Receptacles, Residues, Retributions from my Remaining Life / Anupama Alias

"You were there. I could hear you, but I only caught glimpses of you in the glass. Eventually I gave in and found myself staring at myself, reflected. Looking at myself looking back at me. Both of us trying to decipher the face that was in front of us. My eyes seeing me in mine and countless. "

— An excerpt from Then She fell, an immersive theater, based on the story of Alice in Wonderland.

It has been something that is stuck to each other, inseparably. I have been looking for that chord that binds my heart and my soul. The essence of my self. These works are an attempt to find the woman in me. A silent transition that whispered to me: girl, you are a woman now! I have been concerned about the state of a woman and the issues revolving the status of womanhood. I wanted to find out the identity of a woman. This must have happened sometime in 2014 when I was first ushered in a single hostel room far away from the cocoon-like comfort of my home and family. The solitude within the four walls initiated a dialogue between me and the me inside me. The conversations took the form of a journey and I began unraveling the secrets lying within the rib cage.

They say Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Why? Nobody knows. The intriguing reason behind the rib became the genesis of my work and I began exploring the human anatomy.

I have become like a temple
I have made my form from
His form and I am
Trying to be worthy of me

The rib cage become the spine of my works and also led me to other body parts and I started discovering myself in that process. The skin, flesh, brain, heart, lungs, blood cells all joined in an unending flow from which I began gathering whatever residues I could pick up. It was not just objects that I collected but also memories. When I heard grown ups recollecting nuggets from their memories I collected them too and also transported myself to the childhood that belonged to me. That was the time when I began becoming the others I interacted with and began internalizing their experiences. It instilled a fear in me and I hid behind the stories that my mother would pull out from her own childhood. And I began the search for myself. Who is this me that is tenaciously using this other me for its own tenacities? I was a woman coming of age.

It is a project that is still in progress. Thus I am focusing on woman in me and other women at a transitional and vulnerable time in their lives: not the teenage years that have been the focus of my work for the past few years, but the other transitional, in-between years: the ‘middle’ years since I left my adolescence behind. My work focuses on people, transitions, identity, and being in-between. I try to unravel the implied desires and fluctuations of identity that my womanhood has thrust on me. The idea is to not just focus on the universality of womanhood but get to the essence of being a girl first and a woman later. I dig deep into my stencils with the lantern in one hand and a lit matchstick in the other. AS my work burns in the fire of my passionate quest, it leaves black residual lines, which I visualize as forming the contours of my self.

Our personal lives, choices and goals are specific to each of us, but the issues are often universal when seen in the larger picture. The choice of subject for this body of work is an organic and natural one. I am a ‘woman coming of age’, just starting to feel like an adult myself. And I am aware of the fact that I might have to take on the roles of mother, wife, partner and daughter and with time they will all be redefined. I have immediate knowledge of how a woman perceives herself and is perceived, and realise that she is often undergoing similar transitions and can be as vulnerable as the young woman coming of age, the me in me, that I have etched over the past few years. It is not only how a woman sees herself and is seen. It is the fact that as she observes herself being observed more critically. The work is self-reflexive and somewhat autobiographical in nature and shows qualities that each woman brings to each of the work. I have gone up and down the mountain, strolled down the garden path, floated, drifted, nearly drowned in choppy waters. Yet, I am yet to find myself.

And my singing
Becomes the only sound of a
Blue/black/magical/woman. Walking.
Womb ripe. Walking. Loud with mornings. Walking.

Making pilgrimage to herself. Walking.

Title: Receptacles, Residues, Retributions from my Remaining Life
Size : 10 cm x 6.5 cm ( 90 frames with both sides)
Mixed Medium
Anupama Alias, Kerala, India

The Custodian of Dy(e)ing / K L Leon, Kerala

The Custodian of Dy(e)ing, 2016
184 cm x 612 cm
Oil on canvas
K L Leon, Kerala, India

Artist's Note:

While new forms of subjectivity and sensibilities are being excavated and defined through different modalities, painting remains a true study of our existence. In the context of South Asia, artists have been relentlessly investigating history to challenge contemporary mainstream suppositions and prejudices. But there still exists a certain construct that expects artists to take part in the, still-ongoing, post-colonial process of redefining cultural specificities while still being mired in the colonial and pre-colonial clichés about nation/regional identity.

I believe that politics without imagination is equitable to bureaucracy; however it's juxtaposition with man-made tools and cultural produce allows me to establish a world that reflects my ‘locality’ without being merely nostalgic. And without this recourse to nostalgia, my work seeks to confront broad shadows of doubt that plagues notions of history, culture, migration, and place.

The work for Young Subcontinent, curated by Riyas Komu, is an exploration of historical, cultural, and political roots through still-life allegories. But the danger with allegories is that it can easily be misrepresented as myth when placed out of time and history. Capturing these allegories, as a painter, then becomes an act of making emblems out of lands, myths, cultures and lives. Therefore it becomes essential that the work also address the critical methods of archiving, research and intervention while harnessing new narratives to amplify perception.

In that context, the work seeks to explore landscape(s), through historical and cultural vignettes, and its increasing alienation from its nature and 'roots' as a result of expanding industrialisation and urbanisation. This landscape not only takes advantage of the lived and living histories of the land and its people, its colours, memories, cycles of birth and death, and even its flora and fauna but also of contemporary art's incompleteness and ability to host many narratives without conforming to a determined discourse. Though "nostalgia" is often invoked as an yearning for 'purity' and the 'good old times', my landscape(s) seeks to assert that the artist too is very much a part of the world; that the canvas itself is not a transcript, but rather a carefully created construct where the local seeks precedence over the global.

Invisible connection-II / Mekh Limbu, Nepal

Invisible connection-II
note by Mekh Limbu

My art work is a visual diary about relationship between me and my father. I will be using intimate letters, recordings of phone conversation between us, family photographs of social gathering, celebrations, festivals, images of my father at his workplace, with his friends in the camp and his short visits to Nepal, documents and official paper works and belongings of our family in my art work.

I belong to Kirat origin; youth joinining the British and Indian Army is very common trend in my society. However, in later days the pattern of migration shifted. Most of my relatives and villagers were flying to Malaysia and gulf countries as labor workers. My father was a primary School teacher at Dhankuta, Nepal before he joined a Construction Company at Doha, Qatar and have been working there for 20 years. Being only person to earn in the family of eight members, it was very difficult and challenging for him to run the family as a primary school teacher. Therefore he left Nepal when I was just 8 years old. Though he was not physically presence his continuous support, love and care was sensed in the family.

In the course of 20 years my father visited us only four times. In the meantime, Nepal went through major socio- political and technological changes like royal family’s massacre, civil war, end of monarchy, movement for democracy & federal government and endless strikes. All of these affected the socio-economic structure of the country. This instability in the country led to more internal and international migration. While most of my friends were applying for foreign education or employment, I joined Fine Art College in the capital city and I started my career as an artist.

During my father initial days of work, he used to say "This place is like a desert with very few people, It is hard to find another Nepali here." Qatar with its oil production, liberalization policies and economic development strategies has become Newly Industrialized Country which demand more Foreign Migrant Workers (FMWs). This lead to explosion in FMWs. Now my father says, "You meet almost all the youths from a particular Nepali village." Qatar has witnessed its rise from being a small fishing port in the middle of the desert to a multibillion dollar country with the contribution of tears, blood and life of millions of Foreign Migrant Workers.

Me and my father’s life diverted in different directions because of his absence for such a long time. The intimacy we had slowly faded away, although he tried to keep it alive through frequent communication by means of letter and phone calls. This is a critical problem in many families in our country. Like my father there are millions of Nepalese who works outside of Nepal separated from their families. The issue of International labor migration is my personal experience but it is related with many other people who are also facing these critical circumstances. Every day almost 1700 people are leaving Nepal for work. And most of them are young people.

Display:
The work constitutes of two adjacent walls right angle to each other (corner wall). On one wall depicts my own timeline and another wall depicts my father's time line. The timeline is represented through intimate photographs, letters , mirrors, the excerpt from the political events, social and cultural changes, personal belongings and voice recordings of conversation between me and my father, installed in the wooden boxes of different sizes indicating the different events in different time periods which we face during all these 20 years of separation.

Erased Memories / Jeanno Gaussi

Erased Memories
36 inches x 24 inches
Photographs
Jeannette Gaussi, Afghanistan / Berlin
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It's a pity that Jeanno could not make it to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, 2016. Having done multiple rounds of the VISA office, Jeanno was denied VISA to India for no particular reason. To some extent, this also echoes the strained relationship between the countries of the subcontinent. Infact, Jeanno has regularly visited India in the past, and no one can really predict what parameters work in visa approvals in cross the subcontinent borders. Inspite of this drawback, she was able to send us images of a project that she undertook in 2007, which we could print and install at the exhibition. 

Jeanno sent us some vivid images of Kabul. One can see in the grainy, burnt out images the lonely landscapes of Afghanistan. Large dry stretches of land are encompassed within the fold of distant mountains that also contain the city. The photographs have serendipitously desecrated, (as Jeanno informs us), much like the landscape itself. Shot from a distance, most photographs try to capture the overwhelming silence of the city. In the selection of images, one sees little sign of life, creating a sense of strangeness and fear. Is this place desolate? Do people only stay inside? Is it too aloof to be outside? Are the outdoors safe? These are questions that have come to grip me on a primary viewing of the images.

The washed out photographs on one hand metaphorically represent the unfamiliarity of a distant unknown landscape, and on the other, allow the viewer to fill in the "gaps" with their own imagination. Phenomenally, they evoke simultaneous sensations of tranqulity and fear. Has the city calmed down after a turmoil, or is this the silence before a large upheaval? The faded photographs leave us in suspended time - sometimes leading into, and sometimes leaving us within Kabul's political geography. They may also give us an impression that the photographs were taken by a fugitive - rather they make the viewer feel like one...creating a sense of suspense and secrecy. But more than any thing else, the photographs become an apt mirror of Kabul's past, as much as the artist's.

Artist Statement: 

I was photographing Kabul, but had no knowledge that my camera was faulty until I returned home to find that all the pictures had been marred by a black or white shadow.

But there was serendipity in the incident because it highlighted the existence of my past within my present. The past was erased while my present was visible.

- Jeanno Gaussi

The Land and the Lore / Shrimanti Saha

Shrimanti Saha's drawings were one of the most delicate works at the Young Subcontinent exhibition. She works with drawings on paper, and collages them to create new mythical story structures. Shrimanti is an avid reader, and much of her art is worked out through her readings of Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, other nonsense literature, the tales of Shakti and so on. Her drawings in turn results into accidental mixtures of characters and environments from different readings / settings, thus mirroring the working out of cultural processes. 

In doing so, Shrimanti is able to put together different timescapes together, invoking the viewer to read into disparate histories at one, bringing in a contentious comparison. Some of her panels also reveal the actual confrontation of different histories in real time - for example, the different practices of worship in everyday India and its rejection by the British; or the ritualistic versus the scientific approaches to life, and so on. By employing such methods, Shrimanti is able to create soft surreal imageries that playfully tickle the viewer.

Living in contemporary India is much like living multiple histories at once. Our urban environment is full of such absurdities - Temples installed with CCTV cameras, railways as theatres of religious exchanges, mobile phones used for attending ritualistic ceremonies, cows fed on streets for promotions, gadgets worshipped on festivals with garlands and kumkum - all such practices often intrigue us about which time and history are we living in? The co-existence of traditional and modern lifestyles in contemporary India is gently provoked through Saha's paintings. It gives us a moment to reflect, ponder and think about the way in which our lives are collaged. Further, they also have a speculative quality, for they create fictitious historical futures - extending both, in the past and the future.

- Anuj Daga

Artist Statement:

My work is a compilation of detailed collaged drawings, depicting allegories of historical significance and mythological references; mingled with personal experiences.

They are rendered from the imagination of the present and placed with figures which are depicted like objects/shapes (collaged paper mounted on board); denoting a sense of fragmentation and the feeling of being embedded in the collective memory.

The intention of the work is to explore the possibilities of drawing, collage and storytelling while commenting on the ideas of identity, exploitation and the present as a conse­quence of the past.

- Shrimanti Saha

Letter From Korlai / Aman Wadhan

“We’ve inherited hope – the gift of forgetting.

You’ll see how we give birth among the ruins.”

-Wisława Szymborska


Of the cattle that come to graze on the slopes leading to the fort of Korlai, I would ask, why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me? Their eyes appear to say, the reason is I always forget what I was going to say—but then they forget this answer, too, and stay silent so that the human being was left wondering before the sea, in the time of yellow grass.

I had first visited Korlai in 2009. A very dear friend of mine had also been there, separately, unbeknownst to me, around the same time. We were both haunted by something mysterious at work over there. We used to write each other about life, about cinema and languages, but we had never mentioned Korlai and its secret indifference, or our desire to return there. It wasn’t until a few years later, when an assignment brought me back to Korlai, that I could begin to speak about it. By then, my friend had disappeared from my life.

It was the walk to the fort I remembered most—following cattle trails, not the dirt road to the lighthouse, finding pockets along the hill which seem to put the whole world into perspective by revealing that the world is blue at its edges and in its depths; from these pockets one can see that this blue is the light that is lost, the colour of where you are not, where you can never go. These nameless places awaken a desire to be lost, to be far away, yet they can also become anechoic chambers where the silence of the Self becomes audible. You take a deep breath, and unto the dust bequeath yourself, to grow from the grass you love.

In the year and a half it took to make this film, to retrace my footsteps and start over again, Korlai, for all its endurance, kept on changing. I have not returned to Korlai ever since, though some of my friends have recently been there and sent me souvenirs. The continuity of memory falls short to measure the abyss between what it once was and what will remain of it in the near future. Though when I think of my long-lost friend, I feel how little some things change—the last stretch of white sand, the three trees, the cattle trails—even if I be not there—it would always be the same. May the grass make it known that wherever you are my friend, if you want to find me again, look for me under your boot-soles.


Film Synopsis

On India's Konkan coast, in the village of Korlai, a sense of quaintness pervades its Portuguese heritage, the Creole, the faces, and the fort. The filmmaker had visited this place once, as did his friend, of whom nothing is ever said. Years later, an assignment brings the filmmaker back to Korlai. Memories revive but what compels his wayward excursion this time is the elemental and the immemorial wherein his solitude finds refuge. In the time of yellow grass, with steps receding and prayers unanswered, a desire for oblivion forks the search for images of exile and belongingness. This experience surfaces through grainy 16mm images and an elegiac voice-over, which retrace a sense of remembrance, loss, perception, and time intersecting with an inner self and with history. A letter for Korlai also becomes a letter to a dear departed; and in reading this letter, in seeking a new way of inhabiting the world, a vision of Korlai emerges that is both attentive and phantasmagoric, a series of possible angles and tributaries that the viewer and traveller might possibly take.


Letter from Korlai 

running time: 22 min. 23 sec. 

original format: 16mm 

Colour & Black-and-White screening format DCP 2K 

BluRay sound format Dolby Digital 

original language English 

subtitles none


direction, production: Aman Wadhan 

cinematography: Niraj Samad 

editing: Nachiket Waikar 

sound: Bhanu Dhande 

production company: Film and Television Institute of India

-Aman Wadhan

Inside / Anuradha Upadhyay

"Inside" was performed by Anuradha Upadhyay as a part of the Young Subcontinent Project for the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, on 16th December 2016. In the inner courtyard of the Adil Shah Palace - Anuradha prepared for her performance invoking the environment through mythical symbolic themes. Defined within the geography of several pots was a triangular arena outlined with series of candles that would be lit up during the performance. The pots, the candles and the red triangle (created using the sacred red sindoor) clearly refer to ideas of fertility, gender and sexuality. Each pot contained different experiences of growth - some poked by sharp objects, some filled with masculinity, and and another trapped within barbed wires. Bound within the carefully constructed diagrams, as well as within the four walled geography of the palace's womb - the performance began with the recital of Kabir's poem, followed by a short passage.

One with the ground, contained within a red translucent fabric, the performer almost appears to be like a seed erupting from the earth. The next fifteen minutes saw her struggle to release herself from the bounds of societal confines. The performance/setting recalls several mythical tropes that have come to define the dual status of women, particularly in the Indian society - the birth of Sita from the soil, or the laxman rekha - the boundary that puts her in trouble on crossing it... Women in India are often held in this duality - where on one hand they are considered to be sacred sustainers of life, while on the other, they are imposed with several societal restrictions in the way they behave, speak, dress up and so on. The fight begins from the moment when the seed is planted in the womb. 

The issue of women's liberation is certainly not just an Indian one. It is shared across most cultures in the subcontinent, as well as beyond. Often, what holds back women from acting against such domination is their own cultural conditioning, which creates an ethical-moral dilemma that can be quite emotionally disturbing. In such confused state, often women define new limits of liberty, inscribed within their limitations. It is hard to open up new questions when we still dealing with, and waiting for the earlier ones to be answered. 

One wonders if it may be a pointless exercise - when the upholders of the state rights (equality of women) themselves speak a language disqualifying their questions! I am referring to the recent molestation of a woman that took place in Bangalore over the New Year 2017! Inside provokes the audience to experience frustration - what it fees like to be caught up within in the mythical, social, moral, ideological, symbolic as well as constitutional traps - what it feels like to be a woman. Perhaps.

 

Anuradha Upadhyay's ideas and work covered in the newspaper Sakaal Times, 8th January 2017. In the context of the molestation case over the new Year in Bengaluru, India (incidentally also included on the page by the editor), the performance gains more significance.

The Disturbed Corner / Teja Gavankar

The Young Subcontinent Project, as much as the Adil Shah Palace in Goa greeted its visitors by Mumbai-based artist Teja Gavankar's bold experiment in bricks. Produced in about two weeks on site, Teja created a large brick wall corner that folds itself strangely. At once, the viewer is taken over by the projections from corners, as if the corner is shouting out to you. the mutated edge, the fuzzed boundary, the distorted lines, the protruding forms - all call out for several themes embedded in the framework of the Young Subcontinent curatorial note. The collision of the subtle and the loud, the plain and warped echo how seemingly benign materials can take disruptive forms, much like the history of the Indian subcontinent.

In the 'Disturbed Corner', Teja attempts to question the idea of security that a wall corner creates. How do parallel and even brick courses create sloping surfaces? How do the brick lines remain continuous over the folded planes? How does the brick cantilever? These are initial questions that take the viewer by surprise and confusion. New forms of shelter are created on both sides of the intervention - where on one hand, space is created through shadows, the rear side caves in to form a scooped corner.

To be sure, brick is one of the oldest materials through which civilizations have built themselves and sheltered humanity. Clay brick is a material that has moulded, and been moulded by cultures. The brick is an apt metaphor for humanity - fired and hardened over years of civilizational pressures. Several building blocks come together to form walls - those that can protect, as well as screen (from) the other. Regimental courses set in history can create hard edges, without any room for negotiation. Creative processes can blur such boundaries, opening up spaces for dialogue and discussion. In the present work, Teja challenges the conventional method in which bricks are laid out, and how their capacities can be furthered through strategic intervention. By twisting surfaces, Teja makes the unsettled geographies of the subcontinent more apparent. In doing so, she invites the viewer for a close observation of the disturbance.

In the urban settings in which Teja has grown up and still lives, often an unfamiliar, unrelated accident on the street brings together passers by to whom the event may be seemingly unimportant. Yet, in the established pause of the moment, the viewer is able to reconsider and reflect upon some of the innermost morals and values that one carries in a flash. Such disturbed rhythm of quotidian city life often becomes a productive backdrop for us to relook at our lives. It is these disturbed moments make us human.

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Artist's Statement:

The interrelationship between different urban spaces, and the way the individual relates and reflects upon them is the primary subject of my inquiry. Working with architectural sites, I find it interesting to think of the “corner” within a space to represent an individual’s “personal area” - that which distorts, deforms and ultimately becomes the impression of the changing identity in the way it is occupied.

Saju Kunhan's artistic explorations

ABSTRACT

Two works of maps on wood panels; which deals with the area of mythology> history> anthropology> migration> invasion> expulsion> displacement> unity> settlement. The multidimensional power of maps gives it the inclusiveness.

IMPORTANCE

Throughout history, there were many civilizations and lands, which are buried under history or lost in mysterious conditions. The reasons are mostly unknown. But we make speculations with available information and hypothesis.

The search for new lands always opens up the possibilities of invasion and violence, which was and is always the result of somebody's domination over the others. Neo-modes of information and ‘news or resources’, which may or may not be reliable, have the power to change or divert the entire connotation of a subject and it acts as the new mode of domination.


METHODOLOGY

I have a habit of visiting different places through ‘Google map’, especially the areas, which has considerable his­torical and archeological value. And from here, I take screenshots of zoomed areas, stitch it together to make a large scale map.

The recycled woods; which is nearly 200-300 years old, as mate­rial, was part of an entirely different functional existence before. Somehow it is the rebirth of the wood as an art piece. Its damages, marks and corrosions were from its previous birth.

The medium plays a vital role. Here I used panels of recycled wood to transfer the images. The slow manual process of transferring the digital prints on wood, gives accidental results. While transferring, through the process we can't predict how the final result would be. I often got maps with missing and erased areas along with extra lines and marks on it. The semi transparency of the wood surface and its rusted areas created some mystery to the map. Moreover, the recycled wood, which has an unknown history and has lost and damaged surfaces, creates holes and erases certain lands from the map.

PROCESS

There are two works of mixed medium on recycled wood panels. Both of the work have a size of 9ft x 5ft. Six panels of 3ft x 2.5 ft are joined together in one work, similarly in the other. One work shows the world map whereas the other depicts the South Asian region.

The use of high definition computer monitor is essential, as the process involves joining hundreds of screen shots together to get an image of 'google map' with desirable quality and size.

The map is then printed on paper, later subjected to processes like painting, erasing, fire burning etc., before transferring the print from paper surface to wood surface.

Multiple images of different layers are added throughout the process. The surface of the wood has to be treated and protected well. 

-Saju Kunhan

Saju's final works:

History Always Repeats, 2016
9 ft x 5 ft (6 panels)
Mixed Medium on Wood,
Saju Kunhan, Mumbai, India

United We Stand Divided We Rule, 2016
9 ft x 5 ft (6 panels)
Mixed medium on wood
Saju Kunhan, Mumbai, India