Review

Living Off the Grid—Visual Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Art critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya examines the issues represented through the concept of ‘grid’ in ‘Living Off the Grid,’ the group exhibition curated by Meera Menezes, that was held at Anant Art Centre, New Delhi.

A woman is lying on the ground in a public square. The attitude of her body is desolate and yet peaceful; both visually separated from the frenetic chaos of everyday life, and also profoundly grounded in the subtle rhythm of the quotidian. The hard rectilinear grid of the pavement provides a sharp contrast to the soft curves of her body and her fluid posture. She occupies and transforms social space in this performative act of lying down and her embodied stance offers a quiet yet powerful poetics that confounds the binary boundary between public and private.

The woman lying down is Sonia Khurana, and this public performative intervention has taken place in a number of settings, most recently in Barcelona, earlier this year. Using light box photography, video and poetry, she offers an interpretation of “living off the grid,” that takes “off the grid” as a stance of removal and rejection. Her “small acts,” such as lying down in public, gently but pointedly violate norms of social behavior, and her presentation of the work as looping video and series of light box photographs at different degrees of remove offers a circularity and seriality that is antithetical to the rectilinear ordering of the “grid,” posing a counterpoint to the contained linear spatial order that makes up – both metaphorically and physically – so much of the social and functional landscape of the modern city, and regimes of governmentality and discipline that order our daily lives and behaviors. In this way, Khurana’s small, private acts transform public, social space in a way that echoes acts of protest and symbolic resistance, and invite passersby to join this refusal to participate in the structures of the “grid.”

Curated by art critic and independent curator Meera Menezes, ‘Living Off the Grid,’ displays a rich array of works by 15 prominent artists – Abhishek Hazra, Atul Bhalla, Baiju Parthan, Baptist Coelho, Gautam Bhatia, Justin Ponmany, Manisha Parekh, Nataraj Sharma, Prajakta Potnis, Raqs Media Collective, Rashid Rana, Rohini Devasher, Sheila Makhijani, Sonia Khurana, and Susanta Mandal – at the Anant Art Center in Noida, just outside New Delhi.

Using the inherent ambiguity of the expression, “living off the grid,” as a space for meditating on forms of order that regulate our existence, as well as the possibility of escape from or transcendence of those disciplining structures, the conceptual frame of the exhibition plays on the dual meaning of the title of the show. “Living off the grid” can imply subsistence and dependence, such as the ways in which we relay on power grids for electricity, rigid infrastructures such as networks of roads for transit and mobility; social hierarchies and ordering principles that manage populations and bodies; ideological systems and epistemes; structures of value, and more. But there are also rhizomatic forms of connection, patterns of action, modes of association and visions of human relationships that refute and reject the dependence and discipline implied in this first sense of “living off the grid.” In this alternate vision, the “grid” is something to be escaped, a beaten path to be avoided, and thus the seemingly rigid structures that undergird and regulate our relationships to one another, our planet, as well as to the dominant ordering systems of our shared world, are thus problematised and challenged.

Among the variety of offerings, a number of works stood out in their investigations of the dialectic of autonomy and dependence implied in the title of the show.

The political nature and speciousness of clear divisions between public and private animated a number of works in the exhibition. Baptist Coelho’s “Neighbor #1” (2007), interrogates the division of public and private. Behind glass blinds, which the viewer can open and close at will, access to visions of the changing city is a function of the viewer’s privileged position. The work highlights the continuous transformation of urban space in Mumbai, where finite and asymmetrically allocated resources push up against the visceral crush of burgeoning population and the unequal satisfaction of needs in the megacity. In this context, the grid is continuously being stretched and jostled to accommodate the needs of increasing numbers of bodies and lives, space and our experience of it is thus transformed, and privacy becomes a commodity available only to the privileged few.

A darkened room, redolent with the chemical smell of glue or paint, is the elegant work contributed by Prajakta Potnis. The grid in her work is the simple outline of the interstices of the walls, ceiling and floor. Tracing the spatial contours of the room in thin phosphorescent lines, Potnis offers the impression of a dark, contained, enclosed space in which an ethereal light from outside seeps its way through the cracks. This infiltration of outside leaking inward, embodies the porosity of the walls that divide us – and by metonymic extension, the binaries that cleave us from each other as well—the ‘in’ from the ‘out,’ the public from the private.

Raqs Media Collective’s “Insurance %Investment” (2007), plays on the dialectic of autonomy and dependence through the circular and self-perpetuating logic of systems in their tri-channel video and sound work, and set of photographs. Here the grid can be said to represent the workings of capitalism, and the relations, behaviours and modes of thought and action that this system engenders. The self-confirming logic of this system is metaphorically instantiated by the pair of motorcyclists spiraling in the gridded, circular metal cage of a fairground ‘well of death,’ coupled with the ceaseless rotation of two fans and a soundtrack that Raqs describes as an “auditory reference to a ‘pneuma’, an onrush of breath.” The rotating fans, with their cycles of intake and output of air and exhaust, the circling motorcyclists, and the oxygen cylinders, masks and empty room in the accompanying set of photographs embody the relationship between “possibility and failure, between hope and the premonition of danger,” conceived as a ratio or percentage. Indeed, the risk that accompanies all forms of investment (not merely financial), becomes the horizon against which the need for forms of “insurance” to protect against failure is predicated. The relationship is posed as one of mutual, self-confirming, self-perpetuating necessity, and the shadow of the future is the dark screen upon which contemporary anxieties about the tenuousness (perhaps even recklessness) of our current arrangements are projected. Risk and hope have both public and private faces that are causally interlinked, yet our collective arrangements under capitalism are still rationalised by the myth of individual autonomy and the notion that collective, public good is best achieved through private striving, and even when collectively incarcerated in system that allows little room for either choice or exit, risk and loss are to be individually and privately borne and suffered.

Military boots step across a grid of railroad tracks in Atul Bhalla’s ‘Untitled,’ (Cadets at Dachhau), photography work. Shooting the visit to a concentration camp by young German soldiers as part of their training, the work draws on the ambiguity in this practice. While soldiers are taken to places like Dachau and Auschwitz as an organised humbling practice against forgetting, Bhalla investigates the ambivalent manner in which this experience may also ironically make these soldiers aware of the power that made these places into factories of death, opening up the mental space of possibility for re-envisioning, perhaps even revalorising, the grotesque acts which once occurred in these camps. Here, too, risk and hope are inextricably intertwined.

For his work ‘hNau mNau khNau: GhostLaw PipeFlow’ (2009), Abhishek Hazra takes the grid as a metaphor for ideational systems. Taking the earth from around the house where Karl Marx was born in Trier, he scattered this “sacred dust to the winds” from the rooftop of the Casino Luxembourg (one wonders if the site was perhaps chosen as a nod to Rosa Luxemburg). This scattering of soil was the artist’s “small gesture” that attempted to “contaminate that city of banks with the traces of a different imagination.” He asked himself whether this act was not also a symbolic expression of his “rights over Europe, which still sees itself as the Promethean ground of civilisation.” In the video, the hand scattering dust from Marx’s birthplace is superimposed with a textual reference to Marx’s most famous line from the Feuerbach theses: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.” Echoing, perhaps, the radically eroded stature of the epochal idealism that once animated the Marxist project, Hazra’s text asserts: “The traders of Praxis have changed Marx in various ways; the point however is to read him.” The way ambitions have been downgraded from world historical revolutionary strivings to merely hoping Marx might actually get read, testifies poignantly to the demise of Marxism as one of the dominant frameworks – systemic grids, if you will – for life in the 20th Century.

But not all the artists treat the grid as a negative quantity that constrains us. Susanta Mandal and Rohini Devasher’s works both explore the generative aspects of the grid.

In Mandal’s installation ‘Living Off the Grid’ (2009), he uses solar panels outside the gallery to fuel the release of bubbles, which constantly morph as they are emerge. Nearby, the viewer can see the workings of human agency and the contingency of these grid-like arrangements by simply using a hand to interrupt the flow of light to a solar panel. And the artist situates his own experiences of living off an electrical grid to that of his father and grandmother – who experienced everyday life on both sides of the electrical divide, and who spent her life without electricity, respectively, historicising the contingency of this order.

Devasher’s video and still work ‘Bloodlines’ (2009), treats the grid as a generative matrix in a way that is both aesthetically and conceptually satisfying. Exploring the relationship between technology and nature, she draws on evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins’ theory of cumulative selection, in which an infinite number of organisms are contained within the grid of genetic possibilities of life and uses his JAVA applet to generates ‘biomorphs’ – life forms whose possible existences are potentially infinite. Beginning with seven ‘parent’ forms, whose intricate skeletal structure was constructed out of individual, manually placed layers of video, Devasher uses a feedback loop is between a video camera and a television monitor that produces an exquisite array of “spatio-temporal patterns that emerge spontaneously from the feedback system.” In this way, she celebrates the exponential possibilities and combinatorial freedom encoded in the matrix our existing forms of life.

The grid may often seem immutable, governed by autonomous processes that are beyond our grasp and ken, but the ways in which we negotiate our relationship to the “structures” that seem to define the parameters of our existences are myriad. Marx reminded us that we are born into conditions not of our choosing, but perhaps the struggle to choose how we position ourselves in relation to those structures can make for new structures altogether, or even take us beyond the ‘grid’ to indeterminate spaces where order has not yet been imposed.

Maya Kóvskaya is a Delhi and Beijing-based writer, art critic, curator, translator, scholar and consultant with over a decade of experience in China. She has curated numerous exhibitions, in China, the USA, India, and Europe, and her art criticism appears regularly in art catalogues, international art magazines and academic journals. Her book, ‘China Under Construction: Contemporary Art from the People’s Republic’ (2007), is available in bookstores worldwide. Email: mayakovskaya@gmail.com)