affected people. We have decided to instead issue a press note, inviting journalists to Reva Diaries as observers and possible neutral documentors.

The other important shift from the action plan is not to use cameras as a primary mode of documentation as we would be occupying private spaces and the camera is often viewed as a tool that infringes privacy.
The third deviation from the action plan is that the Jantar Mantar presentation is not a foregone conclusion but instead it is through a discussion during the residency that will decide how we will carry it forward.

here are the day by day break up of what we might be doing..
(might because we can always choose)

• 1st April - Departure from Indore at 3pm. [those arriving later can leave in a group with a local coordinator once the last person has arrived] - spending the first night at  Omkareshwar...Interaction with the community, film screening,  visiting the river.

                                                                                                           

lands between Omkareshwar and Pusa

• 2nd April -Departure at 8am from Omkareshwar for Dharaji ; seeing Punasa Dam (the biggest dam in India)

                            => On reaching Dharaji, discussion on geography, history and tradition of the area.
                            => introdction to the many histories of resistances from the area...activists and villagers will come        and share stories with us.
                            => from lunch time on every participant gets into a dialogue with the curators and coordinators as to how they would like spend the next 3 days...what are the kinds of interactions and projects they would be interested in.

                                                                                                               the banks of narmada at dharaji

       day 2 will be devoted to group brainstorming of individual plans and facilitation of implementation.

• from day one the late evening will be deditated to artists showing work to our hosts, getting into a dialouge about their practice etc. one is free to choose what kind of work to share, and the manner of sharing.

•  3th-4th April - implementation of plans and projects

along with the artist presentations, the evenings  will be filled with music and story telling sessions.

• 5th April- winding up day, saying goodbyes and leaving for Khandwa

sharing Reva diaries with local press, and having a dinner dialogue about how to take it forward...

                                                momentary dispersal begins

Why meet at Jantar Mantar?

Ever since the early 1990s, Jantar Mantar had been a space for farmer groups, human-rights activists and other political groupings to bring their issues to public notice. Since the Narasimha Rao government had banned access to the Boat Club Grounds near India Gate, the protestors had shifted primarily to the Jantar Mantar area. We should understand that Delhi is the political centre of the country which makes it the strategic, and in most cases, the inevitable choice for people’s demands for justice.The shrinkage of space of dissent is curently underway and this beautification drive seems to be pushing it to an extreme. Dissenters are understood in all the negative avatars of encroachers, traffic-jammers, illiterate vandalizers but never for what they are, and never for the reason they are there in the first place.

What are we hoping to achieve:

As project curators and organizers we would like to present documents of the artists presentations and show films, photographs, write-ups..etc. at a non-commercial political site thats why we chose Jantar Mantar

After having chosen the site, we just thought of tapping the political potential the space offers. We are now trying to put our energies into having a rally which will be a nation-wide meet of about fifty thousands people coming from across the country including people from movements and organisations like NBA, Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha, IPTA, Sahmat, AISA and like minded groups including mainstream media, local media, bloggers, net activists etc.

Indian Visual Culture and its Discontents

album cover : Axis-Bold as Love

Originally written and published as Art&Deal Magazine's 36th issue's editorial

Yesterday a young girl died during Richard Davis’s presentation at the “Conquest of THE WORLD AS PICTURE- Indian Visual Culture and its Discontents” at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. The way the present art historian community reacted to the death threatened to take away all meaning from this issue. She was a young student from somewhere faraway, by the time she was taken to the hospital, we all knew that she was on the verge of death. The seminar promptly resumed and in an appalling moment of human history the organizers apologized for the inconvenience and we all took a deep breath and carried on. We needed to be informed by the hospital that the young girl had died… and thankfully that made us stop. The entire Art&Deal editorial team was attending the seminar and in the recent past we have been writing, thinking and reading about death, tributes and obituaries. It’s at that point the (suppressed) truth finally dawned…linkages between tribute and cultural capital and how it functions in today’s contemporary arts…

Coincidently at that point Richard Davis was talking about Euro-American interests in collecting Indian popular culture and was dwelling upon the linkages between Indian popular, tantra and psychedelia. The two neo-tantric artists who passed away this month represent the Indian voices of this hippy-orientalism and it’s on that wave that both Biren De and Sohan Qadri found acceptance and dialogue in/with the west.

cover -art&deal 36th issue

When we got the news of Sohan Qadri passing away the first reaction was that one should not lose the stories associated with this reactionary character, so in that sense this issue embodies an archival instinct. The cover story almost sealed and ready was “Art in Society” and we realized that the individual and the socio-cultural aspect of neo-tantra in visual culture have largely been un worked upon and forgotten. Ajit Mookerjee's giant tome Tantra Art in 1966  (he was the then director and curator of the Crafts Museum — artists like GR Santosh, Biren De, KCS Paniker and J Swaminathan were ‘influenced’ immensely by this philosophy) is an wonderful exception. However, Ajit Mookerjee sits in the intellectual fringes of the intellectual landscape that informs the mainstream of contemporary art.

Geeta Kapoor’s momentary inability to understand and narrate neo-tantric impulses within modernism began the process of these artists slipping out of ‘public memory’.  I mentioned Geeta Kapoor because one feels that she is the only person with the intellectual ability to understand the formulation of neo-tantra in the 60’s in the larger narration of Indian modernism.

The intellectual environment that dominates art writing and gallery practices move from the Marxist ‘religion is foolish’ to the neo-liberal definition laced with consumerism, identity and terrorism. We have forgotten that people can engage with art through religion and vice versa. In fact we have forgotten that at a certain level there can be zones when difference between art and religion does not exist. Within the sub-continental context how can we understand art and society if we don’t start looking at art and religion in a different way.

More than anything else we decided to do this as a Sohan Qadri Special because he was an absolute rock-star, and his tantric practices challenge the monopoly that Hinduism enjoys over tantra in contemporary imagination. The deep influences of Sufi and Sikh mysticism in Qadri’s practice forces us to challenge our notions of neo-tantra in post-partition India.

Taken from - Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam that was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art The painting depicts three sufi mendicants and one Buddhist yogin

Mysticism and art were very central to Qadri’s life not only informing the art he ‘produced’ and how he produced but also informed how he lived and how he engaged with the forces of capitalism. However, let us not be hedonistic and assume that knowing a person’s life is one way traffic of knowledge.  Speaking to a young gallerist whom i has known Qadri for a long time I learnt that though he stayed in Denmark and Canada for above 40 years he did not speak a word of Danish or French, though he was married to a Swedish lady and has a son who speaks only English and Swedish, Qadri did not even pick up that language. He ate Indian (Punjabi home cooked food) and never connected with the cultures of the countries he stayed. Over a meal of parathas and accharwhen asked he not simply come and stay in India, Qadri felt that India could not offer him the quite meditative space he needed. He preferred to stay in a small house and paint in a government studio. I wonder we will know about ourselves through this story.

Just as the Qadri tribute cover story was closed we received the news of Biren De passing away. With a little more time in our hand we would have done a neo-tantric special. Maybe sometime in the future…Soon.

Obituary: Biren De

written for Art&Deal Magazine

A lot of interest has been shown in the notion of ‘progressive’ in the recent times. The root of this progressive tendency is broadly understood as a renunciation of the Bengal School Orientalism and early signs of contemporary Indian art (re)aligning itself to a Eurocentric art. In this flow of things one strand of art, in fact, probably the most viewed and sold trends, but under-theorized is that of neo-tantric abstraction. Biren De was one of the first artists in north India to force historians to deal with this not-so-easy understanding of the word ‘progressive’. This is further confounded by neo-tantricism’s engagement with repetition, tradition and meditation, which are semiotically on the opposite side of the ‘progressive’.
A casual chat with a friend made me aware that he had just passed away. Immediate flash backs were those of Prof. Shivji Panikkar classes on ‘modern Indian art’ in Baroda getting reverted by radiation of flowing bright yellows and reds, transfixing minds though the darkness of a afternoon slide show.  At the point of time I did not quite understand what the personal and the political were when an artist explores art through Tantra and vice versa. What did strike me was that it must have required a lot of ideological integrity to be an early inventor and a consistent master of a school so easily misunderstood.
The ‘progressive’ situation of Biren De as an artist comes from how it took the West (American expressionism) to liberate him and change perception about what one can do within contemporary painting. But somehow, neither the art-historical formalism of West, nor contemporary Indian urbanity really appealed to Biren De. Till the end he was extremely reclusive and has always been very quiet about the role Tantra played in his process of art-making. Superficially we can talk about the cosmic form and his engagement with energy. But speaking of form and energy separately betrays a lack of empathy to the core from which his art kept coming.

He passed away this Saturday. May his soul rest in peace.