Photographer - Salik Ahmad - Captioned: 90-year-old Kajodi trudges home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown. Published in - https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-90-year-old-kajodi-trudges-home-400-km-away-amid-coronavirus-lockdown/349525
Many years ago, the Wanted Series initiated the dialogue on ethics in photography. A seminar was organised at Max Muller Bhavan Delhi in collaboration with Goa-Cap and Askar. Subsequently, the Goethe Institute at New Delhi tried to formulate a working group which would explore the question of Ethics in photographic practices. A large seminar was followed by a couple of close think-thank meeting, and then we all disappeared. Going back to the conversation that we generated, I remember being numbed by the impossibility of it all. Yet, ethics as praxis and as a concept metaphor has always remained important to me as a critical tool while looking at (looking through) any cultural act or artefact. In today's world, we can no longer hold on to the notion of a 'Universal Good'. Over the years my notions of ethics have been shaped by moral negotiation processes, red-flagging arbitrariness or manipulation.
Kevin Carter, 'The vulture and the Little Girl', first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. Image taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl
'The Vulture and the Little Girl' is perhaps one of the earliest instances in recent
memory which threw up grave questions regarding ethics in photojournalist
practices. Initially, Carter claimed to have come upon the scene,
snapped a few photos, and then chased the bird away.
"You won't believe what I've just shot! … I was shooting this kid on her knees, and then changed my angle, and suddenly there was this vulture right behind her! … And I just kept shooting – shot lots of films. Silva asked him where he shot the picture and was looking around to take a photo as well. Carter pointed to a place 50 m (160 ft) away. Then Carter told him that he had chased the vulture away. He told Silva he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, saying, "I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan", his young daughter. " (https://joesackcom.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/the-vulture-and-the-child-what-happened-next/)
These were Carter's immediate words to his colleague João Silva, (a part of the Bang- Bang Club
specialising in reporting from conflict areas). However, Carter eventually admitted that he watched the scene for about
twenty minutes, waiting for the vulture to get closer to the boy and
hoping that it would spread its wings for a more dramatic photo. After the
vulture refused to move, Carter finally chased the bird away.
Salik Ahmad's ' 90-year-old Kajodi trudges
home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown' succeeded in spotlighting the
effect of CONVID lockdown on the migrant labourers of India, apart from photo narrating
plights of victims during the conflict, it also bears similarity to Carter's image
in the use of dramatic foreshortening and depth-of-field. There is one
crucial difference and this perhaps reflects the culture of consumption in our
times. The readers of Outlook and the online viewers of the image raised no
question regarding the fate of Kajodi. How did the photographer intervene in a
human capacity? Did he (even) offer her some water to drink? Has Kajodi reached
home?
Many years ago…in the early 90’s Cater and New York
times had to face these questions and these questions made the photographer and
publication realise that lines between being a photographer and being a human
being could not be blurred beyond a point. Carter’s eventual suicide about 5
years after taking the photograph should not be directly linked to the
psyco-emotional impact of 'The Vulture and the
Little Girl'. He had seen enough morbid violence and death
in South Africa and Sudan for any sensitive soul to be deeply affected.
Contrary to perception, photojournalism has an uneasy relationship with ‘truth’. The ‘girl’ from South Sudan
turned out to be a boy, and Carter framed the shot to maximise the impression
that this disaster was taking place in the ‘middle of nowhere’ where in reality
it was on a runway with her parents just a few minutes away in a place surrounded
by UN workers and journalists. In Salik
Ahmad's work, I do not know if her name is really Kajodi, is she really 90
years old? Is her village really 400 km away? Such details get lost in the spectacle
of a tragedy and conflict generates. In a way, way beyond truth, this is a
work in the politics of representation.
Photographers easily forget that their subject
matter is (at least) an equal collaborator in the economic and cultural capital
a picture produces. They also (always) forget that they are very much a part of
the frame, that they exist within the photograph and not outside it. If
political photography and photojournalism want to break through the structures
they critique, these realisations are important.
|
Discover Rahul Bhattacharya, a design educator, theorist, and independent art historian who explores post-contemporary ethics and aesthetics. Through curation, writing, and workshops, he engages in critical discourse and promotes insightful perspectives on design and art. With a focus on ethics, aesthetics, and the intersection of various disciplines, Rahul Bhattacharya's work offers a fresh lens to the evolving landscape of design and art.
a change is just around the corner
///--->>>rethinking art, contemporaneity and (my)self
Works and Curations
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Coronavirus India | Has Kajodi Reached Home? | Our South Sudan Moment
Labels:
Coronavirus,
ethics,
Kajodi,
Kevin Carter,
photojournalism,
Representation,
Salik Ahmad
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Saturday, April 4, 2020
It is not Coronavirus it is your Desire
Many of us do not understand this lock down, we don't know what is beyond the plateau of a flattened curve. Right now we are like clockwork. When pushed to work for the sake of our and social survival we do so till be collapse - then when told to stop work for the sake of our and social survival, we are trying to do so until we collapse. This is my take - 1 in my personal attempt to understand this code.
When I was in class 8 (?), I understood what a virus is. Clearly it cannot be Chinese or Muslim, cause virus is not even a living cell. In fact like it is more conceptual; like religion and nationalism, viruses are not free-living; i.e., they cannot reproduce and carry on metabolic processes without a hosting on living creatures, but once they do find hosts then they can manipulate host behaviors to create environments in which to thrive and spread. My biology teacher had explained that viruses were not 'living beings' thus they cannot be killed, that's why we still had flu...explaining how vaccination and building anti bodies were the only hope. (Right now I will avoid looking at this as a political metaphor).
Since then a lot of water has flown under many bridges that I have crossed. HIV came, made the word virus a household name. I understood the danger, yet felt safe in my middle class cocoon. Safe sex was doable, and the media made me feel that HIV happened to either the rich or the poor...the middle class were to be worried about cancer...which was not a virus (though I was scared for my friends who pushed sugar). Many years later, SARS came in. My partner and I were thrilled! Chicken prices came crashing down we feasted for a whole month! Of course misplaced nationalism had a role to play in this act of bravado, as Indians our immunity was supposed to much higher, one of the great perks of living in one of the dirtiest nations. On a more serious note, I did begin (re) looking at the research around viruses, specially because governments and corporate started investing in cures.
Then one by one these cure/vaccine research projects began to shut down. Suddenly an old frustration, (which I felt heavily in my class 8 but never really expressed) began to rear its head. How come humans have made so much scientific progress taking us from moon to Mars and beyond, to make nuclear weapon and power plants, to do pretty much anything...but could not cure us of common flu. Slowly it became clear that the answer to this lay in the priorities of funding. The pharmaceutical industry would actually lose money if some commonly available cheap drug was produced which could cure the flu.
Cut to the season on 2019-20, the times of COVID-19. The initial reaction was almost similar to SARS...and then like an avalanche it began to spread and take over. Before we knew it, February was over and by March, the world was entering into its lock down phase. Initially, my mind went numb. Much energy was spent in checking into my resources. Checking up on relatives, friends, students. Then the emotional stress of the lock down, coupled with the stress of 'work from home'.
The first trigger for me was the crisis of the immigrant contractual laborers being homeless, stateless and criminalised. The brutality that is unfolding in lockdown situations globally and the normalisation of it all is unparalleled in civil society in the post WW-2 period. It slowly began to dawn that COVID-19 had scared even the capitalists in power. Which seemed strange and confusing. After all we had seen so many epidemics. Also, contagious diseases like tuberculosis had also affected and killed the rich but there was never such a panic in such a large scale. Then of course in India we have had dengue for years now, so may people die every year post monsoon...but even in the most dengue ravaged, mosquito infected zones there has never been a lockdown. What exactly was happening now? How is COVID-19 different ?
The clues (unsurprisingly) came in from the USA and (once) Great Britain. Led by Donald Duck and Boris Jonson, these two countries (along with Brazil and Turkey) have resisted the lockdown mode the most. Choosing the normal flu containing technique of evolving herd immunity and treating only the severely ill and quarantining the known infected were the measures taken up...and this turned out to be a severe misjudgment and is today costing many lives. But why did these measures fail so drastically? What pose does COVID-19 contain that it continues to overwhelm all our social structures?
The answer blows not in the winds of COVID-19, but in the winds of our Desire. Or rather on how our desires and our capitalist social structures have co-produced each other. After the WW 2, and the wave of decolonisations we had the space and time to imagine a new world order. We ended up voting for governments and policies which has led us to stick pile so much nuclear weapons that the world can be destroyed many times over. We have dreamt of taking vacations on Mars, designing all kinds of cosmetic makeovers, dreamt of destroying Pakistan, invested in Formula 1 technology...bullet trains, statues....
So we created a world with excess capacity of nuclear and non-nuclear ammunition, but a world where ventilators are scarce. Yes, it is that simple...we are under a lockdown, medical and para medical personnel putting their lives at risk, contractual workers are being left to die...because the world has a shortage of ventilators.
COVID-19 is mimics the commonest flu in the manner in which it spreads, making it highly contagious. At the same time about 20 percent of infected people would need intensive medical attention and among them a sizeable portion would need ventilator support. So what COVID-19 essentially does is to expose a deep glitch in the system which is just not geared for community health crisis, or any kind of health crisis which outside the sphere of the pharmaceutical industry and its profit making. Most of us will survive the COVID-19 even if we catch it...but clearly the system will not. This lockdown, is an attempt by the existing capitalist machinery to save itself from collapse. It is never your health that they are worried about.
-------------------
also, do read -
- https://www.marxist.com/italy-the-coronavirus-epidemic-is-an-emergency-but-capitalism-is-the-real-disaster.htm
- https://www.quantamagazine.org/viruses-have-a-secret-altruistic-social-life-20190415/
- https://www.britannica.com/science/virus
Labels:
Capitalism,
Coronavirus,
COVID-19,
Desire
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Monday, October 7, 2019
Future of Design Education within the Changing Cultural-Economy of India
Working Paper towards - Humanizing
Design panel at WDO Research and Education Forum on 10 October 2019.
Abstract -
"This paper explores challenges and negotiations faced by Indian Design education as it is poised to locate itself within the changing cultural economy of India, and the wave of globalisation that is sweeping higher educational structures. Design education in India is struggling to meet multiple inadequacies brought about by changes in the global culture and economy. The discipline is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based technologyi. At the same time, the process of privatisation has led to a readjustment of stakeholders, redefining the aims and functional realities of these design institutes. This is in parallel to the growing globalisation of education that is bringing about structural changes in pedagogy and assessment. As we grow and adapt into this flux, it is imperative to re-situate design education within the zeitgeist of a 21st century India.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once
India became a signatory to the World Trade Organisation, (1994) , it
became inevitable that the cultural; economy of India will be
affected and inflicted by globalisation. This integration was not a
sudden all encompassing process, but a change that came slowly,
negotiating through the layers and structures of Nehruvian socialism.
One of the sectors deeply affected by the socio-economic and
political shifts has been the sector of Higher education. In the
year 1995 World Bank published “Higher education: Lessons of
Experience”. In many ways this report has had a long term impact
in how higher education has been conceived, policed and funded. The
report termed higher education as “a private and quasi- private
good which allow students-consumer to command a better market for
their skill”. A first step towards the implementation of this
policy agenda has been the introduction of Establishment
and Maintenance of Standards in Private Universities Regulations,
2003, UGC. By
this time, the World Bank had revised its position and tabled the
“Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary
Education (2002)”1.
In this report higher education was again classified as a “public
Good and there was a strong push to initiate public private
partnerships while future through the Privatisation of Design
education began after the 2002-3 era has begun to expand rapidly.
This expansion makes it important for us to focus on its commitments
to its stake holders and how design education today understands its
cultural-economical role.
Though
globalisation has brought in a strong need to de-localise educational
methods, at the same time it becomes imperative to remember that
different cultural-political-economic contexts need different
responses and adaptations to globalisation. It important to
acknowledge that though the technological and structural spread of
globalisation has been all encompassing, its economic, technological
and ecological impact on cultural economies has been varied. The
largest private design universities in India are very new and in a
constant struggle to refine curriculum, define systems and arrive at
a sustainable pedagogy.2
The first world economies had gone through this transition in the 80s
through the 90s, and it was almost natural that many of the new
design schools would be looking at universities in Europe and America
to guide this transition. In India, Design itself was a new
discipline , institutionalised only in the 1970’s. At that point,
design was considered important to shaping a modern nation state and
crucial for India’s search for self sufficiency in urbanisation and
industrialisation. The scope of National Design Policy (2007) is
much more ambitious. Among many goals it states it’s objective
being “Making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of
designs and creative process for achieving a design-enabled
innovative economy.3”
This
policy is a good refection of the confusions in imagining design and
design education , and a lack of roadmap in how the objectives and
goals are to be attained. The NDP mirrors the aspirational culture of
‘new India’, but fails to theorise solutions. The word
‘innovation’ is used all over the document without quantifying,
calls for a tremendous expansion of infrastructure and knowledge base
without mapping the resources needed for an expansion. The document
does not acknowledge that the discipline
is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the
lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure
to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based
technology.
One
of the key debating points of neo-liberal education has been around
learning for learning sake and learning for employment's sake. As
academic fees increase across board, education has become an economic
investment (a shift away from its earlier existence an a knowledge
and economic investment). Many design educators feel that an
employment focussed design education takes away from long term
concept building by promising immediate hard and soft skills
requirements of the market. In a sense this a continuation of the
older clashes between ‘technical education’ and ‘university
education’. However, this takes a different meaning in the present
scenario because in most scenarios, the structural/ institutional
differentiations between universities and technical education
institutes have lapsed into a composite whole. The problem has been
compounded by us continuing to look at answers from the first world
where neo-liberalism is older and infrastructural and cultural
realities and completely different. However one very important thing
that the
National
Design Policy does achieve is to align the needs of design education
in India with the “Knowledge for Development,” World Bank 1998
report4.
In the Indian context the push towards design as capital (away from
design as function of manufacturing) is significant and crucial to
the future design and its cultural-economic value.
Our
excessive focus on the first world to guide our tryst with design
education has lead to us ignoring the parallelly looking at models
and experiences from Japan, China, Brazil, Mexico, South-Africa and
other dominant-emerging economies where privatisation and
neo-liberalism in higher education, particularly in design has been
closer to our journey and have been going through their own journey
balancing between delocalisation and localisation of design
pedagogy5.
Even today almost all private universities are focussed exclusively
on Euro-America and do not engage with China, Japan or Brazil,
countries who have made shaping design to be an effective tool for
manufacturing as well as an independent capital accumulator. Our
entanglement into the technical versus university debate has kept us
away from important issues like the need to to rethink knowledge flow
in a data saturated world and the need to reconfigure the position of
craft in the future of design.
The
modernist idea of design has been governed by the idea of a
‘significant form’ and aesthetic unity. The National Institute
of Design formed its pedagogical practice based on these principals,
and this perpetuates how design is taught and evaluated even today.
This approach limits the role the design process into trying to
arrive at a form-function harmony working within the principals of
aesthetic unity. This model has a little understanding of design
thinking as being separate from design process and is incapable of
responding to the heterogeneity of taste cultures in post colonial
societies. What we see as short term demands of the market could be
the demand for a more diverse and non modular understanding of design
itself and a simultaneous need to different approaches to form and
concept.
Working
within large scale privatization of policymaking creates challenges
in situating the future of design education within the zeitgeist of
the nation6.
Yet, in a diverse nation like India, the solutions might come from
moving away from the notion of a singular zeitgeist and instead to
focus on a sustainable relationship between key stakeholders. Design
education needs structural interventions through design thinking as
there is an urgent need to reimagine business models and long term
development goals of key institutes. A failure to do so risks loosing
the recent growth of design education to an economic bubble and more
dangerously to fail in our goal to become a country that exports
design and design based solutions. Almost all institutes look at
students as service consumers building their revenue models of
increase of intake and fees.
A
cursory deconstruction would lay bare the insubstantiality of this
model as a business proposition and the tremendous continuous
pressure it puts on infrastructure and resource building. Design
schools can only become sustainable in terms of business models if
they shift from an admission based to a content based revenue model.
The kind of value incubation centres, patents and content design can
achieve has the potential to surpass earning potentials of the
admission and fees based model. However, this would require design
schools to re configure their approach and focus on research,
analysis and intellectual property rather than on employability
creation. We need to understand and respect the market as the supreme
appropriator and realise that it will in any case appropriate the
training/education of design school graduates to meet its demands and
there is more sustainability in centring design as a more conceptual
and structural context.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Neo-liberalism
and Higher Education in India, Dr. Marami Goswami, Quest Journals
Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science, Volume1 ~
Issue 3 (2013) pp: 32-37
2
Chatterjee,
A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy
of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design
Issues, 21(4), 2005.
3National
Design Policy , 2007
4
World
Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP,
1998.
5
Barbosa,
Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future
Expectations." Visual
Arts Research 16,
no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734
6
Jayandhaya
Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus, Council
for Social Development, 1991.
i
Chatterjee,
A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy
of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design
Issues, 21(4), 2005.
ii
World
Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP,
1998.
iii
Barbosa,
Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future
Expectations." Visual
Arts Research 16,
no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734
iv
Jayandhaya Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus,
Council for Social Development, 1991.
Labels:
Design,
Design Education,
Neo Liberalisation,
Privatisation
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Sunday, May 26, 2019
A Magician and his offerings | Notes on Tambulam
Still, I Love You - Exhibition View |
I have been visiting Shridhar Iyer's studio over some years
now, and every time I realise that it a very different kind of space, a kind we
are not used to these days. Most
established artists have a very clear home studio distinction, and in this
distinction, their homes have become much-sanitised spaces. However, every time
I visit Shridhar Iyer's studio, I feel as if I have walked into a magician's
house where life, art and spiritualism come into one melting pot, and a spell
is being cooked or being imagined. The studio is an intrinsic part of his
practice and his exploration of abstraction. Over the years, the artist has taken up
studios, built them from scratch, lived in them, produced shows, and then just
let it all go...moving into a new place with just a suitcase and starting all
over again. This reflects an artistic philosophy exploring the journey between the possibilities of assimilation and letting go. Over the last decade, Iyer has been working
around the disconnect between nature and civilization, a disconnect which for
the artist symbolises our inability to understand the forces of the universe
and our place inside it. Tambulam, his new body of works is his offering to
nature, as well as healing touch to the bonds which are on the verge of being
lost forever.
Shridhar Iyer is one of the rare modern masters whose works
have been trendsetters for postmodern and contemporary art practices in India.
Known to be one of the greatest living abstractionists in India, Iyer's art
practice has always gone beyond pictorial abstraction and he is one of the
earliest artists from the subcontinent to embrace installation and video as an
integral part of his practice. The
artist explores pure contemplation on a spiritual level, almost as a window to
the unknown energy and force of the universe. His ability to rasp philosophical
abstraction is extraordinary and his works show his painterly deftness as he
juxtaposes strong and fragile colours in complete harmony.
"The lines and
forms of tribal art always play with the idea of meaning and reality; the forms
invent their own geometry based on their context, play and rhythm. I realised that to be an artist, one has to
go beyond mirroring reality and only through developing an extremely personal
language, and one can generate new forms and meanings for the world.... what
tribal art taught me is that through spontaneity and rhythm, lines could be
transformed into something magical. You
could say that since then, the 'line' has become key to my artistic practice;
it helps me to explore and understand my own imagination. Over the years I have
grown to realise that possibilities of new forms and ideas are deeply embedded
in the exploration of 'line'."
Shridhar Iyer
In Iyer’s artistic practice,
there has always been an attempt to propose an alternative to the contemporary
fascination with the spectacular image. Since his early days at Bharat Bhawan,
though his paintings, drawings, videos and installations, Iyer has been a part
of aesthetic trajectories which nurtured painterly abstraction as a mode to
develope languages different from the figurative, data dense visual culture
with images that are designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that
bounces off into the recesses of your overfed conscious. His works have
explored between chaos and calmness with an emphasis on tactility and
playfulness. This life lived in an
overdose of spectacles has numbed our senses forever. When we travel we are
busy clicking and hardly ever just seeing. Our eyes cannot rest and are constantly
bored. In these times Iyer's works have offered us a different mode of seeing.
This mode of seeing is not only operational in the viewer, but has had to be
first digested by the artist. The painted surface is not just a residue of
pictorial mark making and rendering, it is also a reflection of the artist own
gaze, the way he engages with the world, and how images form inside our head.
The manner in which he mixes his media, the self-consciousness about the aesthetic
values of Form and possibilities of play, and the manner in which he
appropriates the spiritual and the political into the ‘painterly’; speak of a
deep entrenchment into the history of visual vocabularies. Deeply influenced by
modernism and tribal art Iyer extends awareness of the historical/aesthetic
frameworks of social consciousness and the subversion of the spectacular. This
consciousness is significant it a time when aesthetic consciousness become
marginal in the globalised imaginations and desires. The works celebrate a
resistance to the homogenization of the human condition. It is this postmodern
critique of contemporary, which strongly marks Tambulam as an artistic
intervention.
The installations in the show
are layered with prayer, wishes, nostalgia and love. 'Still, I Love You' and Ámia and Champa Trees
are steeped in a sense of deep loss and endless hope. This dialogue between hope and loss is a
layering of Iyer's relationship with assimilating and letting go. Wood becomes
an important metaphor and so do shadows. It is difficult to understand whether
they stand in anticipation or in defeat, but both contain prayer and a
song. They are attempts of the artist to
remind himself, stretch the envelope of his spirituality to be able to retain
hope even as one remains a witness to the Anthropocene. Yet, for the artist, there are no gaps between
the personal, the spiritual and the political, he seeks to negotiate the space through
beauty, balance and hope.
Tambulam is a complex body of work, a lot of it is in
continuation of the artist's explorations over last five to six years, yet in
this body, there are also seeds of the new directions where Iyer's practice is
heading towards. His art is becoming more conceptual and one can see a
conscious attempt to experiment with pushing the boundaries of drawing and
painting as separate forms. In his paintings,
leisure and hints of boredom become fundamental to the experience of time and
problems of meaning, creating that hint of tension between notions of
existence, consumption and taste. The artist is able to arrive at the visual language that goes beyond exploring the self with the paint and the line
as the primary tools, here we see artist trying to communicate the thin, almost invisible state of interdependence
and order that guides all transitions of life.
Abstraction, for Iyer is not just a visual language, but a
strategy that initiates dialogue compassion and understanding. In this respect,
'Tambulam' is not just a body of works, but a space which the artist offers,
pushing us to rethink our relationship with the Anthropocene. The show presents
drawings, paintings and installations stylistically ranging from gestural to
minimal. Iyer has always made art as a
way of connecting to the cosmos, as an endeavour to expand his spiritual self.
Yet nature is an integral part of the cosmos, and as the artist realises how
fragile it has become, it brings out of Iyer a mellow, tender reaction, almost
like singing a song to an ill parent, sad yet hopeful. A large set of very fine drawings, largely
monochromatic, aesthetically anchor the show. They are like gentle drifting,
the marks on paper become a residue of the artist's
process of seeing, hiding, masking, and preserving. The exhibition is
carefully constructed through interplay of form, colour and media centered on
the conceptual metaphors of nature and hope.
Rahul Bhattacharya
Spring 2019
New Delhi
Labels:
abstraction,
installation,
Post-minilamism,
Shridhar Iyer,
Tambulam
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Saturday, February 23, 2019
A Young Girl and the Moth Eaten Fakirs
A young girl, stood under a tree admiring the splendour, as a droopy battalion with an inflated phallus walked past the forest of moth-eaten fakirs.
The moth-eaten fakirs stayed in the forests to be safe from the golden priests.
Keeping the phallus on the spirit of the moth-eaten fakirs, the battalion wanted to march on.
The phallus needed to be kept safe as the battalion could not carry it anymore
The moth-eaten fakirs knew that this was the army of the golden priests. but they knew no anger, jealousy or fear.
Yet, the battalion marched on, the neighbouring villagers feared that they need to learn how to make doors.
The wars went on for long, raging high, especially on the nights when rains stroked the inflated phallus.
The battalion returned, with slaves and riches, they lost many men but those they will forget
They wanted to reward the moth-eaten fakirs for keeping the phallus safe and inflated.
But the silken ceremonial shawls pricked their moth-eaten skin; this reward they could not take.
Trained never to loose, the battalion lost control;
The fearless moth-eaten fakirs were massacred.
The forest wilted in shame and in rage, the phallus was swollen and ready to burst
A droopy battalion with an inflated phallus walked away from the forest of moth eating fakirs.
The phallus had to be carried back home, it had become heavier with all the slaves and riches.
Carrying the phallus proudly on their backs they marched towards the land of golden priests.
Carelessly plundering on the way, men, women, animals even children
Such stories go far and old, as gold lives longer than moth-eaten skin
But the land and the forest could take it no more
A young girl realized that she needed to learn how to make doors.
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Friday, January 18, 2019
Carving a New Language : Indira Purakayastha Ghosh in Conversation with Rahul Bhattacharya
Publised in Art & Deal Magazine, Jan - Feb 2019 |
Over
the last twenty years Indira
Purkayastha
has been practicing and evolving a sculptural language deeply engaged
with nostalgia, materials and narration. Through these engagements
she has developed a personal articulation of contemporaneity which is
alternate to the neoliberal aesthetics which largely defines it.
Purkayastha brings into focus our continuing engagement with
modernism and its dialouge with the evolving contemporaneity in
visual culture. Her works carry a memory of our folk cultures and
their visual language without being overtly derivative if those
traditions. There seems to be inherent connect with folk traditions
and their idea of sympathetic magic. Purkayastha’s forms and their
silence speak of an artist who is aware of the forces and memories
that inform her work..... Rahul
Bhattacharya speaks
to her, mapping her practice, artistic journey and
future directions.
R
B:
Could you please share with us your experience of practicing
sculpture in the period of first five years after your completing
your masters.
I
P: After
completing my Master from Benaras Hindu University, I moved to
Kolkata and joined the Lalit Kala Regional Centre. I got the National
scholarship (1994-96), then Junior Fellowship (1997-99) from Minis.
of HRD. That helped me to stay and work form Kolkata for five years.
These years were very important for me. Limitation of life – in
bondages of space and time, of nature, of morality, of society, of
tradition, of custom and religion – become imminent, which found a
vent through my sculpture For
a Place.
These
five years was the fore step to shaping my experiences. My focus was
towards experiments and learnings. I experimented with mediums. I
visited villages of Kolkata & Chhattisgarh and arranged small
camps. Fenced
In
& Cage
were two of my works made that time.
In
1997-98, I worked with Vivan Sundaram in his large installation,
Journey
Towards Freedom
at the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata.
R
B:
What were your early artistic inspirations?
I
P: As
a child I grew up in the foothills of Chhattisgarh playing with
adivasi children.
This the experience grew seeds inside me, which grew to always connect me with the notion of purity and a beautiful sustainable relationship with the
environment that comes to as an almost primordial language. My love
for the subconscious innocence, the playful, and the narrative took
roots within me during my childhood.
When
I was fourteen I made my first collage and since then my works
continues to be inspired by what I find around me. A defunct piece
of furniture in my house was the starting point for my imagination in
my quest to give visual form to my life experiences.
R
B:
Could you elaborate on the effect Banaras Hindu University had on
shaping you as an artist.
I
P: My
ideas of outdoor large scale sculptures focused on skill and
craftsmanship are inspired from the time I spent in the Faculty of
Visual Arts at the Banaras Hindu University. My constant urge to
improvise and narrate deep social stories coupled with the ability to
conceptualize and craft the images, which manifest through my
sculptures, have been imbibed by my guru, the legendary Balbir Singh
Katt. My initial creations
Gathering,
Mob,
Queue
and Fenced
In have
been profoundly influenced by the lanes and the ghats of the
mythological river Ganges, where I spent years doing sketches and
indulging in addas.
R B:
This year you have won the first prize at the Lalit Kala Nationals,
sometime before that you had a large solo show – can you tell us a
bit about your artistic expression in this period of your journey?
Especially in terms of you working as a teacher and based in Raipur.
I
P: The
show Epiphany
is
a large body of work produced over seven years after I become an art
teacher. Teaching exposed me to the power hierarchies of the
knowledge industry, but also to the great power of the sub conscious
mind and the vast power in children to explore fantasies, and create
narratives, which are sincere and playful at the same time. The works
showcased in Epiphany
contain many such explorations and stories of power, play,
inspirations and fantasies. The show is rich container of an adult’s
struggle to imbibe to experience and articulate the emotions of
children in a representational form.
Being
based out of Raipur gives me an edge; it gives me a new imagination
of contemporary life which is difficult to access from the centers of
Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata. Chhattisgarh being a tribal state, has its
own aesthetic tradition and visual culture, as a sculptor, I feel
anchored by it. Being a teacher keeps me connected with children,
playfulness and fantasies. The sculpture on which I got the National
award this year is Assembly
of Angels
shows a factory like building representing an institution. One
conveyor belt is goes through the building, on which baby ants are
entering into the building from one door and coming out from another
door of the building like grown up robotic ants.
The
sculpture is a manifestation of my involvement with children. Ants
have been used as a metaphor for the future denizens. Each one is
endowed with differential abilities, but the education system fails
to recognize the same. The result is assembly like production. The
wheel with the handle is a depiction of systematic control driven by
ideology.
R
B:
You seem to have a special relation with wood.
I
P:
When I was in my master some defunct pieces of old furniture brought
uniqueness to my work. Wood has been preferred over other mediums
because of its different colors, textural quality, monochromic
impression and its amenability of space division. I started making
shapes with wood pieces, pasting it according to the texture and
different colors together, which make me very appealing. Still, I
feel there are lot of possibility to work with wood, both as a
concept and as a medium.
R
B:
In terms of how you blend your use of medium and concepts...
I
P: In
my works, medium and concept develope simultaneously, each exploring
the other.
I
have always been interested in giving aesthetic forms to abandoned
objects. I work with wood scraps of different colors and different
textured, pasting together according to the shapes and concepts, in
playful manner. I use metal scraps, wires, metal dust in many of my
works. I blend metal to show strong sentiments and assert my
feelings. These are the manifestations of the inherent strengths
within all of us, which mostly lie dormant. I depicted the character
of bird through Bamboo roots. Sometimes neglected parts of woods
arouse in me significant thoughts. With gourd somewhere I tried to
show lightness and sometimes i have used it to show heaviness too.
R
B:
Your works seem to have connection with folk and tribal elements.
I
P: As
a child I grew up in the hills of Chhattisgarh playing with adivasi
children. The pure and fresh environment in all its phase took roots
in my sensibilities and perceptions were naturalistic. This
experience grew seeds inside me, which grew to always connect me with
notion of purity and a beautiful and sustainable relationship with
the environment that’s come to as an almost primordial language.
Thus my works carry a memory of our folk cultures and their visual
language.
The
travails of pursuing my work in an alienated rural setting give a
tribal impression to my sculpture.
Most of
the tribal and folk art forms have been confined locally.I envisage
spreading my works of art deep into Chhattisgarh in a contemporary
manner. My vision is that, through my sculptures the folk art and
tribal art forms of Chhattisgarhmay live ina global phenomena.
------------------------------------------------
Interview Publised in Art & Deal Magazine, Jan - Feb 2019
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Monday, October 1, 2018
INDIRA PURKAYASTHA : SCULPTURE AS EPIPHANY
SCULPTURE AS EPIPHANY: In this world of contemporary art, when factory-produced sculptures are dominating gallery space and mediatic realism is almost unchallenged in our imagination, Indira Purkayastha’s ‘Epiphany’ is a very important body of work to be showcased. Her works show us tangible alternative ways to imagine and articulate our world, our contemporary life, our anxieties and our nostalgia.
Will as a Catalyst, Gourd & Wood |
At a time when cold conceptualism almost dominates mainstream imagination of visual arts, Indira Purkayastha’s sculptures show engagement with materials and narration. These engagements make these artworks important articulation of a different kind of contemporaneity, bringing into focus our continuing engagement with modernism. Her works carry a memory of our folk cultures and their visual language without being overtly derivative if those traditions. There seems to be inherent connect with folk traditions and their idea of sympathetic magic. Purkayastha’s forms and their silence speak of an artist who is aware of the forces and memories that inform her work and more importantly is in sync with their conscious altering possibilities in the face of contemporaneity.
‘Epiphany’ is a large body of work produced over seven years after she became an art teacher; it has been a long journey for the artist. Teaching exposed her to the power hierarchies of the knowledge industry, but also to the great power of the subconscious mind and the vast power in children to explore fantasies and create narratives, which are sincere and playful at the same time. ‘Epiphany’ contains many such explorations and stories of power, play, inspiration and fantasies. The show is a rich container of an adult’s struggle to imbibe to experience and articulate the emotions of children in a representational form.
Purkayastha’s works not only are a response to her relatively new life experience as a teacher, but it also connects her to the nostalgia of her bygone days. As a child, she grew up in the hills of Chhattisgarh playing with adivasi children. This experience grew seeds inside her, which grew to always connect her with notions of purity and a beautiful sustainable relationship with the environment that comes to as an almost primordial language. Possibly, her love for the subconscious innocence, the playful, the narrative took roots within her during her childhood and her experience in teaching art to children re instigated her memories buried deep within the pressures of a grown-up urban life and art school education. This enables her to develop a critic of contemporary culture.
Picassos words “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” is something Purkayastha identifies with deeply. Her relationship with Picasso goes beyond their delight at the strong, emotive, pure forms of ‘child art’. One can see a certain knack for geometric formalism in her works, her incorporation of the visual language of tribal masks, paintings and woodwork. Like Picasso, she goes into the world of tribal art and child art in search of a language that will enable her to articulate her critique of the present.
As an artist, she has always been interested in giving aesthetic forms to abandoned objects and accidents. She began doing collage at the age of fourteen and since then her works continue to be inspired by what she finds around her. Slowly as a sculptor, she began to use abandoned wood, furniture using them as starting points for her imagination in her quest to give visual form to her life experiences.
Working from a far away rural setting, her connection with primitivism is very strong and it deeply informs the installation oriented, simple, geometrical and bold sculptural language she works with. The work ‘Fantasy’ (2016, Gourd, wood & metal scrap, approx. 50 x 95 x 135 cm & 50 X 82 x 115 cm each; reflects an artist who is immersed in trying to articulate the intersubjective response through which modernity classifies humans and enforces subjecthood onto them. The sculptures thus form a deliberate alignment with elements in the adivasi imagination, which is at the same time a tool for pushing the constructed boundaries of reality enabling her to create fantasies of altered contemporanity.
‘Assembly of Angels |
Though storytelling, play and improvisation are important to her art practice, yet, that does not limit her worldview and imagination. She is capable of carefully crafted Kafkaesqe nightmares. ‘Assembly of Angels, (2016, wood & metal scrap, 15 x 3.5 x 3 ft.), shows a factory-like building possibly representing an institution. One conveyor belt goes through the building, on which baby ants are entering into the building from one door and coming out from another door of the building like grown-up robotic ants. The work is deeply disturbing even as it is beautiful forcing us to be engaged in this startling critique of the education system. The work Untitled (2016, wood scrap metal & fibreglass, 33.5 X 4.5 X 8.3 ft.), too is a grim take on how power operates inside education systems, the temptations how power and how it tarnishes young souls that go through its structure.
The scale and execution of the body of works that show in ‘Epiphany’ speak not just of life experiences, imaginations and deep inspirations, they also contain a deep engagement with skill and sculpture making. The eastern part of India has a long history of working with discarded wood, entering the fantasyland of children; it is a land of wooden dolls and adivasi totems. Yet, through all this her deep training in sculpture at the Banaras Hindu University comes through the idea of outdoor, the idea of large-scale, focus on skill, execution and craftsmanship all carry the inspiration of the legendary Balbir Singh Katt and the values he instilled in his students. What makes Purkayastha special is her constant urge to improvise and narrate deeply social stories and concerns. Her ability to form her own language of feelings, the ability to conceptualize and craft the images that come out from within, and her constant struggle to manifest into sculpture what is often incomprehensible are the facets that form the cornerstone of her practice.
Rahul Bhattacharya
New Delhi
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
Monday, July 23, 2018
another night and then another dawn
the greed for their story went on and on
another night and then another dawn
the journey that was up in the air
a monk who could not sit without a chair
remembering faces that knew no fear
i thought of the sheep we always shear
passions ebb as seasons flow
the seeds would live if we would sow
another night and another dawn
the things unknown had begun to spawn
the curtains burnt in the cigarette fire
the factory announced that they would not hire
morning prayers and a sleepy meal
weeping for the bread that he did not steal
so many desires and no place to die
had to presume that someone could fly
so many friends love cats so much
and trees are scared of the human touch
on every inch i love to dwell
so many things to always tell
another night and then another dawn
the greed for their story will go on and on
Sunday, January 14, 2018
some salt for you
Have sugar with a pinch of salt
Take loneliness with a pinch of salt
Take praise with a pinch of salt
Have your heartbreak with a pinch of salt
Take loneliness with a pinch of salt
Take praise with a pinch of salt
Have your heartbreak with a pinch of salt
Take your friends with a pinch of salt
Have your birthday cake with a pinch of salt
Have a pineapple with a pinch of salt
Take your salary with a pinch of salt
Have your birthday cake with a pinch of salt
Have a pineapple with a pinch of salt
Take your salary with a pinch of salt
Have your tea with a pinch of salt
Take your lover with a pinch of salt
Take your mother with a pinch of salt
Have your yogurt with a pinch of salt
Take history with a pinch of salt
Have caramel with a pinch of salt
Have your peace with a pinch of salt
Take your nation with a pinch of salt
Have caramel with a pinch of salt
Have your peace with a pinch of salt
Take your nation with a pinch of salt
Have your dinner with a pinch of salt
Take advise with a pinch of salt
Take your teacher with a pinch of salt
Have your revenge with a pinch of salt
Take advise with a pinch of salt
Take your teacher with a pinch of salt
Have your revenge with a pinch of salt
Take truth with a pinch of salt
Have your dreams with a pinch of salt
Have your beer with a pinch of salt
Take yourself with a pinch of salt
Have your dreams with a pinch of salt
Have your beer with a pinch of salt
Take yourself with a pinch of salt
Deeply committed to social and ecological sustainability, and am a frugal innovation enthusiast. I am an educationist, art historian, and experience designer living between Gandhinagar and Kolkata. Currently Head of the MDes Integrated Programme Department at Unitedworld Institute of Design and Mentoring UX design and research and a design consultant.
I have extensively written about Contemporary Indian Art, Medieval Architecture and Interdisciplinary Design Practice. Mentored social innovation, and community interventions, curated for galley spaces and for large public-based festivals.
Ex Managing Editor of Art&Deal Magazine and the founding Conveyor MATI (Management of Art Treasures of India).
Brick layer+ Co-Founder of Kolkata International Performance Art Festival.
Since 2014 I have also been a part of the NINE Schools of Art collective working towards developing workshop-based teaching methods for art, design and creative theory.
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