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