Illustrated lecture presented at the Speakers Forum, SITE art space, Baroda – 2014
Walking through Depths of field
I would like to thank Rekha Rodwittiya for inviting me to present a paper at this Speakers Forum. I would also like to thank SITE art space, Foundation B&G and The Collective Studio for bringing this wonderful exhibition of Veer Munshi to Baroda and for creating this platform for discussion and exchange.
Chance
Chance… Is often how life seems to unfold. Chance, is how we are presented with more to discover. Chance is how I was invited to present this lecture during a casual conversation. Chance can sometimes be a close aide for photographers but that’s about as far as we can romanticize chance.
Observer
Visual artists are essentially keen observers. Every visual encounter is turned into an opportunity to observe and find new perspectives. And it is through observation that many incidental details are discovered or even chanced upon. Observation provokes thought, forges connectives and nurtures narratives.
Document
Observation feeds our actions as artists. From mark-making, to drawing, to sculpting or even an odd assemblage of objects that become signifiers of meaning; all these serve as documents of our engagement with the world. The manner in which a form on a tree-bark can end up as a road-side shrine, or habitual sequences of actions turn into personalised rituals, we all create tangible documents of our own histories every single day.
Reflection
I believe that art-practices are largely reflective spaces. They are fed by the need to consistently rummage through not only materials, objects and media but also the perceptions of one’s own surroundings, our understanding of history and the continuous involvement with articulation and language. When documents, artworks, objects and memorabilia are taken into spaces of reflection, they can serve as an archive, even if only at a conceptual level.
As I proceed with this paper, I will expand on how a few artists have chosen to work with and create their own archives. Artists who have incorporated the photographed image as not just a formal element in their work, but have integrally manipulated it to formulate the subjective context within the overall framework of their visual language. The photograph essentially functions much like the specificity of a thread that weaves a piece of fabric, an underlying fundamental component that shies from claiming attention when seen in entirety. And yet, these images lead the viewer into examining personal histories, politics, locations and even simple wonderment that the mundane everyday can offer. The images serve as triggers independently but their voice finds an altered evocation through conglomeration. They represent the trace of an imaginative territory which undergoes many transformations as it gets adopted or appropriated in different contexts, yet tugging at the roots of its original form. This invariably causes the viewer to oscillate between different time and space contexts to establish meanings.
For my inexperienced abilities in the know-how of writing papers, I resort to beginning with a personal note to let my insights unfold.
A series of circumstances might have placed me in a position to assist my teacher, Rekha Rodwittiya, in the task of organising her documentation. But as would be the case with any individual who opens up an archive, what they in fact do is to silently open up a million stories. I found myself sorting through photographs taken over three to four generations of family lineages, finding sequences of time through the faces of people, imagining stories in sepia and black and white. The photographs serve as a trigger within the artworks too, to look back not just through a personal history, but even to reflect on social attitudes, cultural contexts, gender issues or even as a visual in itself. The static, the stoic, the stance, the posture, the characters are all ingrained into reflective spaces. We are momentarily transported into a different time, a new space- an interior of a home perhaps, or an evocative landscape, or the piercing gaze of an elegant lady who stands for a time when it was much harder for women to command a space professionally, socially and as a result, politically. Radicalism and sophistication wrapped up with much elan- presented through little-known documents. Rekha Rodwittiya studied photography under Jyoti Bhatt while she was student of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda and pursued it as a parallel profession for a short time. But to use the camera almost 35 years later, is less of a return than it is about evolving. The camera is neither the same, nor is the deliverance of the photographic image. In the larger context of the canvas, the brush and the camera/ computer co-exist as tools to aid visual articulation, as seen in the works from her exhibition titled Intangible Interlocution: An Anthology of Belonging which included the series “An Anatomy of Recollection”- a set of digital prints that integrated personal photographs and painting, and in her most recent solo exhibition titled “Matters of the Heart”. Language becomes paramount in this case and the painter draws on images of recall by carefully sussing out what seem like echoes of whispers, images within images. What gets captured today on the artist’s camera is an extension of the very language that defines her paintings. She writes in her blog: “It is space where the recognisable alters to become the receptacle of new meanings and where human experience becomes the bridge of empathy that allows the viewer to find their connectivity”. Drawing, other than referring to the act of delineating form through lines can also figuratively suggest a summoning of one’s own being, of ideas and vision. The representation of the women in the artist’s work is drawn with a thin line, taut like a string that gets tuned repeatedly; and within it a plethora of entries and departures that speak of femininity, birth, innocence, ideals, tenderness, motherhood, optimism – a multitude of voices that tell similar stories of a larger belonging, a feminist ideology that survives to still be heard.
Sheba Chhachhi’s approach to photography has been largely documentary and over many decades now, she has chronicled the lives of women in India, every project involving a personal engagement with her subjects. Given her background in activism and documentary photography, her archive offers an expansive source of visuals and research material for her art. In her series called “Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle from Asia”, her interest in subjects connected to migration, mythology, globalization and technology are all addressed through an amalgamation of photographic images, sculptural pieces, video installation, and electronic gadgets. Speaking about her work, she says: “I have created a series of imaginary landscapes, digital tapestries which weave together references culled from Indian sculpture, Chinese brush painting, the Persian/ Mughal miniature and documentary photography to inhabit these moving image lightboxes. These have developed from images, narratives and fables of birds drawn from ancient art, literature and mythology as well as from contemporary media representations of birds as inter regional carriers of the avian/ ‘Asian’ flu. This material may not explicitly reiterate ancient narratives but appropriates them, transformed through subjective associations and concerns, relocated in the contemporary”.
In a time when the overused term of “globalization” seems to refer to a far greater ease in trade markets and information exchange there is an underlying unrest and suspicion in what we know as “the other”; the alien, the migrant. In this context, Sheba Chhachhi’s work becomes a poignant commentary on the incidents of killing migratory birds under the pretext of avian flu, when she subverts meanings with images of mythical birds like Hamsa and Garuda that represent wisdom and purity of the human soul. In relation to her subject, the artist says that she was “deeply troubled by what she understood as a metaphoric murder of aspects of humanity itself”. Sheba Chhachhi has for long documented women ascetics and her preoccupation with the traversal of space and time is both embodied in the idea of the pilgrim, as well as the medium of still-images in motion. Buddhist pilgrims who have travelled for centuries between India and China have been responsible for creating several records that give insights into the cultural, geographical and social histories of these two regions. This history becomes the premise for the artist to choose a chinese-made cheap electronic gadget called the Plasma Action Toy, which essentially mimics a TV, and places it within the sculptural form that represents a pilgrim’s robe. An illusion of movement is created as mythical birds seem to float in the sky over fake landscapes compiled from visuals from art-history, the entire work set on a roller, questioning notions of materiality and belief in the globalized world.
Avinash Veeraraghavan is a Bangalore based artist and designer for whom photography and the photographic image are central to his art-making. “Mine is image-based work that rests on photograph”, he says, “I use the image as a tool. A photograph is an index of something that already exists outside… it is a memory. I use it in my work to create something else”. For more than a decade now, Avinash’s engagement with photography has spanned many projects, from interactive photo-books to design projects, to his own artwork. One of the consistent and dominantly perceivable threads in most of his projects is his interest in the real and the imagined/ unreal/ fantasized. In his project I Love my India, a book of witty, ironic photo montages that capture the mundane and yet ignored sights from the street, he digitally manipulated and collaged photographs of streets, using the space of billboards to carry meta-narratives. The book was a personalized investigation of how cityscapes are observed and how it might impact its inhabitants’ perceptions. I quote the artist: “In our country, people’s connotations of the real and unreal are very different from anywhere else. Everything is so peculiar and mixed up on our streets that it is like a fantasy if you really look around.” Common-place images like billboards, interiors of a room, personal belongings, toys and even popular imagery from other sources are all used as components of a larger composite image. This opens possibilities for multiple points of focus as well as subjective interpretations that shift according to how a viewer may choose to begin their dialogue with the visuals. In his series called Homesick, for instance, Avinash chooses the banality of popular ideas and images- butterflies, snake coils, gadgets to make them perform significant roles in creating large abstracts that seem to evoke nuances of sensation through tonality, patterns, shadows and what appears like a landscape of sand dunes. But at first sight, the work looks like an intricate floral pattern. In another work titled “Total Internal Recall”, the repeated image of the eye seems to signify an internal observation in the context of the central portrait of the person with closed eyes. The aspect of reflection and the reference to the self, though subtle, is omnipresent in most of Avinash’s works. The works at once capture and provoke a contemplation and as one delves further, the details become launchpads to other tangents of meaning, belonging and associations. In compiling and carefully piecing together his compositions, the choice of imagery is based on both formal needs for the larger schema as well as a lyrical approach to building meaning through metaphors. Toys could refer to his own reminiscing of childhood, of innocence; clothes hanging in his room could refer to many versions of the self, and so on. The rationale of obscure visuals coexisting is multifarious, suggesting narratives that always have more to discover the next time around. Whether it is the street, or the randomness of personal possessions, Avinash’s choice for building a vast image archive is his way of tracking a journey through his mind, to find an aesthetic way of representing every day’s overwhelming chaos.
Remen Chopra speaks of a narrative that reveals itself through her works that are layered with photographs and drawn images. Primarily monochromatic, she uses the play of light to create theatrical scenarios that both conceal and enhance different aspects of the subjects through the layers. Remen is interested in staging her photographs keeping in mind the idea of how images can represent time contexts and how this can shift and gets manipulated when different elements are brought together. Remen draws on cinematic influences in the visual construction of her work and similarly, her preoccupation with the classical, the renaissance evidences in her choices of placing the figurative subjects in dramatic settings. There is a simultaneous handling of the past with the present, leaving the viewer almost disoriented with respect to time; or offering an alternate space and time for brief moments. Perhaps this is her reference to “the new order” and “the new world” that she envisions, a fictitious construction of photographs and drawn images compiled from many takes of staged scenes to arrive at a closer understanding of a narrative that embraces the multiplicity of time.
Remen associates the presence of the feminine form to ideas of eternal regeneration, nurturing and balance. She aims at an evocation of empathy and harmony in an idealistic future. In articulating this exploration she writes: “Walking into the shadows of history, on the steps of an old Roman historical building, there is a woman confronted by my own neurosis. Who is she? What does she stand for? Where is she headed? The modern woman is surrounded by ghostly figures of the renaissance. Within the narratives, there is a constant pull between the past and the present, the woman constantly negotiating her own individuality through time.”
All the artists whom I have discussed in this paper present encapsulated identities at different levels and through different means, and these identities are as much personal as they are collective. The archives that they dig into each day is re-imagined every day, while its physicality might even stand the test of time. What I find interesting is their integration of these archives, images that revel on suggested meanings but never offering absolutes. They are given a new life through art, placing it open for many more rebirths by the filters of imagination and experience of countless viewers.
Malavika Rajnarayan
Malavika Rajnarayan 