a change is just around the corner

///--->>>rethinking art, contemporaneity and (my)self

Works and Curations

Thursday, December 13, 2012

dreams refuse to leave






































  Daddy can i hold you tight
  Daddy can i shag you tonight

  Connecting with a body she had lost
  Connect with a new goal
  The better half feels like flying
  Feels like turning her fears to dust

  Daddy i know you are not right
  Daddy i wont do it tonight

  Picking up her clothes she refused to weep
  Life's angel in distress
  Somewhere down the line the winds change
  And her dreams refuse to leave




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Tuesday, December 4, 2012

in the middle of the night




This is just an attempt to preserve 


pls send me your direct email for post-FB communication: iaralee@CulturesOfResistance.org

 Fb keeps deleting my political posts, has shut down past profiles and blocked my page during the last assault on GAZA. one can never tell how long zio-creeps and FB censorship will allow me to keep posting here! — with Mohammad Saloos.
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  • You and 59 others like this.
  • Tracey Zee If you go, I go. Complete bullshit.
  • Sonya Gulzeb Lol, bunch of cowards can do such acts, Keep up the great work Iara anyway, bless.
  • Ahmed Abu Abda alkongrs39@hotmail.com
  • Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker we really cannot count on fb as free space to exchange ideas. i need to create a backup system. pls do stay in touch post fb and email me your direct contact info! iaralee@CulturesOfResistance.org
    59 minutes ago · Like · 7
  • Rainha D'agua as WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, warned us: "We all think of the internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables. So whoever physically controls this, controls the realm of our ideas and communications."
    53 minutes ago · Like · 4
  • Jonas Islander Get a blog to post on. I'll send you my e-mail.
  • Diana Healy Iara, please keep in touch. We are not in agreement on everything, but you remain a friend, always!!!
  • Perry Holt ...this happened with something I shared of yours, that is, it was deleted.
  • Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker yes, Perry Holt, when FB deletes my posts, all the hundreds of people who share them get the posts deleted from their walls too. the latest one was the info on isra-el killing of 4 siblings in gaza and my post describing how heartbreaking it is for par...See More
  • Iara Lee: Activist & Filmmaker and not only FB removed my post on israe-l killing of civilians in gaza, FB blocked this page from posting til ceasefire was announced. they can block people from denouncing the war crimes, but the info is getting spread by many and they cant stop all, so i urge people to proactively keep working. it will take all of us to get the truth to prevail.
    21 minutes ago · Like · 2
  • At Schoeman Keep posting Iara! Info on the web cannot completely be removed, as it go out it gets distributed and read..
  • Jonas Islander Well, now when the try to censor it, I'll be ten times as determined to post it.
  • Sindie Munro Can we find another post, web share site. They are out there. Then we can tell out friends to hook up and maybe fb will be deleted after some years.


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Friday, November 30, 2012

Throwing the 'Book of Said' :







‘May be Removed at Will’ could have been a warm harmless compilation of the chemical-process sepia-toned photographs that constituted the series ’India Poems’. It could have been a displaying of Waswo Waswo X’s early journey.  I did not know Waswo when he came to India, started travelling, taking pictures, falling in love; but the Waswo i know of today has been opening up  notes on orientalism in a manner that  i would love our contemporary academics to. But getting into these questions of culture, power, gaze...has the capacity to take away our power to ‘remove the intervening word/image’. 

In these years of the 2000s  (2000-2012), the art making and viewing culture of contemporary art has changed a lot. Those were the early times of the formation of ‘post colonial’ as an ideological practice, now heavy dose of neoliberalism has made ideology (as a lived practice)  unfashionable and yet in contemporary art,  politics has become as canonical as form was during modernism.  This change is even more dramatic in the context of photography...that has only recently forced the door and arrived on the round table of contemporary art practices in India. What struck me most was that formally these photographs (’India Poems’) was against-the-grain and formally far different from what we know and acknowledge as the mainstream of  documentary photography in India (Richard Bartholomew, Raghu Rai, Ram Rahman, Raghubir Singh, Jyoti Bhatt, Dayanita Singh) Yes, these photographs were definitely not playing to the Cartier Bresson ‘style’ of  the ‘western eye’ (both in the context of documentary and photography), nor was it in the (then) new wave coming in from the Royal College of Art London and New York.


The show has no catalogue, it comes with a booklet, a beautifully written short story by Waswo, which not only anchors the show and captures the changing history of the images.  It also goes a long way in helping us to mock situate-(contextualise) Waswo in the genre of the hundreds who comb the country called India, with cameras around them...clicking its mundane exotica. For a person who has been so sensitive about his location as an outsider...and has been increasingly made conscious about his ‘orientalist’ gaze, this mock/strategic situating works as a mode of subversion  against the gaze the artist is himself subjected to. However, it also short story also helps us to understand Waswo’s self-consciousness as a photographer/artist, his personalisation of the picturesque and his strange falling in love with India.

The choice of sepia-tint itself is telling...Waswo was showing ’India Poems’ in the dominant days of black&white photography. The warm brown tints associated with sepia photography give pictures a classic, old-fashioned feel, adding a sepia tone to a black and white photograph softens the image, giving it a warm, nostalgic feeling. This engagement with nostalgia marks the undercurrent of Waswo’s engagement with art. For most photographers the notion of analogue has been restricted to the medium, and the technical mastery of it. Waswo is one of the very few for whom the analogue is a worldview, precious and political. The love for the process, the journey, time and subjectivity inform the semantics of analogue for him, and this transcends the mode of printing and engulfs the manner in which the artist engages with the subject.



The show ‘May be Removed at Will’ takes this engagement with the gaze and subject matter further and has to be seen in the backdrop of his (exhibition and comic book) ‘Confessions of an Evil Orientalist’. The automated presumptions that the visuals of the India Poems series invoke have been skilfully inverted. We are no longer looking longer looking at photographs, but at etched glass and sepia tinted framed sculptures on the wall. This artistic strategy makes an intriguing and interactive exhibition. Words jupm at your eyes just before they pop in your brain...somehow preempting and stopping the pop...one takes a step back and comes closer again being drawn into the culture infused image text divide.  Waswo forces us to update our encounter with the politics of orientalism, re understand the 'western gaze' and bring back the importance of authorship in art theory.



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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

post title






















sometimes it is the mornings
other times its the dawn

 no reason to get excited
says the little voice in repeat

 bustling climax of the cinema-scope
and the horrors in my heart

 we get amplified by the helplessness
and the joker in my soul

 tough to learn not to dream
i am not that kind of a man

 yet another excuse to smile
as we go with the flow

 i somehow still get excited
when i hear of jumps

 sometimes its the hope of a flight
other times its dawn
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