ArtReview Asia Summer 2019 by ArtReview

Liu Chuang

Yang Fudong Praneet Soi Michael Rakowitz

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ArtReview Asia vol 7 no 2 Summer 2019

Dammit As the world engages in heated discussions surrounding the global climate crisis, China celebrates the return of water to the dried-up ponds and lakes that once formed part of the country’s northwestern Tarim River. Hurray! But wait. Isn’t there an old proverb that says yı̌n shuı̌ sī yuán – ‘when you drink water, consider its source’? Sure, there’s a deeper meaning to it: be grateful for where you came from, remember your roots and all that. But it also pretty much says what it says. Remember the source of Tarim River? Of course you don’t, why would you? And as ArtReview Asia never passes up a chance to dig around in the dirt, it’ll give you a brief reminder: the Tarim Basin barely gets any rainfall as it is, and with the government’s promotion of largescale irrigation for agriculture and jade production, the lower reaches of the river had run dry by the 1970s. Then in 2001 the government launched a ¥10.7 billion project to restore water to the area – one of the solutions being to build dams. In the nearly two decades since, Xinjiang has diverted 7.7 billion cubic metres of water to the lower reaches of the river through its water project. And now fish have returned. It’s a happy (or rather, corrective) story, but ArtReview Asia also has a fastidious side to its nature and so naturally it would want to point out (for a balance of perspective, of course) that excessive damming and overuse of the country’s water resources has not only led to further desertification of the land, but also the forced displacement of ethnic minorities where dams have been built, not just along that river but in many other areas of the country. ArtReview Asia is not here to lecture (actually it is, but its point is that there is a reason for the geography lesson). Liu Chuang, whose work graces the cover of this issue, is interested in the way humans interact with the landscape, whether

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it is symbiotically or parasitically, and the great lengths we go to pretend that we mostly do so in the former fashion than the latter. One neat analogous anecdote: the Chinese artist unearths the rogue use of the hydroelectricity produced by dams across Asia, harnessed by bitcoin miners. But this is not an antihuman issue. Humans can do good things (art is one of them, right?). Beijing-born filmmaker and artist Yang Fudong finds his source material in China’s history and talks to ArtReview Asia about his ongoing project in which he foregrounds the process of filmmaking (while creating a film set during the Song Dynasty, in which the audience is asked to question and interpret the truth of what they see), and Michael Rakowitz, whose work springs from his Iraqi heritage, argues that the things we produce – the debris left behind by centuries of human habitation of this planet – is a very precious thing indeed. We lose it at our peril. From the subject of culture, to the issue of translation: how far can an interpretation from one language to another stay true to its source? Should it? These questions are discussed by British novelist Adam Thirlwell and Hans Ulrich Obrist in the lead-up to their cocurated show Studio Créole, which experiments with the act of translation and considers multilingual artforms and creolisation as a form of cultural exchange. That last point is taken up by artist Praneet Soi, who engages with the materials and crafts of South Asia, shared genealogies, the trade routes that brought Asia’s artefacts to Europe and the assimilation of cultures. Not a new subject for sure, as ArtReview Asia’s delving into the archives of sister magazine ArtReview – republishing a treasure trove of articles on art from South Asia during the 1950s and its relationship with the West – attests. Yet it is one that is ever more pertinent in a globalised world, with global problems. The old adage ‘follow the river and it will eventually lead you to the sea’ is sound advice, all seas flow into each other, after all, but if the river source dries up, how will we find our way? ArtReview Asia

Crossing

MARC NEWSON Gagosian Hong Kong

Art Previewed

Previews by Nirmala Devi 21

Future Great: Fazal Rizvi selected by Natasha Ginwala 32

Notes from Madras by Charu Nivedita 30

Art Featured

Liu Chuang by Mark Rappolt 36

Praneet Soi by Shwetal Patel 52

In Translation A conversation between Adam Thirlwell and Hans Ulrich Obrist 42

Michael Rakowitz by Oliver Basciano 58

Yang Fudong by Mark Rappolt 48

Art Archived

South Asia, 1952â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1961 by Asper, John Berger, G. M. Butcher, Maurice Collis, Ranjit Fernando, Peter de Francia, J.P. Hodin, F. Joss 66

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 82

books 96

May You Live in Interesting Times, by Ben Eastham Arahmaiani, by Mark Rappolt Lavanya Mani, by Rahel Aima The National 2019: New Australian Art, by Micheal Do Jack Whitten, by Martin Herbert Mike Nelson, by Ben Eastham Denzil Forrester, by Louise Darblay Liliane Lijn, by Oliver Basciano

Insurgent Empire, by Priyamvada Gopal Broken Stars, edited by Ken Liu The Last Leonardo, by Ben Lewis A place that exists only in moonlight, by Katie Paterson We, the Survivors, by Tash Aw Clone, by Priya Sarukkai Chabria behind the headlines 102

page 94 Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order (detail), 2019, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist, Kronenberg Mais Wright and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Art Previewed

who had attained to the fruit 19

Previewed Takashi Murakami Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong Through 1 September

Charles Lim National Gallery Singapore Through 27 October

Samson Young Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 24 July – 5 October

McArthur Binion Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong Through 31 August Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong Through 5 July Lehmann Maupin Seoul Through 13 July

Guangzhou Airport Biennale Guangzhou Wing Kong Airport Town Through 31 August

aaajiao How Art Museum, Shanghai Through July 14

superflex Kukje Gallery Busan 14 August – 27 October

Kohei Nawa Pace Gallery Hong Kong 18 July – 29 August

Matter and Place Museum macan, Jakarta Through 21 July

Ryoji Ikeda Taipei Fine Arts Museum 10 August – 17 November

Cao Fei Pompidou Centre, Paris Through 26 August

Healthier, Simpler, Wiser Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai Through 30 June

Tatsuo Miyajima Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai Through 18 August

The Challenging Souls Power Station of Art, Shanghai Through 28 July

Peter Peri Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong Through 5 July

Xu Jiong Each Modern, Taipei Through 6 July

21 Hu Jieming, 100 Years in 1 Minute (Joseph Beuys), 2014, multichannel video, Plexiglass, 68 × 51 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore

Summer 2019

Avalokiteśvara is the bodhisattva of compassion, looking out for and reaching out to those in need. That so many need to be heard caused his or her (Avalokiteśvara takes both genders) head to split into 11, so that she could better hear their cries. That so many needed her help caused his two arms to shatter, whereupon she was given 1,000 so that he could make a better fist of things. She can take on other forms too, but you get the drift. Takashi Murakami’s 2012 sculpture Split 1 is monstrous, a hyperreal self-portrait in which the artist (dressed as an ogre-priest) has apparently split his face in two. He has done this in order to peel off his outer skin (which seems to be a rather thick and leathery dermis) and reveal his identical (though presumably slightly

smaller) inner face poking out from the two halves of its predecessor. His new eyes swivel; the old ones, one on the outer side of each of the new ones, give the impression that he now has three heads. While Japan’s most popular artist has been engaging with religious iconography over the past few years, it’s unclear whether Split has anything to do with compassion (Murakami’s sculpture is based on a Heinan-era sculpture at the Saionji Temple in Kyoto), but he’s certainly everywhere at the moment. Not least in the adaptation of Split used to create a portrait of American pop star Billie Eilish early this year and Murakami’s directing of the anime-style video for her 2018 song You Should See Me in a Crown. Back in the world of unpopular culture, this month sees

the opening of the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Contemporary. murakami vs murakami offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s output, from the kawaii flower paintings to his explorations of the iconography of enlightenment. His costume designs will be on show too, alongside a sampling of works from the artist’s private collection in what promises to be an insight into Murakami’s many selves. And he’s not the only one offering that. Elsewhere in the Special Administrative Region, the work of seventy-three-year-old 2 American McArthur Binion is split across two galleries in the Pedder Building (Lehmann Maupin and Massimo De Carlo), as well as a third space in Seoul (Lehmann Maupin’s other

2 McArthur Binion, Hand:Work, 2019, oil paint stick and paper on board, 122 × 183 × 5 cm. Photo: Aron Gent. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong & Seoul

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fx Harsono, Wipe Out #1, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Museum macan, Jakarta

4 Kwan Sheung Chi, Yawn (still), 2011, single-channel video, colour, sound, 10 min 35 sec. Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong & Shanghai

Asia outpost). Born in Mississippi, brought up in Detroit, trained at Cranbrook, Binion spent the 1970s and 80s in New York, working alongside artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden, before moving to Chicago during the 1990s. His work shifted from gestural and geometric abstraction to a form of collage incorporating hand-painted grids and notionally private materials such as birth certificates and address books, which generated a unique form of personalised abstraction both anticipating and resisting a big-data age. Perhaps it’s a subtler way of telling the world about your many selves. Identity, of course, is constructed in many ways and at Museum macan in Jakarta it’s the role of place and our perception of it as

a driver for identity formation that takes centre 3 stage. Matter and Place is a group exhibition (featuring works by Danh Vō, fx Harsono, Genevieve Chua and Theaster Gates drawn from macan’s collection) based around two new works: Indonesian architect Andra Matin presents an installation featuring a spiral staircase made of Jabon wood that explores the ways in which various traditional domestic architectures have informed Indonesia’s ways of living; while Malaysia-based Shooshie Sulaiman’s Tadika Getah (Rubber Kindergarten, 2019) continues the artist’s exploration of a childhood spent playing on her father’s rubber plantation and the relationship of the material to her own, Malaysia’s and Southeast Asia’s social and cultural development.

Summer 2019

Traditional construction techniques have also provided the inspiration for Hu Xiangqian, whose latest work, on show as part of the group 4 exhibition Healthier, Simpler, Wiser, at Edouard Malingue Gallery Hong Kong, is inspired by Internet videos of people building houses with traditional methods. Hu describes watching such documentaries as a ‘personal interest’, and his work is based around performance (Blue Flag Waving, 2006, for example, documented Hu’s real-life election campaign for a seat in his hometown, though the artist was never an eligible candidate), often recorded on video in a crude manner. Hu’s life to date has been migrant. Born in Guangdong, he later moved to New York and is currently in Beijing. With typical perversity, he says he has never had

6 Charles Lim, sea state 9: proclamation garden, 2019 (installation view, National Gallery Singapore). Courtesy the artist

any interest in building his own home and doesn’t even keep the places in which he lives tidy. Naturally he’s going to be building a structure in the gallery, where he’ll be showing alongside Kwan Sheung Chi and Lai Chih-Sheng, both from Hong Kong. Dwellings also play a role in British artist 5 Peter Peri’s latest exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries Hong Kong. The exhibition is titled Quarters and plays with the double meaning of the word in terms of a division of a whole and a militaristic description of living space. More directly Peri, whose oeuvre is broken into discrete bodies of work, each executed in a different medium (painting, sculpture and drawing), relates it to the phases of the moon. Here, the paintings will refer to the

idea of dwelling and mathematical division, the sculptures will reflect on the human presence and the drawings the act of looking. It is, however, gardening rather than building that 6 informs Charles Lim’s new installation at the National Gallery Singapore (ngs). Following Rirkrit Tiravanija and Danh Vō, Singapore’s representative at the 2015 Venice Biennale is the latest artist to present a site-specific installation on the roof of the institution. Sea State 9: proclamation garden (2019) is an evolving project that Lim presented in Venice, focused on Singapore’s relationship to the sea in terms of processes of land reclamation, natural resources and geographical boundaries. Singapore has increased its landmass by 22 percent in the 54 years since it gained

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independence. At ngs, Lim has transformed the rooftop into a garden composed of plants found on reclaimed land from Changi to Tuas and the Southern Islands, to present an exploration of the city state’s natural and unnatural development since its foundation. Every place seems to be hosting some sort of biennale these days, so it’s only natural that curators should now move on to populate nonplaces with them. As the French anthropologist Marc Augé has it, nonplaces are the kind of spaces that lack any obvious residents or any reason for people passing through to do anything but that: spaces like motorways, hotel 7 rooms and airports. ok, so the first Guangzhou Airport Biennale doesn’t actually take place within the airport (it’s more accurately within

its locale, in Fenghe Village, which is described as an ‘airport-themed town full of rich resources’, mainly catering to those working at or passing through the airport) but, intriguingly, it does aim to give a sense of place to an area without one. Featuring 81 Chinese and international artists (among them Olafur Eliasson and Yayoi Kusama) and titled Extreme Mix, it aims to go about its work by combining local folk culture with international contemporary art. With leading artists Xu Zhen and Fan Bo onboard as cultural advisers, the exhibition promises to be an interesting mix of the comic and the profound. In any case, you’re going to need the airport to get to Busan, where, at Kukje Gallery, Danish 8 collective superflex are exploring another nonplace: the bank. Moreover, they will be 9

showing a new iteration of their series Bankrupt Banks (2008–), which documents the logos of financial institutions that have gone bankrupt or been taken over by other entities since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. The painted logos offer an empty language that was designed to convey stability and power, and a map of the reconfiguration of global banking in the wake of its general failure. Alongside that will be versions of Connect With Me (2018), a series of tubular sculptures that document the rise and fall in value of bitcoin, and that, as works of art, offer viewers little or no opportunity to connect with the currency in anything but an abstract way. Making abstract data sensate has been a part of Japanese electronic music composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda’s output (which spans

performance and installation, as well as albums and cds) for well over a decade now. Ikeda uses algorithms to turn data into complex audio and visual patterns that he often deploys in the form of immersive installations. Test Pattern (2008–), for example, converts any information (texts, sounds, photos, movies) fed into it into a series of binary 1s and 0s. These then sequence an audio track that in turn feeds a visual stream of black-and-white barcodes running at hundreds of frames per second. What starts out being a test for the performance of digital devices ends up being a test of human perception itself. Consequently, a number of Ikeda’s installations are best avoided if you suffer from epilepsy, but provide a true immersion into a digital environment. This August, at the Taipei

7 Lu Lei, Pretending Egomania, 2015, aluminium, Morse code controller, incandescent lightbulbs, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai, Beijing & Singapore

5 Peter Peri, House 12 (Pink), 2018, paint, marker and spraypaint on canvas, 175 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong & Shanghai

8 superflex, Bankrupt Banks, 2013 (installation view, Fundación Jumex, Mexico City, 2013). Courtesy the artist

Summer 2019

10 Tatsuo Miyajima, Space Time, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

12 aaajiao, bot (detail), 2017, single-channel video (colour, sound, 15 min 32 sec), website. Courtesy the artist

Museum of Fine Arts, the Paris-based artist will Asia, like the fundamental mantra of most contemporary art these days, and perhaps that’s develop a new site-specific work. Numbers also why Miyajima, who, despite the fact that his play a key role in the work of another Japanese output now seems so unchanging, trained 10 artist, Tatsuo Miyajima, whose current retrosas a painter and emerged during the 1970s pective, Being Coming, at the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, presents the work dating from as a performance artist inspired by Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow and Christo, before underhis first use of led counters as his signature material in 1988. Again inspired by Buddhist going his personal digital revolution, deserves philosophy, the counters filter through the acknowledgement as being somewhat foundanumbers 1 to 9, avoiding zeros (the artist has tional to the art of today. previously said that zero is a Western concept This July, another musician and visual artist, 11 Hong Kong-based Samson Young, will have antithetical to concepts of reincarnation), often arranged in fieldlike arrays that respond his first uk solo exhibition at the Talbot Rice to each other. Accordingly, Miyajima’s work Gallery at the University of Edinburgh as part revolves around three concepts: ‘Keep of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Real Music is being Changing’, ‘Connect with Everything’ and promoted as ‘a provocation to unfix notions of 12 ‘Continue Forever’. That sounds, to ArtReview authenticity in music, sculpture and society’

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and features the artist’s latest series of installations, Possible Music (2018–), which examine how virtual instruments might sound in unreal environments. A bugle, for example, blown by a dragon whose breath heats up to 300 degrees Celsius. Perfect for anyone suffering from Game of Thrones withdrawal symptoms. A new commission, Possible Music #2 (2019), features a field of speakers creating a 16-channel sound installation, combined with a series of sculptures that create the effect of a colossal trumpet emerging from the earth. Seems like a setup to get someone to use the words ‘ground-breaking’ in relation to that. Not ArtReview Asia of course. Back from the world of fantasy to the world of the digital (as if there was really any difference) and a solo exhibition of work by aaajiao

at the How Art Museum Shanghai. Aaajiao is the pseudonym of Xu Wenkai (it’s ok, this is not an outing, he’s public about that), a Shanghai- and Berlin-based artist who grew up in Xi’an, and who is also active as a blogger and activist, primarily concerned with the social and political impact of the Internet on daily life. Numbers and data, he postulates, define individual existence, but to an artist born almost 30 years after Miyajima and 20 after Ikeda (in 1984; naturally the content of George Orwell’s famous novel has been a major influence on his work), this is expressed in a form other than the numerical. Instead, aaajiao’s art is expressed via digital prints, sculptural installations and video feeds, many of which consume or spew information (via

printouts or video streams) to the viewer standmagnify or distort various areas of the object they ing before them, who is then encouraged to encase, collectively they evoke both images of engage with and overcome feelings of alienaplagues, cancers and mutated cells and the glittertion engendered by their part in an overwhelming iridescence of a chandelier. New works from ingly connected global technological system. the PixCell and drawing series will be shown To visualise a problem is to start to overcome at Pace Gallery’s Hong Kong space this July. a problem, as ArtReview Asia’s therapist is It’s something of a shock to discover that always telling it. 14 Cao Fei’s solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Coming at the relationship between anais the first such that the institution has dedicated logue and digital in a different way is Japanese to a Chinese artist, particularly given the Paris museum’s long engagement with Chinese art, 13 sculptor Kohei Nawa. The artist is best known for his PixCell series of works in which found and the fact that the Pompidou is due to launch objects are covered in corallike clusters of its new Shanghai outpost in November this year. transparent spheres so that they appear, to Still, better late than never, as ArtReview Asia’s the viewer, as if pixelated, even though, in fact, publisher keeps telling it. Cao’s exhibition, hx, they are as analogue as it gets. As the individual focuses on a new body of work evolved from spheres, according to their size and construction, research into the neighbourhood, Hong Xia,

14 Cao Fei, hx, 2018, photograph. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing & Guangzhou

13 Kohei Nawa, PixCell, 2012 (installation view, Arario Gallery, Seoul). Courtesy the artist, Arario Gallery and scai the Bathhouse, Tokyo

Summer 2019

15 Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960, photograph, 29 × 23 cm. © Yves Klein Estate, adagp, Paris / sack, Seoul, 2019. Photo: Shunk–Kender. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

16 Xu Jiong, Poet ii / Calligrapher / Killer (detail), 2014–19, acrylic pigment and mixed media, 232 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Each Modern, Taipei

surrounding her Beijing studio, located in a former community cinema not far from the city’s 798 art district. The area features a number of buildings built during the 1950s with support from the Soviet Union, and was home to many of China’s fledgling electronics industries. Indeed, it was here that the first Chinese-made computer was produced. Now all that’s so much history and the area is scheduled for redevelopment. Cao’s work has always traced the impact of digital cultures on an analogue world, and here the history of Hong Xia will be explored in a new featurelength film, videos, photographs and archival materials. Given the Pompidou’s renewed internationalism, you won’t be surprised to learn that Franco-Sino relations are very

much in the air and consequently on the ground at the moment. Back in Shanghai, 15 at the Power Station of Art, The Challenging Souls presents the work of Yves Klein, Lee Ufan and Ding Yi, tracing a line from the French judo expert and monochromist through to Lee’s involvement with Japan’s Mono-ha movement during the 1960s and Korea’s Dansaekhwa during the 1970s through to Ding Yi’s abstract paintings of the 1980s. The show seeks to offer a comparative appraisal of occidental and oriental avantgardes of the second part of the last century, and an insight into the performative and metaphysical aspects of painting during that time. Or, to be succinct, it offers a view of three artists whose work is different and the same.

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Equally contradictory on a superficial level 16 is Xu Jiong’s new series of ‘self-portraits without portraits’, now on show at Each Modern in Taipei. Best known for his blackand-white ink works, the Beijing-based painter’s new series takes those calligraphic techniques and applies them to acrylic sheets using coloured paint. The aim is to create a series of self-portraits that explore identity as a historic and social construction. Consequently the acrylic sheets of the new works are laid on top of older works (exploring the artist’s queer identity) and painted with towers (universal symbols of power and control) of various sizes as well as calligraphic renderings of the artist’s name: the result is a multilayered portrait of past and present selves. Nirmala Devi

The Indian general election results have panned out as I predicted previously in these pages. Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), which advocates a nationalist ‘Hindutva’ ideology, won 303 of 542 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress Party, led by Rahul Gandhi (grandson of Indira Gandhi), managed a paltry 52, meaning that it has not even attained opposition-party status. Without official parliamentary opposition, then, there will be no one to challenge the prime minister during the next five years. This landslide victory must have been a surprise to Modi himself. The overall sentiment among the common man was against the incumbent – Modi’s recent implementation of both demonetisation and a Goods & Services Tax had not gone down well with the Indian public. The government’s surprise decision to declare the 1,000-rupee banknote void, an anticorruption manoeuvre intended to flush out undeclared holdings, subjected average Indians to untold misery, who took to the streets in great numbers over the forced exchange of these now worthless notes. Meanwhile none of the corrupt, with their crores and crores of black money, faced any such difficulty: they could just bribe the bank managers 10 percent and exchange all their currency for the new 2,000-rupee notes. While the 2014 election results reflected a massive ‘Modi Wave’, following an effective campaign against the corrupt and scam-infested Congress Party, there was no such momentum this time round. And yet the bjp has increased its seats from 282 in 2014, with Modi now sitting comfortably. Adding to what should have been Modi’s woes going into the election were the misgivings of many Hindus upset by a spate of highprofile lynchings carried out in the name of protecting cows. What condemnation he gave was mealy-mouthed, a mere formality. Why would Modi not condemn such extremist actions more forcibly or take proper action? Does his silence not affect the equilibrium of our society? With so much of the moderate Hindu population fearing Modi’s approach, how did he still manage to win 303 seats? The answer lies in the disturbing actions of the minority – the Christians and the Muslims. After the announcement of elections, the churches began to campaign against Modi, insisting that Christians must not vote for him. Thousands of videos of preachers speaking against the prime minister started to do the rounds on social media. The Christian education institutions emphasised the same to its students. Imams spread a similar message in mosques. There are viral videos that show Muslim organisations making trips to Mecca (their airfares subsidised by the government) to pray for Modi’s defeat. The Congress Party

notes from madras results from the recent Indian general election, a landslide for hindu nationalism, leave Charu Nivedita in the kind of despair that only art – and certainly not religion – can reach

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encouraged such activities. Rahul Gandhi made an appearance at a prestigious Christian women’s college on his visit to Madras and said that they could address him as ‘Rahul’ and not ‘Sir’, as it made him feel more comfortable. As a counter to Modi’s Hindu nationalism, Gandhi has been exclusively romancing the minorities: at this particular school the speaking of Tamil is banned for instance – only ‘Christian’ English is allowed on campus – and the politician’s ‘flirty’ act here, and the Congress Party’s ‘Hindu bashing’ in general, irritated many moderate Hindus who might otherwise have turned away from Modi’s extremism. Hindus, despite being the majority in India, consider themselves a minority in the world. Historically, unlike for example Buddhists, Hindus didn’t attempt to spread their religion in Southeast Asia. The Hindu religion has several worship methods. While villagers make animal sacrifices and offerings of arrack, urban Hindu populations regard such practices as barbaric and uncultured, preferring instead to avoid meat while performing their religious duties or to fast as a mark of reverence to Shiva or Vishnu. City-dwellers offer flowers, fruits and milk as part of their ritualistic puja. Hinduism even embraces atheists (the Charvaka is one such ancient school of thought). There is neither a holy book nor a prophet in Hinduism. Its origin hasn’t even been dated. So Hindus are scared that the evangelical acts of the Christians could completely wipe out their ancient religion. The unending concessions and reservations to minorities (especially to their educational and religious institutions) has rattled the Hindu majority. In the last five years, while

‘Hindutva’ fervour gathered momentum, the Christians went on an equally aggressive conversion spree. A cacophony of sermons and Hallelujah ‘decibel infernos’ was heard from preachers standing in every nook and on every street corner. “Oh Sinners! Pray to Jesus to absolve yourselves of all the sins!” tore at our eardrums. Things got to the point where people who planned to move would first check whether any churches were based near their prospective new homes. Nor could the police question this nuisance behaviour – places of worship sit beyond their control. The preachers worked overtime, as if their only task was to convert every Hindu to Christianity within the next ten years. One day I was travelling in an autorickshaw. As I got down to pay the driver, he refused to take the money. Instead, he thrust a book in my hand and said it would be enough if I read it rather than giving money to him. It was the Bible. I returned it to him, saying that I already had six versions of the Holy Book with me. We live in a world of fanaticism on unparalleled levels. The activities of the minority drove the ‘nonpractising’ Hindu, or a Hindu who hadn’t given a serious thought about his religion until that point, to vote for Modi. These are the two main factors for Modi’s sweeping win. Moreover, the accusations of corruption and inflation that brought down the Congress government in 2014 have not been laid against Modi. And by reelecting him, the people of India have effectively absolved the prime minister of religious extremism and fascism as well. This mandate will result in our greatest misery. Religious harmony between Hindus, Christians and Muslims has now become a dream of the past, the drastic consequences of which every Indian must be ready to suffer. Despite the ‘Hindutva’ success across the rest of the nation, the bjp didn’t win a seat in any of the 39 constituencies it contested in the state of Tamil Nadu (losing the one seat it took in 2014). There is a very specific local reason for this. Despite the age of modernism, the Tamils are still deeply divided in casteism. A century ago, the Dalits were considered untouchables. Even though such glaring acts of untouchability are not prevalent these days, we still witness heinous acts of Dalits being attacked violently in the villages. Amidst such deep-rooted casteism, extreme antagonism exists even today between the Brahmans and the non-Brahmans. There is a famous quote by the politician E.V. Ramasamy – ‘If you happen to see both a Brahman and

a snake simultaneously, let the snake go and thrash the Brahman.’ The Brahman community of Tamil Nadu mostly favours Modi, and so the majority, deeply influenced by Ramasamy’s ideologies, believe that, by voting for Modi, they would be subjecting themselves to the dominance of the Brahmans.In Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic period drama, Ran, the court jester looks out at land left in utter destruction and breaks down, saying, “Are there no gods? No Buddha?… Are you so bored up there you must crush us like ants? Is it such fun to see men weep?” The warlord replies, “Don’t cry. It’s how the world is made. Men prefer sorrow over joy… suffering over peace. They revel in pain and bloodshed. They celebrate murder.” As soon as I heard about Modi’s sweeping victory, I wrote a poem.

above T-shirts for supporters of, from left, cpim, National Congress, Trinamool Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party for sale in a shop in Kolkata ahead of the 2019 Indian general election. Photo: sopa Images Limited/Alamy Live News facing page People queueing outside a private bank to deposit and exchange 1,000-rupee notes during the Modi government’s 2018 demonetisation drive. Photo: Biswarup Ganguly / Wikimedia Commons

Summer 2019

Not even the Gods can save us any more ‘cos we’ve chosen our way of life – We prefer misery, We favour tears of pain, We wish for a bloodbath. We’ve now carved out our fate Make no mistake – this is precisely how we like it What are Gods and Prophets good for? Who needs the seditious Mahatmas donning just a simple loincloth Gone are those days For we now embrace the path of blood Why don’t you send a word to the Gods? Tell them to rest in peace for a while. Translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash

Future Greats Fazal Rizvi

Coloured Fields 1 (Typewriter series), 2017, ink on paper, 39 x 52 cm. Courtesy the artist

selected by Natasha Ginwala Natasha Ginwala is associate curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and artistic director of Gwangju Biennale 2020 with Defne Ayas. She has been part of the curatorial team of Documenta 14, and recently curated sea change, the Colomboscope Arts Festival (2019); Hello World. Revising a Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Museum fĂźr Gegenwart, Berlin (2018); Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa-Galerie, Berlin and Stuttgart (2018); Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium, the Contour Biennale 8 (2017) and several other international exhibitions. She regularly writes on contemporary art and visual culture.

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Coloured Fields 17 (Typewriter Series), 2018, ink on newsprint, 25 × 38 cm. Courtesy the artist and Indigo + Madder, London

I first met Fazal Rizvi as a core member of the Tentative Collective anecdotal and past chronicles; interlocked floating worlds that in 2015, during a collaboration with the group of artists, curators, refuse a majority tongue. teachers and architects for a workshop and public screening along In other works, such as Rooms Afloat / Tairtay Kamray (2018), Rizvi the Ravi River in Lahore. This gathering was held within the broader pursues coastal stories from Karachi through recorded sound fields. framework of Gujral Foundation’s project My East is Your West at the Inviting listeners into fishing boats headed towards the Arabian Sea, 56th Venice Biennale (with Lahore Biennale Foundation as a local the acoustic narration, together with a handmade book, foregrounds partner). The body of water traverses the hostile India–Pakistan enslaved bodies and geopolitical routes between India and Pakistan. border, and so we converged to explore the riverine environment, This project was part of a larger exhibition titled The Fleet, curated by Aziz Sohail at aan Gandhara Space in Lahore. The Indian Ocean tracing its colonial legacy and present-day toxicity. Rizvi’s typewriter-drawing series Coloured Fields (2017–18) littoral is a recurring subject. ranges from short poetic texts to minimal line markings cutting Reading Rizvi’s works between anticipation, dreaming and loss, the page or clustered together. One drawing muses on the colour the words of Zora Neale Hurston come to mind: ‘Ships at a distance indigo, recalling economies of the plant have every man’s wish on board. For some dye and its central role in peasant rebelthey come in with the tide. For others Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Karachi, often reading and writing about the sea, though lion under colonial rule. Several of they sail forever on the horizon, never out occasionally escaping to the mountains to cook at a café the artist’s text-based works are conof sight, never landing until the Watcher instead. He has participated in the Lahore Biennale, Karachi turns his eyes away in resignation, his ceived as multilingual pieces – Urdu woBiennale, Dakar Biennale and Colomboscope 2019, and he ven together with English. They relate dreams mocked to death by Time.’ ara has a solo exhibition at Grey Noise, Dubai, in September.

Summer 2019

3X3X6 SHU LEA CHEANG

TAIWAN

鄭淑麗 IN VENICE OFFICIAL SUPPORT

PROMOTER AND ORGANIZER

11 MAY – 24 NOV 2019

PALAZZO DELLE PRIGIONI

CASTELLO 4209, SAN MARCO STATION: S. ZACCARIA. NEXT TO THE PALAZZO DUCALE HOURS: 10 AM-6 PM (CLOSED MONDAYS, EXCEPT 13 MAY, 2 SEP, 18 NOV) | PREVIEW: 10 AM-8 PM 8-9-10 MAY 2019

Art Featured

of entering into the path of salvation 35

Liu Chuang by Mark Rappolt

Cannibalise, Colonise

One of the ways in which we assimilate the new is to insist that it which governments and businesses access audiences they couldn’t is, in fact, old. Nothing comes from nothing, as the old saying goes. previously reach. Cannibalise and colonise is the motto of today. That certainly seems to be the case in Shanghai-based Liu Chuang’s Skip to the present and images and video of workers larking on three-channel videowork Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic overhead fibreoptic cables (which have spread from urban to rural Minorities (2018). The work takes the form of found and filmed footage areas), recording themselves for China’s Kuaishou photosharing app. with a voiceover narrative that traces material and immaterial lines “Today, everyone is a user,” the voiceover says as the imagery switches of power that have been deployed in China, over the past few thou- to a crowded subway carriage in which every passenger is on their sand years, to conquer people and territories, and to generate material phone, service providers are constantly “cashing in on users’ time, and immaterial profit. The narrative moves from economic inflation intelligence and data”, and we’ve all been “Uberised” to “generate triggered in eastern China during the fifth century bce, when King profits for one app or another every second of the day”. Distinctions Jing of Zhou reduced the amount of copper in coins in order to fuel between online and offline have been erased. Telephone lines are no an obsession with creating enormous bronze chime bells, to nomadic longer required. There’s nowhere to hide. bitcoin miners, operating outside any centralised banking system, When Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities was first screened, as part of Cosmopolis #1.5: herding their rigs across present-day China Enlarged Intelligence, a collaboration between in harmony with the seasonal and regional With the character of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Mao variations in energy production. shaggy-dog story and an Jihong Arts Foundation in Chengdu at the Like many of the works of speculative academic thesis, threads of research that are so in vogue in the artworld end of 2018 (which travels to Paris in October; right now, Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings the work has subsequently been shown, earthought are drawn together of Ethnic Minorities has the character of both lier this year, as part of Liu Chuang’s solo into something that a shaggy-dog story and an academic thesis, exhibition Earthbound Cosmology at Qiao we’re invited to consider without quite being either. It draws disSpace in Shanghai, and the group exhibiparate histories and threads of thought tion China Landscape: Selections from the as a length of rope together and weaves them into something Taikang Collection in Beijing), the Chinese that we’re invited to consider as a length of rope. The inevitable telecommunications company Huawei was starting to take centre product, you could say, of a culture that creates sentences out of hyper- stage in the ongoing Sino-us trade war, having been accused of facililinks, it cites anthropologists and political scientists alongside sci-fi tating international espionage. movies and popular-music references. And at 40-minutes long, it’s not Jump back to the advent of hydroelectric power (hep) and the aimed at audiences with a short attention span. But isn’t that the case relationship between controlling the land, controlling energy and with so many attempts to explain the complexities of the world today? controlling a people. Stalin apparently said that it was wasteful to let The film begins with a series of black-and-white photographs of water run into the sea. The Hòa Bình Dam in Vietnam (the country’s traditional Chinese architecture, instantly recognisable by a focus on largest hydroelectric dam and the second largest in Southeast Asia) the fly-leaf roofs that evolved during the Han Dynasty (206 bce – 220 opened in 1994, supported by funds from Russia. It’s said that Ho Chi ce). Gradually telephone wires start to appear: first as faint traces in Minh signalled his intention to build it after struggling to cross the the background of the photographs, then everywhere, behind people Red River during the Vietnam War. An 18m-high, 400-tonne statue protesting, parading or simply going about their business on city of the founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now faces the streets. Modernity has arrived in China and everything flows from structure he never lived to see. A sculpture transforms a founding there. Some people notice, some people do not. fiction into a fact. The narrative moves on to the first instances of repetitive strain Meanwhile, in most parts of Asia, ethnic minorities lose land to injury (rsi) being discovered in Chinese telegraph operators, at the end dams in a way that’s disproportionate to their share of national popuof the nineteenth century. Operators would move from using one digit lations. Adivasis (tribal people) in India account for eight percent of the population but are estimated to make to another as each successively succumbed to the syndrome, until the operators could up 40 to 50 percent of those displaced by the “Today, everyone is a user” operate no more. Modernity is inhuman. country’s development projects. Globally, Fast-forward a little over a century to Apple’s acquisition of over ten million people per year are displaced by World Bank developFingerWorks in 2005. The latter company had developed touchpads ment projects (dams and infrastructure projects). In China, resettled and touchscreens designed to help people with rsi use computers. minorities tend to be assimilated into the Han Chinese majority, and To the soundtrack of a single, stringed instrument (sounding like a over time to lose their cultural identities. Dams allow governments to pipa lute), the first of the video’s three channels (read left-to-right) control and police remote populations. features a hand, poised at a train window, that appears to be plucking At this stage Liu Chuang introduces the geographical term the passing telephone lines in rhythm to the music; on the third, a ‘Zomia’ to the narrative, a word that was coined in 2002 by the histohand robotically swipes left on a track pad; which causes more black- rian Willem van Schendel to designate a vast area of Southeast and and-white images of telephone lines to pass by on the central screen. East Asia (spanning parts of Myanmar, Indochina, Thailand and southwest China) characterised by highland population centres that Human digits are no longer required to fuel the digital revolution. Three years later the iPhone was born, paving the way for the age of were largely beyond the control of national governments. In The the smartphone and constant connectivity. A tool designed to provide Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (2009), access for those to whom access was restricted becomes a tool through the American political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott

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Summer 2019

all images Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (details), 2018, three-channel video installation, 4k, colour, 5.1 sound, 40 min. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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asserts that such societies were ‘barbaric by design’; stigmatised suggests, were produced in factories across Zomia and marketed by their remoteness, they evolved to resist state control. Zomia is in an effort to ‘digitise’ the nervous systems of minority outsiders, also a zone in which a high proportion of bitcoin mines are located. introducing them to every form of digital media, entertainment and Often operated by remote control, the mines are there because of the connection: television, radio, DVD, evd, karaoke, Bluetooth, WiFi and large number of hydroelectric power plants (many semi-abandoned more. What was happening, the video suggests, was akin to earthlings because of the high cost of maintaining them), which give the miners trying to communicate with aliens via echoes of sound and light in access to the large amounts of energy they require, because the noise Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1979). As minority from the power plants conceals the noise from the mining rigs’ fans ethnic groups were introduced to the latest musical fads via digit(as the difficulty of mining bitcoins has increased, mines have become ised media, their own voices, in the form of traditional songs, were louder than train stations), and because the locations are remote introduced into museums and archives in the form of field recordand people are unlikely to wander by. Ironically, a decentralised ings made by anthropologists, which, according to the late American currency is generated thanks to a centralised power system, which folksinger Pete Seeger (himself the son of a prominent musicologist), in turn follows previous networks of railway and telephone infra- meant that these traditions had simply been moved ‘from one grave structures. This symbiotic relationship, Liu’s narrative postulates, to another’. As we watch a plane of saffron-robed Indian devotees (it’s mirrors that between minority communities and ancient empires. unclear of what or whom) chanting “Aaya Re! Aaya” (‘He has come’ in It’s unclear who is cannibalising and colonising whom. Moreover, Hindi) at the heavens, in a passage from Spielberg’s movie supposedly many miners operate like traditional bee farmers, moving their rigs set in Dharamshala (but actually shot just outside Mumbai), it seems around according to the seasons: during the droughts in Sichuan possible that the afterlife of these doomed pasts and fringe histories they move them to the wind farms of may be in sci-fi. Xinjiang (one of seven areas in China From there it’s backwards to Ironically, a decentralised currency designated for wind farming – China Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and is generated thanks to a centralised has the largest installed capacity of the lead character’s encounters with power system... It’s unclear who is any nation); in the spring they shift his dead wife, who has been rematerito the coal-fired power stations of alised, perhaps as a means of commucannibalising and colonising whom Inner Mongolia; from there it’s back nication, by the sentient planet Solaris. to Sichuan (the province generates 20 percent of the nation’s hydro- The familiar becomes a way of introducing the unfamiliar, the old power). Thus, bitcoin miners have reclaimed a transhumance lifestyle becomes a way of introducing the new. “Consider yourself lucky,” says once associated with the highland peoples of Zomia. A twenty-first- Kris Kelvin’s colleague Dr Snout as they discuss the problem. “After all she’s a part of your past. What if it had been something you had century barbarism. Nothing is new. It’s here, in one of the bigger jumps in the narrative, that King never seen before, but something you had thought or imagined?” Jing and his chime bells pop up. Liu Chuang’s narrator describes As the video ends, with vintage images of women in traditional how the largest of the bells was named Dalin and was supposed to Mongolian wedding dress morphing into Padmé Amidala wearing provide heavy bass notes that would echo the frequencies of natural a similar costume in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), phenomena such as earthquakes and thunder. The court musician distinctions between coloniser and colonised, past and present, fact Lingzhoujiu apparently argued against its construction because a and fiction blur into one. The question of whether or not new systems smaller instrument would be more harmonious. Rumbling bass notes, of social organisation can be thought or imagined remains hanging Liu Chuang argues, are the soundtrack of modernity, from atomic in the air. ara bombs to the rumble of cities, infrastructure and hep stations. We’ve invented noise-cancelling technologies to make these networks less Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities is on show at Protocinema, Istanbul, 7 September – 26 October, and the Centre visible. And, in China’s highlands, similar technologies are employed Pompidou, Paris, 23 October – 23 December. Work by Liu Chuang will also in multimedia shanzai entertainment systems, with flashing disco be included in the Ural Biennale, Ekaterinburg, 12 September – 1 December, lights (originally added, in an echo of the FingerWorks narrative, the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, 30 September – 25 February, and the to help deaf people engage with the music), introduced during the Dhaka Art Summit, 2020 early twenty-first century. Such entertainment systems, the narrative

Summer 2019

In Translation – a New World Literature

Studio Créole is a group exhibition that takes literature as its medium, cocurated by Adam Thirlwell and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In advance of the show’s debut at Manchester International Festival, the pair met to discuss the relationship between language and identity, creolisation as a model for cultural exchange, and how to stage the act of translation 42

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hans ulrich obrist The Lebanese-FrenchAmerican poet Etel Adnan recently wrote for my Instagram that ‘The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.’ Studio Créole is about a common future threatened by isolationism. So, we should start this conversation by introducing a key influence on the project, the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, who understood early on that we are living through a period of globalisation. Not necessarily the first – the Roman Empire was another – but certainly the most extreme and perhaps also the most violent. That leads to a lot of different things disappearing, not only species but also cultures and cultural phenomena. Now, of course, we are experiencing a counterreaction to this extreme form of globalisation in the emergence of new forms of nationalism, racism and intolerance. Glissant wrote that we needed to resist both the disappearance of cultures and the counterreaction against it. He called this new form of exchange – which does not homogenise but instead produces a ‘difference’ from which new things can emerge – mondialité [which might be translated as ‘globality’]. And this exhibition might be understood as contributing, in some small way, to this idea of mondialité. The title of this project alludes to one aspect of mondialité. In his first novel, La Lézarde [The Ripening, 1958], Glissant considers the blend of languages and cultures as characteristic of Antillean identity. His native Creole was formed from a combination of colonial French with the languages of African slaves, and yet is independent of them both and unexpectedly new. Using this as a basis for his insights, Glissant observed similar cultural fusions all over the world. Creolisation is a global phenomenon and, as he noted in Le Discour Antillais [Caribbean Discourse, 1981], ‘a process which never stops’. adam thirlwell I feel like Glissant is a crucial member of a secret society whose mission is the utopian, maybe impossible ideal of a world literature – an ideal that emerged into the open for the first time in one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, dated to January 1827: ‘National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.’

That was the ideal of literature I grew up with – of literature as an international artform. My deep model was always the modernist moment – the Paris of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein – along with Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollinaire and so on. Their entire concept of literature was that it should transcend the idea of the nation. (Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934: ‘One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know what part of it they live in’.) I always loved the magazine El Lissitzky put out – Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet, with its multiple title and multilingual contents. And I guess that modernist aesthetic contained an implicit argument – Why should the map

of literature be the same as the map of the century’s murderous border disputes? – a proposal also made concrete in what are for me the century’s two great works of European criticism: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis [1946], and E.R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [1948], one written by a Jewish exile in Istanbul, the other by a German internal émigré, both published in Switzerland in the postwar 1940s. Weltliteratur was a rebuke to the insanities of nationalism. facing page Hans Ulrich Obrist (left) in conversation with Adam Thirlwell at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, 2019 above Post-it note by Etel Ednan, 2016. Courtesy @hansulrichobrist / Instagram

Summer 2019

But then you are faced with this very specific problem for literature as an international artform, which is language. An idea of an international artform is very different for an artist like Marcel Duchamp, say, or a composer like Igor Stravinsky – whereas literature is always limited by the language in which it is written. Language is at once the medium through which it communicates and a kind of limiting agent. And this, at least from the nineteenth century onwards, has allowed literature to be part of a nationalistic paradigm – because language became bound up with the idea of a ‘national literature’. This notion that literature should belong to a nation always seemed to me depressing, as a novelist. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to me to describe a novel as a ‘Russian’ or ‘British’ novel. A novel belongs to an international history. And so I’ve always wanted to explore what might be necessary to achieve this kind of international existence. Which means I’ve also always been fascinated by translation and the role translation has to play in literature. And that brings us back to Glissant, because one thing Glissant was talking about through his theories of mondialité, or créolisation, was translation. Translation is a creolising agent: it brings two languages together and, in doing so, preserves them but also changes them. huo Glissant also writes about the archipelago as providing a way of thinking: an island group that has no centre but is instead a string of cultures whose interaction does not compromise their individual identity. This leads to his incredibly important insight: ‘I can change through exchange with the other without losing or diluting my sense of self.’ So the question was how we can bring that kind of thinking into the exhibition, the way Glissant also tried to imagine a museum. To quote Glissant a final time, ‘I imagined the museum as an archipelago. It would have housed, not the synthesis serving to standardise, but a network of interrelationships between various traditions and perspectives.’ at Translation is one form of archipelagic thinking, I think: something that makes it possible to hold two terms together without diminishing either, and to effect an exchange between them. And that is what we’re trying, I think, to dramatise in this exhibition.

But also there’s a wider problem we’re addressing here – which is how to be cosmopolitan without extinguishing the local. And Glissant’s idea of archipelagic thought offers the possibility of reconciling those two. Because there are two absences that need to be reversed, in order to think accurately about world literature. The first is the absence of translation: and I’ve always wanted to put translation at the centre of literature rather than at its periphery. This always seemed incredibly important to me. But also there’s the possible absence of the original language – a translation isn’t valuable if it becomes so powerful that it obliterates the original. And this is particularly a problem, perhaps, for a global language like English. So, when you approached me and asked me how I would stage literature in the context of an exhibition in Manchester, I immediately wanted to make a kind of literalised version of what happens when we read in translation – without losing the translation, the original or the meaning of the story. And then, in developing that idea, I returned to the fact that there are obviously two types of translation. There’s literary translation, which involves a text written by an author, translated

by another writer, making their own text out of that text – a process that takes time, and which has a giant history and theory behind it. In that context there is an emphasis on accuracy, and on the idea of literary style and its preservation across languages. Then there’s simultaneous translation, or interpretation, which happens live and is, because it has to be, being completely time-limited, much more improvised and much rougher. And I thought it would be interesting to subject literature – this august form of language, in which words are treated with total reverence – to the chance encounters of live interpretation as opposed to literary translation. huo This is where Rem [Koolhaas]’s exhibition design comes in. One of the great inspirations for Rem was his experience of working in Brussels as part of a think tank, with Umberto Eco and others, which was convened to design a logo for the European Union. As part of the research, Rem studied the interpreters’ booths that are part of every eu session and which would in a deconstructed form become a central part of our exhibition architecture – where the authors are placed on islands with their interpreters, connected only by noise-cancelling headphones and cables…

oma, Image for Europe, 2001–. © oma

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at It’s a very high-tech setup. The audience will be supplied with bone conduction headphones, which aren’t inserted into the ear but instead rest on the listener’s bone just in front of the ear – so that the sound is conducted through bone, not the ear itself. Which means that you will be able to hear two things at once: through your ears, the sound in the room – a live translation into the audience’s host language – which in Manchester, of course, will be English – and, through the headphones, each writer reading a story in their original language. That juxtaposition really dramatises what happens when you read in translation, because there is always this other voice in the background. That’s where I think Glissant is also very important, because we’re not trying to forge some artificial synthesis but allow the two voices to coexist and to interact to create new meaning. We’re not proposing some single definition of what literature should be. Instead we want to present these seven different writers working in different languages, with very different practices and approaches to language. And one of the interesting things to emerge from this project is just how fascinating it is to hear seven different stories. Not just because of the variety

of languages used, but also because of the conventions of what a story can be in different literary cultures. Which brings me back to a question that has always fascinated me: how do you create an idea of a world culture? Does that idea exist only at a level of such abstraction that it’s meaningless, or is it possible to create a precarious identity out of multiple interlocking identities? How can you keep the original in focus even as, in some sense, you obliterate it? huo It’s about the production of knowledge, and I’ve always believed that exhibitions have to come up with new rules of the game in order to achieve that. In this example, these rules govern the presentation of literature in time and space, and through translation. When we talked about this at the beginning of the project, we discussed Oulipian techniques. Because, of course, the Oulipo group – Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews and others – came up with new rules of the game in order to produce literature. And you’ve implemented new sets of rules before when curating literature, like the project you did for Dave Eggers’s magazine McSweeney’s, for example.

at You’re calling it curating, but the more prosaic term would be editing… Dave Eggers asked me to guest-edit an issue of McSweeney’s – an issue which we ended up calling Multiples. We decided that, for this one issue, the rules of the game would be like that game ‘telephone’ – where a story gets retold over and over again via different speakers. So my rules were: a story, never translated before into English, would be translated by a chain of novelists (professional translators were banned). We took 12 stories, which were each translated by a chain of international novelists, each working only from the previous language. I wanted to test the extent to which literary style could be translated – how far it could survive the assault of other novelists’ different styles, and also dubious competence in the language they were translating. We ended up with this huge network of stories, and that led me and you, I remember, to a discussion of how it might be possible to do a group show for literature (in a way, every anthology is a group show), but this time explore how literature is a time-based medium. huo I have always worked at mif, first with Alex Poots and now John McGrath [the past

and current directors] to produce exhibitions that work with time rather than exclusively with space, incorporating other disciplines and trying out new formats. And Studio Créole is very much an extension of that investigation into working in time, rather than producing static objects. at I’m interested in how a novel is a sequential artform, like cinema or music, but produced via a support – a book – which is incapable of controlling the tempo at which a reader reads. The megalomaniac in me wants to force a reader to sit down and not let them move until they have finished the whole novel – the way a film director can at least control the viewer’s attention in a cinema. And so we were thinking it would be interesting to make literature ‘live’ in that way, to be able to control the reader’s experience of it. For Studio Créole we began with one basic rule of the game: that each novelist would be allowed a fixed amount of time. We then realised that one problem of an anthology is that the stories can be too disparate – whereas we were more interested in trying to create some kind of unity out of diversity, something like a federalised identity – and so we decided to set out some parameters to the stories themselves.

Mladen Stilinović, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, 1992, artificial silk. Photo: Boris Cvjetanovic. Courtesy the artist’s estate

Summer 2019

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Another rule was relatively simple: that no iteration of the exhibition – because this show will be presented in different countries, it’s designed to keep on travelling forever, in new configurations – will feature a writer who works in the ‘host’ language. So there won’t be an English-speaking writer in Manchester, for instance. huo This is actually the only rule of the game I came up with, because otherwise I was just listening to you. But I was committed to the idea that the exhibition should tour and that each iteration should be different and adapt to local conditions, because of course that’s very much in the spirit of Glissant’s mondialité. I learned, when I was starting out as a curator, how problematic it is if you package exhibitions and throw them from city A to city B to city C and don’t change them. That’s nothing other than homogenised globalisation. The idea with this model is that each time the show goes somewhere, it responds to the local context. at One of the main impetuses behind the exhibition is to dismantle the way English asserts itself as the cosmopolitan language. I’m excited with this first iteration that we’ll be able to subject anglophone audiences to the experience of other languages. Englishspeaking people are able, in large part, to live without ever experiencing the anxieties of translation and interpreting, which is very different to all of those people who are required to learn English as a second language. English speakers seem often not even to notice that this is going on, that other people are forced so regularly into these positions of uncertainty. huo Another rule is the theme of these pieces of writing, and their address to identity, difference and otherness. at Yes, so the parameters we set out for the stories were that each one had to be written in an anonymous first person, and that at some point it should feature a conversation with a stranger. That, in itself, was enough to create all the themes that we needed. We wanted to explore precisely those issues – of identity, belonging, place – but it was far more interesting to give people a specific instruction than to say ‘make it about belonging’. huo And then the director, John Collins, came in to help stage this polyphony. To create some kind of visual component to the act of translation. at John is the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service in New York, a company he founded – and they’ve always been very

attentive to how to work with text. (Their most famous show is maybe Gatz, a giant word-forword version of The Great Gatsby.) John has been integral to making this work, because the idea as you and I first envisioned it was that there would be seven writers onstage, and about 45 interpreters translating each writer in every single direction. What we realised, after our first workshop with John, is that interpreting is simply too improvised an artform, as a theatrical artform, for it to be visually compelling. The interpreters are too densely engaged with the task of interpreting. And so there was a 24-hour period where we thought the entire project was in jeopardy. But John came up with the idea of feeding the live translations to an actor, who would then be tasked with rewording and representing them. And we’re incredibly lucky in Manchester that the wonderful actor Lisa Dwan, who is famous for her interpretations of Beckett’s

“This notion that literature should belong to a nation always seemed to me depressing, as a novelist. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to me to describe a novel as a ‘Russian’ or ‘British’ novel. A novel belongs to an international history” monologues, will have the job of acting out the interpretation as she hears it. Becoming, in some sense, an incarnation of both author and translator. We never anticipated that performance element, but it’s now the place where for me all the excitement of the piece pivots – it means that this work is really a combination of theatre, literature, performance and installation. huo This project about moving across borders and translation has also gained some extra significance in the three years since we first discussed making it. at We’re living in an era that seems to see a border or an identity – both collective and individual – as something absolute and to be valued. Our current politics, on both the left and the right, is without moral accuracy facing page Meriç Algün, A Work of Fiction, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

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or courage. So, yes, this project has certainly acquired extra polemical meaning, but then I always understood Studio Créole as an act of resistance. Maybe this is just because I’m Jewish – and Jewishness in literature for me has always meant a refusal of national boundaries. But then, I think there may be an even deeper blasphemy going on here, that goes beyond even politics. It’s always important to be blasphemous about the things that people take most seriously, and one reason why world literature still feels like a conspiratorial project is that we continue to take language very seriously. The world cannot be said in a single language – just as a person is not bound to a single language either. But we’re so rooted in the idea of a single language, a mother tongue, and of a person’s identity as in some way correspondingly single and transparent, that any attempt to think in terms of a world or a planet is very difficult. It can feel somehow artificial or unnatural. But a future world literature will require the knowledge that a language isn’t something that belongs – to a landscape, or a nation, or a person. And one method will be a form of créolité… I’ve always been interested in deconstructing fluency and competence – to question the authority literature would like to achieve. That’s why Glissant’s example is so important, and his idea of créolité: it’s in making mistakes, merging languages, mistranslating, that we might see emerge a new kind of literature. huo Perhaps we can finish with another quote from Etel Adnan: ‘Thankfully, we are living after Babel, in a world of many languages that we can all move between. Our deepest identity is created from an infinite number of things and every language is the door to a whole world.’ ara Hans Ulrich Obrist, born in Zürich, is an art curator, critic and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also coeditor of the journal Cahiers d’Art. Adam Thirlwell, born in London, is a novelist and essayist whose works – including Politics (2003), The Escape (2009) and Lurid & Cute (2015) – have been translated into 30 languages. He has twice been named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the London editor of The Paris Review. The above is an edited and expanded version of a conversation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, in May 2019, part of the United Artists for Europe programme.

Yang Fudong interview by Mark Rappolt

In March 2018 Yang Fudong, arguably China’s leading video artist, exhibited the first stage of a new project at Shanghai’s Long Museum West Bund. Dawn Breaking marked the realisation of a longstanding ambition to make the shooting of a work a live performance. Accordingly, Yang constructed two largescale sets within the museum and filmed on them, in front of an audience, over the course of a month. The action surrounds the ceremonial and artistic life (for example, the morning ceremony at which the emperor would discuss matters of state with his ministers) during the Song Dynasty period in Chinese history (960–1279 ce). At the end of each day the artist presented an edited short film of the day’s work as a form of video diary, each one marking an evolution towards a final film that is yet to come. The diaries themselves featured the day’s filming, interspersed with quotations from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which provided a form of psychological commentary on the scenes that had been shot and connected the past to the present. The journey towards a final film is intended to take place via several exhibitions and countries. The first stop post-Shanghai is at Marian Goodman Gallery, London.

ara What is the relationship of Western philosophy to Chinese history, do you think? I say this in part because in so many parts of Asia the twentieth century was marked by both an embrace of Western thinking as a sign of modernity and a rejection of it as a mark of colonialism. yf I think Chinese people tend to have a good understanding of their traditional culture, and to understand the country’s history through its many religions or philosophies, including Taoism, Confucianism or Buddhism. But I think they have realised that there are different ways of thinking in the world – including Western philosophies – and that they are not independent, they are complementary. Chinese philosophies have also been spreading around the world. ara Yes, and I guess there’s a particular relationship between Nietzsche and Buddhism, particularly in the notion of return and reincarnation that’s sometimes in conflict and sometimes sympathetic.

ara How did the interest in Nietzsche develop? yf This exhibition is the second part of a film project that began at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai in 2018, part of my ongoing Museum Film Project. The film project is called Dawn Breaking in English, and it’s an account of life during the Song Dynasty, inspired by – among other things – the writings of Nietzsche, whose language and thinking offered a structure for the film.

ara Which version do you like best? yf I have no preference: it’s half-and-half. It’s an ancient story and the actors wear period costumes, but the way it’s presented allows the audience to step outside of that, to see the lights, cameras and production team. I want the audience to think about how it is constructed, to question whether it is the story or the process of shooting it that is the ‘true’ thing. ara Do you think it’s slightly ridiculous for people to look for truth in an artist’s construction? yf That depends. In China, we also have a proverb that says, ‘Seeing is believing’. I’m interested in asking the audience to think about how and whether that applies. ara Is that analogous to the way in which audiences have to decode your installations, in many of which the work is spread across multiple screens, around which people can move in different ways and reconstruct the work according to different narratives?

artreview asia The title of your new exhibition takes Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil [1886] and adapts it to Beyond god and Evil. Why God? yang fudong In the Chinese version of the title, ‘good’ was translated as shàn, which has a much wider meaning. When we translated the title back into English I thought we could play with the words a little bit, to address the religious overtones and wider meaning of shàn in Chinese.

to the audience. But these errors, of course, do not make the ‘final cut’ of the film. The viewer gets to be the director: they can see how things change onset, and then predict how the film will turn out. But the film in its final version is something different from the dailies showing the process of making it.

yf They inform each other. ara Dawn Breaking and Beyond god and Evil also reveal the structure of the film in the process of its making, which is different from other works you’ve made. It is a bit like a magician showing his audience how the trick works: even though we’re not watching you shoot in the Long Museum, here we see footage of actors in harnesses that allow them to fly through the air, we see the edges of sets and the boom mics. yf There is a difference between the diary works or ‘dailies’ and the ‘final work’. The 36 dailies exhibited downstairs at Marian Goodman [as a single installation] record what was happening onsite [in Shanghai] every day, and so they contain mistakes, and these are presented

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yf Yes. When we were making the exhibition in Shanghai we had two different ways of showing what we were filming. One was to show the actual film on different screens and the other was to show some of the dailies as an evolving film on one larger screen. Every day after we shot, dailies would be edited into a continuous film version shown on one large screen, but we would also show the 36 dailies (one for each of the 36 days) individually on monitors, screens or as projections. In this way we showed the audience different ways of viewing a film, which I think is both artistic and varied. ara The last time I saw one of your earlier video installations, Revival of the Snake [2005], each of the people watching would decide that one of the ten screens in the installation was the start of the video, and often it wasn’t the first one you came to

in the space. In London, some of the dailies are shown on monitors or flat screens, while others are projected onto a patterned wallpaper fabric that gives them something of the feel of paintings. yf The wallpaper is an important element: the film is set during the Song Dynasty, so we chose traditional Chinese patterns that would evoke the era. ara You chose the Song Dynasty because it marked something of a renaissance in the arts? yf The Song Dynasty was a very prosperous time, and a highpoint in Chinese culture. Yet, as in any other time, there were conflicts and difficulties. ara Including debates about the relationship to God, and specifically the influence of Buddhism. yf It’s not necessarily that Buddhism came into the wider society and created conflict. In every society, as Nietzsche’s book makes clear, there are conflicts of desire and struggles for power among the people. I think this is humanity.

ara So, do you think these motivations are eternally present? yf History always repeats itself. ara Modern China has a complicated relationship with its own history, marked, not least, by the Cultural Revolution [1966–76]. But even today, it seems to me, many artists, even younger ones, seem reluctant to associate themselves with the past. yf In every era and country there are artists who prefer to focus on everyday life, while there are also those who would consider history on the national and global scale while trying to express themselves creatively. I think that contemporary art is grounded in history; it is not a standalone project. ara That’s not always acknowledged. yf Perhaps contemporary art might not show its historic elements on the surface, but it’s impossible to separate it completely from the history of a community. When I was teaching at university, I would always introduce my students to early Chinese art.

ara The texts that you supply about your works, in exhibition handouts, for example, tend to avoid direct interpretation, or to skirt the idea that there is fixed meaning behind them. Is that important? yf Yes, because I think everybody will have their own interpretation shaped by their own experiences and cultural background. I don’t want to define the artwork. It’s up to the artist to decide how much information he wants to give to the audience. But if he decides not to explain the work, he also needs to make sure that the viewer has enough information to be able to make their own interpretation. Talking about this exhibition, I would like the audience to know a little background: that it relates to last year’s film project in Shanghai, that this is an ongoing project and so the film may change in the future and new scenes perhaps be added, and that the intention was to show the process of making a film. ara Beyond god and Evil – Preface is on show at Marian Goodman Gallery, London, through 26 July

all images Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project (details), 2018, 36, day durational performance. © the artist.Courtesy the artist, Long Museum Shanghai, West Bund and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London.

Summer 2019

Praneet Soi by Shwetal Patel

In 2017 Indian artist Praneet Soi was invited by Lisbon’s Calouste timely. This interest in regional history, one of shared cultures and Gulbenkian Foundation to create a proposal for the Conversas genealogies, is central to Soi’s oeuvre. By creating a puzzle drawing (Conversations) series, a format developed to encourage contempo- on social context, on history, on patterns of labour and production rary artists to engage with the museum’s collection. In response, Soi and on the role of objects themselves, Soi finds points of intersection proposed to distil his experiences of working in Srinagar, India’s in time and space. northernmost city and the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, For the site-specific work at Gulbenkian, Soi also researched the which state has been the site of a separatist movement since India’s life of the museum’s founder, an oil magnate who became one of the liberation from colonial rule and the subsequent first Indo-Pakistan world’s leading philanthropists during the first part of the twentieth century. Following some trails of enquiry through to the museWar (1947–48). Violence continues to divide the city. In April the Joint Resis- um’s archives, Soi sought to understand the objects collected by tance Leadership, a separatist organisation, called the latest in a series Gulbenkian through the stories and trade routes connecting them. of citywide shutdowns to highTwo additional tiles were comIn a political age in which the history light alleged human rights abuses missioned, one containing the finby Indian security forces, while in ger marks of the factory’s master of the subcontinent is being redefined February a suicide attack on a bus craftsman, Vítor Formiga, and the along religious lines, making the killed at least 40 Indian paramiliother coated in red engobe, a hylink between Central Asia and India tary personnel in one of the deadbrid design in which a well-known liest attacks in the region in recent Bordallo floral trope is overlaid by is both poignant and timely years. Yet Soi, who since 2002 has a tessellated pattern gleaned from a been based between Amsterdam and his birthcity of Kolkata, chose footpath in Srinagar. The whole, then, became an expansive record for an exhibition that opened in the summer of 2018 to move away of accretions and overlapping cultural exchange, further enhanced from representations of conflict to focus on the more personal narra- by the fact that Maranha’s soundtrack is derived from the noise of the tives that unfolded during his time in the region. Bordallo factory itself. Eschewing convention, he stripped bare the museum’s sprawling Soi also filmed the manufacturing process, allowing the factory Conversas chamber and exposed its modernist architecture. The title to enter the story that is projected onto the tiles. The imagery in the references Viktor Shklovsky’s 1977 book, which proposed that the video is collaged – drawings, still images and video clips sutured role of art was to estrange the viewer from the familiar so as to make together, generating a narrative that is experimental and associative. perception ‘laborious’. Shklovsky identified as ‘factories’ the periods Pencil-drawn architectural schemas related to the mausoleum, or the that influenced his development as a writer; at the Gulbenkian, Soi industrial architectures of the factory, oftentimes become patterned underlined how his experiences in Kashmir, Lisbon and a town north backdrops upon which appear clips of the craftsman’s hands at work, of Lisbon called Caldas da Rainha have shaped his own practice. a recurring motif within Soi’s oeuvre (which often focuses on smallInstead of a conventional museum display, the space resonated scale industry and manufacture), larger-than-life and glanced above to a score created by Portuguese composer and architect David cutout stills that detail the tomb. Maranha, which in turn served to link the three video installaA strange switching occurred as the viewer moved between the tions that made up the exhibition. Pushed into a corner and not real and the virtual: at times the emphasis is on the moving image, at initially visible from the entrance stood a curving screen measuring other times the pattern moulded upon the tile becomes visible, gener2 × 9 metres, a seemingly gridded video projected upon its surface. ating synecdochal connectivity between the tile, the mausoleum and Closer inspection revealed that its surface is layered with ceramic its making at the factory, and between people and the objects they tiles textured by a pattern in basleave behind, and the people who The politics of labour is implicit in the relief. The tiles were baked in an in turn interpret those objects. The off-white engobe, a matte slip that labour of making is matched by the process of trade, migration, identity and absorbed the projection and gave labour of deriving meaning. The assimilation on the peoples of the subit the feel of a painting. (That Soi politics of labour here is implicit in continent and their histories. The global is predominantly a painter shows the process of trade, migration, idenin his use of light and texture and tity and assimilation on the peoples dimension further informs Soi’s practice treatment of illuminated surfaces.) of the subcontinent and their histoThe tiles, manufactured by the Bordallo Pinheiro Factory in Caldas ries. That these issues are being played out globally continues to da Rainha, reproduced those that decorate the fifteenth-century inform Soi’s practice. facade of the mausoleum of Queen Miran Zain (itself built upon Moving past this structure, one walked deep within the space to what was formerly a Hindu temple) in Srinagar. Queen Miran, who a semicircular column about two metres in height. Enigmatically lit, hailed from Turkmenistan, was the mother of Zain-ul-abidin, one of its curved surface was encrusted with another array of tiles, similar the region’s greatest rulers (1420–70) during its Islamic period and to those that covered the previous structure but here coloured and whose mausoleum sits next to hers. This history, linking Central arranged in a manner similar to that adorning the original mausoAsia to North India, doesn’t go unnoticed by leum. On its reverse was a video narrative preceding pages Soi. In a political age when the history of the constructed of collaged clips and texts diarisThird Factory (From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas), 2018, subcontinent is being redefined along relitically describing Soi’s forays around Lisbon video projected on tiled wall, 300 × 1200 cm. Courtesy and the founder’s collection. A journey that gious lines, this link is both poignant and the artist and Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

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this and following page Detailed view of tiles from Third Factory (From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas) (2018) at Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

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started in Turkmenistan, via Kashmir and Amsterdam, moves to the streets of Lisbon and the exhibition rooms of the Gulbenkian. The effect is to stage conversations and exchanges that are centuries old: Portuguese craft objects beside those of contemporary Kashmiris’ and ancient, often anonymous, artisans. The narrative of the videos was interspersed by Soi’s own associations while navigating the city and the museum’s collection: at one point, he muses over the changing chromatics of the kum kapi carpets (named after the Armenian district of Istanbul in which the carpets originated during the nineteenth century) created by Armenian weaver Hagop Kapoudjian. Elsewhere, an image of the eyelike aperture in Charles Correa’s Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon causes him to reminisce about an earlier construction by the Indian architect of Goan heritage (Goa was annexed by India from Portugal in 1961), which Soi frequently passed as a child in Kolkata. Clips of a gloved hand leafing through the nine-volume index Cérémonies et coutumes religieuse de tous les peuples du monde (1773) segue into a description of walking through Mouraria, an immigrant enclave in central Lisbon. The energy unleashed by displacement articulates what might be construed as a set of theses on subjects such as representation, migration, language and exchange, all discussed anecdotally without ever being named: as we might encounter them in daily life, as opposed to how we might think about them in moments of reflection. The final component of the exhibition was a cutout structure placed at the end of the chamber describing the outline of the Zabarwan

Range of mountains that surround Srinagar. And yet it was this structure’s exposed back, revealing its artifice, that was turned to the visitor. Only by walking around it were you able to see the plain red tiles that, like an elegant brickwork or the stories in Soi’s videos, supported it. The multilayered approach to materials and histories developed at the Gulbenkian has now led to a new body of work commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms in London, which will be on show at its space this September. Titled Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the uk takes its name from the distorted perspective technique famously deployed by Hans Holbein the Younger to depict the skull (only ‘truly’ visible from a vantage point high to the right of the painting) that dominates the foreground of The Ambassadors (1533). Soi has described this new body of work as deriving from ‘notational methodology’, used during his time in Palestine as part of a un-organised visit in 2009. It’s a technique that might, in its defamiliarising effects, be described as Shklovskian. It is one that Soi will use to explore how the landscape of Palestine has been represented, from the point of view of multiple religions and multiple cultures, via an accumulation of drawings, archive materials, paintings, video and sound. As such, it represents the latest evolution of a perspective on the world that is both personal and many-eyed. ara Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine is on show at The Mosaic Rooms, London, 27 September – 10 December

Third Factory (From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas), 2018, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

Summer 2019

Michael Rakowitz â&#x20AC;&#x153;The absurdity of minor objects telling a major story is something I seek outâ&#x20AC;? Interview by Oliver Basciano Portrait by Mikael Gregorsky

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For almost 3,000 years, the city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern-day Iraq, was protected by a 30-tonne, 4.5m-high stone lamassu stationed at its gates. The Assyrian deity takes the form of a winged bull (at other times a lion) with a human head. In 2015 members of is used a pneumatic drill to gouge out its eyes and subsequently destroyed the city’s ancient guardian. Then, in March 2018, the lamassu reappeared. This time beneath Admiral Nelson’s watchful eye in London’s Trafalgar Square. And with reincarnation came reinvention: what once was stone is now constituted of 10,500 cans formerly containing Iraqi date syrup. This public art commission, located on the square’s Fourth Plinth, is a work by American artist Michael Rakowitz, who has mined the Iraqi heritage of his grandparents, who left the country during the 1940s, in a number of open-ended projects. One of these, The invisible enemy should not exist (2007–; the title translates names of the ancient Babylonian processional way through the Ishtar Gate), involves the mammoth task of reimagining looted or destroyed Iraqi antiquities using food packaging available in Middle Eastern food shops in the West. With over 7,000 artefacts registered as lost, he has a long way to go. Yet his projects involve much more than the production of objects: in 2010 in Ramallah he restaged The Beatles’ acrimonious last concert as an analogy for the Israel-Palestine conflict; in 2013 he opened an Iraqi-Jewish restaurant in Dubai with menus put together under headings such as ‘Bitter’, ‘Sweet’ and ‘Sour’; during Hungary’s 2006 elections, Rakowitz created a series of architectural collages riffing on ‘utopia’ on the streets of Budapest in collaboration with members of the public. The artist posits that culture, whether presented in museums, or that which is passed on via the kitchen or in music, is what makes us; consequently Rakowitz is vociferous in its defense, protesting against what he sees as its abuse through “artwashing” by corporate powers or governments. Ahead of a return to the uk, for a survey of the artist’s work at Whitechapel Gallery, and having withdrawn from exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and the Jewish

Museum, both in New York, ArtReview met with Rakowitz to discuss cultural heritage, institutional ethics and his take on the history of art. artreview asia Is there a particular work from your past that drove you towards the approach to art you have today? michael rakowitz The work that I’ve returned to every winter since 1998, parasite [in which inflatable polyethylene shelters for the homeless are attached to the exterior

heating vents of buildings] continues to teach me a great deal. It’s the work from which so many of my projects have been spun: the engagement with people who are rough sleepers taught me what it means to be a citizen without being accepted and how a work could wield some kind of resistance against parasite, 1998–, plastic bags, polyethylene tubing, hooks, tape, distributed in Cambridge (ma) and Baltimore. Courtesy the artist

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capitalism and a government structure. That education came from slowing down: from listening more than speaking. Also finding a way in which I can foreground what I am interested in, as an artist, in terms of making things and still practice social engagement. ara There’s been a growth in architecture that acts against the homeless: public benches with arms that prevent people from lying down, studs on walls. Was parasite a response to this trend, or did it stem from a more instinctive reaction to the problem of homelessness? mr Initially it came from going to the Middle East for the first time. I wanted to look at the architecture of Palestinian refugee camps where, in some cases, they were replicating the facades of buildings that the Israelis had bulldozed. I went on an architectural residency to Jordan in the winter of 1997, but the Jordanian government did not want us anywhere near the refugee camps, so I ended up being shepherded into the desert to look at the Bedouin. All this is much romanticised, but one thing the Bedouin did every night was set up their tents in response to the wind patterns. It was a very beautiful detail, but I had no idea what to do with it. When I got back to Boston that winter, I saw a homeless person sleeping underneath the vent of a building, where the warm air was coming from. The hvac [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] system was keeping this person alive. This was another kind of wind pattern and another kind of nomadism. I was made aware of the anti-homeless devices you’re talking about by a guy named Keith in Boston, one of the folks I was designing for. He pointed out that the air vents in Harvard Square that they used to sleep on were suddenly given a secondary metal structure that created a tilt so they couldn’t lie down. The shelters enabled them to siphon off the warm air. It is insidious how cities have made it imperative that you be in continual motion, unless you’re somehow ‘legal’, in which case you have to pay for the privilege of rest in rent. ara Your work might be described as ‘social practice’ but I believe you dislike the term. Most artists don’t like labels, but is there something more to it than that?

mr This is a term that has its origins in the field of psychology in the 1980s and has been recycled. As I understand, in psychology, it is about a certain kind of betterment or behavioural improvement, where I’m also interested in antagonisms. The claim of ‘social practice’ for a certain kind of work also invokes a particular stereotype, when in fact all artworks are social. I don’t want to overemphasise this though, because people can call my work whatever they want and I respect everything that’s come before me. I started out as a sculptor, then went on to study graphic design in college, before going back to sculpture. I became really enamoured with site-specific work and then moved towards artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, Dennis Adams and Mary Miss, who were looking at the contexts in which they were working and engaging with audiences. ara Your identity is very wrapped up in the work you went on to make. You are American but your maternal grandparents were Iraqi. Did your upbringing feel very Iraqi? mr Yes, I was born in Great Neck on Long Island, where my grandparents had settled. My mother was born in Mumbai after my grandparents had started to live between there and Baghdad, a consequence of the British colonial presence in both places. When the Farhud, the anti-Jewish pogrom, occurred in Iraq in June 1941, my grandfather realised that the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East, whether Zionism or Arab nationalism, would mean minorities get torn up. So he made plans to leave the region. I grew up in this house full of rugs; on the walls were paintings and the miniature drawings that they were able to bring with them. Iraqi music played on reel-to-reel tape during family gatherings. I would hear Arabic whenever they didn’t want me to understand something. I assumed all this was Jewish. It wasn’t until I had been round somebody else’s house that I realised it is actually Arab. “I’m an Arab-Jew.” Being surrounded by this culture rescued all of us when the Iraq War started in 1991. Highly televised, with these vulgar images of buildings being destroyed, I at least had that counter-understanding of the city that my grandparents loved and were heartbroken to leave. ara While my introduction to ‘Iraq’, as a child in the West during the first war, was the tragedy that befell the country… mr Right, and that dehumanises, demeans, the people. I knew then that I was, for the rest of my life, going to have to do something to rescue those stories that my grandparents told

us and to do something to elevate those things that surrounded me: the crafts, the history, the music, the food. ara You have this familial culture, but you’ve never been to Iraq. How come? mr I have a certain amount of privilege with my us passport, and it’s a privilege not afforded to the many people I work with on my projects who can’t go back. The places that I heard about in my grandparents’ stories, the places that are part of ‘my’ Iraq, those places don’t exist any more. It is not that I will never go back, I don’t want to fetishise this decision – I get asked about it a lot – it’s that I want to be invited by my Iraqi friends, have them show me their places. So I will go when the circumstances allow that to happen. ara You used the word ‘antagonism’ in relation to your work. There’s also a humour to it. I’m thinking of Spoils, the Creative Time project in which meals at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were,

“I knew then that I was, for the rest of my life, going to have to do something to rescue those stories that my grandparents told us and to do something to elevate those things that surrounded me: the crafts, the history, the music, the food” in 2011, served on plates looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It is antagonistic, but there’s also a humour for the rest of us in imagining these moneyed Americans being forced to eat off such charged objects. mr When the humour comes in, it’s really not something that I’m trying too hard to do. I’m aware of the small moments of irony but don’t want a project to stop at that. The vulgarity of the us invasion becomes apparent in these war trophies, hawked on eBay by returning soldiers. I remember seeing pictures of Iraqis carrying things out of Saddam’s house – his big chairs or chandeliers. A lot of people installed those things in their own homes, and a lot of the plates, of which there were many, were used as tableware. There was a dispersal of the symbols of power. It was like when, in colonial history, the body of a dethroned sovereign was paraded through the city. ara A very visceral demonstration that power has been transferred. mr The absurdity of minor objects telling a major story is something I seek out: it creates

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tension without resolution. I think about this in the context of Iraqi cooking, where it’s very important to engage with hamud-helou, sweet and sour. Likewise I’m interested in making art that makes you feel really good and really bad at the same time. ara The invisible enemy should not exist also deals with looting and with the object as a symbol of conflict. mr I was always troubled by the comfort with which countries like the us can wage wars remotely. There is total dehumanisation. I often talk about the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. It was almost like the first moment of pathos in the war where people – whether they were for or against the war – could agree that this was not only an Iraqi problem. This was a world problem: some of the first moments of human history and ingenuity were at risk. I was very conscious that the outrage about lost objects did not translate into outrage about lost lives, so I asked myself, “What would it mean to bring the war home?” Being represented by a commercial gallery in New York in 2006, when I started to develop the series, it was clear to me that you could walk through Chelsea, where the galleries are, and not know that we were living in a war culture. I wanted to engage with that in a way that wasn’t heavy-handed. A commercial gallery makes sales, of course, and I was conscious that it was the antiquities market, fuelled by demand in the West, that allowed the Iraq Museum to be looted in the first place. I decided to make this work that ‘reappeared’ – not reconstructed – the ghosts of the artefacts looted from the museum using date syrup labels. ara Why that material? mr Because of the embargo and then because of bureaucracy, Iraqi dates and date syrup, which is the best in the world, have since the war been labelled as products of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, even Sweden. The dates are smuggled across the border before they are packaged. Again, it is this question of the market. ara You say that the destruction of these artefacts in Iraq is a global tragedy, which points to some kind of universalism, or common ownership of the cultural object. At the same time, your work highlights the pillage of objects by imperial powers for Western museums. That suggests that these objects are owned by the cultures that produced them, in some sense, and should be returned to them. mr I’m interested in listening to people from places that have suffered this haemorrhaging of their culture. I’m also interested in what it means for an encyclopaedic museum to exist, where people who are truly curious about one

The invisible enemy should not exist (detail), 2007â&#x20AC;&#x201C;, drawings, cardboard and newspaper sculptures, museum labels, sound. Courtesy the artist

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top Spoils (2011) features tableware looted from the ruins of Saddam Husseinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s palaces. Courtesy the artist above Still from a video released by is in 2015 in which an is militant destroys an ancient Assyrian frieze in Nimrud

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another can go. I leave open the possibility that there should be restitution, but also that there can be moments of exchange. If we were truly visionary, what might it mean to say, “Well, if the British Museum has the Lyre of Ur from Mesopotamia, perhaps they could send John Lennon’s first guitar to the Iraq Museum”? ara The British could send over a bit of Stonehenge. mr Exactly! I think that we need to be careful not to oversimplify the history, but there also needs to be some kind of accountability. Apologising merely liberates the person who is apologising. That said, I’m thinking about this from a position of privilege. I don’t bear the traumas and wounds directly. I think it’s up to the people living in those countries to decide.

and victim on the same level. Anyway, I started to wonder what it would mean if I staged the concert in Palestine, if I sang his songs with air from my Arab lungs. I bought Leonard’s old typewriter from a superfan in Germany and wrote him a letter asking his permission. Of course, I did not get a reply. Last year the curators of the Cohen exhibition in Canada heard about this project and invited me to be part of the show. By now, however, my Palestinian collaborators were nervous and decided that restaging the concert, given Cohen’s history, was too risky. So in Montreal I showed a video projection reconstructing the period in which Cohen travelled

ara You declined an invitation to participate in the Whitney Biennial while Warren Kanders – the owner of Safariland Group, which manufactures tear gas canisters and other military products – continues to be vice chair of the Whitney’s board of trustees. You also pulled out of the second leg of Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, a touring show that opened at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and is currently at the Jewish Museum in New York. What is the background to the latter decision? mr My wife is Canadian and really introduced me to Cohen’s music. We went to see him in concert and it was amazing. I got really into him and started researching him intensely. While surfing fan forums I found an image of Cohen playing to the Israeli Army in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. He met Ariel Sharon – this was when the world already knew what kind of man Sharon was. I became intrigued: Cohen never stated publicly his thoughts on Israel and Palestine. I am, however, a signatory of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. I learned that in 2009 Cohen was set to play Ramallah. Cohen is famous all over the world of course, but in the Arab world he is loved. I thought at first this was Cohen making amends for the 1973 performance, but the Palestine concert ended up being cancelled after it became apparent that he was also to play Tel Aviv. The concert in Ramallah was an attempt to be ‘balanced’. But, of course, that puts aggressor

management now become part of this project. With Spoils, for example, the dinner plates ended up being requisitioned by the fbi and returned to Iraq. mr On the Iraqi prime minister’s private plane! He had just had a meeting with Obama. I happened to be in New York at the time and was able to witness the plates being packed up and driven to the embassy. And of course that was the best possible result, one I could not have predicted, for the work. ara The Whitney Biennial issue is different: it hasn’t opened yet and you removed yourself from it. mr I want to be clear that I intended my withdrawal to be private. I didn’t want to put any of the other artists in a difficult position. For me, however, I could not continue after reading the letter the museum staff had courageously written to the management. The tear gas canisters that Warren Kanders’s company manufactures can be found at the border with Mexico, and in Palestine. The whole power structure can be traced through those objects. ara But where do you stop? Naturally, before this interview, I checked through the patrons and funders list of the Whitechapel Gallery. There’s nothing immediately obvious, though no one gets rich entirely innocently.

to Israel. Then he died, and his management took over. After the show opened I got wind that the manager did not like the work. He thought it one-sided. I had a meeting with him, which was cordial, but then I got an email in which he wrote that he ‘looks forward to helping me complete the work’. That rang alarm bells, so I declined to show it in New York. ara There’s an instability built into your practice. Things don’t always go to plan, which seems very much part of the work: the problems with Cohen’s The invisible enemy should not exist (detail), 2007–, drawings, cardboard and newspaper sculptures, museum labels, sound. Courtesy the artist

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mr Right, I did too! Things are changing, though slowly. For example, the Whitechapel sent me an email asking me what patronage or funding sources I would be comfortable with. That is progress. Every museum I know is pursuing an extension or a capital project, maybe institutions just have to do fewer in the future. Maybe they don’t have to expand. Maybe they don’t need to put on shows with the big, star artists. Maybe it’s time to instead work with the local art scenes or invest in local artists at the expense of always having to be bigger. ara Michael Rakowitz is on view at Whitechapel Gallery, London, through 25 August. A version of the artist’s 2011 work Spoils is being presented in food: Bigger than the Plate, at the V&A, London, through 20 October

Art Archived

craved of him who should be worshipped 65

Archive Focus South Asia

As part of its ongoing celebration of sister title ArtReview’s 70 years in the business, ArtReview Asia has been digging into the archive to unearth some of the key texts published since 1949. The following articles, all of which focus on art from South Asia, originally appeared during the 1950s. In them the reader can discern the first glimmers of postcolonial thought as it emerged in the pages of Art News and Review during the years following Indian independence and partition. The language might be archaic, the place names consigned to history, but these texts nonetheless represent an attempt to analyse art from South Asia on its own terms (with acknowledgment of Western influence where sighted). Some artists of the time undoubtedly spoke, as one critic puts it, ‘the idiom of the École de Paris with an Urdu accent’, but change was afoot…

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above 9 August, 1952 below Lionel Wendt, Untitled, c.1933–38, gelatin silver print on paper, 30 x 25 cm. © Tate, London, 2019

9 August, 1952 Feature

2 The spread of industrialism and the mass production of domestic products.

The Artist in Ceylon

The second cause, industrialism, has been injurious to art and particularly to craftsmanship all over the world.’ At the commencement of the British period vast fortunes were made by several Ceylonese families in the Low-country. Though these people contributed much to the economic and political advancement of the country and gave much to religious institutions, they did not cultivate the fine art of living. The fault was not theirs perhaps, for they were not grounded in a culture which would at least have created good taste in them. Hence no valuable contribution was made to the arts – no great treasures of the East or West adorned their houses, nor were any national or private collections founded or bequeathed to the country. A notable exception was Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who endeavoured in vain to make his contemporaries realise the foolishness of their ways in aping the West whilst neglecting their own heritage. He was ignored by his people, India, and even Britain. America alone recognised his worth and secured his services for the Boston Institute of Fine Art and retained his valuable collection of Indian and Ceylonese art for itself. Coomaraswamy’s contribution in bringing the art of the East to the West is already well known the world over. The Colombo Museum and the Archaeological Department are two worthy institutions created and sponsored by British initiative which still exist. In spite of lack of patronage the artist and craftsman carried on their work. Beautiful temple paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can yet be seen in a few temples scattered in various parts of the island. Unfortunately these paintings are gradually disappearing and are being replaced by inconceivably crude paintings of the worse taste, influenced no doubt by the wrong type of Western art. The present century must be held responsible for the complete degeneration of the temple painter. Whether he can be saved from the depths of degradation in which he finds himself today depends on whether the taste of our local patrons can be improved. With the advance of Western education, and more facilities for travel abroad being made available, contact with good European and Eastern art is tending to have a beneficial effect on a small minority. A few artists have been abroad for their education, a school of art has been founded by the Government and a few scholarships are at present being awarded for study overseas. The Second World War and the grant of universal franchise have been responsible for the rise of another class of ‘nouveaux riches’. Bus magnates, contractors, petty ‘boutique’ keepers… During the latter part of the nineteenth century an effort was made to revive an interest in art and the Ceylon Society of Arts was founded. This society still

The impact of three Western cultures – the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English – since the sixteenth century has been instrumental in the deterioration of the indigenous art of Ceylon. This was inevitable since the conquerors, intent on enriching themselves by trade and commerce, were responsible for profound changes in the island’s economy and social structure. In his memorandum for the establishment an Arts Council in Ceylon, Lord Soulbury states: ‘For many centuries the artist and craftsman mainly relied for his employment on what we should now call public works and services and for his remuneration and livelihood upon the kings, the temples and the aristocracy. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century two causes gravely prejudiced his position and prospects. 1 The elimination of the kings, the impoverishment of the temples and the aristocracy and the loss of their patronage.

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Dancer Ram Gopal in front of George Keyt’s Radha and Krishna at the opening of Keyt’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 6 January 1954. Photo: Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo

exists, and though it has received government support throughout the 60 years or more of its existence, it has only been able to build an art gallery in Colombo where art exhibitions are held. But in spite of government assistance and patronage, this gallery contains no work of intrinsic value either of local or foreign talent. In 1943 the late Lionel Wendt rallied around him all the progressive artists and individuals sympathetic to the arts, and the ‘43 Group was formed. The chief functions of the group being to discover new talent, organise exhibitions and do everything possible to improve the standard of art and help the artists. Wendt was a remarkably gifted personality – the only genuine patron of the arts modern Ceylon has known. Besides being a first-rate musician he was an excellent photographer and his photographs are known wherever good photography is appreciated. He was a brilliant conversationalist, a source of inspiration and help to artists in all spheres of the arts. It was he who discovered George Keyt, rightly recognised now as one of the foremost artists on the island.

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Some very good examples of Keyt’s work, as well as those of Deraniyagala, Beling, Ivan Peries, Gabriel, and others can be seen in his collection. He was the first to introduce the modern French painters to the local artists by bringing out the best facsimile reproductions of their work to Ceylon on his return from England in 1924. After his death in 1944 his friends decided to erect a memorial to his memory, and the form it was to take was modelled on the lines of the arts centre planned by the Arts Council of Great Britain and later abandoned. The building of this memorial has already commenced and work on it is held up on account of the rising costs of building. The friends of Lionel Wendt and the general public collected over one and a half lakhs of rupees. It is to be regretted that the government has not yet shown its appreciation of this public-spirited gesture to improve cultural facilities in Colombo by offering any support. I am happy to state, however, that a foreign institute such as the Volkart Foundation in Winterthur, Switzerland, has made a very generous contribution to this noble effort to help the arts. This much must be said for the State and the part it should be playing in helping the arts in Ceylon. Last year a proposal to establish an Arts Council of Ceylon on the lines of the Art Council of Great Britain originated with the present governor, General Lord Soulbury, who has since his tenure of office shown the greatest interest in the cultural development of the country. Though this scheme was propounded over a year ago, the establishment of the council has not been realised as yet. The Colombo Exhibition which opened on February 23 will give the public an opportunity of seeing for the first time in Ceylon original paintings of a few distinguished painters of East and West. The English painters are represented by Sickert, MacBride, Ivor Hitchens, Ben Nicholson, Piper, Colquhoun and some others. For this we are indeed most grateful to the British Council and can earnestly hope this will be followed by a more representative collection of painters in future. The French painters are very poorly represented. The need for frequent exhibitions of the best works of art cannot be stressed too often. I hope unesco will step in and lend a helping hand to the much neglected artist of this island. Meanwhile the artist must continue to carry on his difficult and dreary existence as best he can.

23 January, 1954 Exhibition reviews: George Keyt, ICA, London; Justin Daraniyagala, Beaux Arts Gallery, London; group show, Artists International Association Galleries, London; by Peter de Francia

Painters From Ceylon It is agreeable to emerge from the hothouses of Imaginary Museums into the reality of living

above 23 January, 1954 below Ivan Peries, Untitled (Seashore), 1966, oil on board, 90 × 61 cm. Courtesy Documenta, Kassel

painting. All the more so when the painting comes as something new, revealing, and very instructive. For in three exhibitions at present in London can be seen the tentative and impressive beginnings of a group of painters from Asia, and in their work the conflicts and difficulties of working in the twentieth century. All the artists are from Ceylon. All are members of the ’43 Group, an organisation stemming from the nationalist movements of the twenties, and centred largely around the personality of Lionel Wendt, pianist, critic and photographer, who died in 1944. The ica is showing the work of George Keyt; the Beaux Arts Gallery the paintings and drawings of Justin Daraniyagala; and six painters are exhibiting at the aia Gallery. These shows follow a large exhibition held with considerable success at the Petit Palais in Paris in November-December last year. George Keyt (born in 1901) is the oldest member of the group, and was one of its founders. Of the 51 works included in this exhibition 14 are drawings. At first glance he is the most traditional of all the painters, his work deriving from Indian fresco painting, his drawing linear, his themes largely religious and mythological. The chromatic harmony of his pictures depends largely on subject material. His work is full of a formal sensuality, of a type that was hardly ever found in Western art, and completely lacking in any type of painting of the twentieth century. His drawings are extremely economical, thought out more than felt, with a particular quality of line (found also in the paintings), which recalls the strings of harps. Structurally his compositions are magnificent. The relationship of curved lines to right angles (not those of the outer format of the canvas, but contained within it)

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is always perfect. His pictures have a particularly singing quality, as the sky behind one of his figures in the Threshing Floor (No. 17). It would be relevant to cite as European counterparts the attempts of Maurice Denis and Scrusier to re-establish a tradition of religious mural painting, with results far less successful, though Keyt’s approach is based on a scholastic appraisal of the artistic heritage of his country. But his scholasticism is never arid; his altitude of mind less traditional than might appear, and his vitality such that he is capable of quickly discarding, if need be, certain European pictorial formulas. Justin Daraniyagala (born in 1903), studied painting in Europe, but lives and works entirely in Ceylon. He is in some ways the most impressive painter in the group. His work is a curious combination of explosiveness and humour, moodiness and gaiety. His colour is powerfully and often beautifully used – blacks, pinks and dark blues predominating. He will be called an Expressionist for probably the wrong reasons: since European Expressionism usually consists of a deformation of reality to echo the personal predicaments of the artist, whilst in the case of Daraniyagala the deformation is rather that of an accentuation of actual characteristics. In this he is reminiscent of Goya. Both Spain in the nineteenth century and Ceylon in the twentieth escape the dilemma of urban capitalism – a dilemma arising from the contradiction of increasingly collective living and an almost hysterical ideology of individual personality worship. His paintings are almost entirely of figures. They differ from Keyt’s in deriving far more from life, but at the same time the relationship between Daraniyagala’s figures are given the momentousness of mythological encounters. Of the animal paintings perhaps the most impressive is that of a dog: a gutter Minotaur. At the aia Gallery the large canvas of Ivan Peries is outstanding amongst the work of the other six painters, but there are some good drawings of George Claessen, and some interesting paintings of Richard Gabriel and Aubrey Collette, which have strong ties with a more local art and which are based on rural and religious themes. There is also a good landscape by Ranjit Fernando. These painters are diverse and many-sided, but not chaotic. Whilst it is too early to talk of a school of Ceylon it is not too early to point out that their strength and confidence lies in their constant use of a national idiom, their preoccupation with life around them, an objectivity and a lack of introspection. They are faced, in difficult circumstances, with the necessity of creating a synthesis between a tradition going back over a thousand years and the twentieth century. They do not fall into the trap of phoney folklore, or into that of a frantic plundering of the school of Paris. They absorb outside influences, make use of them, and go beyond them. Their work is the meridional expression of Asia: essentially lyrical and full of vitality. We shall hear more of them.

4 November, 1961 Feature, by G. M. Butcher

South Asian Artists Whatever effects the Common Market may have upon short-range Commonwealth economic relations, the Commonwealth idea, as an intercultural concept, has a tremendous future before it. There is needed only the will, and a relatively modest financial commitment. In at least one limited field, that of painters and sculptors from Ceylon, India and Pakistan, the reality of the Commonwealth link has been increasing year by year over the past decade. There are now more than twenty artists from South Asia living and working in the London area. They have received singularly little official support; but they have chosen to come here, despite the rival attractions of Paris, because London is, for them, the obvious ‘home away from home’. Of course, there are neither the language nor the employment difficulties associated with living in France; and it is a fortunate chance that London has become, along with New York and Paris, one of the three ‘metropolitan magnets’ in the world of art. To draw a parallel, there are certain similarities between the situation of South Asian artists now in London, and that of American painters before and during the war. Just as the Americans migrated to Paris in the ’twenties and ’thirties, so, many of the younger South Asians are choosing London – or Paris – in the ’fifties and ’sixties. No one can foresee how quickly this interchange will produce generally important results. One hopes there will be no occasion for European artists to become refugees in South Asia – as they did so significantly, in America during the last war. On the other hand, the pace of development, in so many activities, seems to accelerate day by day. It must not be thought, however, that the presence of South Asian artists in London implies the loss of their national characters. Post-war New York painting looks very little like pre-war French painting. In the same way, even though the South Asians are still at work in our midst, the best of their paintings and sculptures look quite unlike their British counterparts. Although there is a great deal of technical and theoretical influence, it is, in most instances, undergoing a profound adaptation to the various strands of South Asian sensibility. It is as a convenient ‘progress report’ that the Bear Lane Gallery, of Oxford, has conceived its November exhibition. Twenty-one artists are included, in order to give a certain breadth, and also to indicate the volume of activity taking place. But there is no intention of implying the existence of any ‘school’. Each artist is working as an individual; and many are quite unknown to each other. It is also, of course, the intention to mount as good an exhibition as possible. This might, in principle, have been better achieved had the number of exhibitors been limited – but at the cost of a considerable portion of the exhibition’s ‘situational’ interest.

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preceding pages, left Ivan Peries, Nude, 1961, oil on canvas (from The Arts Review, 4 November, 1961) preceding pages, right F.N. Souza, Crucifixion, 1959, oil paint on board, 183 × 122 cm. © the estate of the artist / dacs, London 2019

below Tyeb Mehta, Mahisasura, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 61 cm. Courtesy Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

Some of the artists included are already well established, like Avinash Chandra and F. N. Souza. Others are first-rate artists who, for one reason or another, have not yet made their mark upon the London scene. Perhaps the two best examples of this are Tyeb Mehta, from India, and Ivan Peries, from Ceylon. At the other extreme of status are those who are just emerging from their student years. This is not reflected as closely by age as one might think; for most are obliged to earn their livings in fields other than art. As for the paintings and sculptures themselves – and I write before the exhibition has been hung – there are certainly a few things of very high quality. Price alone, however, is not a direct criterion of value. Souza’s Crucifixion at 570 guineas is the most expensive picture in the show, as well as being the most compelling work; but good things can also be had at prices from five to twelve guineas. Yet, however interesting the price opportunities for collectors may be, there is the added incentive of the Commonwealth idea. Just as the provinces tend to look kindly on the work of local artists, and Bond Street on the work of British

artists, so might the time have come for the public to particularly encourage Commonwealth artists. This is a ‘provincial’ and extra-artistic appeal, I know, but it is at least a wider provincialism. And yet, is it just a matter of provincialism? For the whole point is that the encounter between the artistic traditions of South Asia – as personified in these twenty-one human sensibilities – and the contemporary standards of artistic achievement in Europe is on the edge of producing a great movement of painting and sculpture which will enrich us all. The imminence of this achievement would naturally have been more apparent if it had been possible to choose South Asian artists from New York and Paris, and from Ceylon, India and Pakistan as well. Let us hope this may one day be possible. But it is worth noting that the Bear Lane’s exhibition is, so far as I can discover, the first of its kind ever to have been held anywhere. It can be objected that there is very little in common between, say, Ceylon and Pakistan. This might be true were it not for their common share in the traditions of Greater India. For example, Ranil Deraniyagala, from Ceylon, is at this moment painting a figure subject with a reproduction of one of the wall paintings from Ajanta propped up beside him. And M. J. Iqbal Geoffrey, from Pakistan, has just completed a picture in which the symbolism has been interpreted in the emotional manner of Indian miniature painting. I should like to go on with example after example of certain common traits underlying the surface of apparently very disparate works; but as this is not possible, I can only suggest that the visitor take careful note of the colour harmonies of these painters, of their propensity for flat patterns and black outlines, and of their resistance to the loss of the human image. For in this exhibition, one may reflect for himself upon some of the problems facing the artist who tries to be both modern and a projection of the traditions of his homeland.

23 January, 1954 Exhibition review, Bazaar Paintings from Calcutta, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, by Bernard Boles

Bazaar Paintings from Calcutta From now until April next one can approach the Indian Section of the V. and A. Museum with a sense of recreation. Indian Art as it is known from the erudite elegance and mature taste of Mughal and Rajput Courts decreed subtleties, lore and minutiae from their painters, all of which demand severe reciprocity from the spectator. The present exhibition of Bazaar Paintings from Calcutta takes a more democratic form. In the 17th century a temple was built at Kali near the Ganges, the inevitable bazaar of bric-à-brac followed, and pilgrims to the Durga Puja Feast bought keepsakes

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top 23 January, 1954 above Cover of Bazaar Paintings from Calcutta by W.G. Archer (1954, H.M. Stationery Office) right Hanuman revealing Rama and Sita enshrined in his heart, opaque watercolour on paper, Kalighat, Kolkata, ca. 1830, 43 × 28 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

of the dieties. To retail them at less than a penny the bazaar artists or patuas, possibly influenced by ancient murals at Ajanta and Bagh, resorted to simplified forms brushed in water-colour on cheap local paper. The first established period of these modern Kalighat painters lasts from 1800 to 1850. The concept is bold, the eye is chaste, the vision complete. The monkey chief, Hanuman with Ramu and Situ in his Heart, shown in the first bay of the present exhibition, is already the prototype that has influenced Léger decisively and Chagall deviously. Temporal fare of this time is stylized in finely modelled forms as horses race and Englishmen shoot tigers. In the mid-period 1850–70 the Kalighat bazaar becomes a trifle rowdy. In the progressive concept Hanuman becomes almost a mastodon, the form is deepened, the pattern forced and the spirits Ramu and Situ take on a befitting worldliness. A price war with the newly-established Calcutta Art School makes for a quick wood-cut effect. However, in this posterlike rendering of prawns, fish and eagles, the heavier treatment of planes is most effective. After 1870 under the famous Chandra Ghosh family there appears a ‘Back to Ingres’ movement. The line becomes rhythmic, sensitive, and the drawing fine. The theme is secular. Westernised wives are slain while the homely girls receive the supplications. Strength is eventually restored to the drawings, sensitivity remains, and there is interest in the single figures cleverly composed by Kali Chandra Ghosh. By 1924 the Chandra Ghosh line has ended, but not before a partly trained Kalighat, Jamini Roy (Bay 19), is drawing as one in the avant-garde style of Bloomsbury. Modern art has passed to other things, but the Kalighat painter remains as data for the historian.

23 January, 1954 Book review, Bazaar Paintings of Calcutta by W. G. Archer, by Maurice Collis

the simplest style possible, the ample forms of the figures, particularly the female figures, were in accordance with Indian immemorial predilections for embonpoint. Mr Archer’s introductory essay marshals all the elements that went into the style, some of which, curiously enough, were derived from the English academic style for the period. It is a lively essay by a specialist in Indian painting, who is also well acquainted with modern art.

23 January, 1954 Book review, Art in Pakistan, by F. Joss

Bazaar Paintings of Calcutta Art in Pakistan This book has a curious bearing on modern painting. The bazaar paintings with which it deals have a resemblance to Léger’s and may also be compared with those of Picasso’s classical period. They were executed, however, in the years between 1830 and 1900. Mr Archer answers the question how it was that the bazaar artists of Calcutta achieved such an anticipation of a French style. Their reasons for creating it had no connection with the aesthetic theories of the nineteen twenties. Some of the reasons were practical. The pilgrims to the great temple at Kalighat near Calcutta wanted pictures of the Indian gods and on other topical themes, but could not afford to pay more than a penny a picture. A linear style with bold colour washes was evolved, a drastic simplification of existing Indian styles, which enabled an artist to produce in a few minutes a striking figure, which yet he could afford to sell for a penny. But if economic necessity dictated

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The new frontiers created in 1947 within the Indian sub-continent do not divide different civilizations. Indo-Islamic culture blossomed on both sides, in Pakistani Lahore as well as in India’s Agra. Today, Moslems in both states – and in Ceylon and Indonesia as well – are taking their places in the world-wide ranks of contemporary artists. Rightly, the Karachi Government are conscious and proud of art that has grown and is growing within the confines of Pakistan. They have now produced a monograph, wisely called Art in Pakistan rather than Pakistani Art. The period covered extends from the Mughal era to our own times. Their common religion, Islam, not geographical community, marks out the artists whose work is shown and explained in this book. The author of the informative introduction, unnecessarily anonymous, makes no claim that

above Zainul Abedin, Famine Sketch, 1943, ink on paper, 43 × 57 cm. Courtesy Documenta 14 facing page Abdur Rahman Chugtai, Endless Journey, etching on paper, 37 × 30 cm. Courtesy Grosvenor Gallery, London below 12 June, 1954

contemporary Pakistani painters rank with the great names of the West. He merely states that a beginning has been made, ‘modest but hopeful’. Almost a hundred plates, partly in well-reproduced colour, give a vivid picture of the uneven level of the work regarded by Pakistani authorities as representative. Most of the Mughal work is of supreme quality. Of the moderns, Safiuddin Ahmad is a sovereign draughtsman and accomplished technician. Zainul Abedin’s famine sketches carry a powerful message; they are more than graphic reportage. A. R. Chughtai proves that following in Mughal tradition need not mean uncreative imitation. Shakir Ali speaks the idiom of the École de Paris with an Urdu accent. Ajmal Husain is a cartoonist turned expressionist painter. Islam forbids pictorial art. But the ban has never been effective in Persia and Moslem India (whereas the first Moroccan Berber took to painting only two or three years ago). Modern Pakistan is proud of her artists. They are given help and encouragement – except in terms of money. The present book is a token of that attitude. My only regret is that it contains no example of Pakistani sculpture.

12 June, 1954 Artist profile, Akbar Padamsee, by Asper

Bungling in Bombay Akbar Padamsee, a young painter after a four years’ stay in Paris, returned to Bombay in the early part of the year and opened his first one-man exhibition in India in the first week of May 1954. His canvas created a tremendous stir and reached a point of climax when the Vigilance Branch of the Bombay Police arrested him on the charge of exhibiting

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indecent and obscene pictures. This reference was applied to two of his paintings entitled ‘Lovers i and ii’. The Police took charge of these two paintings and also confiscated the catalogue in which one of these paintings was reproduced. In the history of art in India this is probably the first time that a painter has been arrested on a charge of exhibiting obscene paintings, and has raised a most serious problem for the Indian painters. What is indecent? The tradition of Indian sculpture and painting is both sensuous and erotic work. Temples of Kokunda and Khujaro have some of the world-known sculptures illustrating the sex act. Can these very traditions be wiped off by the application of the English penal code which is still used in India? There is great similarity between this case and that of Epstein when he created nude sculptures for the Medical Association Building in Strand, London. This case, when it comes up for hearing before the magistrate, will be of immense interest to every painter and art lover in India. Paris has a most congenial atmosphere for a painter. It is electric, which fills a painter with new hopes; it is free which inspires him with the joy of living. No wonder Akbar has been saturated with the spirit of Paris. His painting ‘Lovers’ could easily be a lyrical painting of classical India, a restatement of Radha Krishna. The difference is that Akbar’s ‘Lovers’ have no religious aura and that brings them down to the plain of reality. The landscape Nos. i and ii are architectonic. The rising towers are lyrical and give to it a baroquial movement, but the whole design has been conceived in the tradition of stained glass. The two landscapes i and ii deserve a closer study to be able to understand the personality of the painter. Both these canvases are in oil and painted in Paris in 1953; ii is larger than i – the composition of vertical line is similar except that there is an addition of a single vertical steeple in ii which developes the composition further, but the palette changes, expressing different mood of the same feeling. The i is intense and shows better craftmanship. The colours are restrained and lines flow with a conscious caution. The ii betrays gaiety and lighter tones; there is a greater freedom of lines but at some point loses its exuberance and becomes a picture. But Akbar’s important works are heads. His Christ and head i and ii establish him as a painter of great depth. The Christ in his simplicity symbolises both the martyrdom of man and the power of pity. This head dissolves time and takes back the memory in flight to the beginning of man when Barabas saw the Master on the cross; he fell to his knees and saw the lips of the man on the cross move and the breeze carried the voice to him, “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Study the head ii side by side and the story of Michelangelo unfolds itself. A primitive Roman, perhaps one of the same people who tortured and crucified Christ, rises from the sands of time. It is

above 31 May, 1952 right Affandi, Wisdom of the East, 1967, fresco mural, 396 × 488 cm. Courtesy East-West Center, Honolulu

a cutting across the traditions to seek the beginning of man’s sensitivity the time when he was a brute and a saint. These lines do not merely enclose the form of the head but a history of man’s reaction to life itself. The painter may not be conscious of the process, he creates and re-creates forms to discover the hidden secrets of man. This distinguishes modern art from its ancient equivalent. The modern painter, if he be worth the name, is not trying to communicate anything. Not being a missionary he has nothing to communicate. The form has no content – it is a part of the painter’s sensitivity. His re-actions and his moods alone make him an artist.

31 May, 1952 Exhibition review, Affandi, Army and Navy Stores, London, by John Berger

A painter of genius Apart from the 1945 Picasso show, this is the most important contemporary exhibition seen in London since the war: important not only because Affandi, who was born in Java in 1910, is a painter of genius, but also because it indicates the type of work and the attitude which lie behind the new emerging culture of Asia, and because we in Europe will finally have to learn from that attitude [...] Most of the pictures are fairly large and are painted on coarse canvas. The pigment itself usually thick and often applied in line-strokes which literally appear to have hit the canvas, and, having hit it, to have been

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drawn irresistibly into the orbit of the forms and spaces portrayed. Or more accurately, the magnetic process appears to work both ways: tension of the paintings is dependent on the lines and colours both attracting and being attracted by the development of the presented forms. Or again, to put it in an abstract way: the form and content of these works is indivisible. Their colour is bright, but violent and dignified rather than gay. Their subjects range from landscapes of ricefields, cities and mountains to portraits of the artist’s family, from paintings of animals – buffaloes, horses, boats, to paintings of the people to whom the artist has a complete, unselfconscious loyalty – rickshaw drivers, street musicians, republican soldiers, beggars, serious students. There are also on show a number of extraordinary drawings whose calligraphic quality is oriental, but whose grasp of particular form and expression is more reminiscent of Rembrandt or Goya. Yet what makes any description of these works inadequate (Expressionist is the only label that appears to fit but doesn’t) is that they are different in kind from anything we are accustomed to seeing. Not because of their exotic content – far from it: looking down one of these street scenes, one has no feeling of being on an unfamiliar set of values. Broadly speaking, ‘Art’ in the West has become inflated at the expense of life. Aesthetics have triumphed over vitality. These paintings redress the balance. They are the result of participation rather than contemplation, action rather than introspection. They are not concerned with Taste, for Taste completes and isolates. (This, I think, is the significance of the canvases being unframed and of a few being badly organised and uncorrected.) Instead, they are concerned with the continuity of life, the

above Indonesian artist Affandi (right) at an exhibition in Paris, 1953. Courtesy Ministry of Information of Indonesia, Indonesian Affairs below M.F. Husain, Puppet Seller, oil on canvas, 79 × 74 cm. Courtesy Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

necessary continuity of being able to risk achievements. One could argue that such attitude means the destruction of art, that a work of art must always be complete in itself. This is true, but such completeness is only achieved by an artist who resolves his continuous, other-than-aesthetic responsibilities, never by one who rejects them. Affandi, working during historic and heroic events (the resistance to the Jap occupation and the war against the Dutch for Indonesian independence) has a profound sense of active solidarity. The public, to whom he accepts responsibility, are not those who may happen to look at his paintings, but those who make, or are implied by his subjects. It is for this reason that his pictures do not present themselves to the spectator, but turning him into a witness, confront him. Looking at one of Affandi’s pictures, one feels that the canvas and pigment, neither cherished nor despised for their own sake, were simply the ground on which the particular situation was fought out: the lines and colours somehow miraculously expressive tracks of the fight. Yet the proof that Affandi has resolved his responsibilities is that his work never appears to be either moralistic (in the narrow sense) or sentimental. On the contrary, its predominant quality is one of tolerance and exhilaration. Finally, the obvious: Go to this exhibition. What I have said may be irrelevant to many readers. The only thing of which I am absolutely certain is that this exhibition is a supremely important challenge.

23 January, 1954 Book review, Modern Indian Painting by P. R. Ramachandra Rao, by F. Joss

Modern Indian Painting Like the flora of the jungle, Indian art looks the sameish at the very first glance, but quickly reveals bewildering variety. Two or three generations ago it was the fashion to minimise the value of India’s art of the past. Today the temptation is great – as the present writer confesses to his shame and sorrow – to classify contemporary Indian painters under two headings: Those who cling to great but dead tradition, and those who uncritically ape Western styles. Mr Rao’s ambitious and elaborate opus should go a long way to prepare the West for the impact that contemporary and future Indian art will inevitably make on it within a decennium or two. Over a thousand years Indian art has been thriving and withering under the physical and moral rule of foreign conquerors. Only for a few years the giant – who brought forth ‘Grecian’ sculpture a thousand years before the Greeks – has been free again, and he doesn’t know his own strength. The twenty-two colour plates and 203 monochrome plates in Mr Rao’s book, helped by a historical sketch, and particularly by biographical thumbnail notes on India’s painters of the past hundred years, will give an idea of the fertility and variety of that country’s artistic talent. Against the odds of bad taste and national as well as social prejudice on the part of actual and potential patrons, Indian artists have come into their own by sheer genius and cussedness, more in spite of than because of European or Europeantrained art-school teachers. More and more Indian artists are being invited to show their work in the West. The next to have a one-man show in London, I hear, will be M. F. Husain, a Muslim from Indore whose modernism of style and brilliance of technique stand up to Parisian standards. As a well of information on any Indian painter likely to show in the West, Mr Rao’s book appears to be unrivalled. A must for any catholic art library.

2 August, 1958 Exhibition review, XXIX Venice Biennale, by J.P. Hodin

A Biennale of Surprises Entirely surprising was the fact that the xxix Biennale of 1958 established itself as being much easier to survey and more concentrated than any Biennale since the end of the war. In spite of the great number of countries represented – 36 altogether, the highest participation hitherto – this was achieved as the result of a policy which restricted the number of exhibiting artists. It is to be seen as the first contribution of the new Secretary General, Professor Gian Alberto dell ’Acqua. […]

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top Cover of Modern Indian Painting, by P. R. Ramachandra Rao (1954, Rachana, Madras) below 2 August, 1958

Amongst the ‘anthological’ exhibitions must also be counted those of Georges Braque and of Wols, both in the Italian pavilion, and in the same vicinity exhibitions of lesser artistic interest such as those of the Argentine, Australia, Brazil, Ceylon, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Norway and South Africa. […] Against this trend of the accidental stands the will to a new figuration – in fact, not as new as all that, because it was always there and no “ accident ” could kill it, but regaining momentum since the bankruptcy of that contemptible derniere cri in artistic fashions. This may be considered the greatest surprise of the Biennale for the uninformed in matters of artistic essentials. Very sound representatives of this urge for figuration are William Scott and Kenneth Armitage. Amongst the Italians, Alberto Burri, among the Spaniards, Antoni Tàpies, both aiming in a certain sense at animation, the stressing of the sensuous and of the vital in itself, although achieving it by different means. [...] Along the anthological exhibitions of the Italian pavilion, among which must be counted also that of the Australian Realist painter Arthur Streeton and of Lasar Segall, the Russian-born Brazilian Expressionist, are the shows of the folklore-inspired early work of Kandinsky in the German pavilion, of Jean Brusselman’s robust Impressionism in the Belgian pavilion and Gustav Klimt, the Viennese master of Art Nouveau (Jugend) in the Austrian pavilion. The retrospectives of André Masson and Antoine Pevsner in the French pavilion and of Mark Tobey in the American pavilion are also noteworthy. These are exhibitions of already established artists from which the more serious critics were inclined to choose the first prizes: for painting, Mark Tobey; for sculpture, Antoine Pevsner; for the graphic arts, S. William Hayter. But to the surprise and even the perplexity of many, the first prizes went to the Italians Osvaldo Licini for painting and Umberto Mastroianni for sculpture, with the Brazilian Fayga Ostrower (born in Poland) and the Italian Luigi Spacal for the graphic arts, Tobey obtaining the second prize for painting and the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida the second prize for sculpture. Hayter, the greatest living technician in the realm of the graphic arts, had to content himself with a prize assigned to him by the Commission for Liturgical Art (was that not a great surprise in itself?), through which assignment prior to the judging by the jury, he was eliminated from the running for the main prize. The most vital sculpture of this year’s Biennale was that of Armitage who received the prize donated for a sculptor under 45 years of age by the American David E. Bright Foundation. A similar prize for a painter under 45 by the same Foundation was adjudicated to the Spaniard Tàpies. There were many more minor prizes but they cannot be enumerated here. In future it will not be the prizes which count but the quality of the work only, unless the whole voting system is changed which might ensure that the highest prizes and the highest quality become identical.

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The triumphantly announced great number of participating nations had the unfortunate consequence that through the equal voting rights given to countries which have never taken an active, much less a creative, part in the modern movement or are even rejecting it altogether (the ussr and some of its Satellites), the true artistic values are overlooked or by-passed as a result of political or other considerations. The roles in this strange game assigned to Ceylon, Colombia, Iran, India, the Argentine, the United Arab Republic, Rumania and what not, have proved fatal. Even the Italians must feel embarrassed. How can anyone, from now on, consider the prizes decided upon at a Biennale as a matter of significance? This, one feels, was the greatest surprise offered by this year’s Biennale – the question of artistic prestige.

16 August, 1958 Exhibition review, XXIX Venice Biennale, by Ranjit Fernando

A closer look at the Biennale The Biennale of Venice professes to be an International art event. An art critic who writes about the Biennale can therefore be expected to discuss, as fairly and as objectively as possible, such diverse expressions of living art as he must inevitably encounter. However, Dr. J. P. Hodin, in the last issue of Art News & Review, dismisses the work from most participating countries as ‘less interesting,’ but if he will only tell us why this is so, or go some way towards making his attitude clear, then perhaps those serious artists who live and work throughout the greater part of the world might begin to see the light. This year, the number of participating nations rose to thirty-six, and the organisers of the Biennale seem pleased, but their air of triumph is not shared by Dr. Hodin who feels that those countries which do not wholeheartedly embrace the modern movement should not be given any voice in the distribution of prizes. He may even think, although he does not say so, that they should not be allowed to exhibit at all. While Dr. Hodin does not indicate what precisely he means by ‘the modern movement,’ as a commentator on the Biennale he should know that this institution does not set out, officially at any rate, to act as a show place for any particular movement; it is rather a sort of World Fair for contemporary painting and sculpture. If by adherence to the modern movement Dr. Hodin is perhaps referring to painting which is done in the spirit of the Twentieth Century, as this may apply to vastly different places, then I can assure him that such painting is to be found in countries as far apart, and as far away from Europe, as India and Venezuela. Such painting, often of a high order, is also found in Japan, Yugoslavia, Ceylon and, if Dr. Hodin had looked carefully enough, even in Poland. If, however, he is demanding loyalty to the modern European movement, then Dr. Hodin does not see

above William Scott, Nude: Red Background, 1957, oil on canvas, 168 × 101 cm. © Estate of William Scott, 2019

that non-European artists who have regarded Matisse with respect, and even with enthusiasm, may wish to actively disassociate themselves from Jackson Pollock, on the one hand, and Dubuffet on the other, artists for whom Dr. Hodin appears to have little admiration. As for the “will to a new figuration,” this has never been the monopoly of the West, and the search for a new humanistic art has been more actively pursued elsewhere. Finally, Dr. Hodin alleges that the prizes have been awarded to the wrong artists, and he suggests that a section of the International Jury was motivated by political considerations, nor does he hesitate to name those so inclined. He mentions Ceylon,

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Colombia, Iran, Argentina, the United Arab Republic, Rumania and ‘what not’ (presumably meaning Russia, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia!) as being the cause of all the rot. This is all very well, but if he was better informed, Dr. Hodin would be aware that some of these countries, such as India and Colombia, were simply not represented on the Jury. This, while reducing the number of culprits, unfortunately places a greater share of the blame at my own door. I am, therefore, bound to defend myself!* To begin with, it would help us all enormously if Dr. Hodin could give any obvious reason why, for instance, five Jurors apparently addicted to Socialist Realism should prefer Licini to Tobey or Mastroianni to Pevsner. In order to make my own position clear, I don’t mind telling Dr. Hodin that contrary to what he believes, I, personally, voted for Pevsner, but I would not under any circumstances vote for either Tobey or Licini. I agree with Dr. Hodin that Hayter should have got the Graphic prize, but he was excluded at the suggestion of a Juror whose loyalty to the modern European movement is beyond question, and he does not come from any of the countries which Dr. Hodin specifically mentions. If he seriously wishes to analyse the causes that led to the failure of the Jury, Dr. Hodin must examine its activities more closely, and, if he really wishes to get at the truth, he must look a little nearer home! I am afraid the International Jury of the Biennale is controlled and dominated by the votes of over twenty representatives from those very countries which Dr. Hodin conspiciously fails to mention, and the prizes are rapidly becoming more the results of effective lobbying than the rewards for artistic merit. Thus the award, in 1956, to Chadwick of the grand prize for sculpture could possibly be regarded more as a victory for the British Council than for ‘true artistic values.’ Furthermore, the preference of Villon to Guttuso proved the obvious inadequacy of the Communist votes, even when allied to those of a small Western bloc, when the dominant Western forces were overwhelmingly in favour of Villon. The fact that Chi Pai Shih of China was barely considered for the same prize prompts one to wonder if ‘true artistic values’ are ever finally considered when questions of racial, national and political prestige are at stake; nor can Communists and a few others be regarded as the worst offenders at the Biennale. Indeed, it would not be difficult to convince any reasonable person that, although they may unwittingly help to push home a secretly backed Western outsider, they cannot possibly call the tune at Venice. * Ranjit Fernando, Ceylonese painter, was a member of the International Jury of the Biennale in 1956, and again in 1958.

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something to worship 81

May You Live in Interesting Times International Exhibition, Venice Biennale 11 May – 24 November That Ralph Rugoff has taken for his title a Chinese curse fabricated by Western scholars to reinforce a caricature of the East might be interpreted as a warning: don’t trust everything you read; beware binary narratives; remember that identity is a cultural construct. To illustrate the point, he has produced the ‘same’ exhibition twice, with twin displays at the Arsenale (‘Proposition A’) and in the Giardini (‘Proposition B’) showing different works by the same 79 living artists. The use of the equivocal ‘proposition’ (as opposed to, say, ‘concept’ or even ‘exhibition’) implies an experiment in using the same sources to construct divergent narratives. So while ‘Proposition A’ opens with Antoine Catala’s soothing grid of pastel-coloured platitudes It’s Over, visitors to the Arsenale are greeted by George Condo’s vast and violent Double Elvis (both works 2019). The hope seems to be that these antagonisms will disrupt fixed ways of thinking, and that new ideas might emerge from the contest. ‘Proposition B’ seems primed to represent the dark side: the aggression of Condo’s mirrored portrait of two gigantic bottleclutching bums is exaggerated by the unpainted plywood walls on which it hangs, lending the artworld’s most prestigious showcase the impression of having been knocked together from packing crates. Yet, in the first of many jarring juxtapositions, this brutish painting is shown beside the work of Zanele Muholi and Soham Gupta, whose documentary photographs of marginalised individuals in, respectively, South Africa and India speak to an altogether more empathic vision of art as instrument of social justice. A discombobulating opening is completed by Christian Marclay’s crash-bang-wallop video installation, which tiles 48 War Movies (2019) into a concentric rectangular mise-en-abyme soundtracked by the racket of overlaid screams and explosions. These discordant arrangements don’t necessarily pay off. As Marclay’s spectacle mistakes incoherence for polyphony, so nuance is often

drowned out by contributions that seem to play with horror for the cheap satisfaction of rubbernecking passersby (most notably in Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s schlocky contributions to both venues, including a giant robotic arm that frantically mops up a spreading pool of viscous red liquid). Yet the strongest works in this

startlingly uneven exhibition use dissonance to their advantage. Montaging YouTube posts, music videos and cctv footage, Arthur Jafa’s Golden Lion-winning 50-minute video mix tells a subaltern history of white identity. By cutting rapidly between its source materials, The White Album (2018) collapses the viewer’s kneejerk

Zanele Muholi, Bona, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2015, silver gelatin print, 80 × 50 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York

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responses to different stimuli – white people passionately denouncing white supremacism, concealing automatic weapons on their person, being beaten to the ground by young men of colour, failing to recognise their own privilege – into an emotional experience that is both coherent and complex. Which is to say humane. The work may not be new – a large proportion of the works exhibited here, and most notably those hailing from China and Africa, will be familiar to anyone who has recently passed through the world’s major commercial galleries and institutions – but Jafa is also one of the few artists effectively to exploit the invitation to work across two spaces. A series of monumental sculptures in the Arsenale simultaneously alludes, by draping vast automotive parts in metal chains, to the decline of Midwestern industry, the historical abuse of shackled black bodies and the mass incarceration of the black men who might once have been employed by General Motors or us Steel. It’s a reminder that the ‘managed decline’ of the industrial heartlands had consequences for demographics beyond the white working class whose sense of abandonment is so often cited in accounts of the rise of Trump, and in combination with The White Album (on show in the Giardini), it might cause the viewer to question why that reading has become such a commonplace on both sides of the aisle. These counternarratives – also given a platform in Kahlil Joseph’s proposal for a television channel, blknws (2019) – catalyse the kind of independent and intersectional thinking that one imagines Rugoff was hoping to encourage. This reluctance to tie up its many loose ends is at once a strength and weakness of the exhibition, and to introduce so many different ideas, but follow up so few, will frustrate those who prefer an exhibition to develop a treatise rather than unleash cacophony. The abrupt shifts of register are too often disadvantageous to individual works, and so the paintings of Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Henry Taylor in the Arsenale, for instance, are unfairly diminished

above Kahlil Joseph, blknws, 2019, two-channel video installation, colour, sound. Photo: Italo Rondinella. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

top Christian Marclay, 48 War Movies, 2019, single-channel video installation, colour, stereo sound. Photo: Italo Rondinella. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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Anicka Yi, Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble), 2019, algae, acrylic, leds, animatronic moths, water, pumps. Photo: Italo Rondinella. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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by the makeshift exhibition design and the unrelenting visual noise. Anicka Yi and Ian Cheng’s compelling experiments in alternative intelligence and systems thinking, meanwhile, seem out of step with the prevailing tendency towards disparity and fragmentation. But that Rugoff has created an environment which is rarely conducive to the disinterested aesthetic contemplation of a work of art strikes me as the point: the constant interruptions to the visitor’s trains of thought are surely intended to be disruptive of any single interpretation of what the exhibition – and by extension what the art of today – should mean. So the vaunted autonomy of high-modernist form seems everywhere to have been corrupted, from Lee Bul’s latticed metal transmission tower to Carol Bove’s twisting and crumpling of the implacable forms and immaculate materials of American minimalism. The title of Lee’s work (Aubade v, 2019) shares a sense of disillusion with Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name, specifically its celebrated characterisation of organised religion as ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die’, a couplet that might also serve to critique the kind of art that pretends to stand entirely outside of its time and place. Most powerfully, the status of Teresa Margolles’s triptych of standing glass sheets as forms abstracted from life but indepen-

dent of it (one definition of art) is psychologically undercut by the notices for missing women in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez with which they are stickered, and physically threatened by the subterranean mechanical rumble that rattles the panes against their frames. By attending carefully to the effect of her installation on the senses, Margolles generates a physical discomfort that feels appropriate to such freighted objects. Her achievement in doing so is thrown into sharp relief by Christoph Büchel’s installation of a holed boat in which hundreds died when attempting to reach Europe from Libya. Not part of Rugoff’s main exhibition, the work is crass not because it upsets liberal pieties but because it reinforces them. Unobtrusively installed beside a dockside café and provided with no supporting information, it appears designed to lure unsuspecting passersby into taking selfies beside it so that those who got the artworld memo could chastise those who didn’t. The impression of the hermetic seal separating art from the world having been broken, and the contents spoiled, is much more deftly staged in Ed Atkins’s Old Food (2017) in the Arsenale. It features a series of darkly funny digital animations that, like Alex Da Corte’s equally dreamlike if cheerier video installation Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), takes a perverse

delight in art’s freedom from the responsibility of redemptive meaning. This liberating disenchantment – which shouldn’t be mistaken for disengagement – also shines through Nicole Eisenman’s Achilles Heel (2014), which will chime with anyone suspicious of the innate grandiosity of the biennale format or statements like Büchel’s. A painting reminiscent of Philip Guston’s late work depicts a man sitting at a dimly lit bar poking at a malleable lump of wax or clay, putting forward a vision of what it means to make art far removed from the glamorous vapidity and righteous proselytising that mark the two ends of the artworld’s wide spectrum of beliefs and attitudes. Another of those in-between spaces is the subject of Hito Steyerl’s This is the Future (2019). A playful reminder of the limits to human and artificial intelligence, the multiscreen installation marries images of budding flowers generated by an artificial neural network to a narrative that warns against presuming to predict the future, however sophisticated the algorithm, comprehensive the data set or objective the intellectual framework. As the interface between past and future, the present joins what we know to what we don’t. Which is as good a definition of the purpose of art as I found amidst this alternately entertaining and infuriating mess of an exhibition. Ben Eastham

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, And We Begin To Let Go, 2013, mixed media, 213 × 267 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London & Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London & Hong Kong

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Arahmaiani The Past Has Not Passed Museum macan, Jakarta 17 November – 10 March Given the extent of this survey show (which boasts more than 70 works) and the fact that it contains all manner of objects, among them paintings, drawings, installations and documentary videos featuring pharmaceutical products, crockery, flags, machine guns, condoms, coke bottles and soft furnishings (to list just a few), you might be surprised to learn that the creation of discrete art objects is far from central (and often entirely irrelevant) to Arahmaiani’s output. For example, one of the Indonesian artist’s best-known performances, Breaking Words (2004–), appears at macan as a pair of white plates sitting atop a dressed table. On each is written a single word: ‘keadilan’ (justice) on one; ‘mother’ on the other. Behind the table is a wall scarred by dinks and dents of the type with which most visitors to white-cube gallery spaces would be unfamiliar. At its base is a rubble of broken crockery.

The work begins as a performance in which members of the public are invited to write words that are important to them on the plates. Once this is done, the artist appears to read the words and then toss the plates at the walls like so many Frisbees. Both public and personal, in essence it’s a game of almost simultaneous assertion and denial of the power of language (which plays a role in many of the artist’s works, among them The Flag Project, 2006–10). The work appears cathartic and simple, the kind of thing a therapist might recommend, and indeed there is an element of the therapeutic to Arahmaiani’s work in general. If all that seems like a heavy burden of significance to lump on a pile of smashed plates (although you could say that that’s what art does, more or less successfully, in general), it’s worth noting that when Arahmaiani performed the same work back in 2006 as part of the Satu

Kali performance symposium in Kuala Lumpur, the festival was shut down by the police and the artist forced to flee the country following claims by an audience member that she had offended Islam, having smashed a plate with the word ‘Allah’ written on it. There’s a sense in which Arahmaiani’s art exists in the context of the ripples it creates, as much as it does in the objects or performances she makes: something to which this exhibition alludes via a minidisplay of the extensive archive of catalogues, press clippings, photographs and video recordings of the artist’s output. And yet that additional aura, of what the artwork does when it’s embedded in society, rather than preserved in a museum, is generally (and perhaps necessarily) absent in this show. Do not Prevent the Fertility of the Mind (1997/2014/2018), for example, is a large wall of illuminated sanitary towels with two photographs of the

Do Not Prevent the Fertility of the Mind, 1997/2014/2018, mixed-media installation, 274 × 366 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and Museum macan, Jakarta

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artist dressed as a nurse and holding a giant, sicklelike iud contraceptive device in one hand and a pair of surgical scissors in the other (recreating a pose from earlier iterations of the work). In front of it a chemistry flask filled with blood sits atop a white stool covered in what looks like a bridal veil. While this might be a more direct statement of the artist’s feminist ideals, it’s ironic that the more brutal action of smashing plates feels, by comparison, a subtler and more nuanced message of intent. Similarly, a series of paintings from 2008 titled Beyond Good and Evil, in which cartoon characters such as Tom & Jerry, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie act out scenes of American imperialism, fails to truly go beyond the Punch and Judy-like scenarios of the material that has been appropriated. That’s not to say that the artist is not capable of creating standalone objects or installations independent of her performances, as the inclusion here of her best-known work internationally demonstrates. 11 June 2002 (2003) was first shown at the 50th Venice Biennale. The installation comprises a bedroom, decorated in red and white and looking like it was

extracted from an incredibly cutesy Japanese love hotel. The neatly made bedspread, for example, is decorated with hearts; a chair, on which is draped a white bathrobe, appears arranged as if to observe the potential sleeper. Evidence of her presence comes in the form of a pair of discarded tights and underwear. Oddly, there’s a large Coca-Cola machine in the corner. And then you notice that a Koran has been placed neatly on the bedpillow. And a handwritten diary entry and photograph documenting the incident to which the work refers. In the wake of the heightened security following 9/11, the artist was detained overnight by us immigration in Los Angeles during a stopover en route to Canada. During that time a male officer was assigned to supervise her in her hotel room, despite the fact that the artist’s detention revolved around the fact that she is Muslim and that under Islam it is forbidden for unmarried women and men to share a room. Beyond the fact that the work articulates the sense of being identified as something (Muslim) only to have that identity violated, it also speaks to the uncomfortable

relationship between captor and captive on both sides – the photograph pictures Arahmaiani and the immigration official awkwardly standing at airport departures – and, like the artist’s wider body of work, returns global issues to the intimate site of individuals and their bodies. Ultimately, this is an important exhibition that – primarily through the archive materials and their documentation of works such as the installation Nation for Sale (1996), which is also recreated in the exhibition, and Handle Without Care (1996–2017) – leads you to understand why Arahmaiani, through her engagement with issues of gender equality, identity politics, multiculturalism, consumerism, language and religion, has been, since the 1990s, one of the most influential and groundbreaking performance artists from Southeast Asia. Yet it remains the case that her best work in both performance and the creation of objects and installations leaves you wishing you had been there, whether as a witness to a performance or a fly on the wall of a hotel bedroom. Mark Rappolt

11 June 2002, 2003, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Museum macan, Jakarta

Summer 2019

Lavanya Mani Signs Taken for Wonders Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai 14 March – 30 April Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness, the narrator remarks in John Betjeman’s ode to talced decease and decay in a West Midlands nursing home, ‘Death in Leamington’ (1932). What a far cry from chintz’s origins in the Indian decorative technique of kalamkari. That exhaustive process, which can require more than 20 steps, involves soaking cotton in cow dung and buffalo milk, outlining an image using fermented jaggery, filling it in with natural dyes and washing it like you’re auditioning to play Lady Macbeth. Lavanya Mani adapts this traditionally male practice, coupling it with other craft techniques and philosopher Donna Haraway’s vision for the ‘Chthulucene’ – the nonhierarchical, cross-species modes of coexistence that she has posited as an alternative to the Anthropocene – to suture together a cautionary tale of ecological catastrophe. Here the flood has already arrived, in the shape of a circular, wax-resisted piece of fabric pooling at the centre of the gallery. An A-frame tent is pitched upon it, open at both ends and with elaborate designs on either side of the fabric shelter: on one, animals clamber up a tree to escape rising waters, on the other we see sky and sea teeming with avian and marine life.

Its title, The Ark: Animals of the world complain to the Raven (after Miskin) (all works 2018–19), gestures to the myriad mythological, historical and theoretical references present in this show, from the biblical flood to the sixteenth-century Mughal court painter Miskin, who was known for his depictions of animals. Looping in one corner of the multiroom gallery is a video depicting indigo’s reactions with five other natural dyes – extracted from dates, turnips, sweet potato, madder, henna – each in its own beaker. Like India’s own rather bloody colonial history, in which indigo played a crucial role, the admixed dyes take a long time to sediment and settle. The slow accretion results in six blurrily dystopian landscapes that evoke other modes of destruction. The acid-green of nuclear devastation, perhaps, or the dim red tide of a dying sun. Elsewhere in the exhibition, across eight or so largescale works of stretched cotton fabric variously dyed, appliquéd and embroidered, insects and fungi seem to plot their own strategies of world domination – feeding on decay to recolonise the ground in Improbable Planet, or hovering ominously over a tentative new shoot in Parasite. Or is it repair and renewal?

No Man’s Land, 2018–19, natural dyes on cotton fabric, 183 × 305 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

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The show’s palette is at once rich and muted in its natural tones, all saffrons, ochres, olives and burgundies. A generalised jaundicing contributes to the overall sense of decay. Despite the warm palette, the effect is seductively sci-fi, invoking nothing so much as the Gaian faction of the videogame Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999). Whatever the narrative poison, our impending terracide haunts this show. But it is tempered by scenes of multispecies cooperation and the generalised resilience of nonhuman life in the large, wall-hung fabric paintings that round out the show. In Herbarium 1 (From the Medicine Mountain) a volcano is blowing, but inside its rocky walls is a lush jungle of tropical birds, white blooms and assorted ferns. In the triptych No Man’s Land, the central panel shows clouds breathing fire onto cacti clinging to a scrubby wasteland, while hybridised alien forms thrive underwater in the side panels. Another triptych, Auguries (From The Conference of the Birds), similarly depicts a central panel that is aflame while a veritable conference of birds hover and preen on the sides. There are no humans anywhere in sight. History and climate change suggest that this is maybe for the best. Rahel Aima

Improbable Planet, 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;19, natural dyes and applique on cotton fabric, 183 Ă&#x2014; 183 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai

Summer 2019

The National 2019: New Australian Art Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 29 March – 23 June/21 July (dates vary by venue) It is a longstanding critique of Australia’s museums that they have not done enough to advance local and Indigenous artists. So as the wider Western artworld reevaluates the representation of minority histories, three of Sydney’s largest institutions devised The National in an attempt to redress the balance. Falling on the off years of the Biennale of Sydney, the exhibition partnership attempts both to stabilise Sydney’s position as Australia’s cultural capital and deliver a more encompassing national art history: one that prioritises, following the marketing copy, the buzzwords of ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘collaboration’. With this second edition of the biennial project, a new set of curators – Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia; Daniel Mudie Cunningham at Carriageworks; and Isobel Parker Philip at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – have learned from the mistakes of the first, which did not do enough to accommodate those perspectives. The result is an eclectic selection that complicates Australian concepts of the nation and its relationship to history. The Museum of Contemporary Art takes the Aboriginal Australian struggle for equality and reminds the viewer that these injustices are not settled in history but implicate wider contemporary society. Painting on disused canvas mailbags, Kunmanara (Mumu Mike) Williams’s Kamantaku Tjukurpa wiya (2018) memorialises the artist’s ancestors, murdered during the frontier wars (1788–1934). Combining Aboriginal motifs with maps of the land and phrases from the Pitjantjatjara language, the work draws on the colonial practice of posting poisoned rations to remote Aboriginal communities. The large wallhanging, made up of sewn-together mailbags, is a reminder that the very

mapping of modern Australia is a continuation of the violence in itself. Hannah Brontë’s video installation Heala (2018) is a glowing orange chamber. Onto a disc of sand on the floor is projected a video featuring six minutes of commanding rap, speech and singing by a multigenerational chorus of women of colour. Addressing the experiences of Aboriginal women, it is a cathartic meditation on what is lost and gained in the aftermath of trauma, both individual and communal. Eugenia Lim’s The Australian Ugliness (2019), meanwhile, is housed in a canary-yellow ‘fishbowl’ structure – a reimagining of Anglo-Australian architect Robin Boyd’s last building project, Neptune’s Fishbowl, completed in 1970 in South Yarra. The three-channel video follows the artist – here named ‘The Ambassador’ – through culturally and historically significant sites across Australia. The work suggests that, while she is permitted to enter these public and private spaces, she is never invited to stay; that Australian national identity has been built on exclusion. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mira Gojak’s Exhaled Weight (2019) comprises a series of curious bulbous steel sculptures, wrapped with bundles of sky-blue yarn. Extended into a straight vertical line, the length of yarn would stretch from ground level to the top of the stratosphere, where sky bleeds into space. It’s one glorious example of this section of the exhibition’s focus on the simultaneously mundane and transcendental properties of materials. Elsewhere in the building, a number of different interventions collude with the building’s architecture. Andrew Hazelwinkel’s Part 1, The Emissaries: Keepers of Our Stories from The Ongoing Remains (3 Parts) (2019) comprises replications of Italian politician Niccolò da Uzzano’s 1431 death mask. Situated in three different spaces – each responding to the galleries of colonial

facing page, top Hannah Brontë, Heala (detail), 2018, mixed-media installation with single-channel digital video (colour, 5 min 58 sec), dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist

history painting – Hazelwinkel’s sculptures of an opponent to the Medici family might allude to the relationship between art and power. Rushdi Anwar’s Irhal (Expel), Hope and the Sorrow of Displacement (2013–) gives form to his own experiences of exile as part of the Kurdish diaspora. For this ‘ongoing’ sculpture, chairs are burnt to a crisp and then stacked to a steep, tottering height. These ruined symbols of support and domesticity reflect on those forced to flee their homes, but the organisation into a structure – however precarious – seems to offer the possibility of hope. Spotlighted in the gloom of Carriageworks is Eric Bridgeman’s monumental painting and textile work Sikiram | Büng | Scrum (2019). Blending motifs from Papua New Guinean shields from the Wahgi Valley with those taken from rugby jerseys, a reference to the region’s love of rugby league, Bridgeman’s ode to his Melanesian upbringing asks how traditional practices adapt to a changing world. The influence of social media on that process is a feature of the Carriageworks exhibition, at the entrance to which is Nat Thomas’s Postcard from the Edge (2019). The visitor is invited to lie down on (and cling to the edge of) a platform in front of a backdrop that creates, to a camera placed at ground level, the cinematic illusion that one is dangling from the edge of a building. All very Instagram-friendly, but it reads like a comment on the reliance of not only social media, but also exhibition-making, on fabricated drama. By using this show as a platform to promote alternative art histories, and resisting the temptation to impose a grandiose prospectus upon it, the curators largely avoid that trap. Instead they put forward a challenge to past and present thinking about Australian art, which alone is worth celebrating. Micheal Do

facing page, bottom Eugenia Lim, The Australian Ugliness, 2019, three-channel video installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Zan Wimberley. © the artist/Copyright Agency

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Summer 2019

Jack Whitten Jack’s Jacks Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 29 March – 1 September This first retrospective of Jack Whitten’s work at a European institution is a bittersweet affair. It was conceived in collaboration with the Alabama-born artist, who appears in a studioshot video at the outset of the show; but Whitten, who left us in January 2018 at the age of seventyeight, did not live to attend its opening. That said, the show is a celebration rather than an elegy, and of more than one person. Whitten, whose early career was marked both by the civil rights struggles and his move to New York in 1960 to attend Cooper Union and master and rewrite the languages of Abstract Expressionism, had a uniquely selfless approach to painting. From the outset of this substantial exhibit, it’s made clear that his creativity related to feelings of gratitude for the diversity of artists and cultural and political figures whom he admired, and he adopted feeling-tones and aesthetics and merged them with his own. As a result, the paintings in Jack’s Jacks are both stylistically diverse and synthetic in manners that don’t, finally, recall anyone else’s work, while giving shout-outs at every turn. The earliest work here, though, is focused on American discrimination, understandably given the temper of the era when it was made: Head iv Lynching (1964), painted while Whitten was in his mid-twenties, is a complicated, grey,

approximately head-shaped smudge on black, with what could be a rope trailing from its upper edge; it’s abstraction as nightmare. Four years later, King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s Dream) (1968), painted in the year King was assassinated, is a vivacious, empurpled mix of sketchy figuration and swooping abstraction that seems to compound King’s optimism with febrile violence. Pointedly placed near it in the show’s opening phase, the atypical (for this exhibition) Red, Black, Green (1979–80) is a geometric abstraction – red and green squares within a larger, layered but approximately black one in rhythmically scraped paint, concentric white circles on it suggesting a rifle sight – that takes the colours of the panAfrican flag and mingles them with threat in the language of Western modernism. To an extent, though, these works are scenesetting for the thrust of the show, which moves in elevating fashion through a bespoke canon of inspirations from all quarters: it suggests, too, that greatness is a chain, a long one. Whitten makes a faintly Richteresque, smeary, eveningsky abstraction out of the luscious Delacroix’s Palette (1974). He delivers a scintillating, percussive trio of pulsing grids of multicoloured squares on canvas in Norman Lewis Triptych i (1985), paying homage to the African-American painter and scholar six years after his death,

Apps for Obama, 2011, acrylic on hollow core door, 213 × 231 cm. Photo: John Berens. © the artist’s estate. Courtesy the artist’s estate and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

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and also announcing the tessellated design that would become a hallmark of his nevertheless varied aesthetic roaming in the decades to come. In Bill’s Way, For Bill de Kooning (1990), the delicate pastel pinks and blues of de Kooning’s late canvases refract through gridded squares from what look like loose, flowing watercolour paintings, in a way that echoes the older painter’s liquefied composing but is not beholden to it: Whitten tangents off somewhere new, differently energised. If the painting probably couldn’t exist without de Kooning, it’s not in his shadow either. It goes on like that, through respects paid not only to other artists (Arshile Gorky, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly) but also musicians (Prince, John Coltrane), sportsmen (Joe DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali) and in the ersatz giant iPad screen Apps for Obama (2011) – a big, swimmingpool blue mosaic dotted with soft-edged squares – to the us’s first black president. The latter painting doesn’t feel illustrational in any way; all the choices seem subjective, personal, even oblique. Seeing all these names risks, superficially, a rebound effect, but in the end it’s a double bluff. Humility is strength, Jack’s Jacks asserts; it takes a strong person to admit that they need others. Here, from beyond the veil, Whitten admits it one more time. Martin Herbert

Mike Nelson projektör (Gürün Han) Protocinema, Istanbul 2 May – 1 June The seventh floor of Gürün Han, the modernist commercial building that hosts Mike Nelson’s Kafkaesque installation, is a warren of offices and storerooms connected by dimly lit corridors. The majority of these spaces are vacant, the wholesalers they once housed having suffered from the decline of the textile industry for which Istanbul was once famous. But a few remain in use, and through an open door I spy a young man in overalls stacking vacuumpacked shirts into neat piles on the floor. Other rooms suggest a more ominous presence: several whitewashed shopfronts are backlit by a sinister red glow, while a dozen or so – bare floorboards flecked with paint, obsolete calendars tacked to walls watched over by fading portraits of Atatürk – have been converted into makeshift screening rooms, showing short videos shot from the backseats of local taxis. Projected at different sizes onto walls or played through monitors, they are variations on the same theme: the back of the driver’s head, the meter ticking through, the unspooling streets of Istanbul. These enigmatic interventions into the architecture are neither explained nor signposted, so I push at locked doors, peer into abandoned salerooms and meander around the labyrinthine arcades in search of… well, I guess I don’t know what. The experience is a little like waking up in a sci-fi film noir and trying to figure out the

plot, or of wandering round the abandoned headquarters of some vast and unresponsive bureaucracy in search of an unspecified appointment. The numerous videos, and the apparently aimless journeys they document, are displayed in curious formats: turned anticlockwise through 90 degrees, projected onto convex mirrors that bounce the distended images back onto the wall, passed through tinted filters. But to what purpose? Filmed by the artist over several visits to Istanbul, these banal chronicles of a changing city serve no obvious narrative, however much their arrangement into patterns implies – like newspaper clippings on a conspiracist’s wall – some more arcane organising principle. If there are clues hidden amidst the clutter, they are oblique. One narrow room, in which a number of 14-inch television monitors are arranged on shelves stacked with archaic audiovisual equipment, resembles a projectionist’s workshop or surveillance centre. In a corner office bathed in red light, an empty chair stands amidst discarded mirrors and cluttered wooden beams. These red lights and dark rooms, the halls of mirrors and looping videos, might suggest a play on the stitching together of light and time by which cinema generates narrative. The feeling that some authoritarian, unaccountable and artificial intelligence is directing the complex might even be a nod to Jean-Luc

Godard’s dystopian Alphaville (1965), namechecked in the exhibition literature. But, equally, it might not. Everything is called into question: I spent several minutes wondering whether a cluttered room lit by blue bulbs was part of the exhibition or a hastily abandoned workspace. Which is, ultimately, the point. Nelson’s interventions into this functioning building work by unsettling the boundaries separating fictional construct from historical record. My abiding impression was of a protagonist having recently fled the scene, leaving behind (amidst the ‘meaningless’ detritus) a set of ‘meaningful’ clues from which it might be possible to patch together an incomplete version of what happened. I won’t be the only person to have recently been frustrated by artists acting under the impression that disorientating the viewer is an end in itself; equally, I resent any work of art that assumes it is the responsibility of the visitor to deduce whatever easily articulated concept or conclusion the artist has chosen for no clear reason to withhold. But Nelson’s existentialist detective fiction stayed with me for days because it neither revels in obscurity nor offers up a reassuring resolution: the promise of revelation is always held out, while remaining just beyond reach. Ben Eastham

projektör (Gürün Han), 2019, commissioned and presented by Protocinema, Istanbul, with support from the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds & Hertfordshire; Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai; and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

Summer 2019

Liliane Lijn she Rodeo, London 2–29 May Liliane Lijn is best known for largescale kinetic works – ranging from her ‘Poem Machines’, spinning cylindrical sculptures on which are written poetic fragments, to a series of public lightworks – made over a five-decade career. Her latest exhibition, however, presents not sculpture but 45 oil pastels and drawings on paper. These compositions, rich in palette, the marks gestural, swirling and groovy, date back to the 1980s or early 1990s and show a continuing pursuit of the American artist’s longstanding interests in cosmology and the cosmic, mythology and science. These were honed through early associations with both French Surrealism (from which she adopted a penchant for exploring the unconscious mind) and the Beat generation (her ‘Poem Machines’, shown in New York in 1962, won her William Burroughs as a fan). The two-dimensional work on show here also retains a sense of movement: there is a frenzied feel to the scratchy oil-pastel markings of Firelight (1992), an explosion of red, orange and yellow paint that becomes denser as it

ascends the sheet of paper. In Dance (1984) an amorphous blob drawn in orange and grey oil-pastel spreads across the sheet of the paper as a series of modular squiggles on a purple background. A spore of blue markings in the centre of the blob anchors this odd composition. More focused are the works that acted as studies for installations. Woman of War was an ambitious 1986 sculptural work featuring a female figure. This steel and aluminium giantess also boasted flashing leds and lasers controlled by computer, and ‘sang’ (via a recording of Lijn’s voice) a song proclaiming the creature, seemingly a goddess of sorts, to be “an image of woman, an image of war”. Lijn has stated in interviews that around this time she sought to ‘elaborate a new image of the feminine’ through an exploration of both robotics and protofeminist mythology, and indeed this show takes a 1988 poem by the artist, ‘Bride’s Song’, printed as a stand-in for a press release, as its organising device. ‘Whirling wind woman’ goes one line; ‘I am the bride / Fragrant moon flower’, it continues.

In the sketches that preceded the sculpture, as well as paintings made after its realisation, we see Lijn experimenting with the form of her new woman, taking inspiration from both nature (the wasp or mothlike head of the figures in Woman of War and Woman of War with Koans, both 1987) and the built environment (the pylonlike figure in the ink and watercolour Study for Woman of War v, 1986). These visual experiments in hybrid womanhood, weighted in mystic philosophy and a hippy form of feminism, continue in works such as Her Monstrous Head (1989–94), Dark Angel (1991) and Lady of Light (1991), semiabstract figures rendered in startling colours. Lijn’s works of this period tapped into cybernetics and the cyborgian possibilities of burgeoning technology. Something was in the air: Donna Haraway published ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in 1984, a rejection of the boundaries between humans, nonhuman animals and machine. Over three decades later, these issues have become ever more urgent, and the questions Lijn was asking through these radical works even more pertinent. Oliver Basciano

Study for Woman of War, 1986, gouache on paper, 66 × 38 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Piraeus

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Denzil Forrester A Survey Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 25 April – 29 May In his 2013 essay ‘Dub: Red Hot vs Ice Cold’, Richard Skinner describes the emergence of dub music during the 1970s as the encounter of two streams: the warm ‘riddims’ of Jamaican reggae with the icier beats of European and North American metropolises. I was reminded of this confluence by looking at the 15 paintings in Denzil Forrester’s first exhibition at Stephen Friedman, which focuses on his depiction of the London dub and reggae scene of the 80s and 90s. Himself the product of two cultures – having emigrated from Grenada to London with his parents at the age of ten – Forrester was drawn to Hackney’s nightclubs (Four Aces and Phebes, among others) as an art student, sketching the djs and mcs performing at the makeshift, totemic sound systems and the crowds as they bounced to the rhythm of the bass and swayed back and forth to the flicker of the strobe lights, or just hung around playing dominoes. His resulting canvases, shown across two spaces and a temporary room in the neighbouring, newly built gallery complex, are infused with the energy of

a scene experienced and recorded first-hand by Forrester (‘What I used to do was draw to the length of a record – about 3 or 4 minutes… I’d do about 30 or 40 drawings a night’), while serving as a lens onto an important yet little documented subculture. Forrester’s impressionistic use of colours, like Skinner’s dub analogy, oscillates between hot and cold. In the diptych Wolf Singer (1984), the largest painting on view, the green and blue overtones of the background and the dancing musician caught mid-pose (as well as the titular wolf at his feet) are brought into life by a swirl of red and purple defining the people surrounding him: they are dancing or sitting, one holding a book open on his lap. Also structured around a central figure, the blue monochrome Blue Jay (1987) uses a similar composition to more claustrophobic effect by collapsing the perspective. Pictured from behind, it first appears as though Jay is dancing, trancelike, in the midst of a crowd; on closer look, the peripheral figures (one sporting a police uniform) don’t seem to be dancing

so much as running towards and threatening him. In which light, Jay’s expressive gestures evoke panic and fear. In the bottom right corner, another open book reads, ‘Buried amongst the dry leaves beneath the forest floor / There to rest in the shade, here lies the Rose’: a reference, we learn from the show’s handout, to the killing of his childhood friend Winston Rose by police in 1981. These paintings record the physical and cultural spaces in which London’s black British community could converge and escape oppression (police raids during the 1990s led to the closure of most of these clubs). At 63, and now surrounded by the quiet of Cornwall, Forrester continues to paint those scenes, as three recent works attest, using some of his old sketches as basis for the compositions. With the distant light of memory, however, the energy of the original images has faded; the compositions are stiffer, the figures silent; a literal and figurative blue hue has replaced the vibrating contrasts. What remains is the impression of what has been lost. Louise Darblay

Summer 2019

Books Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and the Making of British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal Verso, £25 (hardcover) During a brief stint as under-secretary of state for the colonies in 1942, Conservative politician Harold Macmillan went out of his way to characterise Britain’s relationship with its colonies as a ‘partnership’. He would say that; he needed colonial resources to support Britain’s ongoing war against the Axis powers. And some were calling the empire a fascist occupation. By the time he was prime minister (1957–63), with India and Sri Lanka having achieved independence and the decolonisation of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia underway, Macmillan was suggesting that a sense of ‘national consciousness’ was a Western invention taught to colonial subjects and that ‘self-government’ had been the intention of colonial rule all along. Freedom, by extension, is a Western invention; the independence of former colonies a sign of Western success. For University of Cambridgebased academic Priyamvada Gopal, such attitudes are still prevalent in Britain today, in its politics, pedagogy and press. She even finds traces of it in Brexit Britain’s dreams of happy future trade with its former colonies, and within the words of America’s first black president, Barack Obama, during a 2011 address to the British parliament in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings. In it he appeared to suggest

that freedom is at once Anglo-American and capitalist, and that, therefore, to struggle for freedom is to struggle to be more American. As a corrective to that, this book traces instances of colonial insurgency, from the 1857 Indian Mutiny to the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya almost a century later, and the way those actions were mediated, interpreted and discussed within the metropolitan heart of empire. Key to her narrative is an emphasis on the ways in which these discussions were generated in the colonies, taken up by British dissenters, and then used to inform more general debates about social and economic justice, and race and class. Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and its brutal and bloody repression, for example, provides a moment of reflection about relative definitions of freedom: the colonial government insisting that it meant the freedom of former slaves to sell their labour to white planters; the former slaves insisting that it meant being able to own the land they farmed. Meanwhile, the Jamaica Committee, set up to ensure the trial of Edward John Eyre, then governor of Jamaica, for his excesses (hundreds of innocent black people killed alongside most of his nonwhite political opponents), worried that what might happen under martial law in the colonies might

very well happen at home. Such warnings were later repeated by Bombay-born Indian-British Communist Shapurji Saklatvala, who was elected to parliament as the mp for North Battersea in 1922 and later arrested while supporting the 1926 General Strike. He insisted that there was a convergence between anticapitalism and anticolonialism, and that, as Gopal puts it, ‘resistance to empire was in the interests of both the Indian and British working classes’. Through the course of her narrative, Gopal traces a gradual awareness that the empire is run in the interests of capitalism rather than altruism and that a foundational element of any true sense of freedom is that it is achieved, not granted. Along the way her history interweaves the publishing platforms operated by Nancy Cunard and Sylvia Pankhurst, critics of colonialism and its related racisms such as G.W. Gordon and George Padmore, and overseas-based anticolonialists such as the Pan-Islamist Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and theorists of Swaraj such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak to provide a complex history of the rise of dissent and criticism of the imperial project, and the people and labour involved in it. This is an important first step in the telling of a history that has been for too long overlooked. Mark Rappolt

Broken Stars: Sixteen Stories from the New Frontiers of Chinese Science Fiction Edited and translated by Ken Liu Head of Zeus, £18.99 (hardcover)

In 1999 Chinese students sitting their final exams at senior school were asked the following question: ‘What if memory could be transplanted?’ The fact crops up in Regina Kanyu Wang’s ‘Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom’, one of three essays published at the end of this anthology of 16 short stories. That this science-fictional exercise was included in the National Higher Education Entrance Exam demonstrates both the popularity of the genre and the state’s interest in using it to futurecast the consequences of rapid scientific and technological advancement. Edited and mostly translated by Ken Liu, a sci-fi writer in his own right who is credited

with bringing Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (first published as a standalone book in 2008) onto the world stage, the stories in this volume date from 2004 to the present day. It opens with Liu’s Moonlight (2009): over the course of one night, an engineer receives three calls from his future selves, each sending plans to solve environmental crises caused by the butterfly effect of decisions he has made. There are stories like Tang Fei’s Broken Stars (2016, and from which the title of this collection is borrowed) that, you could argue, fall into the fantasy/horror genre – a deranged teenager gains control of the fates of those around her. But the more compelling stories are those that relate to the unpredicted

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impacts of technological inventions, such as Hao Jingfan’s The New Year Train (2017), in which a passenger train is feared lost within the space–time continuum, and Chen Qiufan’s A History of Future Illnesses (2012), which drily narrates the symptoms of prospective illnesses like iPad Syndrome. Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation warned against the excessive use of smart screens by young children and their impact on cognitive development. Here’s hoping Chen’s predictions of a generation of humans characterised by empathy deficit and antisocial behaviour don’t come true. But then again, perhaps that future has already arrived. Fi Churchman

Summer 2019

The Last Leonardo by Ben Lewis William Collins, £20 (hardcover) If art exists to shine a light on the world in which we live, then there is no more illuminating painting than the Salvator Mundi (c. 1500). This has little to do with the image’s supposedly transcendent power – there are good reasons why centuries passed without anyone seriously entertaining the idea that this crumbling wreck was by Leonardo da Vinci – and a lot to do with the more, let’s say, mundane properties of the object. By tracing the painting’s histories as a status symbol, hyperinflationary commodity and diplomatic pawn, art critic Ben Lewis exposes the corruption of the artworld and the socioeconomic power structures to which it is tied. Exhaustively researched and aimed at a wide audience, Lewis’s book intertwines a potted biography of Leonardo, a journalistic investigation into the provenance of the Salvator Mundi and the story of a remarkable hustle. We are introduced to Alexander Parish and Robert Simon, the latter a small-time dealer who was scratching a living by scouring the market for misattributed Old Masters when, in 2005, he took a punt on a grainy photograph in an obscure auction catalogue. Having roped in Parish to help cover the $1,175 for a painting listed as ‘After Leonardo da Vinci’, they gradually came to believe they might have stumbled on the greatest ‘sleeper’ of them all. But then they had to prove it. That the pair would be selective in their use of sources to substantiate their claim is neither surprising nor objectionable, given what they stood to gain and their declared

interests. (I found myself rooting for the unclubbable Simon and the sizeable chip on his shoulder.) Yet Lewis’s exhaustive detective work exposes the vested interests of those independent arbiters who abetted the work’s attribution to the ‘universal master’. These range from the desire of a gifted restorer to work with Leonardo, to the professional aspirations of experts and the National Gallery in London’s need to deliver a blockbuster exhibition by including a ‘rediscovered’ work. These conflicts of interest will no doubt exercise the small circle of art historians who serve as gatekeepers to the canon, but in the wider scheme of things they seem like minor and forgivable infractions. The painting is what it is. You don’t need to be a Leonardist to see that certain passages in this painting are exceptional and others are disastrously degraded or markedly inferior; nor do you need a degree in art history to wonder whether the extensive restoration might on its own complicate the notion of sole authorship. All the bragging by connoisseurs about the education of their ‘eye’ and the unmistakable attributes of greatness are undermined by their inability to agree on whether this is a masterpiece by one of the most important artists of all time or a second-rate copy. So what does it matter whether this was an autographed work by Leonardo, a workshop production to which he added touches, a pastiche by a talented acolyte or even a flight of fancy on the part of the restorer? The answer – leaving aside the wearisome bluster about Leonardo’s mythical genius –

is money. That much becomes clear when Lewis moves out of the worn-leather world of Old Masters historians, dealers and curators into the glitzier and more dangerous circles kept by the international kleptocracy. The final chapters of the book, after the Salvator Mundi’s mind-bending financial value has been (at least temporarily) confirmed, feature a Russian oligarch, a morally bankrupt Swiss businessman and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, with cameos from Donald Trump and a Chinese billionaire who has declared his intention to deliver ‘a message to the West’ by buying up its art. Not to mention police corruption and international money laundering. Lewis does not spare the reader the nauseating details of the painting’s exploitation as cash cow by auction houses, fig leaf over human rights abuses in oil-rich states or instrument of tax evasion for the superrich. Anyone who still holds that art might serve some humbler purpose will feel compelled to throw this book across the room (this is to the credit, to be clear, of its author). My own copy was dented after I learned that the catalogue published to support the auction of Salvator Mundi for $450 million was prefaced with the quote that ‘Beauty will save the world’. I cling to the hope that some aspiring satirist on Christie’s editorial team understood what it means to cite Dostoyevsky in support of a ‘trillionaire’s pissing contest’ and chose to withhold that this phrase is taken from The Idiot. But it seems unlikely. Ben Eastham

A place that exists only in moonlight by Katie Paterson Kerber Verlag, €30 (hardcover) ‘Printed with cosmic dust’, states the inside back cover of Katie Paterson’s artist book. What sounds like a metaphor or conceptual joke might just be, as is often the case with the Glaswegian artist, a statement of fact. For turning seemingly impossible ideas into disarmingly simple objects is a specialty of Paterson’s, who has spent the last decade making her daydreams come true through collaboration with various scientists. This pocket-size book serves as an anthology of these ideas presented in haiku format. If familiar with Paterson’s oeuvre it becomes something of a game to try and

identify the realised projects from the as-yet. She really did make ‘a light bulb / recreating / the moon’s halo’ (2008) for example. ‘A necklace / of carved fossils / threaded era by era’ (2013); ‘a candle scented / by a journey / through space’ (2015); ‘a forest / of unread books / growing for a century’ (2014–2114) also all came (or are coming) to fruition. It turns out – with a little research online – anyone can buy moon dust, meteor fragments and asteroid remnants, yet, like all the ideas contained here, the book’s poetic appeal lies in the abstract potentiality of the idea itself.

ArtReview Asia

In that sense, this book feels like a tribute to artistic imagination and ideas left unrealised, while acknowledging – at the risk of sounding like a romantic – the power of words when unbounded by physical materialisation. As you reach the end of the book, the poems become increasingly ungraspable, deliciously metaphysical, as if the artist were slowly losing sight of ever needing to realise objects: ‘Gravity / released / one unit at a time’, ‘The universe rewound / and played back / in real time’. Some ideas, perhaps, are just better when they exist solely in the mind. Louise Darblay

We, The Survivors by Tash Aw 4th Estate, £14.99 (hardcover) We, The Survivors is a novel about how people cope with change – although it is perhaps misleading to offer a definition of a work in which precise definitions are elusive. Even the novel’s central character, Ah Hock, a Chinese Malaysian who grew up in a rural fishing village (during the late 1990s), turns out to have been using the name Jayden, because it has a cooler ring. We learn this at the beginning of the book, when Ah Hock describes his trial and conviction for the murder of a stranger (the full details of the act itself only come at the end), and his annoyance at his lawyer’s inability to pronounce ‘Jayden’ properly, thus giving it the shifty character of an alias. For Ah Hock that name is an assertion of freedom in a world governed by determinism: he even had it printed on his business cards. And yet, despite the rest of the book appearing to be Ah Hock’s summary of his life up to the murder, Jayden is barely referenced again. Ah Hock is, in any case, merely the familiar name of Lee Hock Lye, whom Ah Hock, again referencing his trial, describes as ‘another guy who shared my name’. There’s a touch of American Psycho about Aw’s fourth novel, but We, The Survivors is in many ways the inverse of Bret Easton Ellis’s late-twentieth-century controversy-magnet. It is set on the other side of the world, in Tash Aw’s homeland, and is a record of the excesses that result from desperation rather than boredom, and from failure rather than success. Initially, however, Ah Hock’s account of his

childhood appears to offer up all the clichés that we’re taught (on tv at least) make for a criminal mind: his grandparents fled China (presumably in the wake of the Civil War), then Indonesia (presumably during the communist purges and Chinese massacres of the mid1960s) before ending up in off-the-map rural Malaysia – the narrative is peppered by words or phrases in Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay. He barely remembers the father who left for a better life in Singapore. He committed various acts of apparent animal cruelty as a youth. He lacks any academic qualifications. He’s good at manual labour only because while he does it he’s living a wuxia fantasy. His best friend is a drug dealer turned human trafficker. And yet, although he never seems to earn enough money to be anything other than poor, Ah Hock appears slowly to gain a veneer of respectability: a wife, a home, a job managing a fish farm. But for every step forward, the world seems to drive him two steps back. Malaysia, today, is undergoing rapid economic and industrial change. Successive waves of migrants – from Chinese to Indonesian, Bangladeshi to Rohingya – labour at its foundations, each subsequent wave pushing the previous one further up the social and racial pecking orders. The constant development of new homes continuously pushes older dwellings towards the status of slums, leading their inhabitants continuously to desire a new home. Desire is what drives people. Success for

one generation meant owning a Mercedes; for the next it means living abroad. Business is no longer about local markets, but global economics. Just as Ah Hock seems to have succeeded in integrating himself with the land, the land appears to have integrated itself with someplace else. The sense in which Ah Hock’s life is a fantasy is more than the product of his mind. More too than the product of Southeast Asia’s recent history. While We, The Survivors appears to be Ah Hock’s first-person narrative, that’s complicated by his accepting a request to be interviewed for a PhD paper by a sociology student. As they proceed, her paper evolves into a book that is classified by the student as ‘narrative non-fiction’ and by its publisher as ‘true crime’. And as the ownership and branding of Ah Hock’s story shifts, we’re left wondering if what we’re reading might be, in fact, Su Min’s packaged book. Does that make it even more of a lie? Towards the end of the novel, Ah Hock catches the daughter of a Bangladeshi immigrant looking at him with the expression ‘of someone who didn’t like strangers’; she learned that look, he assumes, from observing people as they looked at her. Ultimately this novel is a brilliant and disturbing account of what it’s like to be a subject in a rootless and changing world, of how culture and identity are the product of fantasy as much as fact and of the struggles of contemporary subjects to recognise and exercise free will. Nirmala Devi

Clone by Priya Sarukkai Chabria Zubaan, Rs 595 (hardcover)

Blending the dystopian plotlines of us and European sci-fi with stories specific to or evocative of narrative traditions in the author’s country of origin, Clone is set in twentyfourth-century India, now called The Global Community. The title character – full name Clone 14/54/g (she’s the 54th clone in batch g’s 14th generation) – has begun manifesting individuality. With frictionless replication guaranteed only to the 13th generation, Clone may be a mutant. She is aware of this possibility – she recognises as aberrant her decision to conceal a diary in one of the cellchips in her neural circuits – and so is The Global Community’s security apparatus, which

subjects her to special surveillance when she develops an interest in history and other stories from the past. Interrogated by a sympathetic poet-creaturething named Couplet, Clone draws the attention of a very important Original (from whom clones descend…) both for her bravery and for the mix of riddles and ‘visitations’ issuing from her as she develops a sense of her own identity. Running the gamut from snippets of Gustave Flaubert and Rabindranath Tagore to stories-within-the-story told from the perspectives of a pet parrot, a palace guard and a fish seeking Eternal Knowledge (and representing close to a third of the novel),

Summer 2019

these narrative effusions point to a literary sensibility. Indeed Clone, we learn, is descended from a dissident writer killed 14 generations earlier just as she was about to reveal the hypocrisy and corruption at the heart of The Global Community. Enlisted by The Cause – the resistance movement – to channel the message her ‘mother’ was on the verge of delivering, Clone works her way towards the identical revelation. An exemplar of post-colonial sci-fi, a parable of awakening and a metafiction concerned with the creative process, this work may be more hybrid than clone, but it gets to the heart of what it means to be human. David Terrien

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Liu Chuang, Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (detail), 2018, three-channel video, 4k, 5.1 sound, 40 min. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 35, 65 and 81 come from the Mahavamsa, Chapter 1: The Visit of The Tathagata, trans Wilhelm Geiger and Mabel Haynes Bode (London, Pali Text Society, 1912)

on pages 58, 97 and 100 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

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behind the headlines On 20 May 1961, The Arts Review published a review of an exhibition by Rabindranath Tagore, held at the Commonwealth Institute in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the great Bengali polymath’s birth. It was written by George M. Butcher, the magazine’s resident India specialist (also a critic at The Guardian newspaper), who declared it to be ‘one of the most important exhibitions of modern painting to have been seen in London for months’. Bizarrely, 40 of the 49 paintings on view weren’t paintings at all, but rather collotype prints run off by the Ganymed Press, which had started producing highend editions (the majority produced in conjunction with living artists) that same year. Nevertheless Butcher pronounced the reproductions ‘excellent’, before claiming, somewhat strangely given the importance he ascribed to the display, that only ‘two or three’ of the nine original works ‘are of any special quality’. The detail of what that quality might be he left unsaid. Instead, Butcher focused on his key point: that Tagore’s (evidently indescribable) gifts as a painter had been overlooked in a slew of centennial tributes that focused ‘on his manysided talent, his stature as a man, and his role in shaping India’s renaissance’. Tagore had only started painting seriously in 1928, aged sixty-seven, and some 15 years after he had shot to worldwide fame as the first Asian writer (and only the second nonEuropean) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘I am not alone in believing that he was the first really significant modern painter of India,’ Butcher (who had earlier introduced the readers of The Arts Review to the Visva-Bharati school that Tagore had founded in Santiniketan) added, concluding, ‘and not quite alone in believing that he was her greatest painter so far this century.’ He then offered his only assertion concerning the nature of the artworks themselves:

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that Tagore was to Indian art what Paul Klee was to that of the West. Before capping it all off with something of a retraction, cryptically claiming that the ‘real situation’ of Tagore’s status as a painter ‘is as enigmatic as Tagore’s own line: “The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail”’. To be fair to Butcher, enigmatic is a description that might be appended even to Tagore’s direct comments on his paintings: ‘My pictures are my versification in lines. If, by chance, they are entitled to claim recognition, it must be primarily for some rhythmic significance of form which is ultimate and not for any interpretation of an idea or representation of facts,’ he wrote. And there are no doubt similarities between Tagore’s and Klee’s descriptions of the creative process and its roots in both the unconscious and the mapping of universal energies, similarities that were much discussed in India (extensive comparisons were laid out by the celebrated writer Mulk Raj Anand, in the March 1961 issue of his literary quarterly Marg, for example) at the time of Tagore’s centenary. The relativism deployed by Butcher was not uncommon in Western descriptions of the mystical attractions of both Tagore and his works, and could take many strange turns. Charles Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornford recalled after meeting him that ‘I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before’. Taking things a step further, the German writer Kurt Wolff pontificated that Tagore, ‘with his long grayish-white beard and dignity… presented a most impressive figure, so that it seemed a completely natural error when my three-year-old daughter assumed God was paying us a visit, and settled contentedly in the lap of the Lord’. The American arts patron Harriet Monroe, meanwhile, located similar sentiments closer to Tagore’s home, claiming that she felt she was ‘sitting at the lap of the Buddha’. While back in Asia, Yasunari Kawabata, who in 1968 became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recalled his hero as a man who ‘with his long, bushy hair, long moustaches and beard, standing tall in loose flowing Indian garments and with deep piercing eyes… gave the impression… of some oriental wizard’. The impression of the modern mystic was, of course, as carefully constructed as it was successful. Tagore had peacocklike tendencies, beyond those that Butcher ascribed to the long tail of his many, heavy talents. As befits a writer who fused the modern with the traditional, and whose words make up both the Bangladeshi and Indian national anthems (as well as providing the inspiration for those that make up Sri Lanka’s), Tagore carefully dressed himself in a mix of clothing associated with both Hindu and Muslim cultures (dhootis, chadars, chapkans and jubbas), topped by specially made hats, in ways that distinguished him from those around him while reflecting his more general secular philosophies, both to an audience at home and abroad. ‘I am like a show lion in a circus now!’ he roared to Monroe, following a wardrobe failure on a 1916 tour of the us that had forced him to wear tweed. The English painter William Rothenstein, one of Tagore’s longest-standing friends in London, wrote to humorist Max Beerbohm in 1920, after Tagore had been on another tour of the us: ‘Alas that the strong wine of praise, and the weak wine of worship, should have gone to this good man’s head. It is a misfortune for a poet to be too handsome.’ The last is a sentiment with which Butcher, in his own way, seems to have agreed. ara