Saran Raj's etchings at YS2018

Biju Ibrahim's Photographs housed in Kerala Mosque

Originally exhibited at the Goa PWD as a part of the Young Subcontinent Project, Serendipity Arts Festival in 2017, Biju Ibrahim's photographs of the 42 distinct communities living in the 4 square kilometre area of Fort Kochi, have been subsumed as a part of the Masjid ul Islam mosque in the neighbourhood. 

Here are some news clippings that report the healthy hybridization of a mosque into a space of reflection through artistic endavours.

YS2018 Install

Courtesy: Shayanika Das

Team YS2018

We continued our discussion over issues regarding boundaries, tension, politics, art and representation in the South Asian region through the Young Subcontinent Project at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. We had the opportunity of bringing 8 countries and 24 artists for the third cycle of YS, a long term curatorial project initiated in 2016 with the support of SAF. The discussions were conducted by Dr. C S Venkiteswaran and Mr. Amrith Lal - advisors to the project since its beginning. Special leads by director Smriti Rajgarhia-Bhatt and Mr. Munjal helped orient the artists. A big thanks to all the wonderful artists for their solidarity and the team at SAF for its belief in the project and its successful installation. I wish the dialogue between the countries continues despite the unforeseen curatorial causalities this year.

Overarching chain of connections by Soma Surovi Jannat, Dhaka

Bhumiputra: photoessay by Partha Sengupta

‘Ali, Coolie, Bongali
Naak sepeta Nepali’

This racist slogan was in fervor in the Assam state in India during the Anti Foreigners Movement in 1980s against other ethnicities (Ali , Coolie, Bongali means Muslims, people from North Indian and Bengalis respectively) Coolie means who are migrated to the state bore the brunt of Assamese xenophobia. Since Independence violent agitations continued till today particularly the six-year long AASU agitation. Later a tripartite Assam Accord agreement in 1985 is the genesis of NRC (National Register of Citizenship) update process. These have found unstinted approval of the Assamese cognoscenti with their political zeal.

Assam has a long history of migration. Beginning of eleventh century the migrations of Ahom and in the end of nineteenth century the expansion of British colonial policy encouraged immigration of various class people from different parts of the Indian subcontinent into Assam. In 1920s British patronized “grow more food’ policy brings Muslims peasants to sparsely populated state. The Assamese “homeland” was a colonial creation. Robert Mullen a British Officer whose remark on the divergent ethnicity in the state and Colonial ruler’s ‘divide and rule policy’ was the seed of rift on Identity and language of today. Later various political developments in the Indian subcontinent undocumented migration continued is the reason for the state people to revolt against the ‘foreigners’. Since India’s independence “illegal foreign immigrant”, has undergone many changes claiming migrants from other states too.

Currently the Hinduvta policy of the ruling party in India and their counterparts in various states set the agenda and fuelling the ‘foreigner’s issue. Their poisonous politics legitimating of extreme unethical political formations are at the helm of NRC implementation on identity and religious ground. My project would explore the way core of Indian democracy is under threat on identity issue. NRC implementation is challenging the constitutional validity on citizenship status. Their profound nationalistic imaginary brings divisive politics foments hatred among the ethnicity and religious animosity. Central to my project would narrate visually the crudest xenophobic movement in modern India. The project portrays the plights of the four million stateless people.

Nobody knows what will happen to those who fail to prove their citizenship.

- Partha Sengupta

Saran Raj's Work at YS2018

OPPARI PAADAL
Audio installation
Mixed media - Handmade wooden chair, Oil lamp (hanging), Parai instrument (made of cow’s skin)


The deep connection between Oppari songs and me started from my childhood and it still continues. Whenever I happen to listen to those songs, I will be taken to an illusional state of emotion irrespective of the state of my mind or the place I am. Along with it I would be surrounded with a strange fear. When I was a child, I lived with that fear and . But now as an artist I am able to interpret and understand the fear and find the truth it is based upon. These songs raise numerous questions about my existence in the world. The answers of these questions and the truth gives me a sense of a fear which is different from the prior one. It is the Realisation. This Realisation of truth continues to haunt me. This new fear brought me to a clear understanding on many things such as life, birth and death, love, humanity, happiness, hate and the suffering of fellow beings. So I believe these songs convey the same to anyone who is listening to it. Many changes had happened through the ages is because of the reverberation of suffering, loss, sorrow and tears of the fellow beings has been transmitted to other individual. The intention of this audio installation is to take this truth and the realisation of existence to some extent to every individual who listens to this piece of audio.

Music is largely supportive for an individual in expressing his/her emotions. In Tamil culture, Music becomes the integral part of inner expression from a his/her birth to death. A life of an individual has been divided into seven categories in Tamil Folklore Music. One of such categories is Oppari or the lamentation song. It is played at the demise of a person. The meaning of Oppari is ‘no one is comparable to the lost one’.

In the Tamil Folklore culture, Oppari songs are being sung by women. It is also considered as ‘Oral literature’ in the literary world as these songs of mourning are passed through generations by their ancestors orally. Women sing these songs not only to mourn the loss of the person but they do it for consoling themselves for their own emotion of grief and loss.

In past days, these Oppari songs were known and sung by mostly all of the women in the locality. In recent days, only few have known to sing. So the situation has changed like, the family of the lost is approaching a woman in their locality who can sing the songs and they pay her to sing at the ritual. I met eleven such women who were used to sing mourning songs and brought their singing into an artwork.I have tried to transcend the emotion of these mourning songs through my work of art. I have drawn their portrait on “Parai” an ancient framed drum instrument made out of cow's skin. At the house of the lost, the music of Parai is played after the lamentation song. Regionally, the Parai music is called as “Saavu Maelam” (Rhythm of Death).

As this practice of playing Parai music after the lamentation song at the place of lost is a crucial part of the funeral, I had decided to have the singers portraitures to be done on the Parai instrument.

- Saran Raj

YS2018: SIGHTLINES

Through the last two editions, the Young Subcontinent project attempted to chart the contours and sightlines of South Asian art imagination and art practice, illustrating and celebrating the lines of convergence, the commonalities in historical experiences, the entanglements of its cultural roots, and most crucially, its shared aspirations and dreams. These tapestries of art practices from across the continent meditated upon and mediated the complex social, religious and political spheres of life in the Subcontinent. While, the first edition triggered dialogue and exchange between the artists from the region, the second edition probed further the socio-cultural and political tensions and struggles that animate and also in many ways, restrict imagination and art-making in the region. YS opened up contemporary aesthetic parallels to the much-trodden trade routes of yore, tracing common lineages of art history and practices, shared traditions of faith and ideas and ideologies of the sacred and the secular. The experiences of sharing a common space/platform at YS and the exchanges it provoked and pursued, brought to the surface the need to reinvent and reassert vital connections and traditions of exchange, to strengthen arts infrastructure and the urgency of developing vibrant platforms for intercultural dialogues and synergies. These interfaces invariably pointed to the potential of art in excavation and celebration, assertion and redirection of tools and techniques, resources and efforts towards rediscovering and reasserting the cosmopolitan roots and global imagination of the region. In the present global art, economic, and political context, such articulation of creative discourses and fresh sightlines are essential to foresee and forge new, exciting common futures through art-making, art-thinking and art-organising.

The geopolitical dynamics of South Asia is subject to several local, regional, national and global factors. On the one side is a kind of globalisation imagined and imposed by capital, aggressively moulding the structure and direction of economics and politics of nation states in the region. On the other are the menacing forces of fundamentalism and totalitarianism that threaten the democratic fabric and ways of living in this region. So an art project like YS is necessarily a struggle against monolithic culturalism and narrow nationalism based on othering, and one that argues vehemently for the coexistence and celebration of pluralities that constitute South Asia, its societies, identities, politics, economy and culture.

With this in view, the YS project ought now expand points of contact, explore sightlines of common struggles and aspirations, look at reassertion and reinvention of geographies, facilitate conversations and narratives of peaceful coexistence and democratic aspirations. YS aspires to imagine and develop into a free platform of art-making and theorizing, storytelling and mentoring, that will draw, and draw from, new sightlines for inter-cultural and political diplomacy.

A Preliminary Announcement: YS2018

Young Subcontinent: An Intermediate Analysis

This essay relooks at the two years of Young Subcontinent Project curated by Riyas Komu in Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival, organized by the Serendipity Arts Foundation. Here is the link to the essay:

https://issuu.com/anujdaga/docs/ys_essay_saf