Tracing the Human Trail

Art critic and curator Oindrilla Maity Surai, reflects upon the artists’ role in reinforcing public memory, based on her experiences as a curator of community-based art projects. This is the first instalment of a series of articles based on her experiences as a curator of community-based art projects over the years. She is currently attending a Curatorial Residency at the Khoj International Artists' association, New Delhi.

Perhaps the greatest struggle on earth is about getting a fixed point on earth – settling down; adapting to an environment – through orientation. Issues on orientation have gained importance over the years as on many levels it is associated with psychological, economical and sociological aspects. Simultaneously, orientation has been associated with disorientation too, which is a consequence of chaos, violence and enforcement. There can be many reasons for the dispersal of a people, leading to a change in human geography.(1)

Broadly speaking, change in human geography is often brought about by economical changes. People orient themselves or tend to settle down in areas that offer better job opportunities. The movements thus eventually end up in the urban centers. This movement, thus, may be observed as a journey from their place of origin to a land of different cultures or a journey from nature to culture; from the centre to the periphery; from the root to the surface; from the past to the future; from concentration to dispersal.

Adapting in a new place of orientation comes majorly through food, clothing and language. These three essential human habits can be potential sites of contestation. These acts of eating, speaking and putting on clothes can be potential in determining the extent of change that occurs simultaneously with migration.

As a curator of community-based art projects, I have often had to face one persistent question – why do I choose what I do choose? Why am I working with specific communities and not others? What intrigues me? My answer would be several.

A nation; a race, comes to die not as a consequence of genocide, but when it’s collective memory is wiped off completely. Art perhaps stops that slippage of memory, preventing its corrosion.

It is the legitimate right of a people to celebrate its history. Art in the public sphere attempts to mediate that celebration. The public sphere is the space that embodies and reflects collective memory through several signifiers. However, how far the public sphere excels in doing so is debatable. Does it really enliven the collective thoughts of a race; a nation; a people? What participatory role does it play in reliving the thoughts? Can artists’ mediation, thus, become instrumental in reinforcing public memory?

Secondly, when the history of a people is not recorded, it apparently ceases to exist. (In fact any initial approaches to finding out the history or identity of a clan or individual may simply wane away as quickly as it had occurred if Wikipedia does not provide a first hand knowledge of it). However, despite the fact, human existence continues to prevail in its own peculiar way.

Curatorial ventures based on a community art project are essentially research-based, involving investigation, discovery and critical reflection. One, therefore, needs to have a relational-curatorial strategy. The initial problem which I have to cope with in the beginning of such projects is how to start out of nothing – or at least how to begin conceiving one out of the few resources which I am equipped with. My objectivity has often been mapping the trail of human geographies, to remain insistently aware of how spaces can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology(2).

While at it, I have tried to find out if this journey is moving forward or moving forward without going anywhere? The most ephemeral aspect of these journeys is ‘change’ – evasive, transient as it can be, – change hints at the fluidity of the barriers of human cultures and memory. Memory and change know no boundary. As a curator, my endeavours have been to take into account all these miniscule subjectivities; marking the fissures; the nuances that patterns of life produce and carry with it whether its charted or not.

For the last two projects at Narendrapur (2005) and at Asoknagar (on-going), which are two suburbia, fringing the city of Kolkata, my concerns have been to touch upon several aspects that become inextricably linked up with life as people settle down elsewhere as a result of either forced or voluntary migration. The nature of migration in these two cases have been different in the sense the first one is apparently an example of forced migration while the latter is of both forced (in its early stages) and voluntary migration. My research has often included the study of the myth as a form of weapon to survive; to exist and to reinforce memory; how the concept of the myth evolves from its place of origin and change as people have migrated from these communities; the nature of the myth as it gains shape in an urban place. The urban place is a centre of pluralities, a nucleus of cultivated habits. The journey of the myth is, therefore, a journey from nature to culture and also from the centre to the periphery from where it again breaks up into fragments and forms scores of individual centers. In the course of doing so, the focus has also been on tracing and locating signs of psychic connections that the people have with the places to which they had once belonged and their current habitats – whether these associations are hypothetic or concrete. My concern has been questioning and probing what is sublime to these people who shift from their original locus? What dream do they create as a weapon of survival? Do they carry with them their ethnic particularities or can these ethnic particularities survive in a reality which is both contemporary as well as homogeneous? How space inflicts violence on its occupants and how it demands, coerces its inhabitants to do what they do?

To quote Lizz Well, curatorial strategy becomes most effective as critical intervention when it opens exploration and debate, invoking a range of issues and emotions of the viewer. If with artists (or with the people of a specific community itself) a community can be helped to retrieve its collective thoughts by sensitising it to celebrate its own history; bringing about changes in the public sphere by initiating participatory engagement with the lay public in a community in reliving public memory, my guess would be it’s worth trying it. After all, there is a sheer joy in reminding people of the point from where their own stories have started.

(To be continued)

References:

1. Orientation/ Disorientation/Design2context

2. Beginning Postmodernism/Tim Woods/ Manchester University Press/ Manchester and New York / 2007.

(Oindrilla Maity Surai is a Kolkata-based Art Historian, Independent Curator and Practicing Artist. She teaches Art History at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She has recently been chosen as one of the two Curators at the Khoj International Artists' Association, New Delhi for their first Curatorial Residency supported by the IFA. Email: oindrila.maity@gmail.com )