Across and in Between

Shelly Bahl and Nitin Mukul, two contemporary artists recently collaborated to produce a project on an ancestral building in New Delhi. Brooklyn based writer Murtaza Vali writes on this video, performance, music and painting project and tries bring out the nuances that connect the artistic concepts with the formal renditions, supplemented by the artists’ statements.

On adjacent screens the viewer encounters the same urbane, black clad, female figure navigating through two very different domestic spaces. As the images unfold, the dancer, Anusha Lall, trained in both Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance, physically interprets the architectures through a series of improvised responses. Tentative and exploratory, Lall’s movements map the architectural spaces and surfaces she encounters. In return, the architecture and objects appear to exert a powerful gravitational pull on the figure; Lall’s body does not inhabit or move within enclosed space as much as it caresses, rubs up or pivots against the surfaces, literally and physically marking them with traces of her presence. At moments, Lall’s improvised gestures uncannily mirror elements of her surroundings, a flurry of fluid hand movements echo the tangle of electric wires and boxes above her head.

Consciously or subconsciously, in short sequences Lall’s actions reenact moments of domesticity, recreating the lived experiences of the women who might have made these structures, homes. In the colonial house, Lall struggles to find a comfortable perch, dementedly flitting between pieces of furniture like a bored and annoyed memsahib, evidencing the colonial as eventually inspiring a form of lethargy expressed through a desire to sit. In contrast, within the modernist house, she arranges and rearranges potted plants in an interior courtyard, in an apparent attempt to maximize direct sunlight, with the conviction and precision of a modern housewife.

The video installation juxtaposes two different architectures and by extension two discrete historical moments, each a particular iteration of India’s long complicated engagement with modernity, a history marked by hybridities. At first, the split suggests a disjuncture, incommensurable between the two historical moments. However, the repeated figure and movements of the dancer overlaid with Mukul’s score, establishes a bridge across the temporal gap, allowing for distinct phenomenological experiences to align, arranging the two spaces and histories into a simultaneity of dialogue and tension. These captured moments assert the possibility of coevality through the yearning figure of the dancer, who like a restless spirit haunts and is haunted by the architecture.

Mukul’s canvases attempt to capture this potential coevality in the materiality of paint. His compositions sediment the distinct visual and architectural registers and the particular histories and memories they evoke, into single frames. Though the perspectives captured by Bahl’s camera serve as his compositional base, Mukul challenges the supposed veracity of these documentary images by transforming them into imprecise but all too human impressions. Eschewing precise detail and careful modeling for approximate patterns of silhouetted forms, they bear an indexical but necessarily incomplete relation to their architectural referents. The mottled, moldy, ochreous surfaces, diligently created by supplementing acrylics and oils with gentle washes of tea, suggest the weathered walls and peeling paint of the decaying colonial edifice. Mukul’s canvases also resonate with the sonic textures of his score. The rough itchy texture of the painted ground almost demands the satisfying aural scratches, while the sharp guitar twangs echo the clear delineation of the forms that float on top.

Disjunctive histories re-articulated through a female body create new memories that coalesce through these varied media. In searching for a communion with self, home and history, the project reflects an uncertainty about belonging for those who live across and in between.

Nitin Mukul on Hous of the Rising Sun
 
In this series of four paintings I respond to the architectural spaces used for  House of the Rising Sun.
This group of pieces takes certain  scenes from the video as a departure point. By layering elements from various frames in the video, as well as other related photographs, I extract my own non linear narrative, compressing time and space into the singular painted object.  The late 19th Century Civil Lines colonial building was the home that my mother and her family grew up in. I also spent part of my childhood in this home during numerous visits to India. A few years ago, to save the house from razing, it was declared a national heritage site—but that also has led to its crumbling state of disrepair and lost history. With no one able to save the house, its fate remains up for speculation. As a result, its past might be read like something akin to tree rings or sedimentary formations, a colonial-era ruin.The house intrigues me as a place that reflects my own bi-cultural position, integrating western classical forms and the local vernacular of India. The modernist house on the other hand, also has a specific east – west relationship, but its pristine state and planar structures stand in stark contrast. It stands testament to India's onetime choice to embrace an international style in lieu of an independence vision. By contrasting both of these spaces, and via my own memories,
I piece together a pictures that attempts to give form to the tensions of my own absence/presence, and how larger patterns of migration and conquest throughout history collapse physical boundaries, reshape identity and breed new expressions of cultural forms.

Shelly Bahl on House of the Rising Sun

In a short experimental two-channel video, a dancer (Anusha Lall), trained in both Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance, creates an improvisational and interpretive physical response to these two very different environments. Two screens play simultaneously, with the dancer moving through a late 19th century Civil Lines colonial
building on one screen, and a 1974 Charles Correa modernist house on the other. Through the video I examine the colonial/post
colonial contexts and hybrid natures of these spaces, through a feminist lens. In this project and other recent works, I have been interested in creating narratives that explore the lived experiences of women, madness/obsession and orientalist fantasies via surreal and hybrid environments. An original music score composed by Nitin Mukul and Kurt Fedora accompanies the video piece.

My art practice explores the history and exotification of Indian art and culture, and much of my work plays with and questions the practices of Orientalism, kitsch appropriation and the mass-production of culturally-specific iconography. The narratives in my mixed-media works play with issue of cultural schizophrenia that can occur in the translation/transmutation of time and space. I am specifically interested in the contemporary transmission of visual culture, and the experiences of individuals who lead trans-cultural lives.