Curator Chaitanya Sambrani with Art India magazine editor Abhay Sardesai.

Colluding Trajectories

Amrita Gupta Singh, after attending on the seminar, ‘Place and Pedagogy in Edge of Desire’ comes out with a feeling that in a pluralistic society, each artist has the right to pursue a trajectory of creative expression that freely delves in the visual languages of the past and present.

Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, curated by Australia based curator and pedagogue, Chaitanya Sambrani, is an exhibition that attempts to subvert constructed boundaries/hierarchies, marking the contemporary by questioning the historiographical argument of the urban versus the rural. It brings together metropolitan/regional/local/rural narratives, in an inclusion of alternative modernities at interpenetrating levels, where one can look up/down/left/right at the same time. Modernity is not a fixed paradigm, it is relational and tradition and modernity are mislaid polarities, for one is always found in some measure in the other. In a fair spread of locations, practices, histories of learning and pedagogy, diverse ethnicities, political ideologies, and social strata that define the modern nation are brought together in this exhibition, while the works engage the viewer by enjoining, pushing towards some kind of a transit, beyond comfort zones. The narrative of modernism in Indian Art is a manufacture seen via the registers of Modern/Indian/Art and the exhibition seeks to penetrate these registers by addressing the production of the Self, the production of authenticity, in times of transit/migration, violent political conflict, religious fundamentalism, economic globalization and frenzied socio-cultural change. Explaining the title of the show, Chaitanya Sambrani says, “At one level, all art making is about desire. The artist's desire—even need—to be acknowledged and sustained by audiences is matched by desire to learn, see, consume, or simply to be entertained. It is a two-way contract; it entails effort on both sides; in the best instance, the effort enriches both parties. . . . Edge of Desire proffers visual delight. It also poses questions about the world we inhabit, in India and elsewhere”.

Brought to India by the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and the Asia Society India Center (ASIC), this exhibition has traveled in the past two years to various locations, starting from Perth in Australia, to New York, Mexico City, Monterrey, Berkeley and New Delhi and puts into perspective the visual art practices of Indian artists’ from1993 to the present. It presents the works of thirty-four artists and two collectives from diverse regions and locales of India, side-stepping generational and disciplinary divides. From drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, installation, video and interactive media art across urban, tribal and folk visual practices, the exhibition takes the shape of a vigorous dialogue between peoples in its inter-regional, national and international contexts. Sourcing artworks from major public and private collections and from the artists themselves, Edge of Desire provides instructive juxtapositions that challenge preconceived ways of seeing and how we understand the contemporary in a problematic period of history.

As part of this monumental exhibition, various outreach programs have been organized by the NGMA and ASIC, which include guided tours, film screenings, artist-led gallery talks, artist-led workshops, activities for children and students and a symposium titled “Jhumritalalya Se….Place and Pedagogy in the Edge of Desire”. A collaborative event with Art India, this symposium marked the opening of the exhibition and was conceived as a conversation between Chaitanya Sambrani and artists such as Manu Chitrakar, Swarna Chitrakar, Santosh Kumar Das, Shilpa Gupta, Archana Hande, Mallikarjun Katakol, Umesh Maddanahalli and Vasudha Thozur. Excellently moderated by Abhay Sardesai, editor of Art India, the symposium focused on the twin themes as forwarded by Sambrani in the catalogue, of “location in times of globalization and fundamentalist politics”  and “…how do our locations channel or limit aspiration…in what ways is it possible to push at these limits?”. Sardesai introduced the exhibition/symposium with potent metaphors, “Any show that tries to exhibit various kinds of artworks, produced over a decade, tries to unearth, reproduce and fabricate patterns, patterns of seeing, consuming, producing and is pitched around two important axis, the capacity to aspire, desire and the tendency to be conventional, to be politically conservative; These are the two axis in which Chaitanya’s exhibition revolve…The decade of1993-2003 has been an extremely hectic, new urban initiatives have taken shape, interesting traffic has happened between people, places and moments while being situated between violent confrontations and collusions between the state, people and the media. Edge of Desire tries to look at art produced in the shadow of the spectacle and catastrophe…”

Taking the metaphors of “spectacle” and “catastrophe”, Sambrani’s responded by saying that he was working against to very idea of “exotic disasters from far away lands”, implicating the fact that if a Picasso or Pollock can be naturalized or domesticated why couldn’t tradition/modernity/contemporaneity be treated as mutually inclusive paradigms, in a normalization of diverse visual practices co-existing in our times. If one looks at the art history of India, the regional supplied motifs and served as a repository of forms for metropolitan narratives and with the phenomena of migrations, religious politicization of culture and transformation of livelihoods in the 1990’s one needs also to look at the careers of the Adivasi/Folk/ Urban-Popular/Urban-Modern, in an osmosis of cultures with elements of one filtering into another. Also with the sophistication and penetration of various avenues of communication and information technology into small towns and villages, one’s cultural environment is comprised of the entire world, allowing the contemporary artist to talk about “reference points”, in an eclectic variety of “image-quotes”. The ubiquitous presence of Bollywood and Hollywood where stories travel across regional boundaries also provide visual fodder for the artist and one can see its influence both on urban and folk artists, and here one can draw on Ashis Nandy’s claim of cinema providing the first experience of modernity to most Indians. One of the ironies of this exhibition is that it has traveled to metropolitan centers only and there are several omissions, and Sambrani attributes this to the “the inequalities of resources and the monumental scale of the project”.

Focusing on the artists’, the conversations stressed on their individual locations and how that influenced their art practices, while bringing in the role of pedagogy, for some had not attended art school at all, especially the patua painters (scroll-makers and painter performers) from Midnapore, West-Bengal. Swarna Chitrakar and Manu Chitrakar are traditional painters, who while adhering to the pata style, draw upon contemporary life and events, with films and television providing myriad narratives for their work. What makes Swarna’s scroll on the Titanic interesting is that she never saw the movie made in 1997. A visiting foreigner told her the story and she painted it in 1998; also another departure was that patuas usually conceive the songs first and then paint, but here Manu, her brother, conceptualized the song in 2001, which she now sings when she presents her paintings. Manu Chitrakar painted a scroll on the Afghanistan war; the new stories do not interfere with their construction of visuals, for the forms and colours remain the same, like fluid writing. Also many of these stories whether it be the Gujarat riots or other contemporary political events, often transform into a Bollywood narrative, with characters that tell multiple stories that move back and forth within the painting, having profound emotive qualities. While both artists stress on wanting to keep this traditional form alive for posterity, they would nevertheless like to send their children to art school in Santiniketan. When Swarna was asked how she sees herself as a woman/artist, she simply responded “When I step out of my home, I am an artist”.

Santosh Kumar Das is another artist from Madhubani, Bihar, who attended art school in Baroda, and now runs a school in Madhubani, teaching children the traditional folk idiom in its formal aspects while encouraging diverse subject matter, and also teaches modern art. He stressed that it is important to attach oneself to one’s roots. Art school in metropolitan Baroda was a place where he didn’t learn anything, did’nt care much for Gulam Shiekh and Swaminathan, but he spent his time watching a lot of movies, and in a way grew up in Baroda, and while he looks back at art school with a sense of nostalgia and says that the experience of being there was enriching, he acknowledges that one needs to take up challenges in the world and times we live in; Being located in the pastoral settings of Madhubani does not make him incomplete in any way, art making is like living everyday life for him, and he sees a future in the children that he teaches, a future as artists.

Archana Hande has worked closely with folk artists and her video work in the exhibition has close formal associations with the patachitra, which she sees as the first step of film-making, in the way the narratives occur. When she met the folk artists, she wanted to learn the very process of story-telling. Using the digital media and coming from a formal art school presented its own challenges in the work; and many stories overlapped with the ones that she had heard, underscoring the fact that folk stories have the simultaneous potential of being both didactic and open-ended and that is what that makes them so engaging. Vasudha Thozur on being asked of the experience of being in Baroda, painting, holding workshops for students and teaching children, stated that painting/teaching is part of the creative process for her, it is all about understanding an image. In a scenario where globalization has brought about a transparency, this exhibition and symposium presents a metropolitan/rural dialogue allowing the possibility of urban artists to adapt to a totally different infrastructure. Shilpa Gupta spoke of her performance installation “Blame” , and  responding to Anita Dube’s question of  what is the role of her work placed as it is in a static gallery setting, in a modernist grid of transparent shelves, and whether the original context faded in the process, Shilpa didn’t find a problem in that for she felt this work contextualized itself in a new way of sitting on shelves like in a supermarket while the word “Blame” marked on each bottle still had the potential to posit questions to the viewer. Mallikarjun’s works move across the mediums of photography/archival projects and public art, and while he attended art school, he moved to photography, and the work at the exhibition did not start as an art project but he was interested in the many micro-narratives that exist on the streets of India, that are disappearing with the onslaught of globalization. Umesh Maddanahalli, is an artist who studied in art schools in Bangalore and Baroda; he is actively involved in films and theatre, and has also done monumental earthworks, constantly exploring contemporary materials. He refuses to be categorized as a new media artist, for his quest is to explore space and try to incorporate technology, questioning the realms of myth and history, Indian and global issues.

What made the symposium engaging were the organic conversations and world views that came across, especially of the folk artists, underscoring the fact that in today’s pluralistic society, each artist has the right to pursue a trajectory of creative expression that freely delves in the visual languages of the past and present. The origin of the concepts of art, folk art, craft, classical art, fine art and decorative art as applied to the Indian situation owes much to the 18th and 19th century anthropological discoveries and resultant colonization. Indian Aesthetics sees no hierarchies of art practice, every art is shilpa and every artist is a shilpin, shouldn’t we look at diverse art practices in this manner? Tradition is equally innovative in its various forms, and the symposium was a refreshing attempt to locate the changes that have taken place in the rural and urban contexts, underscoring the fact that the contemporary is not identical with the urban.