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ECH 2022: DAY 2 SUMMARY BY SHARANYA DEEPAK
Day two starts with a recap, and I realise how much more there is to discover about the conversations I had yesterday.
This is what I like best about writing and art, the ability for cultural products to bring different conversations around; for art to evolve with the times. There is something crucial here – about creating something permanent, but not fixed.
Day two starts once again with Priyanka and Prateek welcoming the audience to the hub, and Natasha GInwala’s roundup of Day one, and what we absorbed from it. It will hit me now — about how important and difficult Ginwala’s role is here, to sponge and absorb from audience and artist, to mediate between genres, disciplines, temperaments, all the while advocating for the need for these conversations, these spaces, this art. When Natasha talks, I think about the importance of retrospect, and here too is an act of keeping something alive and relevant. The Artist as a curator, but then the curator, the mediator as the one responsible for keeping something, and the reactions around it intact.g something standing it
The first artist we hear is Brooke Garru Andrew – “Garru means Magpie in my mother’s language”, he says. Garru Andrew’s work, as Ginwala introduces, takes place in intertwined narratives, “often emerging from the mess of the “Colonial Wuba (hole)”. Garru Andrew begins and bases his presentation in language, introducing himself as an Australian Wiradjuri (Indigenous) and Celtic person. He goes on to speak about yindyamarra — a Wiradjuri concept he introduces as “respect, honour, go slow and with responsibility”, and counters the word with often used discourse-ridden terms for healing and practice, like “de-colonial”. Garru Andrew’s unapologetic use of his native tongue is moving and powerful, as it always is. Many of the artists will echo this – about how language is encompassing and imperial; and how resistance to an opressor’s tongue is constant resistance. I think of indigenous languages in India being erased into utilitarian, mercenary tongues; Tibetans disallowed from writing their scripts in school, the Irish denied from speaking their language when on their own land. Garru Andrew introduces Nirin — the manifestation of the First-Nations and artist led readership of was the 22nd Biennale of Sydney. It comes across as “Gurray” (transformation),of “Bagaray-Bang” (healing), a site for where First-Nations, indigenous artists; and Artists of colour can create, exist and take a breath.
The cultural space as one of joy feels new to me; and I am thankful to know it. In Nirin, and the artworks Garru-Andrew shows us, there is the insistence to acknowledge the stealing and plundering of indigenous lives and land; but there is also playfulness, and relaxation, and in these pictures – we see doses of good-old fun.
Next, we listen to Aqui Thami, who has created several spaces for safety and joy.Thami is an artist and organiser, whose work deals with public interventions (like A Woman Was Harassed Here) cultural production, and envisaging community led spaces. I am, like many of our generation in the country, no stranger to Thami’s work — her ability to create spaces of joy, space and comfort in spaces that need it the most has been nothing short of commendable. As Thami begins to present, she invokes Savitri Mai or Savitribai Phule, the social-reformist and activist who fought for the right for women’s education, a feat, one of the subcontinent's most important, that often goes unacknowledged in mainstream discourse. Thami’s talks about the philosophy of “doing” but also “don’t do it”, her refusal to participate in mechanisms that are oppressive and profiteering; and not in sync with what she believes and works towards. I start to think about the labour of such resistance, of that everyday and how that is often romanticised by those that do not do it. But contrary to my more dense thoughts, Aqui’s presentation moves on fluidly. She takes us to the Sister Library, which she founded in Bandra, Mumbai and is India’s first feminist-library. She wants the space to be one for the reckoning of patriarchy, but one that is accessible to everyone. It resounds with something Thami will say later — “we must all share resources, whoever we are, lots of good comes of that.”
In a simple but magical move, Thami calls the library, including it in her session, breaking the four walls of the space we sit in. The library is full of smiles and devoted glances over pages, the kids wave at us, I notice especially two of them smile widely and hurriedly get back to the books.
Thami herself is delighted to be able to see the kids, and the friendship between them is palpable. For a moment, although I cannot say this aloud, I wish I could be transported to Sister Library. While Thami talks about her work, she also brings in herself. Thami is an indigenous woman from (Kurseong) Darjeeling (“I am an indigenous woman in every cell and bone”). It is a move of great courage, to centre one’s self and a history of pain and resilience in a room full of people who she does not know — Thami stands her ground. She also narrates the position of Darjeeling, as a colony of Bengal, which resounds with what Rajbhandari and Gurung said — and how indigenous peoples’ land is taken for the pleasure of those who profit from the nation-state. In her presentation, Thami talks about her other projects, Dharavi Art Room which she co-runs with her partner Himanshu, and the Bombay Zine Fest. While DIY has become a buzzword, it is artists like Thami that keep its spirit of alternative methods alive. Herein is a rejection of industrial making; hierarchical judgements, the artist as a force that will not beckon down.
In these presentations, yesterday and today — I note something crucial. Spaces of reckoning often work towards comforting those on top of the hierarchies; there is often a notion that it is the powerful (the white, the wealthy, the dominant-caste) that need to be pandered to, and comforted. Garru-Andrew showed photographs of his curatorial productions – “now you
will see happy pictures”, he told the audience, and there they are. Artists from historically oppressed communities breaking into a smile, catching a breath, living as they deserve.
By the time we break for lunch, the room is already warm and buzzing with transformation. When we return, we listen to Tanzim Wahab — photographer, curator, researcher and lecturer. Wahab takes us through the initiatives in his home-city Dhaka that he and colleagues, allies and collectives have initiated. He introduces Paathshala; an institute wherein young people are trained and introduced to the artistic and photographic medium, something not many have access to in Bangladesh and South-Asia. He talks about “creating a ground up structure for engagements” and and he makes me think about how those like him create fluid, open-ended structures in places like Dhaka, which like many cities in South-Asia, undergoes surveillance, violence and rapid change in small frames of time. Wahab talks about merging the local with international worlds, but the focus is still on making art-spaces accessible to cities like his. Wahab’s work and that of his colleagues has a deep relationship with the street and the activities that take place in it – from everyday life, to the more congregated act of protest. As Wahab talks, this is crucial for us all, in the regime we live in today, like others before, street protest is a thing of importance and also one that is being curtailed at every bend.
In India’s last 8 years, clamping section 144 on protest has been a favourite by the government, repeatedly, scholars, activists, artists and reporters are taken into detention and disappeared for days. As if reading my mind, Wahab takes us to a slide of Shahidul Alam, perhaps my introduction into protest in Bangladesh. Alam, while perhaps one of the better known, is only one of the artists who regularly suffers surveillance and arrest. Here we are, South-Asians divided by national borders, but in the act of resisting regimes and mourning the futures of our contexts, all in all, very much the same. While “South-Asia '' is often used reductively and without usefulness, I find it important to communicate across the borders drawn for it, and hearing about Dhaka, seeing it in form in Wahab’s photos moves me. I also see how these festivals and artworks connect with the city and exist within it. To bring dissenting art into a capital city’s centre; to challenge those that sit on tall pedestals by confronting them with the horrors they enable – this is of crucial importance. I comment that while brave, artists must not be normalised for bravery, just like reporters, writers, poets; artist’s labour of resilience must not be erased. Wahab’s work makes me think of street-theatre in Delhi, of Safdar Hashmi, and how most dissenting discourse is produced in the world outside, and how scenes from the street are given little space when we define democracy and rights.
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During Wahab’s presentation, questions of representation; of depicting indigenous womens’ bodies began to arise. Important questions and criticisms are raised by Thami and
Rajbhandari, about why indigenous womens’ bodies, especially those that suffer objectification and violence, are depicted to larger publics. Consent between subject and lens-based artist is a conversation that has to be had often, and especially in areas that have undergone repetitive violence, as Rajbhandari and Thami point out, consent does not have full agency, and cannot be considered the same as consent from a place that exists with their rights intact.
These conversations will populate the panel, and give rise to brave, and transformational answers. Here is the moment, where the last two days have led to reckonings; where artists confront others; and a world that is broken, and damaged, but not - as Ginwala will remind us - beyond repair.
A lot is discussed, and the audience comes in with their conjectures. Ginwala asks the artists about sovereignty, and they discuss it — Thami says, that under the Indian nation-state, with its violent assimilation of lands and peoples, sovereignty for communities like hers, spread across nations does not exist (but I see that though her work, and that of Rajbhandari and Gurung, and Garru-Andrew, they forge it for themselves and their people). Gurung adds to the conversation - that as artists, and people that work with communities — “ we also maintain sovereignty, ethics, we don’t make life vulnerable for those we work with”. He asks the question that is central to sovereignty — who gets the benefit of cultural products, and the things being created?
The panel continues, and in the end, I ask about if artists and curators are aware of urban shifts that occur because of festivals, about the world, the “regular” world, for the lack of a better world, and how sites of art interact at them. Malatsie answers me and enlightens me that in the Global South, festivals and initiatives are taken by collectives, artists, those without elite resources and power, unlike in the North; where countries and tycoons benefit off art. I love this, I have not thought of it before; of how artists and collectives, while considered peripheries because of the lack of resources, are also a challenge to those that rule the world. I think about what my colleague Jonathan Nunn once said about “there being great power in the margins”. And the centre is not really the centre, Malatsie’s comment reminds me.
I admire Malatsie’s ability to think with clarity, which later I tell her about and she calls back to her process of “listening”. Everything requires listening, and listening requires silence, she says. “That’s why, when we have talked, it is important to sit with it, not restless. Not rush towards hopeful solutions that simply drift off.”. It is a fitting message with which to leave, that transformation is constant, but also bound with friction, it is enormous and amorphous, and cannot be curtailed; an must be observed. “I believe it, to sit with thoughts and conversations, and sit with silence” Malatsie had said, and then added, jokingly – “But nobody listens to me!”.
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ECH 2022: DAY 1 SUMMARY BY SHARANYA DEEPAK
As I walk into the room for my first day at Experimenter Curator’s Hub, I become innately aware of sharing a closed space – for the first time in years – with people, and ideas I did not yet know. Through the pandemic, the way we navigated space changed, domestic spaces turned into sanctified spaces, or entrapping entities, depending on who we are. To bristle among others feels daunting at first. The air is plump the way it is when collaborations are at the brink of realisation, and soon, I settle into the calm of other people’s ideas, feeling my own (thankfully, finally) silence.
In his opening address, Prateek Raja calls for the need for us to take a ‘pause’, in the transformations of the world, in the tight clenches of political upheaval, he advocates the need to be able to stop, think, reflect. This sets the tone for the day; and I think of the Sandra Cisneros poem, wherein she makes the case for newness and renewal despite it all— “This season of my escape, I will push my foot down on the accelerator of life, vamonos vobiscum, I will laugh daily and in liberal doses to balance the bitter compost called the news.”
After an introduction by Natasha Ginwala, the hub begins with Kabelo Malatsie, who traces the year 1987, the year she was born, and the political and social occurrences that were tucked into the year (Andy Warhol Dies in New York, ). Her presentation begins with the song “This Train” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the singer from whom multiple white musicians stole melodies and lyrics. Malatsie’s act of getting the room to listen to “This Train” creates a twofold effect: of the calming harmony of listening together and the more jolting necessity of thought. Who makes room for art, along with who gets the credit for it? Malatsie also talks about what she calls “inheritance”, the mechanics and systems of museums, mostly colonial and Western, that curators inherit. She aims to question and critique these, she says, and evokes the process of “listening” as paying focussed attention to one’s thought.
We listen to Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung, who take the audience through a rich array of contextual references about their native Nepal; its recent histories, its devoted activists, civil conflicts and forced movement and marginalisation of indigenous people by the Brahmanical nation-state. Rajbhandari and Gurung’s work encompass the many ways that indigenous people in Nepal encounter an onslaught by neo-colonial expansions, their work reflects on how indigenous Tharu and Gurung peoples, among many other indigenous communities, are displaced, their lives and traditional systems of language, art and culture threatened by expansion that underlies the formation and profiteering of nation-states. “Under the pretext of modernisation”, Gurung says, when he talks about how tourism bases itself on the theft of land (much like India’s projects in Kashmir and Adivasi land); and Rajbhandari illuminates the resilience of oral, indigenous narratives and arts; the “multiple cosmologies'' in which everyday and constant resistance to these oppressions exist. Gurung and Rajbhandari contest the monolithic, inaccurate way Nepali histories are known in India, and when Rajbhandari asks — “Can we imagine a future where indigenous peoples live freely, and without surveillance on their own land?”;she creates what is needed in the cultures of solidarity – weaves that run between indigenous peoples everywhere, connections in the subcontinent with deeper, more nuanced throats.
When Ade Darmawan and Iswanto Hartono present their collective, ruangrupa, I am extremely heartened, the way someone feels when they meet a person at a party who loves their favourite band. I am not a regular at galleries, and I am not familiar with art in exhibitions; but here is something I do know and love when I see it — healthy anarchy, the spirit of kindness and inclusion that comes with real, creative, unfiltered punk. The redefining and creation of a space is the artist’s fundamental resistance to regimentation, wherein the artist does not succumb to the banality of capital-driven life, does not just occupy space but creates new models of it. In the lumbung model that the collective envisions, states of equality are pondered and attempted, herein collectivity is a practice but also the work itself. In a world of a thousand imagined utopias driven by capital and hierarchy, all this feels refreshing. To me, an artist’s role is to disrupt the way the world around them has accepted their fate; to extend, beyond their own niches and circles, the possibilities that people think lie within reach. I think of this amorphous organism that ruangrupa has created, they have realised the classic triumph of “Show, don’t tell”.
When we listen to Ashok Sukumaran towards the end of the day’s end, he talks about watching the watched, “archive or be archived”. Sukumaran thinks of “another dimension” – that of technology and surveillance; he thinks of archiving as a move of claiming power. It is a fitting transition – from thinking of land-colonisation, to creating an artist’s democratic idyll, to developing an awareness of the ways that we are being denoted, marked and watched at every bend. Sukumaran shows many facets of this world – of Artificial Intelligence as maker, albeit “backward looking” (the most useful insight I have heard on it yet), and introduces CAMP’s projects indiancine.ma ; and pad.ma. “We should be aware of the conditions in which we are floating” Sukumaran says, about connecting with the ways we function with technology, the things we submit to without knowing. It introduces to me how becoming aware of the simulations that define our interaction with technology, and how that leads to some agency in a system envisioned to dissolve it entirely.
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The end of Experimenter day one rounds itself up into questions of justice and resistance. Supreme Court Lawyer Karuna Nundy argues for the right to be hopeful in a time of political violence and obscurity. Nundy too thinks about space, about existing in the male-dominanted, elite site of the Indian Law. We must not stop acknowledging progression and progressive judgements” Nundy says, in the cleansing clarity needed now and then to resist polarised, attention-economy driven fatigue that arrests all our brains. In the end, we view Bani Abidi’s exhibition; The Song and her work The Woman Who Talked Until She Disappeared, and here, too, is the question of space - the reckoning of the dispersed, of those women punished for existing vividly, of those who are forced from their homes faced, and the things that happen when they enter a new, far-away place. I resolve to go back to linger in Abidi’s work, to study the maps of movement and migration she draws, of her subjects and also of herself.
When we watch Sabika Abbas Naqvi in the end, there are conclusions, and no more questions. This is what Naqvi does best, turn the air into a canvas for her language, fill the room with resolve. I love Naqvi’s poem ‘Mera Kajal’, in which she takes back pleasure and space; stands her ground, and shares her bravery with the rest of us, generous with it, unthinking of if we deserve it or not.
“Mera Kajal, yeh tumsay paray hai”, she says, with a wave of her hand, distancing kajal, her bodies, her minds from the control of anyone else. I am thankful for Naqvi because my brain has closed off to English as it does in the evenings, and I sit there, remorseful but still hopeful, tucked into the powerful refuge of the poet’s pen and tongue.