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Works and Curations

Showing posts with label atul bhalla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atul bhalla. Show all posts

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Dilli Dur Ast: A lens based artist camp in the walled city of Delhi.




Written as the Critic in Residence:Published in Art India Magazine 2006


Three very different artists…completely different approaches to the medium called lens…some very decent chemistry…and some great hunger to explore…you get the makings of a good artists camp. Not that all work that has produced is very good…they have their own tryst with failures…but then again, the point is not always centered around object hood.

When I approach a theme based workshop…it is always important to be able to grasp what influence the structure of the workshop has on the artist and her methods. It has been quite interesting to grapple with the way Atul Bhalla, Himanshu Desai and Gigi Scaria have tried to impose a structure on the workshops and how they went on to take different roots. The workshop started with the artists going on early morning walks, taking still/video footage and meeting people in the neighborhoods around Turkuman Gate. Quoting a line from the concept note#,

“The idea is to intervene or understand the city in which we all live more closely with”   

it seems that structure of the workshop was predefined by the desire to be the flâneur: to intervene ‘visually’ into a romanticized space, armed with a certain greater access to ‘knowledge’, and with certain desire to explore and re-present the ‘other’, maybe in an attempt to understand the ‘self’ better. At an overtly political level there is a positioning of this workshop in the discourses around identity.

“The walled city of Delhi also poses certain questions on the "modern'' identity of an urban citizen. What exactly makes the old city different?… “What exactly contributes to a city's boundaries to exist?…The 'boundaries of a city’ function today more as a metaphor than specific geographic locations.”#

However, the workshop was not really about macro political concerns like the schizophrenia of urban identities; it was more about a focused retreat, which inspired a particular kind of self/artistic introspection…often playing out intimately political articulations.




Atul Bhalla: Early morning ducumentation 

Display of Atul Bhalla's Piao

But reading this nature of involvement only through the prism of politics is too much a single layered reading of Atul’s engagement. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos. Atul reveals in being very consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategizing the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction…usually passed over as ‘mundane’.  Through this last month Atul has had a near meditative engagement with his process…, the  early morning walks, exploring the space, discovering the histories… it has been a journey in many ways. A journey rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take. The set of still photographs clicked in a the course of the month, document various Piaos in the walled city, shot with a great fondness for ‘form’ and a fine talent for locating beauty. 




footage clipping. Artist enacting the Halal



The video, which captures the Halal, strongly challenges the ‘image’ of a Halal embedded in our psychic.  The focus is rooted in the experientiality of the artist…showing the blood and struggle of the animal were easily available means to make a startling video, but that is simply not Atul’s style. The video is instead a very disturbing piece more because an artist has turned ‘butcher’ for a morning a yet ‘the event’ is showcased in the most tranquil manner possible.

***


Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  
***
Clipping from Gigi Sicaria's video 'Chitli Quabar'


Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  
 

Gigi_Scaria_Old-Cityscapes: Exhibition dispaly
still from Gigi Scaria's video  'Search   2'2

***


Himanshu’s engagement with work production has been an interesting duel between imposing his gaze on the walled city, and learning back. However, Himanshu Desai is more of an ‘actor’ than a listener. His video ‘Scenes from a Hallucination’ is a revelation of a new age re visitation of the flâneur. In a certain sense, the video is also an introspection of the artist’s own engagement with hallucinations…using fragments from others’ stories Himanshu tries to communicate his own anxities.  

What takes the video to a greater aesthetic realm…beyond an out cry of an introspective soul is the artist’s long term engagement with sound and how that engages with his use of visuals. Himanshu revels in making sound videos…but this particular one has been a jump for the artist in the manner in which he has treated the visual dimensions. However it needs to be pointed out that the video has many elements of class voyeurism, and in a certain sense it does come from his ‘high speed’ work production mode. Sometimes I have found the video a shade over rendered…but mostly ‘tripped’ on the artists construction of ‘hallucinations’.

It was even more interesting to follow the artist in his postproduction phase. When he moved into making posters and various other paraphernalia, which were needed to give a screening a ‘movie hall experience’. But the efforts of this phase will be witnesses when it all comes together on the open studio day. Meanwhile Himanshui has gone on to shoot and edit another video…a lens based critic of the workshop….




Stills from 'Scenes from a Hallucination'
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As this report is finished the artists have entered their last phase of planning the display…the zeal to showcase the months work and their personal journeys in very strong. Then the finished works will slowly begin to speak louder than the process. One must admit that it has been a great pleasure seeing artists work through the entire period of the workshop to be a participant in the delights and the anxieties   

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Review of - ‘REMARKING THE RIVER’-Atul Bhalla 2007:


Exhibition view


It is some times one is destined to like an exhibition. On a wet march afternoon when one entered, the Anant Art center at Noida it was dripping wet…inside the gallery. Leaking the leaking roof and seeping water from the basement transformed the show into a site specific installation. There was mildew growing over the minimalist wooden blocks piled on to each other in fragile curvilinear straights, the lush green in the video projection of brutal lumber sapping, reflected off the wet floors and transfused in the damp wall to create an ambience of the ‘tropical wet’ under which the brutal metaphor of the tree being hacked and slowly sapping away stands out in a mellow disturbing manner.    It is this quality of mellow disturbance that characterizes Atul Bhalla’s ‘aesthetic approach’. As a Performance Sculptor and Photo Artist he reveals in aestheticising his intense performative experiences, using the possibility of mediamatic intervention to garb his encounter with ‘disturbing realities’.

It is obvious to state that his body of work shown at Anant Art Center (a body produced between 2006 till date in different residency/workshop studio context), is thematically centered on water. Instead let us being at the point where one reads Atul’s understanding of water as a metaphor for life. Not only a metaphor but in a sense also the carrier of life…eternal in existence…therefore the eternal store house of knowledge. The in episode Mahabharat in which the Pandava, are put to test by a water Yaksha Bhalla, reads the questions as nature asking us whether we are fit enough to rule the world.

His works have also been located in a certain engagement with ‘free’ access to water and nature. Strategically transforming nature into a public domain, Atul Bhalla by and large chooses to radicalize the gallery sphere into sites from which contestation can be articulated to enable us to re connect with our urban spaces and ecosystems. How far this intentionality gets realized is to be seen, and is dependent on how the artist negotiates within the nexus of production, consumption and patronage, and we negotiate through viewership, patronage and engagement. Formalistically he is engaged with the ‘shapes’ water occupies within its various containers; through the shapes he continues his formal engagement with Volume. 






 Title: "Wash/Water/Blood         
   Medium:
( Archival Pigment print )                    
   Size: 13"x20"x(22 prints).

   Year: 2007

Though it is never really spelt out, water also stands as a cleansing agent. The series of photographs showing blood been washed away from the artist’s hands (after the hallal performance in the walled city of Delhi), plays with the oxymoronic tension between life and death. This engagement with purity and water (sometimes translating into purity of water), draws Atul to Jamunna, its environment, and its socio-political life. The life of Jamuna as it transforms from being a life giving river…choking as it slowly cuts through the city.  “If in the past the riverfront was a place of interaction and the river a conduit for barges and boats from afar, the water distribution and drainage systems put into place during the modernizing drive that redefined the architecture of the city in the colonial era, ensured the formation of a gap between the life giving river and the inhabitants of the city” . From Shukla Sawant’s February 2007 catalouge essay aptly sums up the linkages between environment and public domain Atul seeks to draw our attention to.

Washbasins, urinals, pipes, commodes for Atul become tropes, of our ‘choking of the river’, beautyfully solid casted with cement and Jamuna sand, these submerged casts in their etched glass boxes, negotiate our viewing through the projected prism of words and phases essentialising the questions posed by the water Yaksha to the Pandavas and Yudhishtir’s response to the questions. Temporary appropriating the ‘right to speak in behalf of the river’ Atul Bhalla uses the Yaksha’s question as a reflective introspection of our ability to make ‘policy’ under the onslaught of the forces of capitalism.

The observation that dead wood looses weight as water continues to evaporate out it, turned Atul’s attention to wood as a container of water…metaphored through the prism of life. The felling of the branch video, is in dialogue with the hallal performance in ‘Dilli Dur Ast’  residency. It is interesting that in this video, the camera lingered on the sight of the sap dripping from the  tree as it has being hacked by the artist, where as in the showcasing of the hallal (video being an integral part of it) the artist strategically stayed away from showcasing the spill of blood…consciously avoiding the aesthetics of gore. Ants running helter-skelter in the wake of the brute chaos of the hack, pose poignant questions regarding invasions, violence and capture. 



The series of photographs with the Piaos and other free water distributing agents have also originated in the ‘Dilli Dur Ast’ residency.  The Piaos established by Muslim, Jain and Hindu institutions, are still surviving as the only visible source of free drinking water, in a city where even the middle class accepts branded water as a reality. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos.

Atul revels in being consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategising the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction, usually passed over as 'mundane'. A quest rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take.



firt published in artconcerns.com ...
images courtsey atulbhalla.com



Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Khoj No Escape- Who is vulnerable?





We  fought a lot over this one - Report of a presentaion by anita dube and atul bhalla- winter 2006


The KHOJ ‘no escape’ is positioned as “a forum where artists are invited to share a significant artwork and or an aspect of their practice, followed by open discussion / critique with the audience”. As a designated space for public expression, as a designated space for public expression, ‘no escape’ has the potential to facilitate a kind of intellectual exchange between the artist and her audience…a phenomenon which is which is increasingly marked by its rarity. The ‘no escape’ held on May 31: Wednesday at the KHOJ studios, was an eagerly anticipated event, as it sought to generate discussion on recent works of two very strong artists; Atul Bhalla and Anita Dube. Two artists who have over the years played between the lines of aesthetics and politics…creating a body of works which lure us with their formal values…unfolding their politics as we enter and take delight…slowly striking the sensitivities lulled by our conscious. There event (oops?) was also rendered interesting as the artists have crucial differences in their approach to art and politics…and one of the things to look forward to was how the differences played out, and how each articulated his/her artistic practice. There is also a marked difference in hierarchy between the two artists, Anita has been an internationally appreciated artist, who has (in the last decade) exhibited in prestigious art shows…and has often been cast as the face of cutting edge feminist art in India. Atul on the other hand has had mellower career, even though he has had a long running engagement with Delhi’s circle for the arts, he is yet to have get national-international exposure, and only recently is he coming out as an ‘acknowledged’ ‘artist’.


Over the years Anita Dube has created works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology and a certain kind of left leaning feminist experintiality. Her involvement with art and politics was fore-grounded by her involvement with the Baroda based phenomenon called ‘Radical Painters and Sculptors Association’. Anita often uses art to investigate both personal and societal loss, subtly invoking a neo-humanist critical agenda as an outlet for her desire to tangentially address the social through metaphorical means. The work that was put up for interrogation on the last ‘no escape’ was her first entry into ‘performance’, a work titled ‘K E Y W O R D S’, (September 2005) a work through which the artist wanted to explore the movement from ‘body to concept’ and to also re cast the idea of ‘performance’ shifting away from spectacle towards that which embodies pedagogy. Conceived as a performance through enaction and discussions with the gathering, the artist cut/wrote four words/phrases (permanent revolution, avant-garde, sexual love and ethics) from slabs of meat and intended  ‘dissected’ their meanings and histories with the audience.



Atul Bhalla has had a long run with water, centered on its aesthetics and politics. His art treads the fine line between the poetic and polemic in a way that reveals a ‘chewed’ conception and considered response to the subject…and is beginning capture critical attention is the manner in which Atul personalises the experience of water. Atul’s engagement with water goes much beyond the realm of art, as teacher at Mira Model School, Atul has key role in shaping his students into responsible, environmentally conscious citizens. He played a key role in the setting up a rainwater harvesting system in the school campus, which covers an area of 16,000 sq.m. He personally supervised the project and was involved in every phase of construction. As an artist, Atul uses the different media at his disposal but with a humility and economy of scale that is enchanting. Even as his works reveal in the ‘poignant’ and often come from the position of an individual having a Romantic disengagement with his times, Atul consciously works to avoid the cliché of ‘political’ art, he often subverts the politics of his works through an Aesthetic engagement with Form.  The body of works Atul did in the recently concluded Dilli Dur Ast (A lens-based artist camp in the walled city of Delhi)…was to put up for interrogation. In the camp Atul had produced a photo series on the Piaos of the walled city, and a video documentary on a halal, he had done in the process of making a Masq, the Masq and the knife involved were displayed as an installation.

The session began with Atul showing his video, and the discussion around it. Atul introduced his video and installation, as stemming from his fascination, with the phonetic connection between Bahisht and Bhishti. One, the Urdu word for life and the other, a person who carries water in a Masq…a container made from goat hide. Atul was fascinated how the Masq, a product of an act of killing, could have a semiotic resonance with Bahisht. The semantic overlapping is, in fact, because of a long-standing understanding of water as life…he went on to explain. It was strange that he did not show the body of piao photographs as it kind of put the video out of context…and in a certain way hid Atul’s experience of Dilli Dur Ast.
It was a rainy waterlogged evening and the audience was limited…and that in a certain way limited the kind of ‘takes’ that emerged during the discussion (of course it did not limit the number of questions). The questions that came in towards Atul were initially limited to the way video, and Atul’s decision to eliminate the footage of blood and the struggle of the goat…eventually Atul was charged with sanitizing the act. It took Atul sometime to explain that the act was re-presented in the video more as his experience…rather than a showcasing the Halal act. Atul kind of cornered himself; as he went on to describe the experientiality of his stay in the walled city…his engagement with the existing (traditional?) sources of free water…and so on. Immediately he was questioned about the work not communicating the experience (remember, by not showing the piao photographs Atul’s video stood completely decontextualised). The question in fact hit upon the weakest link of Atul’s works done in Dilli Dur Ast. Somehow he had not adequately grappled with capturing the experience of his month long stay in the walled city…almost thinking that it was naturally transparent.   
The discussion soon came to the act itself, why did the artist make the choice of killing the animal but ‘outsourced’ the actual production of the Masq. Atul’s answer though (sounded) fine (that he did not have the expertise of making the Masq and wanted it actually hold water)…but somehow it seemed that the artist had not adequately dwelt upon this duality…definitely…maybe. At this point the discussion essentially went around these grounds…with the artist having to justify his intentionality at every step. However one must admit that Atul was quite comfortable admitting mistakes and shortcomings.  


By the time Anita showed her works…the audience was visibly a bit jaded, it is a pity cause the nature of her works demand a certain degree of intellectual attention. It did not help matters that someone who had not witnessed the performance (Surbhi Saraf a member of the Peers residency) edited the video representing the ‘performance’…and chose to do so in an sleek funky manner…completely de-contextualising the artist’s and the audience’s experience of it. As a result only those who had witnessed the ‘performance’ could enter the discussion. The discussion came to be centered around Anita’s artistic strategies deployed during the performance…and the possible problematics   of such.
         One important strand of discussion that came up was around the intended pedagogical value of the ‘performance’. Why did she choose those set of words/phrases…what kind of dialectic interchange with the audience she presumed would take shape? The artist felt that audience was not used being vulnerable…thereby they were silent when invited to reveal their reactions to the set of words/phrases. Her answer ‘provoked’ a further interrogation of her artistic strategies. As the discussion unfolded one got to know that there were certain memories Anita was enacting (her father was a surgeon)…one also got to know that if it was not for the invited audience the fatigue would have made her stop. One of the main concerns that emerged was the value the particular act as a ‘performance’…or rather was it a ‘failed’ ‘performance’ as it did not give the artist the kind of discussions that were intrinsic to the artist’s intentionality.  
It surprised me to a great extent to an artist of Anita’s stature slip into such a defensive mode. Surely the ‘performance’ came across as one of her weakest works…as her first ‘performance’ it was clear that the artist was yet to fully understand (or to employ her understanding) the medium of ‘performance’. One has full confidence in an artist like Anita to hone her strategies and sharpen her representation in this new medium she is grappling with…but she does not have to defend an initial foray, which simply did not click.
It had been a long evening, and after a while the discussion just scattered…(breaking up into small pockets of interpersonal exchanges…becoming nearly impossible to follow (though I clearly remember the fascist/anarchic value of the audience being forced to go through the performance…and Anita trying to make sense of it) …and in most cases the thirst for beer taking over.

However I left KHOJ with a concern that somehow artists felt defensive in a forum like this…both Atul and Anita betrayed an anxiety against criticism…treating the audience like the ‘other’.  Is it because the KHOJ ‘no escape’ is too strong an anti thesis to the all congratutary exhibition openings? Or is it something to do with the structure of the forum itself?
Will wait till the next ‘no escape’ to make up mind.