Peers 2013 by Khoj International Artists' Association

Production, publishing and copyright Khoj International Artists’ Association www.khojworkshop.org Peers 2013 Artists in Residence Niyati Upadhyay, Rachna Sansad Academy for Fine Art, Mumbai Parag Sonarghare, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda Pratik Bhattacharya, Kala Bhavan, Viswa Bharati University, Shantiniketan Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda Sashi Thavudoz, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda Critic-in-residence Shaheen Ahmed, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Khoj Program Coordinator Simrat Dugal Publication Editor Promona Sengupta Design Studio Eksaat Photography Tenzin Lekmon Printed at

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above mentioned publisher of this publication. Peers 2013 was supported by The Raza Foundation. Khoj International Artists’ Association receives support from The Norwegian Embassy.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PEERS RESIDENCY PROGRAM

The Peers Student Residency program at Khoj was started in 2003 with the intent of giving a meaningful platform to recent art school graduates to freely experiment, innovate and push the boundaries of their emergent practices in a safe space that was distinct from institutional spaces provided by academies. Art schools and academies have had their own rich histories within the subcontinent, dating back to monarchical patronage, the karkhanas of Islamicate courts, the colonial art academies that trained draftsmen and the progressive art movements that were initiated by various art school graduates across the country post independence. As an alternative arts incubation organisation, Khoj has been keen on exploring possibilities of patronage and support for emerging artists outside strictly pedagogic spaces such as universities. To realise this, the Peers programme selects five young artists, fresh out of art colleges across the country, to be in residence for a month. The annual residency is closely curated, populated with artist meetings, studios visits and mentoring programmes by senior art practitioners. The residency culminates in an Open Day, a model of showcasing art work that is still in process, in order to reiterate the importance of processual work in contemporary art practice. Since 2012 Khoj has started the Peers Share program in order to accommodate the large number of applications received for Peers. Peers Share initiates a two-day long intensive sharing session where young artists short listed for the final round of Peers present their practice and engage with feedback, encouragement and critical commentary from senior artists and creative practitioners.

Khoj International Artists’ Association in 2003 initiated ‘Peers’. The 2013 edition of Peers has been supported by The Raza Foundation

OF THE CONTEMPORARY, IDEAS AND THE SITE Shaheen Ahmed Critic-in-Residence PEERS 2013 The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, described a work of art as ‘the opening of the world’, that is, an artwork is a form of life which is distinctive and new. We, the residents of Peers came together in the summer of 2013 to negotiate the dialectics of this process of creation, of opening up of the lexicons of contemporary art discourse. We strived to find meaning within the space at KHOJ, of what constitutes an art work and if art can be non-art too. Keeping in mind the role of the art critic which is to ‘translate visual language into words that explicate the art for others’i (Eubanka 1997: 31), as the critic-in-residence, I had the opportunity to not just engage critically with the five artists, but also introspect with them over the nature of the political or the personal in their art. The crucial ideological and artistic framework was to locate contemporaneity of art in specific and visual culture in general. The term 'contemporary' is a loaded one, not just because it is denoting the temporal, but it constitutes of ‘doubt, hesitation, uncertainty and indecision’ii (Groys 2009: 3). And what is the real content of contemporary art and function of artistic creation? Art also develops out of the site of exchange of both labour and knowledge. The question of process too becomes central to the production of a work of art. Keeping in mind these issues, the residency offered a dialogic window to everyone involved. These were the key areas which , as the critic, I felt offered the leeway to dialog with the five artists. If some of the artists engaged with the personal, others engaged with the site that Delhi as a city offered, whereas some with the meta-narrative of the self and the other. They did create a rupture in the construction of a ‘decisive art work’ in an idiom that truly belongs to them.

THE CITY AND ITS NEGOTIATIONS WITH TIME Alan Badiou writes in his essay Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art that the real content of contemporary art is the ‘impossibility of possibility and the possibility of impossibility’iii. If such be the case, then Niyati, Parag, Juhika, Pratik and Sashi brought out the various avenues of exploring the impossibility within the spheres of the contemporary. Before going into the minutiae of their works, I would like to delve more into an understanding of what the contemporary is. Boris Groys in his essay Comrades of Time posits that contemporary art can be seen as art that is involved in the reconsideration of the modern projects. Contemporary is also not necessarily about ‘being in present’, it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time’. Badiou writes in the same essay mentioned above that the goal of contemporary art is to create possibilities and ruptures in the abstract universality that globalism has brought upon, that is, the abstract universality of money and power. While discussing the contemporary, it is imperative that globalization and the varied globalisms of the present be contextualized in art. Thus, Geeta Kapoor’s idea on capitalism is very important to note at this juncture whereby she writes that totalizing ideologies such as hegemony or fascism which have been ‘repudiated by post –structuralist theory, return via the compulsions of global capitalism’iv. It is in this context that she urges the artist and the critic to rethink the ‘definition of cultural praxis’ if one has to claim the ‘contemporary’ in its historical essence. This engagement with the contemporary and a redefinition of the cultural praxis was palpable in the works of Niyati, Sashi, Pratik and Juhika. What was also intriguing in their works as with Parag’s was the usage of installation. The installations were not just an extension of their own artistic practices, but were very much informed by the architectural sites of both Delhi as a city and KHOJ. One critical dispensation in the realm of globalism is the flow of signs and signage systems. These systems can be appropriated as means of resistance.

Ajay J. Sinha notes that installations exist in the ‘viewer’s space as a heterogenous cluster of sculptural, pictorial, and sound elements, an installation’s crossfire of signs could draw the viewer vicariously into an area of true historical conflicts, giving the diverse, partially erased fragments of India’s historical experience a contemporary semantic value’v (1999: 34). Thus, it is not that the installation just reflects the artist’s intent, but also creates and disperses signs simultaneously as it is the site of intersubjectivity where the subject is the object and the object is the subject. One can resist the global capital narrative via memory, which can contest the straitjacketed teleology of history. The resident artists engaged intimately with not just their personal memory but also with the memories and cityscape that Delhi offers vis-à-vis their own artistic practice. Thus, negotiating the artistic ruptures of these five young artistes in the contemporaneity of time, I feel that through their artistic process, their works were evolving into being ‘comrades of time’. INDIAN CONTEMPORARY ART: A NEW LEXICON As the critic-in-residence, I went looking for a new lexicon and understanding of contemporary Indian art. What I did derive was an intense engagement with ideas of the present that was already there and which could be prolonged into an indefinite future. This residency provided for us the infinitesimal possibilities how the processes and works of the artists could and did become into a study of locating the present in a time that is yet to come. It helped me to study how temporality need not be a real time temporality and how that hyperreal temporality plays with the space into which it is located at this moment or at the moment two hours away from now or even two months or two years away.

i Paula K Eubanka, ‘Art Is a Visual Language’, Visual Arts Research, Vol. 23 No. 1 (Spring 1997), pp. 31-35 ii Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, e-Flux Journal No. 11, December 2009, pp. 3 iii Badiou, Alan ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’, http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm, accessed 1st August 2014 iv Parameswaran, Ameet and Dev, Rahul ‘To Be Partisan, Unsettled, And Alert: Conversation with Geeta Kapur’, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/756-to-be-partisan-unsettled-and-alert-conversation-with-geeta-kapur- , accessed 8th April’ 2015 v Sinha, Ajay J. ‘Contemporary Indian Art: A Question of Method’, Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 31-39, Published by – College Art Association

NIYATI UPADHYAY / Notes on Elsewhere

NIYATI UPADHYAY

{ notes on elsewhere }

Niyati Upadhyay graduated in visual arts from Rachana Sansad, Mumbai. Though formally trained as a sculptor, it was photography that she found herself repeatedly turning to as a chief mode of expression. Her most recent preoccupation has been with documenting the ‘professional underbelly’ of the typical Indian city – whether it’s the scrap dealers of Bangalore or the kaan saaf wallahs -- ear cleaners -- of Bombay. Her curiosity about capturing the murk and quirks of dubious old vocations that lie at the fringes of cities like Mumbai, addressing odd bodily needs, quietly but firmly, finally led her to explore the lives of The Bone Setters and then The Barbers, which forms the main subjects of her current body of work. "My work has always drawn me to the intricate details of narratives that exist within the lives of people I see everyday. Over the past few years, my interest in contemporary urban street culture has led me to watch, observe and document the lives and work of many kinds of practitioners of pre-modern, unorganized street crafts. During my time at Khoj, I tried to explore similar themes in Shadipur Depot, which is home to an assortment of street artists and performers. The work that I have developed at Khoj has resulted in a translation of my experiences in Shadipur on to a wall in my studio, which plays the role of a page in my visual diary. Matchboxes, as faded bits of memories and a metaphor for cultural objects, help translate the experiences through my interactions with the people of Khirki Village."

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

NIYATI UPADHYAY / Notes on Elsewhere

CRITIC'S NOTE Niyati's installation at Peers 2013, titled ‘Notes on Elsewhere’, was an encounter with the resistance against the "abstract universality" (to use Alan Badiou's terminology) of global capital and the state, on the walls of her studio in KHOJ. Her mixed media installation which comprised of digital colour prints, digital black and white prints, video, empty matchboxes and charcoal sketch, was an elaborate exercise on a ‘creative documentation’ of the traditional performers living in Delhi’s Kathputli Colony. The colony is one of the best geographical sites to locate the clash of capital, memory and history within the discourse of globalism. The colony has been a performance site as well as a domestic site for performers such as magicians, puppeteers etc. With the rhetoric of globalism, the global city also rises. For this global city to manifest, the state puts on its best expansionist garb and sanitises the city of what it considers is an impediment to its stature of a global city. These impediments may be in the form of slums, homeless people etc. Kathputli Colony too has been a target of the expansionist state. Niyati juxtaposed her own personal interest in documenting the everyday narrative of the subalterns within the cityscape with the resistance metaphors to a global city in her work.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

PARAG SONARGHARE / Being the Other

PARAG SONARGHARE { Being the Other }

Born in Umrer, in Nagpur District of Maharashtra, Parag Sonarghare was trained in Nagpur University and Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. His academic journey traverses a practice-based bachelor's degree and a move towards art history and aesthetics in his masters studies.

"Identity is a prominent theme in my work. For the work I have done at Khoj, I have tried to look at the theme of identity through cloth and also through 'Aata' (wheat flour). At Khoj, I developed a performance in which I lived with the aata. As the performance unfolded, I was keen to understand how the aata was reacting to me and to better understand my behaviour with the aata. I see the whole performance as a conversation about my offerings in terms of sweat, touch and me being physically there with and for the aata. Now that the performance is completed, I see there is no more aata left and instead see it as the other me, something that is more than what defines me as a person."

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

PARAG SONARGHARE / Being the Other

CRITIC'S NOTE Parag Sonarghare’s work ‘Being the Other’ needs to be contextualised within the dialectics of time. His work definitely provokes one to contemplate deeply on what is the present. Is it the site of transition then of the past and the future? Parag had a continuous play with wheat flour (atta) for ten consecutive days. Using kilos of flour, he filled up his studio with it and played intensely and intimately with the powdery substance. By the end of the residency period the distinction whether the flour had become an extension of him or had he become an extension of the flour was blurry. By such an act, Parag subverted the traditional meaning of flour and infused in it a life that is unique to that particular inanimate object. His display was a large pan where he boiled the same atta in the center of his studio space. He also displayed his loin cloth which he wore in his interaction with the flour, hung limpidly, and some photographs of this process were stuck on the walls. Parag’s work is an ideation of time based art. His work moves against the notion of Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, where time is accumulated. Rather, Parag's work ‘captures and demonstrates the activities that take place in time, but do not lead to the creation of any definite product’ (Groys 2009: 6). The repetitiveness of Parag’s intimacy with the flour is akin to ‘initiating a rupture in the continuity of life by creating a non-historical excess of time through art’ (Ibid: 6). What Parag then displays is also a direct play in accessing the realms of phenomenology. He simulates his sensorial experience with the flour by boiling it in the center of the studio, thereby filling up the space with a noxious smell of dirty flour and bodily fluids. In this encounter one meets Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus of intersubjectivity where interpreting subject is intertwined in the object that she/he views. This encounter also collapses the Kantian notion of disinterested judgment which distinguishes between the subject and the object.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

PRATIK BHATTACHARYA / Presence of Absence

PRATIK BHATTACHARYA { presence of absence }

Pratik Bhattacharya was born in 1988. He did his graduation & post graduation in the field of painting from Kala-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, in 2010 and 2012 respectively. At Khoj, Pratik experimented with video and new media, to critically comment on the unique geographical location of Koj, amidst the bustling urban village of Khirkee.

"The title of my work is ‘Presence of Absence’. It is a mixed media installation in my studio space at Khoj. The work is not just a result of my interaction with the Khoj space, but also influenced by the interaction between different social layers and their engagement with us. I have decided to use live video streaming of the street outside Khoj into the studio space and video streaming of the happenings inside the studio on to the street outside, thereby creating a sense of time warp. This is because there would be a tangible yet an intangible interaction between the bodies on the street as well as the bodies inside the studio. This will also be an interactive element to the work as I shall be putting up black boards on one wall and providing chalks to the viewers, who are welcome to interact with it."

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

PRATIK BHATTACHARYA / Presence of Absence

CRITIC'S NOTE The cityscape is central to Pratik Bhattacharya’s installation ‘Presence of Absence’. Alluding to Jacques Derrida, the mixed media installation indeed evokes us to think about the ‘absence at the heart of presence’. Pratik created a tableau of the memory and idea of a city using found objects, paintings and video. Obscuring the tangibility between the real and the imaginary cityscape, Pratik problematized temporality by bringing in the idea of surveillance. His mixed media installation consisted of two video cameras that simultaneously projected the happenings within the confined space of KHOJ into the street in Khirki Village while telecasting live the happenings of the street into KHOJ. According to Boris Groys, ‘art begins to document a repetitive, indefinite and perhaps an indefinite present – a present that was always there, and can be prolonged to an indefinite future’. Pratik’s installation was a dialog with this indefinite present wherein one crucial element of the global cityscape can also be located and which was written in the earlier paragraphs of the essay – the signage systems. This simultaneous projection of live televised images into the streets of Khirki and in KHOJ also raises problematic in the binary of insider/outsider. Ranjani Mazumdar writes in her book ‘Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City’, that the cityscape is marked by global mobility and visual signage. Not surprisingly, in Pratik’s work then, this lexicon of the cityscape conflates the desires and aspirations that one associates with the global city.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

JUHIKADEVI BHANJDEO / In dependent

JUHIKADEVI BHANJDEO

{ in dependent }

Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo was formally trained in painting at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. However she actively experiments with fabric and installations. At Khoj, Juhika has chose to work with two extremely disparate materials – soft, synthetic, translucent Ribbons and cold, hard, sharp Razor Blades. She’s still trying to understand the possibilities these two materials lend themselves to.

"With my growth as an art student, I started perceiving human behaviors as 'pockets'. A 'pocket' is an embodiment of socio-economic status, religion, caste, and creed, uniqueness of an individual or a group. The way we perceive others can be a 'pocket'. Our religious beliefs are also like 'pockets'. We may term each religion as a pocket of the God. I also realized that each human being is represented by the objects she/he used in day to day life. Or the objects represent different and unique human beings. My recent work is an attempt at making a statement using different objects like ribbons and razor blades. The character and nature of the ribbons and razor blades create a beautiful pattern. The ribbon and the razor blades also represent gender in our society. The ribbon, here, holds sharp blades that can easily cut it. Moreover, the ribbon moulds itself to fit in and bind the razor blades together. The two simple objects: the double edged razor blade and White Ribbon lend themselves to many interpretations."

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

JUHIKADEVI BHANJDEO / In dependent

CRITIC'S NOTE Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo’s work ‘In dependent’ is a structure or a non-structure of two mediums – white ribbons and steel blades. The immense 11 meters, free flowing work was not exhibited inside the studio confines but was left dangling from the tree within the KHOJ compound. Though working with two very diverse materials, she built in uniformity through the colour white. The hundreds of blades were white painted and she weaved the ribbons through the narrow slits in the blades. Her work though a comment on gender – the harmony perhaps or the edgy relation that men and women share, is also an extrapolation of her engagement with the cityscape. The ribbons were locally sourced from the historic markets of Old Delhi which was to supplant her dialog with the gender issues and violence that Delhi is rather infamous for. Juhika’s medium was scale and spatiality, so inherent to the idea of the city, which she utilized to engage with gender and Delhi.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

SASHI THAVUDOZ / In Flux

SASHI THAVUDOZ { In Flux }

Sashi Thavudoz was born in Hyderabad, and has received his Bachelors and Masters in Visual Arts from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. His interest in drawing generated from the practical necessity of form and space.

"In this particular work I am focusing on drawing similarities between packaging methodology and built spaces. The disorder of the city is a surface character that is paradoxically coupled with internal logic, which, strangely, makes everything seem to be in its place. This is much like the built spaces around us, which sprawl in every possible manner: cities are rapidly transforming into concrete jungles, where life is constantly constrained into small cubes. The lack of space is an acute problem in every city. Throughout the history of urban planning and design, space has been a major concern, leading urban planners and designers to persistently innovate solutions that meet the day-to-day requirements to manage human built-space. In my installation, which is a construction of a given space, I want to reflect on the condition of living in over-populated metro like Delhi. I want to investigate the level of human intervention into the natural surrounding, reconstructing a second layer of nature for living and sustaining life. The installation meditates on the feeling of confinement and claustrophobia, dealing with the urban setup and space making tools,

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

SASHI THAVUDOZ / In Flux

CRITIC'S NOTE This process of being a global city and its citizen was also profoundly brought up by Sashi Thavudoz in his installation ‘In Flux’. The title of the work itself lays bare the meaning of who the global citizen or even the global city is in the contemporary context. By utilizing egg crates and other packaging materials, Sashi recreated the idea of contemporary living. The haphazard arrangement of these delicate structures piled up on top of each other was symbolic of the way cities are now being constructed. Sashi’s structures were a reflection on the skyscrapers as well as the densely colonized areas in a city like Delhi which are built structures but by no means permanent. Negotiating through those piles on the studio floor was again a commentary on the everyday negotiation of the citizen in a city. In flux, is not just a description of the evolving cityscape but also on the emerging questions of the citizenry. Who is a legitimate citizen of the global city? In the organized chaos of Sashi’s ‘In Flux’, one is reminded of not just the impermanence of the built structures, but also on the process of migration that leads to the either validation or negation of the legitimacy of the global citizen. Is this global citizen then the migrant day wage worker or is it the corporate worker? The cityscape, as we had noted in the earlier paragraphs deem it a necessity to obliterate its dark spots which includes the poor worker. However, global cities indeed need these very workers to build them up and then perhaps erase them. The workers then move on to another global city project. Citizenry as we know is in itself a dialectical process and this has never been as contentious as it has been now.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

SHAHEEN AHMED / Critic-In-Residence

SHAHEEN AHMED

{ critic-in-residence }

Shaheen Ahmed has graduated in the Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2012 and has done her under-graduation in English Literature from Fergusson College, Pune. She is currently an M.Phil research scholar at the Department of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. She also has a Post Graduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. She has dabbled with both the print and broadcast forms of journalism, but her interest has always been in arts and culture. Although writing remains her first love, she is beginning to experiment as an arts practitioner. She is interested in using her body in performance, while simultaneously blending it with audio-visuals. As the critic-in-residence for PEERS 2013, Shaheen created a critic's intervention, in which she printed critical text around art practice and spectatorship on paper napkins which were kept at the bar on the Open Day.

Peers Share 2013 | Khoj International Artists Association

PEERS

2013