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Cover Story
The Residents in the Presidency:
Artists’ Residencies as Cultural High Commissions
Artist residencies have been gaining significance in India in the recent times. John Xaviers takes a look at the various major artist residencies in the country and how the artist-led initiatives can take on the role of peace talks and friendship in the current national and global scenario.
Resident as a designation, reminds us of the colonial times, when the Company or the Crown had a representative in the Colony named as the Resident. The designation suggests the role of an ambassador or a representative of the Crown. Although the Artist Resident is at the opposite end of the power spectrum, the artist in the residency programmes has a role to play in representing a nationality, a culture or a set of values which are politico-aesthetic. This story is taking stock of the initiatives in India, which has germinated cross-cultural transactions across South Asia, across metro cities in India as well as across regions in India.
KHOJ International Artists’ Association in New Delhi is the flag-ship of artists-led initiatives in India which has been in operation since 1997. Now part of the Triangle Arts Trust, the international network of artist-led workshops and residencies, KHOJ offers an extensive range of facilities for artists from India and abroad, in five of its Delhi studios, as well as in KHOJ, Kolkata. It also associates with various other projects from other parts of India too as part of KHOJ National Network.
The workshops held outside Delhi, like in Mysore, or Bangalore or Mumbai, have helped to make a large number of artists get involved in the activities of KHOJ, often providing an impetus to the local art scenario of the city which hosts the event. The vibrancy of the KHOJ studios is evident from taking just a mere glance over the range of activities that have taken place there in the last few months alone, like the international workshops, which includes a six-week long International Book-making Residency, By Design, the International Design Residency, Pecha Kucha Night and Sonic Art Workshop besides the annual Peers Student Residency programmes.
Besides these relentless efforts to support the young talents from India and abroad alike, KHOJ has undertaken huge initiatives of visual and performance art, often stepping into the public realm. In March, 2008, as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of KHOJ, was held Khoj Live 08, an international performance art festival in Delhi, which had performance artists from all over the world. The participants were given spaces across the cities to do performances that would be considered shocking or unacceptable going by the conservative moral standards of India. To site one example, the performance by Stephen Cohen, a South African artist, at Alliance Francais, New Delhi, had full frontal nudity. This is only one of the instances that show how Khoj has been pushing the boundaries when it comes to be an interface between art practice and audience.
Another big project that Khoj undertook recently was the public arts festival in December 2008. Artists were invited to intervene in public spaces with monumental or intrusive art pieces in the public. Now, it is important to observe and understand the philosophy behind similar activities extending into the public realm. According to Pooja Sood, who has been the co-ordinator, “Our philosophy, modelled as it is on the Triangle network of workshops and residencies of which we are a part, is committed towards developing a forum for exchange and experimentation between artistic communities within India and abroad. Within this larger international context, the development of deeper connections within South Asia/Asia have been of key importance to us and we have actively facilitated the same.” (1)
As part of the efforts to develop artistic exchanges in South Asia, KHOJ has taken upon the role of a ‘Cultural High Commission.’ Artists from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were regularly invited to the KHOJ workshops and residencies through the Triangle Arts Trust Network. Excited the workshop experience, many of the participating artists from these countries later took the initiative to start similar workshops / residency programmes in their respective countries. The first VASL and Theertha International Artists Workshops started in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2001. The Britto International Artist Workshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh began functioning in 2003. The Osho Ashram in Kathmandu also became the venue for an international site-specific workshop soon.
Periferry1.0
Besides avenues provided for international artistic cooperations, KHOJ has also been at the helm of several art initiatives across the nation, of which the most notable is the endorsement of Periferry1.0 in Guwahati. Periferry1.0 project is an initiative of Desire Machine Collective@Khoj Guwahati, a partnership between Desire Machine Collective and KHOJ, Delhi. Conceived as “a laboratory for people engaged in hybrid practices, people whose knowledge tends to fall through gaps between disciplines (or ties together disparate disciplines), people who thrive in the interstitial spaces between art, culture and science, technology and ecology,” (2) this project offers an alternative space for transforming the cultural productions. It is “designed to link together the cultural energies of the Northeast India with other parts of South and Southeast Asia and the world.” (3)
The most interesting aspect of Periferry1.0, led by the artists couple, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya, of the Desire Machine Collective is its location. It is a huge barge, M.V.Chandardinga, floating on the Brahmaputra River, where they give space for people from various artistic backgrounds to interact, share and grow together. The ferry, earlier, under the possession of the Department of Inland Water Transport, State Government of Assam, was used to transport people across the river in National Waterway No.2 for a long time.
Very aptly titled ‘Periferry,’ which alludes to both being in the ‘periphery,’ or, being in a corner of the Indian geography and ‘ferry,’ or the mobile bridge across the river, there is a very strong political significance for the project as a regional assertion in the national art map.
Jain and Madhukaillya point out that the main political intention of starting Periferry as a residency project was to curate a series of projects in the context of re-territorialisation of North East India, through the de-territorialising and opening up the region and releasing it from the conventional image as a land-locked and exotic land. “We did not look at any artists’ residency model,” they said. “Its more like a laboratory.”
During colonial times, only the foreign historian and anthropologists used to study the North-East, Jain and Madhukaillya pointed out. “But when artists from different parts of the world come to our ferry to engage in participatory work, it is a new kind of history writing.”
Referring to the spelling of ‘Periferry,’ they said that the wrong spelling was intentional and was used to suggest that although we are away from the centre, being in the periphery, we are not against the centre. “It is about making the border irrelevant. Indian border affairs are usually focussed on the Pakistan side, but 89 percent of Indian border is shared on the eastern side. That is why we are bringing artists from South East Asia, to foster cultural ties between the East of India.”
CAMP in Mumbai
On the other end of the nation, in Mumbai, we see another initiative called CAMP, founded by the artists, Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhanagar and Ashok Sukumaran in 2007. “CAMP is not an ‘artists collective,’ but a space, in which ideas and energies gather, and become interests and forms. In this activity, we try to move beyond binaries of commodity markets vs. ‘free culture,’ or individual vs. institutional will, to think and to build what is possible, what is equitable, and what is interesting, for the future. Objective: To consider thresholds of ownership and authority as challenging sites for art practice. To test the ground between aesthetics and multiple ideas of the public (or open), private (or closed), personal (about one’s world), and power (about the world, or ‘politics’).” (4)
CAMP is also into public intervention as well, as some of the projects are politically loaded with the affairs of Asia as in, ‘Al jaar qabla al dar,’ (‘The Neighbour before the House,’). It is “a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem. Shot with a security camera, these images show that before and after the instrumental ‘surveillance,’ there is inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt that pervades the project of watching. In these specific times and places, camera movements and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents evaluate what can be seen, and speak about the nature of their distance from others.” (5)
1 shanthiroad
Down South, we see another artists’ initiative titled ‘1shanthiroad.’ This is also an artists-led initiative, founded in 2003 and works among artist communities from various countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Besides being supported by KHOJ, 1shantiroad also has an ongoing residency programme with Asialink, University of Melbourne, Australia. 1 shantiroad “believes in fostering interactions between artists, curators, scholars, writers and young students in the local and global context. We collaborate, share and have interactions with the local artist community. The residency programme provides an opportunity to interact, experiment and work with local materials to extend one’s visual language.” (6)
While Periferry1.0, CAMP and 1Shanthiroad chart the map of the nation in art through artists’ residencies and similar initiatives being located in Guwahati, Mumbai and Bangalore respectively, with KHOJ acting as it’s nerve centre in Delhi, what is of more interest in this story is the international collaborations made possible through KHOJ.
In 1998, Indian artist Shilpa Gupta and Pakistani artist Huma Mulji met in an artists’ residency at KHOJ and the friendship developed then, was taken forward to a friendship between nations, which was manifested in the form of Aar-Paar, a Public Art Exchange Project between India and Pakistan. The first Aar-Paar project took place in 2000, with its second edition happening in 2002, well after the Kargil War and at a time when the bilateral relationships between the two countries were at their worst. In July, 2002, the project took place simultaneously in Mumbai and Karachi, with ten artists from each city developing a single colour work, which were exchanged between the two countries via email. The images were printed locally and inserted into public spaces by plastering them on walls or distributing as folders. “A short, targeted, intervention: less 'incidental' , less 'subtle' than before, more obtrusive, in keeping with the absurdity and level of madness in our lives today.” (7)
The significance of Aar Paar project is to be regarded in the light that it is a friendship between the artists of so-called ‘enemy,’ states, which yet to recover from the bitterness of partition and are constantly affected by intrusions and infiltrations of international terror. The art communities on either side had decided to join their hands together, with this given background. Artists’ residencies are not only about interventions in community, sharing artistic languages and survival strategies but also about developing bilateral cultural ties between nations, especially if the nations have a belligerent history.
The media house Times of India, kick-started the New Year in 2010 with a full-page ad on the front page that announced Aman ki Asha which is an Indo-Pakistan peace initiative between the media houses of respective nations. ‘Aman ki Asha: Destination Peace,’ had Times of India collaborating with the Jang Group from Pakistan in organising a series of cultural events aimed at bonding the Indo-Pak ties. (8)
This stunning print media spectacle was immediately followed by the opening of an exhibition of contemporary Pakistani art ‘Resemble Reassemble,’ curated by Rashid Rana at Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, which brings together the works of 45 Pakistani artists. ‘Aar Paar,’ was in a way the pre-history of these kinds of artistic exchanges.
What is to be deciphered from these events is that there are friendly gestures from the wide range of civil societies from media houses which are, in a way, the mouth pieces of national opinions to contemporary art practices, which are elitist precipitates of cultural formations. Here are two nations divided along religious lines as a post-colonial outburst that led to irreparable damages on either side. With these peace initiatives from the civil society, it is evident that the people on either side love each other and want more mobility across the borders to experience each others’ cultural manifestations. When diplomatic machinery fails to deliver or choose not to get their act together, artists’ communities take on the role of peace talks and friendship.
End Notes:
- Pooja Sood, Catalogue of Khoj International Artists’ Workshop, 2001.
- www.periferry.in
- ibid.
- www.camputer.org
- ibid.
- http://www.1shanthiroad.com/residency.html
- http://www.members.tripod.com/aarpaar2/02.htm,
- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amankiasha.cms.
(John Xaviers is a Delhi-based art writer, currently doing his Ph.D. in Art History from School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is working as the Assistant Curator at Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi. Email: johnofcochin@gmail.com )
