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Works and Curations

Showing posts with label khoj. Show all posts
Showing posts with label khoj. Show all posts

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.



Wednesday, March 15, 2006

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.