ENTRY FREE
ISSUE NO.01
NAMELESS EXHIBITION
10th - 31st January 2015
Opening
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9th January 2015 6.00 pm - 9:30 pm
KHOJ STUDIOS, S-17 KHIRKEE EXTENSION, NEW DELHI - 110017
Artist Profiles Pages 10 - 16
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Symposium Crisis and Un/Making Sense Art as Schizoanalysis
Page12 P10
Artists DESIRE MACHINE COLLECTIVE GAURI GILL JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER VIRLANI RUPINI & LEON TAN MARINE HUGONNIER NAVJOT ALTAF SEAN SNYDER SONIA JABBAR WAEL SHAWKY Curated By
Khoj International Artists’ Association and Dr. Leon Tan
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02 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Artist Profiles
Desire Machine Collective Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya employ film, video, photography, and multimedia installation in their works. Their experiments with a wide range of media techniques and strategies with the aim of probing narratives and modes of representations, infused with a political character, lend them a uniqueness that contributed to their growth as one of the leading artist collaboratives in India’s contemporary art scene. Their works have been showcased at some of the major international festivals and renowned museums. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York and the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin. Over the years, they have presented their work in numerous group exhibitions including Being Singular Plural, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York , Intense Proximity, 3rd edition of the La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris , Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, India Pavilion,Venice , Indian Highway IV, MAC Muséed’Art Contemporain de Lyon and Indian Highway V, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome. Their recent exhibition is a Solo Show, Noise Life at Galerie Max Mueller, Mumbai and Project 88, Mumbai.
image courtesy: Project 88, Mumbai
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Artist Profiles
image courtesy: Project 88, Mumbai
10th - 31st January 2015
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Noise Life 2 Khoj International Artists’ Association
Noise life 2 is an installation that projects stills on to video images, where the forensics of colonial anthropology mingles with the forensics of criminal investigations by the state. In this way the audience engages a palimpsest strained through barely recognizable bodily and cosmic images. The piece, and the entire show that it has been a part of, is a tautology of sorts – life is noise.This noise is held together by a kaleidoscopic knot of pure intensity of sensations that is blind, deaf and pointless. This knot cannot be wished away from experience of life and art, just because we want to run away from the irrational force of chaos. Noise Life is grosso modo about a certain political history of Assam but is above all what the authors call an auto-ethnography…far deeper and intimately personal than their earlier works. (The text is excerpted from an essay by Dr. Kaushik Bhaumik, assistant professor at JNU)
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Artist Profiles
Gauri Gill Gauri Gill is a Delhi-based photographer. She studied at the Delhi College of Art, the Parsons School of Design in New York, and at Stanford University in California. Her work is in the collections of prominent North American and Indian institutions, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography.
Shaheedi Memorial Museum. From the 1984 notebooks. Gauri Gill 2014
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Jis Tann Lãgé Soee Jãné In 2005, when I heard Nirpreet Kaur relate her story, she had to have a psychologist present in the room. For us, it was too much to fully absorb. I did not know what to do with the weight of her words. We urged her to write a book, I hope she does someday. There is a kind of silence around 1984, which may follow from an impossibility of comprehension of the violence, and the terrors of reliving it. Perhaps the stone-deaf silence that has been the State’s response to witness accounts makes the futility of summoning a voice stark. At the time, there were no 24-hour television channels, internet or social media; what we have are only invaluable eyewitness accounts, notes and photographs. Photographers who documented the massacre that November were terrified that their photographs would be made to disappear from photo-labs by the all-powerful Central Government. Images did disappear. Those that survived may now be used as evidence, or to relive the emotion. At a street exhibition of photographs organised in 2012 by the activist lawyer HS Phoolka, many of the visitors wept even as they used their cell phone cameras to re-photograph the images on display. In 2005, after the release of the Justice Nanavati Commission Report on November 1984, and later in 2009, to mark the 25th anniversary of the pogrom, I visited Delhi’s resettlement colonies, and took photographs in Trilokpuri, TilakVihar and Garhi, as well as at protest rallies in the city. These photographs appeared in the print media then. The photographs in themselves are now a kind of artifact, since they were mediated by the mainstream media, and had a certain valence in that context. I wondered how they might be viewed removed from that context.
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To trigger a conversation about 1984, in early 2013 I asked some artist friends, who had lived in Delhi in November of 1984, or have since or prior, or who see themselves as somehow part of this city, to write a comment alongside each photograph. It could be a direct response to the image, or a more general observation related to the event; it could be abstract, poetic, personal, fictional, factual or nonsensically true in the way of Toba Tek Singh’s seminal words on the partition. Last month, in September 2014, I returned to Tilak Vihar. I met with Darshan Kaur and other widow witnesses; saw children from ‘impacted’ families play and recite at the Guru Harkishan Public school; and went into the Shaheedi (Matyr) Memorial Museum - where the only visitors were the family members of those in the photographs. ‘Jistannlãgé soeejãné’, a Punjabi saying goes. Only she whose body is hurt, knows. But perhaps it is also for those of us who were not direct victims, to try and articulate the history of our city – and universe. A world without individual stories, accounts, interpretations, opinions, secrets and photographs is indeed 1984 in the Orwellian sense. ( The text is by Gauri Gill, New Delhi, October 2014) The photographs from 2005 first appeared in Tehelka (with Hartosh Bal); and from 2009 in Outlook (with Shreevatsa Nevatia). The corresponding captions are roughly as they were inscribed in the published reports.
Gopi Kaur. From the 1984 notebooks. Gauri Gill 2014
Text responses are by Jeebesh Bagchi, Meenal Baghel, Sarnath Bannerjee, Hartosh Bal, Amarjit Chandan, Arpana Caur, Rana Dasgupta, Manmeet Devgun, Anita Dube, Mahmood Farouqui, Iram Ghufran, Ruchir Joshi, Rashmi Kaleka, Ranbir Kaleka, Sonia Khurana, Saleem Kidwai, Pradip Kishen, Subasri Krishnan, Lawrence Liang, Zarina Muhammed, Veer Munshi, Vivek Narayanan, Monica Narula, Ajmer Rode, Anusha Rizvi, Nilanjana Roy, Inder Salim, Priya Sen, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Gurvinder Singh, Jaspreet Singh, Madan Gopal Singh, Paromita Vohra.
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Joshua Oppenheimer Born in 1974, USA, Joshua Oppenheimer is recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” (2015-2019), and has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. Oppenheimer's debut feature-length film, The Act of Killing (2012, 159 min and 117 min), was named Film of the Year in the 2013 Sight and Sound Film Poll and won 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award 2013, and Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film. It was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award® for Best Documentary, and has been released theatrically in 31 countries. His second
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film, The Look of Silence (2014, 99 min), premiered in competition at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, where it won five awards, including the Grand Jury Prize, the international critics award (FIPRESCI Prize) and the European film critics’ award (FEDEORA Prize). Since then, The Look of Silence received the prestigious Danish Arts Council Award, and played at Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival (Cinephile Prize for Best World Documentary), and the Copenhagen Documentary Festival (Grand Prize).
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07 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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The Act Of Killing The Act of Killing is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built.When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar Congo and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.
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Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan génocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. The Act of Killing is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. And the film is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.
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08 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Virlani Rupini Virlani Rupini (MFA) is a video artist based in Berlin. In 2012 she participated in the Taipei Biennial, Cinelux in Genève, the 58th International Kurtzfilmtage in Oberhausen, Germany, the Berlinale Film Festival, Germany. In 2013, a group show at Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria, a solo show at Galleri Riis in Stockholm, a solo show in San Francisco, California, USA, and a solo show in1335MABINI, Manila, Philippines. In 2014 she exhibited at Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden.
& Khoj International Artists’ Association
Leon Tan
Leon Tan (PhD, MHSc.) is an art and culture historian and critic, artist, educator and registered psychotherapist. He researches and publishes on contemporary art, public art, globalization, digital culture, social activism and mental health, and is a professional member of the International Association of Art Critics. He is the co-curator of Nameless here for evermore and Crisis and the Un/Making of Sense Art as Schizoanalysis.
New Delhi
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Artist Profiles
09 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Receding Triangular Square Receding Triangular Square (RTS) is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Virlani Rupini and Leon Tan. Commissioned originally for the Taipei Biennale 2012, the project used the mediums of conversation and moving-image to ’analyze’ colonization and decolonization, psychosocial trauma and repression, and potentials for constructing new assemblages of enunciation in Taiwan (Republic of China). Through an unsettling arrangement of sound, voice and moving images derived from on-location interviews, footage and archival material, the single-channel video installation invites audiences to explore Chinese and Aboriginal (indigenous Taiwanese) philosophies and practices of healing as well as the dominant (’official’) Euro-American mental health paradigm, and to relate these to the larger social and historical
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framework of Taiwan’s development as a post-colonial and capitalist state. RTS relays fragmented blocs of sensation, sense-knowledge, in uneasy relations to each other. In so doing, it mirrors orrelays fault-lines in Taiwan as a nation-assemblage, at the same time provoking the imagination of possibilities for new and more life affirming subjectivities, not only in Taiwan, where it was shot, but also wherever Rupini and Tan exhibit the work and extend it through conversations with different audiences and cultures. (The text is by Leon Tan and Virlani Rupini)
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Artist Profiles
10 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Navjot Altaf Navjot Altaf is an artist working in and outside Mumbai, India since mid 1970s. Altaf has created an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of video, sculptures, installations and site-specific works that negotiate various disciplinary boundaries. Navjot continues to work with Indian and international creative people from different disciplines and simultaneously since 1997 has been engaged with ongoing site oriented art projects in public spaces ‘Nalpar’/hand pump sites and ‘Pilla Gudi’/ temples for children in co-operation and collaboration with Adivasi artists/communities from Bastar, Central India. The process has helped her address and realize the significance of transdisciplinary work “whose nature is not merely to cross disciplinary boundaries but to rearrange mental landscape”.
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Some of her recent participations include, Kochi Biennale (2014) ‘Is it what you think?’ at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India( 2014), ‘Forms of Activism’ at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, India, (2014) ‘Rewriting the landscape: India and China: Contemporary Art from China and India’ at MMCA Korea (2013). ‘Water’, Europalia India Liege at Belgium, Germany, (2013) ‘Women In Between: Asian Women Artists’ (1984-2012.) at Japan (2013).
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Artist Profiles
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Soul Breath Wind A video project in process, Soul Breath Wind is based on Navjot Altaf's research on the political situation, agenda of development and anthropogenic environmental change in Chhattisgarh. The loss and destruction of fertile land and soil, forests and biodiversity have had severe impact on the day to day existence and identity of indigenous communities living there for centuries and their rights to decision making…This has led to massive forced and undesired displacements of local habitants, resulting in marginalization of indigenous way of life, their oral tradition of knowledge, cultural environment in which both human, other species and nature could prosper and cultural dynamics are not destroyed, tacit knowledge which is not always known explicitly. Oral cultures encourage the participatory life of the senses, and are linked to the concept of relationship with more than the human terrain and its potential to create experience at several conscious and subconscious levels. Their relationship to land, forest or water which is rooted in very different conceptual frameworks, offers insight into ourselves and the belief in interconnectedness, interdependence. This has been part of the wisdom of people for centuries, which has been transmitted orally across generations. The video addresses the impact of imposed segregation from their live-world in north-central part of Chhattisgarh and dealing with the conflicts between the communities and the Police force, police force and the ultra-left forces in South Bastar District …And what is being lost in the process. The text is by Navjot Altaf
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Editorial
12 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
This thought keeps consoling me: though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed in rooms where lovers are destined to meet, they cannot snuff out the moon, so today, nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed, no poison of torture make me bitter, if just one evening in prison can be so strangely sweet, if just one moment anywhere on this earth. A Prison Evening - Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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Editorial
13 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Nameless here for evermore Nameless here for evermore brings together artistic practices that ask us to reflect on our implication in collective suffering, whether in the violence of Kashmir over the last decade, the Punjab and Delhi riots of 1984, the occupation of Afghanistan, the 'greenhunt' in the forests of Bastar, the competition and alienation of capitalist Taipei, or the anti-communist purge of1960s Indonesia. Our inability to adequately address and transform the wounds of collective trauma has often resulted in silence or stigma, and the erection of all kinds of psychic and social barriers. Many such traumas have proven resistant to treatment in the traditional psychoanalytic clinic, while the social core of these traumas has been left more or less untouched by the various psy-professions. At the same time, the assembled works also suggest that artistic practice, free from the ‘logic’ of the psychoanalytic clinic, has the potential to resonate with, diagnose and change experiences of trauma, often with an unexpectedly new ‘language.’ Art can resist, it can remediate, it can heal. Each work exemplifies how artists, as Deleuze (1997) argued, can frequently go further than clinicians, because ‘the work of art gives them new means.’
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Sonia Jabbar I spent many years as a writer, journalist, photographer, filmmaker and peace activist in Kashmir trying to understand why wars exist. At the close of that 15 year period I thought I had some idea. Now that I have a child I realise I have understood nothing at all. -- Sonia Jabbar, 2014.
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15 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Granted Under Fear In the early days of the freedom struggle, reflecting on state violence and the suppression of freedom, Gandhi wrote, "What is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts"( Hind Swaraj, 1929). A hundred years later Sonia Jabbar examines what Gandhi's statement might mean in an India that won its freedom through non-violence but now counters a violent rebellion in Kashmir with militarism and extreme violence, which includes the shameful practice of enforced disappearances used by rogue states and juntas, including Nazi Germany.
Originally exhibited in Detour (2009) a show curated by Ranjit Hoskote at Chemould Prescott Road, marking the centennial of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, this two channel video work juxtaposes images of the orderly army parade, replete with sounds of the bugle and the bagpipes-- images that ordinarily evoke pride in the citizen at the discipline and valour of its army-with contradictory images of the families of the victims of enforced disappearances in Kashmir.The victims and their families are all citizens of India. The army is the Indian Army sworn to protect its citizens. The rebellion has been controlled through fear. The text is by Sonia Jabbar
Autumn's Final Country 'Autumn's Final Country' is the touching story of Indu, Zarina, Shahnaz and Anju, four women who suffer displacement in the conflict-ridden State of Jammu and Kashmir. Recorded as testimonials for the South Asia Court of Women (Dhaka, August 2003), the film explores the lives of each woman as she relates the circumstances leading to her rootlessness, and reveals an intimate dimension of the Kashmir conflict, raising questions about patriarchal values and power, communal identities, patriotism and war. (Text taken from http://filmsdivision.org/the-fd-zone/films-on-kashmir.html)
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16 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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A Selection of Works From the ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary Collection Founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg in Vienna, Austria, Thyssen-Bornemisza ArtContemporary (TBA21) represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts. The foundation is dedicated primarily to the commissioning and dissemination of ambitious, experimental, and unconventional projects that defy traditional categorizations. This approach has gained the collection a pioneering reputation throughout the world. The foundation’s projects promote artistic practices that are architectural, context- and sitespecific, performative, and often informed by an interest in social aesthetics and environmental concerns. Many of the projects reflect the shift away from disciplinary to transdisciplinary practices embracing architecture, sound, music, and science. The “cross-pollination” of disciplines challenges interpretation and the traditions of collecting, preserving, and presenting works of art.This approach
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reflects the vision of TBA21’s founder, Francesca von Habsburg. In addition, TBA21 shares its collection and commissions with numerous museums and public institutions. Most commissions, initiated and produced by the foundation, form an integral part of major contemporary art exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and dOCUMENTA, where new works are very much on the agenda. In past years, crossover performative projects were realized through a number of collaborations, notably with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, Artangel in London, and the Wiener Festwochen.
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Artist Profiles
17 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Marine Hugonnier Marine Hugonnier (Paris, France, 1969) studied for a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tolbiac University, Paris, between 1991 and 1993. She continued her studies at Nanterre University, where she received a Master of Anthropology. She then studied art at the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Lille, France. She has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at: Villa Romana (Florence, Italy), Kunstverein (Brauschweig, Germany), Die Tankstelle (Berlin, Germany), Konsthall Malmo (Malmo, Sweden), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims, France), Galeria Nogueras Blanchard (Barcelona) and at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. She currently lives and works in London, UK.
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Ariana Marine Hugonnier’s works examine the ways in which representation constructs different ideas of landscape and history, asking “how landscape is a social construct; how it shapes and informs history, how it influences the course of events. We have created modes of analysis and perception—tools like photography and cinema—that echoed the expansionist mission of the time; that helped to establish a particular and perceptual point of view. I see landscape as a form of cultural mediation.” Hugonnier’s film Ariana, 2003, details a western film crew’s journey to the Pandjshar Valley in the north east of Afghanistan, eulogized in ancient Persian poetry as an oasis or Garden of Eden, since the impenetrable and lush nature of its landscape surrounded by the, individually unnamed, Hindu Kush Mountain range, have imbued it with a unique history of independence and resistance to the invasions of Soviet and Taliban ideologies. "To investigate how landscape can determine a region's history, the crew uses a Super 16mm film in its attempt to employ the cinematic convention of the panorama to create a 360-degree view of the entire valley. However, the crew is denied access to the necessary viewpoint due to its strategic value and realizes that attempting to capture a panorama of the valley landscape would constitute a way of controlling it. Ariana emerges as the ‘making of ’ a film that was never made, prompting a process of reflection on ideas of utopia and resistance, western ideas of viewpoint and the ‘panorama’ as a cinematic device and form of strategic overview.
New Delhi
NAMELESS 10th - 31st January 2015
Sean Snyder Snyder was born in 1972 in Virgina Beach, USA. He lives and works in Berlin and Kiev. He takes the global circulation of information as the operating ground for his work. His videos, texts and images data presented in the form of installations or publications, are the material evidence of a systematic research into the intrinsic codes of technologically produced and processed imagery as well as overt montage and propaganda techniques, exploring ideas of accessibility, transparency and the manipulation of information. Snyder draws his material from a variety of sources, being official news channels, information databanks, press agencies such as Reuters,The Associated Press, Governmental bodies as well as personal homepages, digital and material archives and clandestine websites. Through case studies, which have examined the world of urban planning, architecture and the news media, Snyder retraces the strange and often surprising shifts in meaning that information undergoes in the process of translation from one ideological system to another, while avoiding any definitive interpretation. Recent exhibition include Architecture on Film: The World, curated by the Architecture Foundation, The Barbican Art Centre, London, UK in 2014 and No Apocalypse. Not Now, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne in 2013.
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Artist Profiles
18 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars "News stories, scripted for consumption, merge the spaces of recent conflict. Plots, characters, and camera direction produce images for decoding. The sets can be cities, mountainous landscapes, hide-outs and tourist resorts. The plots include documents, dossiers, manuals, reports, un-released videos, un-circulated images, found mobile phone SIM cards, confiscated hard drives, and a largely unseen spectacle of incidental props.” Sean Snyder’s film essay Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars from 2004, analyzes the conventions and complications that arise in the production of iconic images of war. Combining the most diverse footage including moving and still images from amateur, government, photojournalistic and media sources, the work investigates the ongoing re-interpretation of information in the news media, from the Cold War to present day conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, questioning the correlation between factual evidence in the form of images rehashed through the media and the actual pictures of reality as such. Snyder simultaneously focuses on the materiality of war – expressed in consumer goods, economic exchange and the super brands in the title through the repeated appearance of products such as Mars candy bars, Toyota trucks, and Casio watches – and the relationship between the 'reality' of
war as an event and its documentation as spectacle, exposed through quotations from textbooks and instruction manuals outlining the mechanisms of photojournalism. This critical deconstruction of and reflection on photojournalism thus reminds the viewer that the relationship between deed and documentation is reciprocal rather than dichotomous, made acutely evident for example by soldiers strapping cameras to their guns, thereby simultaneously engaging in journalistic and military services. Further addressing the international acceptance and consumption of images and consumer goods beyond all boundaries, both as part of the globalization of the market economy and as part of an ideological war, Snyder addresses the ethics of reportage, the staging and manipulation of images, and the changing role of photojournalists in the era of consumer digital imaging.
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Wael Shawky
Cabaret Crusades Wael Shawky’s epic marionette animation film Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File, 2010, offers a view on the history of the Crusades, retracing events that unfolded over a period of four years (1096-1099) and played a key role in subsequent historical developments, shaking to the core the Arab world and its relations with the West. This horror film of sorts provides a precise description of the places in the Middle East and Europe that formed the backdrop for the early Crusades, following the course of events after a Papal mandate sent half-a-million Franks on a military campaign to ‘reclaim’ Jerusalem from the Muslim armies. To bring these episodes alive, the production uses highly expressive 200-year-old marionettes from the Lupi collection in Turin, dressed in costumes of the Christian and Muslim armies of the time, allowing viewers to momentarily suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in a tragic history, distant in time but not effect.Though the subject is based on historical documents and facts, what emerges is a surreal and mythical atmosphere that blends drama and cynicism, telling a story of remote events that could hardly be more
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topical today. The main source of inspiration for this work is The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, written in 1986 by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, offering a basis for Shawky’s reconstruction of events through the eyes of those who had to confront the invasion. The book by Maalouf re-examines the history of the Crusades using Arab historical writings, most of which have never been taken into consideration in the Western narrative. Considering religion in the modern world as a driving force of history, Shawky sheds light on this crucial historical moment and its profound resonance, constructing a ‘safe’ space in which to examine and discuss the causes and effects of religious wars and their impact on European and Arab relations to this day. Shawky equally endeavors to lay bare who (literally) ‘pulls the strings’ of history and the often biased and theatrical nature of the (re-)writing of history, stating “My interest in the Crusades is partly based on this idea of entertainment… a theatrical show…the writing of history is related to entertainment. I personally don’t believe in history, but I believe in our translation of it. For example, my
Crusades series is an adaptation of Amin Maalouf ’s [book], which he based on his readings of historical sources. He then selected aspects of this history to reflect a particular perspective. It is clear in his text that he doesn’t take the accounts at face value; he is not faithful to a given truth. But I deal with his text as if it is the truth. And I think that my treatment of Maalouf ’s text as fact is itself a criticism of history. It’s an analysis of how we write history. Yet it is not only a critique of historiography; it’s more about my faith in the language of art. Historical analysis gives me space to transform those extremely important historical elements into tools, and not final results. Everything transforms into mediums. The value of the artwork is based on a language, and not the importance of the event or its authenticity”.
Wael Shawky was born in 1971 in Alexandria, Egypt, where he lives and works today. He studied fine art at the University of Alexandria before receiving his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the 2013 Sharjah Biennial; Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); the ninth Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea (2012); the SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2008); the ninth International Istanbul Biennial (2005); and the fiftieth Venice Biennale (2003). Shawky has had solo exhibitions at the KW Contemporary Art Institute, Berlin (2012); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England (2011); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011); the Delfina Foundation, London (2011); Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy (2010); Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2005, 2003); and other venues. He has received various awards, including the Award for the Filmic Oeuvre created by Louis Vuitton and Kino der Kunst (2013); Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2012); Kunstpreis der Schering Stiftung (2011); and the Grand Prize, 25th Alexandria Biennale, Alexandria, Egypt (2009). In 2011 he was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Possible Studies, Serpentine Gallery, London. Shawky is the founder of MASS Alexandria, a studio program for young artists.
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Symposium
20 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
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Crisis and Un/Making Sense Art as Schizoanalysis SYMPOSIUM: 10th - 11th January 2015 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Siddhartha Hall Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi SPEAKERS: Ian Buchanan Ana Paula Cohen Navjot Altaf Amar Kanwar Sonal Jain Mrigank Madhukaillya Leon Tan Virlani Rupini Lorna Collins Sheba Chhachhi Sonia Jabbar
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Symposium
21 ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Schizoanalysis
is a concept and practice invented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a critique of, and methodology beyond, psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari argued that traditional psychoanalysis more often served to constrain and limit, rather than to liberate and affirm life. One of the problems with psychoanalysis was its enclosure of the patient and analyst in the coccoon (and model) of the clinic, isolated from the social relations and economic circumstances out of which symptoms emerge. In contrast, schizoanalysis deploys within the wider social sphere, as a practice that is at once critical and clinical. Its critical dimension lies in the identification of life-negating vectors in the social field, while itsclinical dimension consists of the ‘mutant centers of subjectivation’ seeded in a community, enabling collective imagination and experimentation with new possibilities of life.
Khoj International Artists’ Association
Crisis and Un/Making Sense is a symposium exploring artistic practices that address situations of collective trauma and social rupture. It examines how expression, broadly conceived, catalyzessense-breaking and sense-making processes resulting in social transformation. The idea that art might contribute to the resolution of entrenched social problems is by no means new.Yet it is one that is highly unfashionable, with critics such as Claire Bishop mistakenly arguing that socially useful art is necessarily devoid of criticality. In contrast to such tendencies of thought, the proposition here is that, in fact, the social therapeutic dimension of art cannot be separated from the critical dimension. Furthermore, as Buchanan and Collins (2014) put it, “we are all artists, we all have the potential to exercise what might be called an aesthetico-political function and change the world around us.”
New Delhi
NAMELESS 10th - 31st January 2015
22
HERE FOR EVERMORE
ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Symposium
Crisis and Un/Making Sense Art as Schizoanalysis
DAY 1
January 10, 2015, Saturday Siddhartha Hall, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
1.00 PM Lunch
3.30PM Tea
PANEL DISCUSSION
2.00 PM Noise and Sense – Scrambled Codes and Breakflows
4.30PM Fissured Land: Kashmir and Beyond
KEYNOTE BY IAN BUCHANAN
Panelist: Navjot Altaf, Amar Kanwar
PANEL DISCUSSION
Ian Buchanan is the Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research. His previous position was Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He has published on a wide variety of subjects across a range of disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, communications studies and philosophy and also on film, literature, music, space, the internet and war as well a number of other subjects. He is the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory and the founding editor of the international journal Deleuze Studies. He is also the editor of four book series: Deleuze Connections (EUP), Critical Connections, Plateaus (EUP) and Deleuze Encounters (Continuum).
Moderator: Leon Tan
Panelists: Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya
4.30pm Fissured Land: Kashmir and Beyond
10.00 AM : Tea 10.30 AM : Introduction to Schizoanalysis
12.00 PM Aesthetics of Collaboration – Resistance and Collective Creation in India
Navjot Altaf has participated in national and international artist’s workshops and residencies and has presented papers in seminars on art, in India, Japan, Indonesia, U.K., U.S.A and Canada Since 1991/92 Navjot has been engaged with interactive/cooperative/collaborative projects with Indian and international visual artists, classical vocalists, documentary filmmakers, environmentalist and technicians. Simultaneously, since 1997, she has been engaged with ongoing site oriented / public art projects in collaboration with Adivasi artists/ communities from Bastar, Central India. Amar Kanwar, lives and works in New Delhi. Kanwar's films are complex narratives connecting intimate personal spheres of existence to larger social political processes. Mapping a long journey of exploration, his work has mainly been about our relationships with the politics of power, violence, sexuality and justice. Key works have been A Season Outside, A Night of Prophecy, The Lightning Testimonies, The Torn First Pages. His recent work, The Sovereign Forest emerges from several issues related to land, agriculture, corporate crime and state violence. Leon Tan (PhD, MHSc.) is an artand culture historian and critic,artist, educator and registered psychotherapist. He researches and publishes on contemporary art, public art, globalization, digital culture, social activism and mental health, and is a professional member of the International Association of Art Critics. He is the co-curator of the Art and Schizoanalysis exhibition and symposium.
Khoj International Artists’ Association
Discussant: Ian Buchanan Sonal Jain is a fine arts graduate from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara, Gujarat, India. She subsequently served as a faculty member in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. She collaborates with Mriganka Madhukaillya as Desire Machine Collective. Mriganka Madhukaillya received a degree in physics from Fergusson College in Pune, India, and completed his postgraduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design. As Desire Machine Collective, they initiated Periferry (2007–), an alternative artist-led space and residency programs situated on the M. V. Chandardinga, a ferry docked on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati.
Sonia Jabbar in conversation with Sheba Chhachhi Sonia Jabbar was born in 1964 and is a writer, journalist, photographer, filmmaker and peace activist. She has worked in Kashmir as a rights activist, journalist, photographer and filmmaker since 1995. Her works frequently deal with themes of conflict, displacement, violence, militarisation and gender. She is presently engaged in writing a non-fiction book on Kashmir. Sheba Chhachhi is a photographer and installation artist with feminist and ecological concerns at the core of her work.Her enquiry encompasses gender, ecology, violence, urbanization and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the recuperation of cultural memory. Chhachhi began in the 1980s, both activist and photographer, documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, Chhachhi moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large photo based multimedia installations. Chhachhi often draws on premodern thought and visual traditions, interweaving the mythic and the social to create immersive environments, bringing the contemplative into the political in both site-specific public art and independent works. She has exhibited widely, published writings, given talks and conducted workshops, research and projects relating to her concerns in both institutional and non -formal contexts in India and internationally. She lives and works in Delhi.
New Delhi
NAMELESS 10th - 31st January 2015
10.30 AM Present Memory of the Body: the corporeal experimentations of Lygia Clark’s ouvre and The Archive of Interviews “Lygia Clark from Object to Event” – developed by psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik. KEYNOTE BY ANA PAULA COHEN Ana Paula Cohen is an independent curator, editor and writer. She was the general adviser and curator of Museu da Pampulha's Independent Program for artists, Bolsa Pampulha, 2010-2011, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In 2009-2010, she was the curator-in-residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies – Bard College, NY, where she organized the exhibition: Living Under the Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies. Apart from many of her curatorial projects, Cohen has been a contributor to several art magazines such as Frieze, Art Nexus, Exit Express, and Mousse Magazine, and has written for several art publications, concerning the work of artists such as Goldin+Senneby, Gabriel Sierra, Mabe Bethônico, Detanicolain, Lygia Clark, and Cildo Meireles. and Deleuze Encounters (Continuum).
Khoj International Artists’ Association
ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Symposium
Crisis and Un/Making Sense Art as Schizoanalysis 10.00 AM Tea
23
HERE FOR EVERMORE
DAY 2
January 11, 2015, Saturday Siddhartha Hall, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
12.30 PM Thinking with the Senses: A conversation between artistic practices in Brazil and India Ana Paula conversation Chhachhi
Cohen in with Sheba
1.30 PM Lunch
4.00 PM Tea
2.30 PM Film-Making as an Expanded Clinic
4.30 PM Film Screening (TBC)
Panel discussion Panelists Virlani Rupini, Leon Tan
The Look of Silence (2014) Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer Indonesian / Javanese, 103 Minutes
Discussant Lorna Collins Virlani Rupini (MFA) is a video artist based in Berlin. In 2012 she participated in the Taipei Biennial, Cinelux in Genève, the 58th International Kurtzfilmtage in Oberhausen, Germany, the Berlinale Film Festival, Germany. In 2013, a group show at Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria, a solo show at Galleri Riis in Stockholm, a soloshow in San Francisco, California, USA, and a solo show in 1335MABINI, Manila, Philippines. Upcoming activities include a solo presentation at RISD Museum, Rhode Island, USA. Lorna Collins is an artist, film maker and arts educator based in Cambridge, where she completed her PhD as a Foundation Scholar in French Philosophy, at Jesus College. She was the founder and co-organiser/curator of the trans-disciplinary Making Sense colloquia and co-editor of the series of Making Sense books. She is also the author of the monograph Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics, and co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art. Her provocative practice as an artist (in paint, film, installation and performance) drives the motor that lies behind all her existential and epistemological (philosophical) enquiries.
New Delhi
NAMELESS 10th - 31st January 2015
24
HERE FOR EVERMORE
ENTRY FREE ISSUE NO.01
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Exhibition The exhibition is on view from 10th January to 31st January 11 am to 7 pm (Sundays closed) Khoj Studios S-17 Khirkee Extension New Delhi - 110017
P10
Opening 9th January 2015 6.00 pm - 9:30 pm Khoj Studios S-17 Khirkee Extension New Delhi - 110017
Symposium 10th January - 11th January 2015 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Siddhartha Hall Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi
Khoj Team Pooja Sood, Director Programme Team Sitara Chowfla Promona Sengupta Suresh Pandey Khoj International Artists' Association S-17, Khirkee Extension New Delhi - 110017 Phone: +91-11-29545274, 65655873, 65655874 Email: interact@khojworkshop.org Website: www.khojworkshop.org
Finance and Administrative Team Manoj VP Adil Akhtar Arun Chhetri Manohar Bhengra Graphic Design: Studio Eksaat
Khoj International Artists’ Association
New Delhi