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Works and Curations

Showing posts with label performance art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance art. Show all posts

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Female Body Inside - Rhine Stone @IAF2014






It was the winter of 2014, the vulnerability of the female body in the public sphere was occupying minds and public action across the country. The high art season was at its peak, just 2 days before the India Art Fair . Deeply immersed in exhibition set up, parties and heated debates..I almost did not pic up the phone when it rang.
Rhine's voice - " I am on my way to Delhi , and i want to do the box performance again. Are  you in it? will you curate?"
I was still reeling, the box performance had the potential to touch many raw nerves.
"Where do want to do it?"
"Either India Gate or Art Summit?"
glimpses of Delhi police flashed by
"i am in, Rhine"

On the 2nd night of the IAF , we had a meeting - there was a small group of performance artists and friends who had travelled to Delhi from the Kolkata International Performance Art Festival. We figured out how to get the cardbox into the fair ground, Jeevan Suwal by now was becoming a specialist in assembling 'the box'. Who would dissapear with the clothes, with the shoes, how would the box Jeewan melt away after putting the box on Rhine, how do we insure documentation? How do we keep it guerrilla and yet inform audience before hand. 
I had already explore the audience reaction at IAF through Duchamp's Silence, so that helped. 

In the afternoon of the final day of the IAF2014, the performance was initiated. 


"ok, sending in chrono order now. dont have all pics but this is how it went box spotted opened - alarm - walkie talkies- board cover pink cloth whole lot of cloth screening off of area knew girl was in box and kept her in there. ambulance comes removed cop puts arm around a visibly quaking satadru and questions him.i go and try and rescue satadru they catch me cop says girl has fainted , i ask satadru her name and start shouting 'rhine are u ok'c op says go check on her-i go in to barricade with cops and ask firang girl why they are holding the box and if girl not ok will they take responsibility? they say no- i ask them to lift box and let in air they pull boxt here is a cheer as box is seen on top of screen- rhine is ok - firang girl says who r u? we can handle this, not your businessi am escorted out by cops-cops ask everyone to clear off from the area repeatedly--i start walking away and call you--i hear shouting, i start back by then screen is off and a dressed rhine is escorted in to the cafe and no one allowed near"
                                                                           un edited text from an email                                                                                       sent by Megha Joshi             


                               2/3/14










It was great to observe how notions of permission and fears of nudity had the potential to raise a bomb alert kind of situation, mobilising so much police, ambulance and so much security. The huge installation IAF organisers did in response to Rhine's body in the box reaffirms the destabilisation power of performance art.

Moreover it was interesting that one of our team members Sajan Mani was cornered by the security personel and shouted at This is not a public space ,, I want you to go out now "- 

They made sure with two security guards ...ironically one " public Performance " was going to happen the same ground !
The behaviour of the organisers brought forward issues of public/ private and permission which is dominating high art practices today.

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It was 7 pm, the fair was winding up, we were packing up the stalls- it had been over 3 hours and Rhine, Jeevan and Bhuvanesh were still in police custody-
I needed to intervene-
Anita Dube was at the Lakeeren stall, packing up- i just had to tell her and she immediate agreed to come with me.

Anita opened the gates , and then she had to go....after that for 3 hours we bullied and intimidated the police till they let us out.



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



Friday, March 10, 2006

Poetic Terrosism

Performance art is a concept metaphor usually used to tag avant-garde/conceptual art which grew out of visual art practice and locates the body and space as the as the subject and the actual material for the artwork. Traditionally it is viewed as an interventionist challenge to Painting and Sculpture, and located in the realm of ephemeral artistic practices which resist the "commodity status" of art products. However Performance Art is also a resistant to main stream practices in theater, and has enacted the resistance through positing the performer as an artist (as against a character) and working in the margins/outside of the traditional understanding of plot or narrative and often actively subverting them.
Over the last two decades performance art has largely gained from trends towards dienchanments about the objecthood of art. There has been a significant growth in interest towards the process; performance art often highlights 'process' as an anti-thesis to the 'celebrated  finished hood', often situating itself in an anti commodity protest. However it has also diversified into being a 'new art' which transcends boundaries of recognized media, encompassing those that have not been previously identified as artistic media....especially within fine art practices.
Although performance art claims a inter media status, it is still claimed from within a particular framework of visual arts practices. In its workings to create an 'other' vis-à-vis performing arts, performance art tends to become more comfortable with it's another 'other' i.e. 'fine arts. The KHOJ 2004-05 November December International Residency was a step towards discovering, locating and showcasing newly emerging practices in an attempt to challenge the concept metaphor called 'performance art in India'.
We have been exposed to various possibilities in performance through the various KHOJ worhshops where over the years a number of artists have worked with performance art. Even outside KHOJ, artists like Nalini Ramani, Rumanna Hussain, Sharmila Samant, Pushpamala and Monali Meher have been exploring possibilities and re defining performance art. In 2004 we decided to put it all together in a residential 'process and display' format and give performance art a new critical impetus through practice. The residency was a significant exploration of 'performance' within visual arts.
There is a need to challenge the 'trans media' claims of performance art and to interrogate the comfort it enjoys with a certain kind of 'high' within visual art practices. If performance art has to engage with allegations about it being a derivative practice, it has to it has to constantly rejuvenate it self ....possibly through pushing boundaries of performing and video. The KHOJ 2005-2006 residency is curated towards putting together artists from across the board in an attempt to rejuvenate the concept and practice of performance art in India.
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rahul bhattacharya

Joint Secretary
Performers Independent
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let the river flow