Khoj LIve 2008

khojlive08

khojlive08

As part of its ten-year celebrations, Khoj curated the first-ever international performance art festival in New Delhi, commemorating its consistent engagement with the genre of live art practice. Live Art is an umbrella term encompassing a range of performance, performative and time based works. Beginning with its first international workshop in 1997 to more recent international residencies, Khoj has consistently encouraged experimentation with the genre.

Held from March 25-30, 2008, KHOJLIVE08 was a dynamic six-day programme of events that brought together a diverse group of Indian and international performance artists in an attempt to showcase different currents, positions and possibilities within contemporary performance art. Prominent art galleries across the city hosted performances each evening over the course of the six days. The Max Mueller Bhavan, Alliance Française, Palette Art Gallery, Anant Art Gallery and Gallery Espace collaborated with Khoj on this seminal venture.

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Biographies

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Performance art at Khoj through the years

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CoNteNt

Foreword Pooja Sood KHoJLIVe08: THe KHoJ PerFormance arT FesTIVaL Rohini Devasher wIred From deLHI Khairuddin Hori ProPosITIons Swapna Tamhane

by Pooja Sood

K

hojLive08 was a six day festival of live art held in New Delhi.

A first in India, it marked Khoj’s decade long engagement with performance oriented art practices.

Though often perceived as a recent phenomenon, the context for performance art today may be seen to lie in the seminal “happenings” orchestrated by Baroda based artist Bhupen Khakhar. In 1971 Khakhar invited artists Vivan Sundaram, Nasreen Mohamedi and critic Geeta Kapur amongst others to dress in a manner mimicking the rites of an Indian marriage procession at the opening of his exhibition of paintings. Later he parodied James Bond in a photo performance work with an international artist.

Thus ‘Khakhar became the first artist in India to challenge the conventional interaction between artist and audience, subverting the presence and necessity of spectators to come’. But it is perhaps the artist Rummana Hussain who is considered the pioneer of performance art as we know it today. Her contribution beginning from the mid 90s has been elaborated elsewhere in this catalogue.

From the earliest workshops in 1997 held at Modinagar, to more defined, thematic residencies in 2004, 2006 and 2007 the artist community in New Delhi was privy to a range of projects that have helped broaden and shape an understanding of the performative, performance or (more broadly) live art in Indian contemporary art.

Chinese artist Song Dong’s ten day silent action-work; Thai artist Michael Shaowanasai’s theatrical performance of gay issues; Fuji Hiroshi’s two day silent ritual of cleansing and clearing a stretch of drain; Subodh Gupta’s ritual cleansing in his performance Shravasana and Sonia Khurana’s public intervention of the Flower Carrier; the politically-charged painted action of Nikhil Chopra in the midst of Srinagar’s bustling Lal Chowk, conducted in full view of guntoting soldiers; Simon Gush’s absurdly futile gesture where twelve cycle-rickshaw pullers strained against iron chains to heave the Chaudhari Bari mansion in Kolkata out of its colonial slumber. These are just some of the highlights of the early Khoj workshops.

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Our thematic residencies from 2004 onwards provided a structured program where artists from diverse trajectories worked towards opening up newer spaces within the dominant trends of ‘Performance’ or more specifically live art where temporality was of the essence. The artists who engaged in performative work at our studios have been listed separately in this publication for the readers reference. The range of practices that can be classified as performance art leads us to deduce, in retrospect, that it is perhaps easier to understand live art not as a mere descriptor of an art form but as a strategy to include a diversity of practices and artists that might otherwise find themselves excluded from all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical debates.

KHOJLIVE08 was thus an attempt to explicate practices that lay in the slip zones between theatre, dance and the visual arts; between the temporal, the ephemeral and the immediate; it was an attempt to unpack practices which were focussed on the erotic and the political but equally on the role of the audience: from mute spectator to engaged participant.

I would like to thank the Anant Art Gallery, Gallery Espace, the Palette Art Gallery and the Goethe Institut for their enthusiastic and generous support; A special thanks to the Alliance Francais and the French Cultural Centre for hosting the Festival Hub for all 6 days; The Live Art Development Agency, UK for their keen participation in the talks and seminars arranged through the festival; to the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU and the National School of Drama for hosting stimulating public discussions on performance art. This festival would not have been possible if not for the dedication of the entire Khoj team that worked tirelessly to enable the successful implementation of the festival but never the least – the artists who participated in the festival with commitment and belief thereby contributing to the burgeoning discourse on live art in India.

khojlive08

foreword

Pooja Sood is an independent curator, Art Management Consultant, Director of Khoj International Artists’ Association and Curator of KHOJLIVE08

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The KHOJ

Performance Art Festival

by Rohini Devasher

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HOJLIVE08 was the first ever international performance art festival in New Delhi, India. Aimed at showcasing the different currents, positions and possibilities of contemporary performance art practice across the world, KHOJLIVE08 brought together a diverse and exciting range of artists from very different backgrounds and trajectories. Deliberately polyphonic, the festival offered audiences an image of their own multiplicity, providing opportunities to connect seemingly disparate ideas within larger themes.

Since first international workshop in 1997, Khoj has recognized the significance and importance of trans-disciplinary interaction and exchange. Khoj, which translates most literally as a search, or better still, quest, is perhaps the only consistent artist-led, alternative forum in India for experimentation and international exchange. Since its

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inception in 1997 as part of the global Triangle Arts Trust, Khoj has built an international reputation for outstanding alternative arts incubation, production, and presentation. Alternative spaces, by definition, are spaces for the seeding of radical new ideas; ideas that challenge mainstream practice and discourse. Khoj plays a central role in the development of experimental art practice in India, and in the development of the local art community by providing a space where exploration and risk are encouraged, debate and critical inquiry are embraced, community is essential and today’s issues are thrashed about in the heat and immediacy of ‘art as it is experienced’. With space and opportunity for a diverse group of artists to test their work within a setting that is part public, part private, the studios foster an investigative approach that is more open-ended and enigmatic. Khoj works to establish cross connections and networks with artists across India and the globe, celebrating a diverse arena of practitioners responding in distinct ways to each other and to the site.

2007 marked ten years of Khoj and it seemed appropriate to highlight, a genre of art practice that has been constantly supported through its programs - live art. Beginning with the first Khoj International Artists Workshop in 1997 to more recent international residencies devoted solely to the genre, Khoj has supported and nurtured performance art practice. In 2004, Khoj organized its first International Performance Art Residency. Artists from Jakarta, Belo Horizonte, Amsterdam and Mumbai with practices ranging from theatre to studio based performance worked together, exploring notions of body, materials, space and time. Encompassing a variety of related genres from body art, to action art and intervention, there were ‘as many ways of doing performance art as there were performers’. Given that India boasts a rich and fertile tradition of dance and theatre, questions of performance/the performative and its impulses within the Indian context were thrown open for scrutiny. The 2006 Performance Art Residency, which saw a greater focus on live performances in the public sphere, was curated with the intention of bringing together various practices within ‘performance’ and ‘live art’ to create a potpourri of talents, aiming to re-energize and redefine the concept

and practice of ‘performance’ in India. The Performance Art Residency 2007 more specifically addressed the theatricality of installation and the reality of performance as installation. The interest generated by these various projects provided fertile ground to establish a new vocabulary and understanding of the idea of performance art, particularly in the South Asian region.

KHOJLIVE 08, as the culmination and fruition of this engagement was a melting pot, a witch’s brew of exciting, manic, serious, camp, glamorous, wild, humorous, profound, moving, disturbing, dramatic, provocative and fabulous performances. From March 25-30, 2008, the Festival was a dynamic action packed six-day programme of events. An eclectic mix of 25 artists from Indonesia, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand, Germany, Nepal, France, Egypt and artists from cities across India, working across a range of live art practices such as experimental theatre and dance; installation, video and photography were invited to define, redefine, dissect and reconstruct the genre of live art.

In an effort to access and diversify the audience base, it was vital to forge links with prominent art galleries and cultural spaces across the city. It was equally important to situate a series of ephemeral, performance-based practices within the commercial gallery. In the absence of enlightened support by the Government of India towards contemporary art practice, the visual arts scenario is predominantly supported by and therefore responsive to the art market. The Festival opened at the Khoj Studios and performances continued every night for the next five nights at five venues across the city, including two cultural spaces and three leading commercial galleries. The Goethe Institute Max Mueller Bhavan, Alliance Française, Anant Art Gallery, Palette Gallery and Gallery Espace became ground zero for the most eclectic smorgasbord of performances the city had ever seen. A group of ten curators from the LIVE Art Development Agency UK conducted workshops and presentations at top educational institutions on the development of performance. Combined with film screenings, open mike sessions, and finally a seminar, the festival’s extensive outreach

program aimed to generate extensive debate around the subject, invigorating artists, students, educators and audience members alike.

The first of its kind in Delhi, KHOJLIVE 08 was remarkable in the diversity of its audiences. Drawn by interest, curiosity or pleasure, artists, writers, filmmakers, students, designers, theatre goers, actors, dancers, photographers, graphic designers, businessmen and lawyers, attended the events. Venues were packed to capacity and often overcrowded. Yet a wonderful energy and spirit built up around the performance evenings as the entire creative community of New Delhi and those visiting the city became a captive audience for the Festival. More significant still, was the audience response to the performances. Extravagant glitter and camp was met with delight and humorous mockery, the deliberately provocative with an attitude of ‘live and let live’, the deeply personal and often painful with reverence and complete attention. The audience didn’t just show up— they engaged, and that more than anything else put a stamp of success on the event. The website, which was updated regularly with blogs and videos, recorded an unprecedented number of hits.

The imagination of the media was arrested, and the Festival was covered by more than thirty print publications and more than ten TV broadcasting channels during and after the course of the event. By stepping out of the studios where it is housed, Khoj was able to bring something to audiences across the city that was unlike anything they had seen or experienced before.

While the efficacy of a festival platform as a space to connect, stimulate and celebrate emerged clearly, the future of KHOJLIVE may lie in its mutation into the model of a biennial, with an increasing number of Indian artists participating each time. What the festival accomplished—creating unique opportunities for direct contact between artists, writers, and curators—a biennial could build upon by corralling greater resources, more collaborators and partners, and providing fresh curatorial perspectives, offering encounters with performance art and artists to wider audiences.

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Wired

KHOJLIVE recovered within the complications and the divisiveness of modern living, a sense of community. Khoj above all is a community of artists; those who came together in 1997 for the very first workshop and those that have came on board since, over the past 10 years. The festival certainly celebrated Khoj, but it also celebrated those artists across the world who have been integral to its making. The Festival more than served the purpose of throwing up questions about the nature of live art practice mediated through a range of practitioners.

Above all, it aimed to seed collaboration and new modes of practice and representation. As a result its long term impact or ripples will be the true marker of its success.

from Delhi

by Khairuddin Hori

T Born in 1978 in New Delhi, Rohini Devasher graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the Winchester School of Art, UK in 2004. Recent exhibitions include Drawn from Life, Green Cardamom Gallery, London (July 2008). By All Means, Exhibition at the Scope Art Fair Basel, curated by the Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (June 2008), and the Khoj International Arts & Science Residency, Khoj Studios, New Delhi (Aug-Sept2007). She worked with Khoj between 2005 and 2010 in the capacity of Editorial & Publications Coordinator and continues to contribute to the organization as a Consultant.

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ry if you can, to imagine and juxtapose Steven Cohen—white, Jewish, South African, drag-queen—with Da Motus!, a Swiss street theatre/dance ensemble performing in luminous green overalls, and along with Hassan Khan, Egyptian situationist and digital sound and image artist. Then, sandwich them between Indian stage actor and Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alumnus Rehaan Engineer; Maya Krishna Rao, a veteran theatre and dance practitioner who utilizes both Kathakali and stand-up comedy; and Sarnath Banerjee, an artist-convert, with a Masters in Image and Communication from Goldsmith’s College and two graphic novels published by Penguin India under his belt.

Welcome to KhojLIVE08, India’s first international performance art festival!

I am sure you would forgive me if I say that in the beginning, I was quite skeptical of this curatorial hash of a performance art event.

Having been a co-organizer and director of a similar event in Singapore (Future of Imagination 3 & 4), and also as a ‘performer’, I decided that it was best to surrender my doubts and celebrate the fortune of being among the thirty-three artists invited to the festival.

Besides, I was on page fifty-two of Khoj’s impressively designed festival booklet situated as the lone ‘critic-in-residence’; in other words, I could post ‘official complaints’ later if I so desired. I was advised that my principal responsibility was to attend and observe as much (if not all) of the festival proceedings as I could (including several ad-hoc presentations, forums and symposia) and to deliver an essay for the post-festival publication.

Organized and curated by Khoj International Artists’ Association as part of itstenth anniversary celebrations, KhojLIVE08 took place between 25 and 30 March 2008 at six different venues in New Delhi.

Along with performances that typically began in the evenings, there were also daily presentations and discussions led by associates of the Live Art Development Agency, UK. These took place in nine different venues, Khoj Studios, National School of Drama, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Palette Art Gallery, Gallery Espace, Anant Art Centre and Vadehra Art Gallery—as well as diplomatic institutions, such as the Alliance Francaise and Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan. The support from partner venues, in particular the commercial galleries, was impressive. Three of these galleries emptied their walls and gave complete logistical support for the evenings’ performances. The Alliance Francaise and Goethe-Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan were no less gracious. The Alliance became the official festival hub, where you could find artists hanging out, daily screenings of performance videos and festival updates. Meanwhile, the Goethe-Institute took on the closing night’s revue.

Nikhil Chopra, a Mumbai based artist who returned to India in 2005 after several years of studying and living in America, opened the festival at the Khoj Studios. Performing in one of the ‘cubes’ at Khoj Studios, Nikhil was attired as a respectable Victorian gentleman. As I struggled for a better view in an unusually maddening crowd, Nikhil stormed out

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of the room with a large piece of folded brown paper tucked under his arm. I rushed to follow in his tracks, moving fast outside the Khoj Studios onto the street, and into narrow, winding alleys sandwiched by local residences. His walk led us to an empty Tuglaq edifice, remnants of what used to be a mosque; its interiors filled with pillars, dark, cryptlike, housing bats. Nikhil walked through it with urgency, storming out once again, this time onto a main road, eventually halting on the roof of another architectural relic. He unfolded and laid down the large piece of brown paper onto the roof floor. The paper, joined together using masking tape, was about five meters long and two meters wide. He took off his suit and began drawing. After about an hour, the charcoal drawing reflected the background we were in - a landscape with the setting sun. I was told that we were actually standing on the retentive wall of a Tughlaq dam. Below us, to the left, was a noisy and perilously busy road; next to it, a large sparkling ‘globalized’ shopping mall. To our right, gigantic trucks were driving in and out, filling mud and dust into what used to be a gorge and further ahead, a dwelling cluster, an old neighbourhood.

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by Swapna Tamhane

H

Born in 1974 in Singapore, Khairuddin Hori graduated with a Master of Arts from LASALLE in 2006. His most recent solo exhibition, Trading Craft, where he employed six Asian curators as his art-makers, was presented by Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore at The Substation Gallery and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

embedded history. This history belongs to the body, whether directly referred to or not, and performance as direct usage of bodily actions is therefore a multi-layered, complex genre in this ever-evolving nation.

Histories of performance art in the West can be traced to ‘Le Futurisme’, a text by poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that was printed on 20 February 1909 and distributed in the Parisian paper, Le Figaro. A year later, the Italian Futurists held an evening of political rally, poetry, and variety theatre in Trieste. Using public piazzas, they celebrated the war machine and simultaneously protested the rise of feminism and the institution of the museum.1 Safdar Hashmi (19541989) also utilized the public for his own form of “militant political theatre of protest”2; performance-based work in India draws its roots from Hashmi’s formulation of theatre that braided tradition, folk, Marxism, and resistance. By performing at trade union rallies, outside factory doors, and in working-class neighbourhoods, Hashmi’s own plays and adaptations of Brecht (among others) were effective in mobilizing people against larger organizations that work to restrict and cage the working-class.

1 David Smith, “The Return of History”, The Dragon and the Elephant, China, India and the New World Order, London:Profile Books Ltd, 2007, p.9

Nikhil left, still in performance mode, and I followed him back to the Khoj Studios. Arriving on the cramped street outside of Khoj, the mood was akin to that of a religious procession. Steven Cohen was in drag, into an adjacent Khoj building. J.C. Lanquentin, a French scenographic artist, whose engagements are frequently embedded within communities in the African continent, was jamming with an eager mob twenty meters away via an interactive, video-based work around the issue of home and relocation. The police later disrupted J.C.’s work, as the enthusiastic response was apparently a hazard!

You can probably imagine what the rest of the festival held in store.

As an artist, curator and witness to several other, betterestablished Southeast Asian performance art festivals, the Khoj experience left me ‘ wired’! I dare say that KhojLIVE08 is a promise and premise from which performance art, although without a strong contemporary history in India, is about to emerge.

PROPOSITIONS

I shall leave you with an economic parable, which I think is applicable just as well to arts and culture: “At the birth of Christ, India made up a third of the global economy, China more than a quarter. History, it seems, is on China and India’s side. Their current rise is mainly just the return of the status quo.”1

ow can we define performance-based contemporary art practice in a country like India, which is a jammed/forced/contrived/frictioncausing/jostling/spilling-over-the-brim collection of cultures, languages, identities, politics, religions, and landscapes? How is performancebased art different from street-theatre, from the negotiation of vehicle, animal and subaltern traffic or the tapestry of traditions in dance and drama or the cacophonous multitude of religious celebrations? How does one distinguish a ‘performative space’ when life (apart from sexual expression) is available/accessible for display? This porous line between the street and the private forces a direct relationship between performance-based artwork in India and the environment it is made in; its own history is distinct and rooted in the national. What can we name this media for artists working with their body as their primary site/terrain? The national is rather unavoidable and with it comes an

It was Hashmi’s politically motivated murder that brought artists like Rummana Hussain and Vivan Sundaram together through SAHMAT. They worked to fight against the threat of losing the freedom of speech and creative expression while grappling with the growing communalism of the early 1990s. Hussain’s performance, Living on the Margins (March 10, 1995) at the NCPA, South Mumbai, must be recognized as the first work of “performance art” in India, which operates with an activist edge. Hussain introduced this piece by saying she wanted: 1 By distributing manifestoes and statements, they advertised themselves through mass communication, thereby spreading their ideologies across Europe and Russia.

2 Safdar Hashmi, ‘The Tradition of Street Theatre’ (6 April 1986), The Right to Perform: Selected Writings of Safdar Hashmi, Delhi: SAHMAT, 1989, p. 9

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(t)o look at art as a vehicle for political action, to create a bridge from the seclusion of the studio and gallery to the real world, street and garden.3

the title – Japan’s Gutai Group was working with performance but not necessarily referring to it as such and in Europe, artists like Gina Pane and Hermann Nitsch titled it “Aktionen”.

While her skeptical audience didn’t know what to make of this work or how to classify it, Hussain used performance in the way the Futurists had – as political commentary. This piece had feminist overtones – she used household goods like vacuum cleaners, washing buckets, indigo-coloured Robin Blu detergent and papayas with their slimy black seeds exposed. In effect, she merged objects with art and gave them new signifiers. Hussain worked against the way that art alienates people, that acts of creativity devalue and dismiss the actions that women perform in sustaining life. She switched powerrelations and structures to highlight the victimization of women and children during periods of political instability, communal riots, and religious unrest. She used everyday items that are commonplace in a country where the divide between the “cultured” upper/intellectual/ educated classes and the subalterns is so vast.

What is the exposure in pre-1991 India to some of the artists and movements listed above? What is the relationship to and relevance of this Euro-American history of Performance Art? Did students of art and art history or artists themselves have access to this kind of work?

Did they know of pieces like Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (performed January 15-29, 1971) or Laurie Anderson’s Oh Superman, or even Robert Wilson’s grand operatic gestures? If not, could I suggest that the concept of performance art came to India quite recently and is constantly evolving due to political shifts in society that demand an alternative, avant-garde response that is purely “Indian” in its outcome without falling into the local vs. global conversation?

This political/feminist aspect may carry a relationship to the early work of Marina Abramović or Ana Mendieta, but the twentyyear difference creates an interesting separation from the early developments of ‘Performance Art’ in the 1970s (when it was given this official title to differentiate it from theatre).4 Not all artists took on 3 Mahesh Ramchandani, ‘A 3-D view of pain’, The Sunday Times of India, March 12, 1995.

4 Its key tenets are indebted to the writings of RoseLee Goldberg who fine-tuned its essence and solidified its discourse with a key focus on the artist’s body and the presence of an audience. Goldberg is the author of Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, published by Thames & Hudson (first in 1979 and now in its third edition and translated into seven languages). This seminal text describes the evolution of Performance Art through the 20th Century (discussing Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada, Surrealism, the Bauhaus, the 1980s to the present).

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Sonia Khurana filmed Bird in 1999 while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, but was not aware of the “discursive space of performance” at that time.5 With Bird, Khurana was conscious of its clumsy, filmic, erratic quality, quoting Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. She did indeed make a video document of a performance but there are added editorial touches – rapid cuts and a ghost-like veneer effect; it is not purely a document. 1999 is the same year that Hussain passed away after a four-year struggle with breast cancer, just when her ideas and aesthetic found their rhythm. Khurana regards Hussain as an influence and considers her a lone and solitary voice.6 (Perhaps not so lone and solitary in the international community as she was showing her work in Australia, England, and the Netherlands.)

5 Sonia Khurana, Lecture and Artist’s talk at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, January 2009.

6 Ibid., January 2009.

KHOJLIVE08 brings together national and international artists working with visual art practices as diverse as theatre, dance, and poetry. The festival format enables exposure and experimentation in a non-commercial setting with non-commercial expectations.

The slow rise and development of not-for-profit institutions and museums demonstrates an understanding of ephemeral practices like performance, which leads to growing audiences. It therefore seems imperative to name or designate a form of identity for what this practice could be. My concern is that artists who have had the opportunity to study abroad adopt Western methodologies, or are versed in dominant histories of performance, and use them to discuss inherently complex ideas that are solely relevant to India. Even if currently unaware, many of the younger performance artists (like Nikhil Chopra or Monali Meher) will eventually have their work discussed in relation to these overriding theoretical positions. Today, artists/ curators/dealers are utilizing the umbrella title of “Performance Art” as an apparatus or engine but this position has not been examined or questioned. Saskia Sassen, the sociologist and professor at Columbia University, speaks about a process of denationalization in the rise of the global. She says that in order to understand the global, there must be a greater focus on what happens inside the national.

According to Sassen, immigrant communities, foreign professionals and international artists belong to this process of denationalization.�7 If the body is a representative citizen of a nation-state, when it enters a position of performance and confronts larger themes of politics or its “free” economic self, the very ‘body’ itself mirrors one’s nationstate as an exemplary position from which to negotiate the global. A performative practice as a nascent media in India needs to be given a terminology precisely for this reason.

7 P. Schouten, Saskia Sassen, ‘Theory Talk #43: Saskia Sassen on Sociology, Globalization, and the Re-shaping of the National’, Theory Talks, www.theory-talks.org/2011/09/theory-talk-43.html, (06-09-2011)

Reading newspapers from the various states that constitute the Union of India, one can see immediately that there are ungraspable issues and events that necessitate new conceptions of morality, justice, and the simple black and white of right and wrong. It leads us to ask why there aren’t more pressing currents within performance art practices that work against or discuss communalism, corruption, issues around sanitation, farming, the bizarre and recent growth of consumerism, materialist mentality, etc.? Can these crises only be represented in a documentary-format or theatre or will they be presented as activism/art as with Inder Salim’s public performances? And most importantly, how can we support practitioners of this medium when the infrastructure for non-profit spaces, foundations and museums is still being developed? Ultimately, will these performative histories within Indian contemporary art push ahead into new territories that will eventually define and name themselves when/if needed as they continue to work on the edge of the avant-garde?

SWAPNA TAMHANE is an artist and art historian based between Canada and India.

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khojlive08

Day

01

Tuesday, 25 March, 2008

OPENING PERFORMANCES 6:00pm Onwards

VENUE

PERFORMING ARTISTS

Jean Christophe Lanquetin Nikhil Chopra Zuleikha Chaudhari & Manish Chaudhari

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Day01

Khoj Studios S-17, Khirki Ext. New Delhi - 110017 Tel. +91 11 65655874/73 http://khojworkshop.org interact@khojworkshop.org

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Day01

Jean Christophe Lanquetin Duration: 2 hrs ongoing

The performance and installation takes place in a street of Khirki Extension, a locality in Delhi. The site acts as a metaphor for the moment when the artist travelled for the first time to a place in which he was completely new, a foreigner. “I’m there in the middle of people, nobody knows me. Where have I come from? What have I seen in the past days? Where have I been?” The installation attempts to play with these distances, perceptions and ideas.

“There, in the street, people can ask me a question starting with ‘where’, and I’ll answer, but not with words.”

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Day01

Nikhil Chopra Title: Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing III Duration: 4-5 hrs

The performance saw the artist enacting the character of Yog Raj Chitrakar, through an elaborate ritual of donning a costume and make-up at the Khoj studios. The artist walked from Khoj through the busy lanes of Khirki village, past a medieval mosque and an abandoned dam to a gigantic mall across the road in Saket. The artist had with him a suitcase, a roll of paper, drawing material, costume changes, additional make-up and other odd props.

The artist as Yog Raj Chitrakar proceeded to make a drawing of the view from on top of the dam; a view that lays bare the sharp contrasts between the crumbling Tughlaq monuments of Khirki Village, its present-day migrant communities and the glitzy commercial malls, just across the road.

The performance ended at sunset with the artist returning to the Khoj studios after a walk through the mall.

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Day01

Zuleikha & Manish Chaudhari Zuleikha Chaudhari (Design & Direction) Manish Chaudhari (Performance) Inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story ON SEEING THE 100% PERFECT GIRL ONE BEAUTIFUL APRIL MORNING. The performance is a spatial and experiential reinterpretation of the text.

Duration: 40 mins.

Director’s Note: Haruki Murakami’s short story explores in detail a single moment in time. This moment, experienced by the protagonist, is loaded to contain the past, the present and the future, evoking a shifting perception of memory, time and space.

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The performer’s presence is negotiated to integrate itself into and extend the visual language of the space. In other words, space is not merely a blank affect upon which the performer’s body is imprinted; neither is the performer’s body merely a blank affect upon which emotive expression is imprinted. As the space between text and movement is stretched, the performer’s body assumes a life of its own; it becomes a sculptural object interacting with a space rendered dynamic by various elements, one of which is the light installation.

The story brings up questions about the nature and process of memory: the relationship between sight and experience, the co-existence of reality and dreams, and how emotions are remembered as physical sensations. By mapping the landscape of memory through the light installation, as well as the physicality of the performer, my attempt is to transform the text into a series of visual registers.

The spatial division of the installation into separate rooms dictates the construction of the performance and the separation of the performance into three spaces serves to further fragment the visual and textual narrative. The challenge, then, is to bring these separate spaces into one consciousness. Since this is a solo performance, with the story narrated in a single voice, how does one establish the actor’s presence in all the rooms simultaneously so that his presence does not cease to exist at the end of a particular moment/sequence, but continues to remain part of the visual and spatial environment, even though that particular moment in the performance has ended and the performer has left the space?

The three dimensional light installations within each of the three rooms seek to interpret and respond to the text spatially and experientially. They rearticulate the performance space such that the meaning and perception of the installation/space constantly changes as one travels through and experiences it with and in relation to the presence of the performer.

This piece hopes to explore and develop a series of questions to do with: the interruption of the narrative structure, the fragmentation of the mimetic relationship between text and movement, the relationship between the body and space, the texture of the performative space itself, the quality of the performative body and the nature of viewing experience.

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khojlive08

DAY

02

Wednesday, 26 March, 2008 11:30-1:30pm TaLK & worKsHoP

by Live Art UK and Live Art Development Agency, UK 12:00-3:30pm oPen sPace & Video screenings @ the Hub

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003 6:00pm Onwards PerFormances by

Venue

Gallery Espace 16,Community Centre, New Friends Colony New Delhi- 110 065

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DAY02

Da moTus! Fred KoenIg Rehaan engIneer Doug FIsHbone

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Day02

Da Motus!

Title: En Vie..En Ville (Alive...in Town) Duration: 1hr

Movement alternates with still statuary to create an exceptional fusion of art and architecture. ‘Alive…in Town’ is a brilliant example of site-specific performance (performed in the market area outside Gallery Espace) which not only intervenes in public areas, but shapes it. It provides allegories of urban life, seeking not to provide answers but to pose questions to attentive audiences. The piece is performed by five people, including a musician. Here, dance is no longer about the classical art of beautiful movement or a contemporary search of expression. Instead, it offers a critical approach to the urban environment.

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Day02

Fred Koenig Title: Shock Doctrine/ Searching for the Pink Bag Duration: 40 mins

Deriving its title from Naomi Klein’s classic critique of capitalism, the piece combines projected video, music, and live performance.

Inspired by larger-than-life film productions, the performance challenges the role of the entertainment industry which distracts the public from real thinking controlled by media and religion by playing with the typical clichés of European tourists going to India, while simultaneously providing a satirical critique of machismo and role playing.

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Day02

Rehaan Engineer Title: 377 BEDTIME STORIES AND SONGS Duration: 8 hrs

“Men asleep are labourers and co-workers in what takes place in the world.” HERACLITES [VIA MARCUS AURELIUS]

references to the writing of Virginia Woolf (diaries and essays), and Marcel Proust’s sleep-obsessed In Search Of Lost Time.

To sleep. To sleep with. To sleep on. To sleep in. To sleep over.

To sleep around.

In physical terms the performance is a reading, structured so as to loosely echo the childhood ‘bedtime story’ ritual. Each member of the audience will be provided with a bed of their own to climb into, as well as a printed copy of the text of the performance, enabling them [if they wish] to read along with the performer, echoing the child’s experience of reading/looking at a text being read aloud by someone else.

377 BEDTIME STORIES & SONGS examines the experience of sleep, and the ways in which our sleep-lives (and the physical/ psychic circumstances that underlie them) are subsequently configured in memory and in language, and participate in the project of the construction of the larger narrative(s) of our lives.

The piece takes the form of a loosely-ordered and fragmentary series of attempts at a discursive interrogation of the performer’s personal sleep-history (where/how/with whom).

This material is set against a parallel process of commentary drawn from various sources—primarily extended extracts from Samuel Pepy’s famous (and famously explicit) 17th-century diary [with its hypnotically recurring phrase “…And so to bed”], but also

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This night-long recounting of episodic autobiographical sleep narratives began at 10 PM, and ended at sunrise.

NOTE 1. The text contains significant sexually explicit material.

2. The piece runs for approximately 8 uninterrupted hours.

3. The gallery can only accommodate 35 beds.

4. These beds, though small, can be shared, if you’d like to sign up with a partner.

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Day02

Doug Fishbone Duration: 40 mins

The live performance uses a range of popular imagery sourced from the internet. Fishbone has come up with a new and innovative form of story-telling that sits strangely at the crossroads between high and low, leading one critic to describe him as a “stand-up conceptual artist”. Book covers, national flags, photographs of war, personalities ranging from Einstein and Gandhi to Ali G, restaurants, food, transport systems, propaganda posters are projected in unlikely juxtapositions, contextualized by a live narration by the artist. Humour is used to offer a scathing comment on consumerism, science, politics, warfare and social issues.

His work weaves complex visual and narrative tapestries that recycle the imagery of the mass-media, satirizing many of the outrages and excesses of the contemporary moment in the process.

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khojlive08

DAY

03

Thursday, 27 March, 2008 11:30-1:30pm TaLK & worKsHoP

by Live Art UK and Live Art Development Agency, UK Venue

12:00-3:30pm

7:00pm Onwards

oPen sPace & Video screenings @ the Hub

PerFormances by

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003

Art maHaraJ & Mrs. manmeeT Ashmina ranJIT ingridMwangiroberTHuTTer Mehr JaVed varsha naIr

DAY03

School of Arts & Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi 110067

Venue

Anant Art Gallery F 213 – B, Lado Sarai New Delhi – 110030

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Day03

Artmaharaj & Mrs.Manmeet Title: Hammam Mein Hum Sab Nangey Hain, par yeh Hammam Hai Yahan/ We are all naked in this bath-ritual and it is here.

Duration: 2 hrs ongoing

This performance is a sequel to Hammam Mein Hum Sab Nangay Hai/Par Ye Hammam Hai Kahan? (We are all naked in this bath-ritual but where is this bath?) performed at the Khoj Studios in 2005. During that performance, artists Shantanu Lodh and Manmeet Singh invited the audience to draw/write on their bodies in an attempt to reclaim the naked human form from ascribed tags of sexuality/erotic/ sensual etc

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Day03

Ashmina Ranjit Title: Tamas: The Darkness Duration: 13 mins

The performance Tamas: The Darkness examines the present national scenario suspended between hope and despair, light and darkness, jyoti and tamas. The performance raises important questions about some of our ‘famed’ national values and characteristics such as honesty, trustworthiness and simplicity.

It impels us to ask troubling questions concerning the status of a subject and a citizen in a modern nation-state (specifically, Nepal).

The violence that fear wrecks on the subconscious heart, mind and soul is often so destructive that it takes generations to wear off. That is why we are told that the poor bird cannot survive if it is set free. Just as we hear that slaves would not know how to fend for themselves without their master’s guidance; that a state and its people are similarly doomed without a king; and so on.

My concern is neither about the restrained stage nor the freed state, but that space where one’s anxiety overwhelms one’s integrity, one’s dignity, even one’s existence. Community, its essence and its collective power, are the forces that drive me to create. For me love, social justice, equality, freedom and our rights as human beings, living in societies, countries, and the world at large are the most important aspects of life.

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Day03

IngridMwangi RobertHutter Title: Fragility of Life Duration: 30 mins

The theme of the work is the human condition; the intrinsic fragility of human existence. The performance reflects on the body as being an extremely vulnerable life support, subject to injury, change and death.

At the same time, the remarkable qualities of natural processes, such as coming into life and continuous growth are some of the issues that are acknowledged.

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Day03

Mehr Javed Title: Breath Duration: 2 hrs ongoing

Mehr Javed’s performances explore the notions of intimacy and familiarity, which are intrusive, awkward and often incapacitating, especially in situations of co-existence. In a performance that lasted over two hours, Javed brought into sharp focus that act which all living beings take most for granted- breathing.

Sitting in a chair in the midst of a chalk circle, Javed breathed through a gas mask with a pair of goat lungs attached to it. As she breathed in and out, each breath was recorded on a mechanical counter, the clicking of which mimicked the sound of the beads of a rosary.

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Day03

Varsha Nair Title: Point 33, Flux Duration: 3hrs ongoing

“All in flux again. I pack and move. I look around and amid the uncertainty, my eyes come to a rest on faint traces. The shadowy outlines left by furniture and images that were here just a moment ago slowly start to dissolve. Empty yet filled they gaze back, accentuating the positive and negative, and the cloistered space in-between. Adapting to a new place means memorizing yet another map. The boxes are not all unpacked, perhaps they never will be. Limitations make things possible, four walls of a small room, a pool of light, fragile frames that my grandmother had sewn from cherished bits of cloth to adorn the sacred, and a gift of rock salt for luck in the new home.”

Varsha Nair has done a series of works relating to point 33. Taking the 32 points of a compass that point outward and in different directions, she presents point 33 as pointing in the direction within us.

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khojlive08

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04

Friday, 28 March, 2008 11:30-1:30pm The Place and Possibilities of Live Art in Commercial

Galleries moderated by Live Art UK and Live Art Development Agency, UK Venue

Vadhera Art Gallery D-178, Okhla Phase 1, New Delhi – 110048, Tel: +91 11 65474005

OPEN SPACE & Video Screenings @ the Hub

7:00pm Onwards

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003

PERFORMANCES BY

Boris Nieslony Inder Salim Monali Meher Sushil Kumar

Day04

12:00-3:30pm

VENUE

Palette Art Gallery 14, Golf Links New Delhi 110003

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Day04

Boris Nieslony

the “natural right” (habeas corpus act) of a human being to live unscathed and the political claims of a “right” to kill in the name of laws, rules and rituals.

Out of which motives do humans, institutions and governments claim to have the right to kill humans, or groups of humans?

Title: Koan, Daily Life Plot – In foreign Tongues Duration: 40 mins

During this performance, the photos make me transcend into a condition of complete speechlessness and lead me into a hay-wiring, intense vacuum. I am exposing myself to this fact, emotionally extreme and reaction-less.

“I am forced to give, what I don’t own.

I am without terms.

Riches of empty hands.”

Walls, rocks, objects, dead birds and especially plants and trees are triggers for gestures and lingual utterances that do not refer to any existing language and its sensual references. They are “direct translations” of deep physical and psychic sediments that do not allow any reference to structures of daily communication.

This communication could be defined as “pre-cultural”, and it exists within and between all cultures. The “direct translation” is immediate and sudden. The degree of the un-transmittable is defined by the extent of its very specific emotional depth. All cultures are known to “talk in angelic tongues”. The communication is basically humane.

“Talking in foreign Tongues” reduces the timed impulse between the perception and is de-uttering into the shortest possible time-unit/a nano-unit, and opens up the delineation of a very specific field of energy and another form of time.

The choice of photos, depicting murdered and abused persons, for this performance, derives from an intense occupation with death and especially with legal questions surrounding it: the collision of

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After a while, I pick up a sheet of white, unmarked paper for each photo and start to tell a story based on the photo. From a state of total reactionlessness, I jump into an activity, projecting life as a performative gesture onto the empty sheet; I am completely the fiction of a life and an encounter that has taken place, that could have been possible. That happens NOW, from one person to the next one, until complete mental exhaustion defines the end of the performance. (Translated by Sibyll Kalff) Performance Map There are as many events that constitute performance art as there are definitions. However, it is not possible to understand the definitions without their cultural/political/religious/historical/ personal backgrounds. Thus, a map developed within a contextual understanding of artists, artistic events and publications is of great importatnce. The Context of Performance Art is a map (also in the sense of a picture of space) which has been created over the past 4-5 decades by performance artist/organizer/teacher Boris Nieslony (Cologne, Germany). Not without its predecessors, the organizations A.S.A. European and E.P.I. Zentrum were organizing series of peformance-festivals, exhibitions and conferences thorugh several

years, creating an enormous amount of specific documentation. This massive documentation was used by the artist in creating this unique map. Instead of manifestation-like definitions, Boris Nieslony and A.S.A. European have been trying to demonstrate the plurality and multilateral nature of performance art by organizing the information about it into a system, thereby placing it into an artistic context.

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Day04

Inder Salim Title:MOCHI KI DUKAN, KAMLESH KI RASOI (Cobbler’s shop, Kamlesh’s Kitchen) Duration: 40 mins

Inder Salim enacted an auction within the white cube of a gallery. The objects on sale were photographs of his neighbourhood mochi (cobbler).

The photographs documented the life of Suraj and his wife Kamlesh who live in a rented room with their family of four children and a grandchild. The live auction of the photographs conducted by the artist was aimed at raising money that could be given to the cobbler. Suraj and Kamlesh were present at the event and were seated in large ceremonial chairs, while the auction proceedings were conducted.

The performance is attempted as a critique of the exploitative potential of photography that is circulated within the specific context of the commercial art market.

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Day04

Monali Meher Title: You are in my territory Duration: 2-3 hrs ongoing

The performance attempts to reach out and reconstruct a bridge of dialogue by acknowledging changes that occur over time. Monali’s performance attempts to give “shape to memory and evoke the past through enactments.” Using objects as props, Monali refers to ritualistic cycles of destruction and renewal. The past is invoked as a marker of time; in this the recording and replaying of time-frames allows her to juxtapose real time with mediated time. She uses the notion of constant transformation to challenge the idea of repetition.

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Day04

Sushil Kumar Title: Candle (An interactive performance art proposition) Duration: 30 mins

An open-ended performative proposition with multiple metonymical connections, meanings and contexts, which shares memories, experiences, conflicts in new global situations, conditions and circumstances. The performance is an open invitation to the audience to perform an active role in order to break the hegemony and hierarchy implicit in passive viewership.

Set in a small intimate space, the performance had the artist’s bare body set on a wooden seat with a lighted candle in his mouth. A photograph lay on the floor under his stretched legs.

The artist attempted to read a text projected on a wall, in the process dropping the lit candle from his mouth. The audience was to participate in the performance by re-lighting the candle and inserting it in the artist’s mouth.

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khojlive08

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05

Saturday, 29 March, 2008 11:30-1:30pm symposium Venue

Vadhera Art Gallery D-178, Okhla Phase 1, New Delhi – 110048, Tel: +91 11 65474005

afternoon session Venue

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003

6:00pm Onwards PerFormances by

Neha cHoKsI Reza aFIsIna Ray LangenbacH Sarnath banerJee Steven coHen

DAY05

2:00-4:00pm

Venue

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003

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Day05

Neha Choksi Title: Petting Zoo Duration: 2 hrs.

Petting Zoo, a video and live performance piece, involved the anesthetization of the artist and four farm animals. Visitors could pet the same animals milling around the completely sedated artist, while videos showing the anesthetization of each accompanied the live performance. The videos exploit the handheld home-video format to create a forced familial commonality between humans and animals—specifically, two goats, one sheep, a donkey, and the artist—as they submit to anesthesia and the subsequent loss of consciousness.

Richard Orange had the following words to share when he heard about the piece, “There’s an intimacy in willingly allowing yourself to be unconscious in the presence of others. There’s an intimacy with allowing yourself to be ‘petted’: laying yourself down and open

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to another’s touch. But both these kinds of intimacy make no sense in a public space like a gallery—it’s absurd, impossible. The two also contradict each other—there can be no intimacy if one party is insensible, absent emotionally and unconscious. But I think what made me think and talk about the piece so much is more basic—a sort of enjoyment of the humour in all its absurd contradiction. It teases your moral boundaries. It’s crazy to anesthetize yourself, and sedating goats, sheep and donkeys is funny and just plain wrong. Somehow, rendering such wily, stubborn beasts insensible is treating them like humans. Seeing them stumbling around under the influence reminds us of when we’ve been in similar states, makes us more conscious of the animal’s consciousness, that they, like us, have minds to lose.”

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Day05

Ray Langenbach Title: Night Work Duration: 30 mins

Originally from Boston, living and working in Kuala Lumpur, Langenbach “performs theory,” focusing on cognitive phenomena and propaganda. The “performance” saw Langenbach sitting at a desk and reading out texts dealing with Socratic philosophy from a computer before him.

During the performance, a couple of people from the audience began to get distracted, one even telling Langenbach, in Hindi, that his performance did not make any sense and wondered why the audience was even sitting listening to him. Langenbach continued reading, even as most of the audience squirmed uncomfortably in their seats. The performance came to an abrupt end with Langenbach walking away. One of the members of the audience climbed on to his desk and conducted a brief puppet performance.

As the credits were projected on the screen, it was understood that Langenbach’s performance included five other “performers”; the disruptions were a part of the work.

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Day05

Sarnath Banerjee Title: A Retrospective Reflection

In this age of the amateur, the artist can put his finger in many pies and pose as an “expert”. Meddling with science, medicine, media, economics, public policy, sociology, anthropology, he imagines that he can extend the frontiers of knowledge.

In order to be an expert, one has to spend many years in rigorous pursuit.

However, there is one disadvantage—the deeper you dig, the drier you become.

Additionally, you are blamed of conservatism, narrow-mindedness and tunnel vision. Enter the artist, with his or her superficial grip on things, posturing as an “expert”.

In the same spirit, I, who barely understood the medium of graphic novels jumped to theatre and sound design. With the confidence of an amateur I thought that I could push the envelope for all three. And this too, I would achieve without taking off my clothes or cutting myself in various places.

Failure was inevitable. But according to Prof Saxena’s Chart of Optimised Hindu Way of Life, behind every success are forty-three failures. So there is still hope.

Hope, because the intentions were good. Telling stories in different ways but still adhering to the rules of oral tradition. Creating another space for dispensing narrative within the mainstream. Bringing back the oral.

My performance is a heretic juxtaposition of theatre, graphic novel imagery, sound and projections to tell stories of contemporary relevance.

Awkward and out of place, just the way I like it.

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Day05

Steven Cohen Title: Dancing Inside Out

“There’s no business like Shoah business like no business I know.”1 It is difficult for me to dare to speak, but even more difficult to remain silent. To make secrets public is to enter into a very dangerous relationship of confidence with the public.

Taking dance to its extreme, Dancing Inside Out has at its heart, a profound confrontation of opposites...the contradictions inherent between reality and imagination, intimate and public zones, pride and shame, genocide and survival, the macabre and the ordinary, to be proudly Jewish and simultaneously strongly anti-Zionist.

Dancing Inside Out is about the pain of being human and the joy of being alive ... and, like our own lives, it is a complete/incomplete experiment.

Some notes on Dancing Inside Out in Delhi: Although the work is often positioned as ‘dance’, for me it is live visual art which deals with the outward manifestation of an inward state through the movement of a body which is so heavily costumed (or alarmingly naked) that the vocabulary of expression is redefined. Dancing Inside Out for instance, makes use of many of the conventions of theatre (make-up, lighting, music, etc) as well as projections which are produced in the moment by investigating the orifices of my body with the use of a dildo camera. These beautiful and forceful images of the eyes, the inside of the mouth, the urethra,

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the anus ... are set against a speech by Hitler denouncing the Jewish body; the resultant effect is political rather than sexual or erotic.

Often with a work that takes place on a stage or in a museum, I also include an element of a live public intervention relating to the subject matter of the piece. Dancing Inside Out ends with a five minute segment of me filmed in Lyon, France outside the Museum of Deportation and Resistance. I am wearing a giant Star of David on my head and an enormous magnifying glass over my penis. When the magnifying glass reflects, we see nothing ... when it refracts we see a giant enlargement of my circumcision ... and it is for exactly that reason I constructed the costume. The actual physical space I inhabit is what was formerly the Gestapo headquarters, the place where people who were found in the streets and who had Judaic features but no identification papers were taken for interrogation before being deported. The genitals of the men were immediately examined and a circumcision was the beginning of a quick route to death. I based my dance around a French Flag in a public courtyard and expressly to denounce the fact that France (the Vichy government) collaborated with the Nazis and often exceeded the demands of their ‘occupiers’.

It is for this reason I would not be influenced to modify the work for an Indian audience (as I was encouraged to), not only because the subject matter and the manner in which the work is conducted refuse compromise, but also because I had faith that the audience in India was more mature than the structures that are set up to control it. I was proved right. But the focus of the work is not to shock or to distance, but to explore with innovation and beauty, to take risks and to be original, characteristics as much Indian as mine, and very much in keeping with the spirit of the Khoj festival.

For this reason, I am exaggerating my circumcision and making evident what is hidden ... my work is often about disproportion and my tactics are often confrontational. In this case, I was arrested by the French National Police and charged with sexual exhibitionism, although that charge was later dropped. The process of being arrested violently, of being humiliated and subjected to a medical examination against my will ... and of generally being powerless in the face of an uncomprehending force of authority are an important element of my commitment to the project, as is the case in all of my work. Nothing is accidental, taken for granted or carried out in half measures.

1 Shoah is the politically correct term for Holocaust. This statement is a parody of “There’s no business like show business like no business I know”.

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06

Sunday, 30 March, 2008 12:30-3:30pm Performance Pack by Live art development agency, uK Venue

6:00pm Onwards PerFormances by

Amitesh groVer hassan KHan Maya rao Sonia KHurana Reza aFIsIna

DAY06

Alliance Française, Delhi 72 Lodi Estate, New Delhi-110003

Venue

Goethe Institut, Max Mulluer Bhavan 3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001

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Day06

Amitesh Grover Title: i Hate My Body/I Hate My Body Too Duration: 30 mins

The piece places itself at the crossroads of gender and its performance. It examines the ‘body’ within a cultural, historical and gender value system, investigating the thresholds of the ‘body’ by uncovering the myth and reality of a trans-gendered body in performance. Several personal accounts of trans-gendered persons are woven into the narrative, which rapidly moves back and forth in their performative grammar.

The piece attempts to question the conventional ways in which patriarchy is represented and depicts not only the female body, but also the male body in popular media. The body then becomes a site of contestation and the collision of various definitions of ‘gender’, as well as the ways in which we perform gender in our daily lives.

The performance unfolds in two spaces and includes a video/ object installation and a performance. The video/object piece is

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titled i Hate My Body. Images of different parts of my naked body are scattered on the floor in a top-down projection. A mini-me runs through the labyrinth of this severed body slipping, falling, halting, getting up only to fall down again. The video runs in an incessant loop.

The performance is titled I Hate My Body Too, in which a bathtub is surrounded by three vertical screens. The live performance takes place inside the tub, while live and recorded video feed is projected on the three screens. Viewers are encouraged to stand around these spaces in whatever manner they wish too, as there is no one ‘right’ way to experience the performance.

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Day06

Hassan Khan Title: INCIDENCE Duration: 60 mins

INCIDENCE is a seamless, continuous mixture of older and newer music pieces that are performed live including: lust, figure and ground, KOMPRESSOR (music based on translating sets of dreams), lamptone, G.R.A.H.A.M., beautiful music and host. The live concert is accompanied by different video sequences especially shot and edited by the artist.

‘INCIDENCE’ came at a point where I was interested in taking the work I had done with live improvisation a step further. I was looking for a suitable form through which to establish a line of communication between the improvised and compositional poles that are in constant tension in my working process. Thus, ‘INCIDENCE’ was originally conceptualized as a retrospective of sorts, gathering different tendencies in my visual and musical work over the past fifteen years, stringing them together in one myriad evolving whole. ‘INCIDENCE’ explores different impulses—the impulse towards entropy and chaos is balanced by an interest in precision and formalization.

Live improvisation using feed-backing mixers going through processor banks, live microphones and my virtual synthesizer is mixed to pre-composed sections that include work with piano, string sections, recorded percussions, the Ney flute and a variety of other instruments. These sections were produced and recorded by

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me in the studio with various musicians over the years for different purposes; some have already been used in other contexts while others had been previously discarded. For ‘INCIDENCE’, all sections have been newly mixed, edited and mastered to create a musical structure that acts as the backbone of the piece. In this layer, I deal with a logic based upon the expectations of the audience; of harmony and musical structure, of what the sounds of theses instruments evoke.

description, although I never aimed for something “disturbing” as an end in itself. I think the interest in providing a kind of hypercommunicative moment structurally leads to what could be described as both beautiful and disturbing.

-Hassan Khan

Finally, I was interested in linking this musical “power” to a visual stream of association that in some senses speaks to the act of perception itself while communicating through various visual languages. For example, in the sequence titled “beautiful music”, the intense aesthetic beauty of the gliding shots around the nocturnal urban lamps is undercut by the rough aesthetics of the cell phone images that accompany the following sequence titled “lust”. Ultimately, the whole piece aims at providing the audience with an engaged experience that is not reducible to any single explanation.

‘INCIDENCE’ aims at invoking the different registers of the visual, moving image. From the seductive power of the cinematic image, to the recognition factor of the moving camera in the urban sphere, other images are more abstract, constructed out of points and lines producing basic geometrical shapes. These registers are not used to build one larger mega-narrative or argument but rather a dispersed (not fragmented) experience where the work continuously changes without breaking down—holding the audience at that moment of suspense, for me, is incredibly charged and intense because it is a moment of heightened awareness and communication; it is a space where the audience absorbs forms without having to pre-read them. A moment that is sometimes exactly between being fully awake and deeply asleep.

I have been informed that the work has been described as “beautifully disturbing” and find this perhaps not such a bad

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Day06

Maya Krishna Rao Title: Are You Home Lady Macbeth?

Camera: Amitesh Grover Stage assistant: Varun Sharma

The performance was a playful meeting of Lady Macbeth, Kathakali and a camera.

Lady M has a secret life behind the curtain where we may only partially see her. She would like to be a grand character and meet her audience as other Kathakali characters do, but despite herself, she sometimes meets us from behind the curtain, complete with all her ‘toys’.

She veers between being a witch and a housewife; her clothes iron may be filled with steam or blood! At times she herself is confused about who she actually is…

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Sonia Khurana Title: don’t touch me when I start to feel safe Duration: 2 hrs

Don’t touch me when I start to feel safe I would like to invite you to my place I would like to invite you to share a glass of wine you may have wine or water or nothing, as you like you may do what you like you may say what you like I may not speak very much, but would like you to speak talk to me, tell me what you like I will listen and I will look together for a brief moment would you like to come?

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Day06

Reza Afisina Title: The Manifestation Itself I The Manifestation Itself - II The Manifestation Itself - III

The performance (performed at three locations) consisted of three chapters of welcoming and easily recognizing the value of being oneself. As the audience entered the space, each could have his/ her own “prize” for being recognizable, like realizing the value of new friendship and understanding. The performance aimed to resonate that happy feeling and was the artist’s tribute to the audience.

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Artists’

Biographies

BORIS NIESLONY Boris Nieslony is recognized as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art, presenting his work around the world. Born in Cologne, Nieslony has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realize group performance projects, and ASA, a foundation for a self-organizing a network of performance artists and theorists.

INGRIDMWANGIROBERTHUTTER IngridMwangiRobertHutter uses experimental vocal expression and body movement, creating live action within video scenarios.

The theme of the work is the intrinsic fragility of human existence.

MwangiHutter reflects on the body as being an extremely vulnerable life support, subject to injury, change and death.

STEVEN COHEN Steven Cohen is a performance artist and mixed media artist from South Africa. Traditionally trained in the liberal arts, Steven’s

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work has mainly centered on issues of Queer theory. He has performed and exhibited extensively since 1997.

REZA AFISINA Born in Indonesia, Reza Afisina studied film and has been showing performance and installation works at home and abroad. Using his own body as media, Reza explores the impossibility of representing pain as the effect of external and systemic violence. His work is about compliance with religion and a society of media which imposes compelling forces of surveillance on individuals. Reza is an active member of Ruangrupa and works collaboratively with artists in both Indonesia and overseas.

HASSAN KHAN Cairo based artist Hassan Khan works with image, sound, text, space and situation. Selected solo shows include Gezira Art Center, Cairo (1999), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2004), A Space Gallery, Toronto (2005), Gasworks, London (2006) and Le Plateau, Paris (2007). Khan has also participated in the Istanbul (2003), Seville (2006), Sydney (2006), Thessaloniki (2007) and Contour (2007) biennales amongst other international group shows. As a musician he has composed soundtracks for theatre and performed his own pieces in venues including Melkweg (Amsterdam), Lydmar (Stockholm), Babylon (Istanbul), Whitechapel (London), Cairo Jazz Club (Cairo), KBB (Barcelona), Strange Fruit (Beirut), SESC Sao Paolo (Sao Paolo) Podewil and HAU3 (Berlin) 205 Club (New York) and Point Ephemere (Paris).

Khan is also published widely in both Arabic and English.

VARSHA NAIR Born in Kampala, Varsha Nair’s solo and collaborative works have been exhibited internationally and in Thailand where she lives. Exploring issues of home and displacement, Nair continues to document the changing environment of Baroda where she grew up. She has presented at Saturday Live, Tate

Modern (2006), and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow and Perth (2006, 2005, 2004). Editorial board member of the web art journal Ctrl+P, since 1997 Nair has also curated and coorganized art events and been invited as speaker at various international symposia.

ASHMINA RANJIT Ashmina Ranjit, a citizen of Nepal, is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Ranjit’s works are designed to increase awareness of crucial ongoing social and political issues of marginalized communities. She works with groups of women, children and artists using a wide range of media: drawing, painting, video, sound, installation, and performance. Ranjit’s works also focuses on social injustice, human rights violations and war in her country and around the world. She holds a MFA from Columbia University Graduate School of Art. She also holds a BFA from University of Tasmania, Australia as well as from Tribhuwan University, Nepal. Ranjit has traveled and exhibited widely in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the USA. She lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal.

MEHR JAVED A young visual artist from Lahore, Mehr Javed’s work spans various media. Her recent performances explore the notions of intimacy and familiarity which are intrusive, awkward and often incapacitating, especially in situations of co-existence.

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE LANQUETIN JC Lanquetin is a scenographer and an artist based in France.

He teaches at the Strasbourg Decorative School of Art. He has run many scenographic projects around the world including in France, Cameroon, DRC, and Syria. He has worked for theatre (Philip Boulay), contemporary dance (Faustin Linyekula, Opiyo Okach), and performances (Eleonore Hellio & Joachim Montessuis).

DA MOTUS! DA MOTUS! (da!=give, offer! / motus=movement) was founded 1987 in Fribourg and has performed at international festivals and other major cultural events in more than 140 cities of 34 countries. Its pieces are eclectic and stand for a constant search of artistic renewal, on stage as well as outdoor in specific sites.

Da Motus cannot be defined as theatre, neither as dance, nor as any conventional form of body art. The performance en vie ... en ville (alive ... in town) plays with the city environment.

MONALI MEHER India born Monali received ‘Unesco-Aschberg’ Residency, Vienna in 1998. An immense necessity to work with body emotions, led her to her first performance, Reflect, A personal window display, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai with the statement “Nothing is permanent & it’s nature’s law”. In 2000-2001, Monali did a research residency at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2006, she went on to perform at the Tate modern, London, Dadao International Performance Festival, Beijing, “Sinop Biennale”, Turkey, “Nederlands Een” exhibition, Museum Gouda. In 2007, she performed at “National Review on Live Art”, Glasgow, where she was invited for the panel discussion, “Performance Art and Other Histories”. She lives and works in the Netherlands.

NIKHIL CHOPRA Nikhil has been working in the medium of live art since 2002, when he created his first character, Sir Raja. Sir Raja I (2002) and Sir Raja II (2003) were performed in Columbus, Ohio. His video, film and photo works have been exhibited in several group shows. Nikhil studied at M. S. University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda from 1997-99. He completed his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, in 2001, and an MFA in painting from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in 2003.

He returned to India in 2005 and currently lives and works in Mumbai.

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INDER SALIM Inder Salim is a multi disciplinary artists working with performance, photography, video and poster making. His works are often subtly loaded with political thought. He writes poetry and maintains a regular blog: indersalim.livejournal.com. Earlier performances include the amputation of his finger piece on the ‘dead’ Yamuna river which flows through Delhi, as also Shit of the Other at the Khoj Studios. He is the recipient of a Sarai fellowship for performance, 2007.

NEHA CHOKSI Neha Choksi received her MA in Classics from Columbia University and her BAs in Greek and in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. In her work, Neha often makes use of plants, animals and herself as cultural and emotional constructs to explore ideas concerning transience and material attachments. Her art ranges in all media and has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Sydney, Istanbul and Mumbai, and as part of the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.

AMITESH GROVER Amitesh Grover has conceptualized, designed and directed 15 Live Art pieces so far. His shows have been staged at Delhi, London, Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune. He is an NSD alumnus and was awarded Charles Wallace scholarship in 2005. He completed his MA degree in Live and Recorded Media from Wimbledon College of Art, University of Art London, UK in 2006. At present, he is a visiting faculty member at NSD and a freelance live artist.

ZULEIKHA & MANISH CHAUDHARI Zuleikha and Manish have been working together for the last nine years. Their work is defined by the fragmentation of the linear narrative structure of performance. An experiential relationship to the text that is produced by structuring an environment where the performer can create a physical language which translates text into a series of visual registers.

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REHAAN ENGINEER Rehaan trained as an actor at the R.A.D.A., graduating in 2000, and currently works as a director and actor, often with ‘the industrial theatre co.’, which he helped found in 2001 in Mumbai.

SARNATH BANERJEE Sarnath Banerjee studied Biochemistry and later received an MA in Image and communication from Goldsmiths College. He wrote graphic novels, Corridor and Barn Owl’s wondrous Capers, on the scandals of eighteenth century Calcutta, both published

by Penguin India. He has received several awards such as the MacArthur fellowship, India foundation for Arts, SARAI, Egide bursary in Paris, fellowship of Institute of Advanced Studies, Budapest and was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Sarnath runs Phantomville Books that exclusively publishes graphic novels, and is part of Pao Collective, a group of Indian comic artists.

SONIA KHURANA Delhi based artist Sonia Khurana has an MA from Royal College of Art, London. In 2002, she participated in a twoyear Research residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Over the years she has emerged as one of the known faces of contemporary cutting edge work in video and performance. Sonia’s art practice embraces areas in between video, elements of performance, text photography, drawing and installation. Her performative installations, images and performance-based videos are visually simple and understated. She is interested in exploring mainly two areas of experience: interiority, or embodied experience and the dynamics of identity. Sonia travel and exhibits widely; most recent participations have been at the Newark Museum, Kunstmuseum Bern, Rose Museum, Boston, Film Festival, Rome, ‘Performa 2007’, through Gallery Elga Wimmer, New York, Brooklyn Museum (for ‘Global Feminism’) Davis Museum,

Wellselly, Daimler Chrysler Contemporary, Berlin, Arario Beijing, a solo show titled: ‘Still/Moving Image’ at the Gellerie Phillipe Jousse in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London and Fotomuseum in Winterthur.

MAYA KRISHNA RAO Delhi based artist Maya Krishna Rao works with theatre and performance in different ways. She creates shows from improvising with live sound and camera. She does stand up comedy and also uses participatory theatre as a means of teaching and learning in the classroom. Her shows have travelled extensively and she has also been invited to create collaborative shows in different countries. Maya’s training in Kathakali is a source of inspiration in her work.

FRED KOENIG French artist Fred Koenig combines photography, video art and performances in his art practice. Based in Paris, he has done a series of performances called the little pink series playing with gender, love, hope and a keen desire to find where one belongs, in a style that can only be described as falling between Contemporary Conceptual High Art and Total Trash.

He is currently working as a video artist for theatre plays and a contemporary dance company called The Voodoo Divas. artmaharaj & mrs. Manmeet Shantanu Lodh (artmaharaj) and Manmeet Singh (mrs.

Manmeet) are interdisciplinary artists who often work and perform as a collective. Their art practice is reflective of the subject of family, relationships with colleagues as a social reflection of complex negotiations and notions of femininity. They work across mediums such as photography and installation and have been engaged in public art performances. They have exhibited in Delhi and Vienna.

LANGENBACH Originally from Boston, living and working in Kuala Lumpur and Helsinki, Langenbach “performs theory”, focusing on cognitive phenomena and propaganda. His video works, installations and performances have been presented around the world. He has published in Art Asia Pacific, Artlink, Asian Art News, Afterimage, Performance Research and Performance Paradigms. He served as Singapore Editorial consultant for World Art, and is on the advisory boards of Forum On Contemporary Arts and Society (FOCAS), and Broadsheet, and his work appears in several collections, including the Oxford Dictionary of Performance (2004). Langenbach is Professor of Art Research and Theory at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art, and Visitng Professor at the Finnish Theatre Academy. In Malaysia he serves as Co-Head of the Department of Performance + Media, Sunway University College, and is Senior Fellow at the School of Art, University of Western Sydney.

DOUG FISHBONE Born in New York City in 1969, Doug Fishbone is an American artist living and working in London. He earned an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2003. He is perhaps best known for his project 30,000 Bananas—a huge mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square and later given away free to the audience—in October 2006.

Fishbone’s video and performance work was included in the British Art Show 6 in 2005-2006, a national touring exhibition held every five years to feature the best in contemporary British art. He had his first major solo project at Gimpel Fils in London in October 2006, and performed in London’s Hayward Gallery in February 2007 and at the ICA in London in July 2007. Fishbone was commissioned to create a video for the Beck’s Fusion programme in Trafalgar Square in September 2007, and was voted one of the Future Greats of the art world in the annual survey of the Art Review 2007. He participated in the exhibition “Laughing in a Foreign Language” which opened at the

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Hayward Gallery in January 2008, and staged a performance at the Southbank Centre in March of the same year.

SUSHIL KUMAR Sushil Kumar’s has been a long running radical voice in the realm of performance art in Delhi. Taking inspiration from absurdist philosophy, Sushil takes great delight in nonsense, at the same time successfully playing in the realms of our histories and memories. Claiming a subaltern position within the mainstream artist circle, Sushil Kumar lives his ideology performing in the ‘theatre of the absurd.’

COLLABORATION The Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organization for Live Art in the UK working to support and develop the Live Art sector, its practices, discourses, infrastructure and audiences. The Live Art Development Agency offers a portfolio of resources, professional development schemes, projects and initiatives for the support and development of Live Art practice and discourse in London, the UK and internationally. The Agency works with practitioners and organisations on curatorial initiatives; offers opportunities for research, training, dialogue and debate; provides practical information and advice; and develops new ways of increasing popular and critical awareness of Live Art. The following individuals travelled to Delhi for KHOJLIVE08 to represent Live Art UK. Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine are the Directors of the Live Art Development Agency. Established in 1999 and based in the East End of London, the Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organisation for Live Art in the UK. Helen Cole Helen Cole is the Producer of Live Art and Dance at Arnolfini and has been in this post since 1998. In 2001 she established the biennial Inbetween Time Festival, Bristol, UK. She is a member of Live Art UK, Guardians of Doubt and the Experimental Theatre Consortium and has worked as an independent producer, writer and curator on numerous projects within the UK and internationally.

Tim Harrison Tim Harrison is Live Art & Dance Co-ordinator at Arnolfini in Bristol.

Having completed a PhD in Art History, he worked for Hull Time Based Arts, presenting on a range of live and technology-based commissions.

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Mark Godber Mark Godber has worked at Artsadmin since October 2000 as Artists’ Producer and Advisor. Immediately before joining Artsadmin, Mark completed an MPhil in Theatre Research at the University of Glasgow, with research focusing on performance, public art and theatre in urban spaces.

Manick Govinda Manick Govinda is Head of Artists’ Advisory Service at Artsadmin, where he developed the artists’ bursary and the Decibel Visual Arts Awards schemes. He is also a commissioning editor for [a.n] The Artists Information Company and was a Talent Scout for NESTA’s Creative Pioneers Programme. He has edited two publications for Artsadmin, Performing Difference and Research in Process (published by liveartmagazine), and was co-commissioning editor of Art for Whose Sake? published by Creative Partnerships. He was commissioning editor for Curated Space and Radical Positions, published by [a.n].

and supports the development of new performance, live and interdisciplinary arts practice by providing networking support for artists and by facilitating engagement and collaboration between practitioners nationally and internationally.

Emmy Minton Emmy Minton is the coordinator of Live Art UK. Live Art UK is the National network of Live Art Promoters in the UK. The network manages a series of projects including a critical writing initiative, touring commissions and hosts an annual networking event.

Emmy Minton is also an assistant producer for the performance company Curious and manages an arts service for street based sex workers in Hackney.

Anthony Roberts Anthony Roberts is currently director of Colchester Arts Centre in the UK. He promotes live art in this venue within a mixed programme of performance which includes theatre, jazz, folk, rock, video and film, club nights and children’s shows. He was also in the vanguard of the infamous Lurch movement in Watford in the seventies.

Garfield Allen Garfield Allen is the Artistic Director of greenroom in Manchester in the UK. Garfield believes that experimental urban theatre, dance and live art from a broad range of cultures need a wider presence to counter the stereotypes of ‘curious’ arts.

Philippa Barr Philippa Barr is the Coordinator at New Work Network (2007 – present), a national membership organisation that promotes

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Performance art at Khoj Through the Years

1998

1999

Fuji Hiroshi

Kay Hassan

Pushpamala N

Subodh Gupta

Michael Shaowanasai

From its first international workshop in 1997 to more recent international residencies devoted to performative and time-based practices, Khoj has consistently engaged with the genre of live art through its workshops, exhibitions and installations.

Song Dong

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83

84

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Lucia King

Bani Abidi

Mahabubur Rahman

Sigit Kuncoro

Marco Paulo Rolla

Reza Afisina

Sonia Khurana

Tania Bruguera

Michael Tuffery

Monali Meher

Soumyabrata Choudhury

Sovan Kumar

Pushpamala N

Smitha Cariappa

Tejal Shah

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2005 Shantanu Lodh & mrs. Manmeet

2006 Tracey Rose

Inder Salim

Alexis Bhagat

Cynthia Zaven

Himanshu Desai

Anusha Lall

Diane Torr

Oreet Ashery

Archana Hande

Goh Lee Kwang

Paolo Nazareth

Gilbert Cathy Shezad Dawood

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Marium Sohail

Anita Dube

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2007 Rajesh Mehta

Salil Zubedi

Sushil Kumar

Simon Gush

Atieq

Ni Jun & Motti Brecher

Nikhil Chopra

Atul Bhalla

Zuleikha & Manish Chaudhari

Ravi Parvathy

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Sonia Khurana

WuYe

89

Raimi Gbadamosi

2008

2009

2010

2011

Yokomono

Si Thu Than Niang

Han Bing

Anay Mann

AmiteshGrover

Sylvia Winkler & Stephan Koperl

Sujit Mallick

> 90

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SUPPoRt

khojlive08

working group:

PrImary sPonsors:

Curatorial Team Director and Curator: Pooja sood Assistant Curator & Project Manager: Hemant sreekumar & Parul wadhwa Program Team Programming of KHOJLIVE08 Hub at Alliance Française: aastha chauhan,

Venue sPonsors:

Coordinator of outreach, seminar and lectures: rohini devasher Production Team: Hemant sreekumar & sayantan maitra boka Gallery assistants at all participating galleries Administration: VP manoj, arun chhettri, ramesh bisht Space design of KHOJLIVE08 Hub at Alliance Française: asim waqif Special Thanks: Live art development agency, uK arTIsTs’ suPPorT: Photography: sandeep bali, mK saranjit

sPecIaL THanKs:

Nature Morte

Published in 2012 by

International artists’ association S-17, Khirkee Ext. New Delhi - 110017 Ph: 29545274/ 29542785 email: interact@khojworkshop.org http://khojworkshop.org Catalogue design: akshay raj singh rathore Catalogue Editors: rattanamol singh Johal & nandita Jaishankar allana Catalogue Coordinator: Latika gupta All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. © Khoj International Artists’ Association ISBN: 978-81-909761-3-8