[Reader-list] Documenta 11 Delhi Platform

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

REPORT ON PLATFORM 2_DOCUMENTA 11
Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and 
Reconciliation
India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
May 7-12, 2001

Dear Friends on the Reader List,

This is a brief report of impressions garnered during some days spent at 
Platform 2 of Documenta 11 in New Delhi.Phillip Pocock has already written 
in his concerns about the event and its location in Delhi, and Monica has 
made a preliminary posting as well. For those of you who are unfamiliar 
with Documenta, it is one of the most important contemporary art 
events/expositions in the world and is held every five years at Kassel, 
Germany. The next Documenta (the 11th) is scheduled for June-September 
2002.More information on  Documenta 11 is available at www.documenta.de

As part of the process leading up to the event the curatorial team of the 
next Documenta have organised a series of meetings, designated as 
Platforms, in different parts of the world, with different themes.The first 
Platform titled 'Democracy Unrealised' is in two parts in Vienna and 
Berlin. The Vienna event is over (March/April 2001) and the Berlin event is 
scheduled for October 2001.Platform 3 (Creolite and Creolization) is 
scheduled for St.Lucia in November, 2001 and Platform 4 is scheduled for 
Lagos in March 2002, under the theme, 'Under Siege- Four African Cities, 
Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa and Lagos'. The fifth and final Platform 
will coincide with the exhibition itself in Kassel (June-September 2002).

As is evident from the rather weighty title given to the New Delhi platform 
(Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth 
and Reconciliation) the ideas and themes that were taken up for discussion 
in the platform were often contentious, reflective of the violent histories 
in the South Asian subcontinent, The Balkans, the Middle East and in Africa 
that were being addressed by the speakers and interlocutors in the various 
panels. At the heart of a most of the discussion were questions that could 
be broadly titled as follows :

1. does speaking the truth about violence necessarily lead to reconciliation
2. must reconciliation be sought in all cases, or is there a case for 
avoiding the process of reconciliation
3. what are the different ways of speaking the truth in society-the legal, 
the extra legal, the personal narrative, the historical
4. where is the domain in which reconciliation can be sought ? - the 
political realm, in civil society, or,  in culture
5. what is the status of statements that fall outside the rhetoric of 
accusation/shame, victim/oppressor, are they transcendent or are there ways 
of escaping the task of making hard ethical choices
6. is the role of the victim or the oppressor contingent and provisional, 
or are these frozen and permanent categories
7. what are the different representational strategies that can be deployed 
to make images or artistic interventions in situations of conflict/war/genocide
8. Is it enough to indexically invoke images of violence and articulate the 
difficulty of evoking them. How may violence be interrogated in art practice
9. what are the different sites in which violence leaves its traces on 
memory - the archive, folk narratives, personal testimonies
10. how may we rehearse, recall and perform difference without necessarily 
getting locked into the attrition that is demanded by situations of conflict.

(This is a list of questions that I have come up with based on my 
understanding of what was being discussed. It is by no means comprehensive 
or exhaustive. Others are welcome to add to or dispute the contents of this 
list.)

Personally, i found it quite interesting that so many people stayed on to 
listen to what were obviously quite demanding and contentious 
presentations. Many in the audience were artists. It is not often that in 
an arts related milieu in delhi that you can find a space for serious 
reflection. This is because of the iron separation between 'display' and 
'discourse' that rules our cultural life. Another term for this is 'dumbing 
down'. In the face of this, a substantial part of the time spent in the 
Delhi Platform took the form of a welcome degree of 'smartening up'.

Quick, agile, thinking or intensive and imaginative intellectual engagement 
is (or should be) as much a part of an artist's or cultural practicioners 
tools as is a penchant for the bright gesture, or the telling image. One 
without the other leads either to sterile academism or to sterile 
formalism. This event was a welcome reminder of the necessity for a third 
space for a productive encounter between theory and practice.For too long 
have we suffered a climate of art practice that prides itself on its 
unwillingness to be thoughtful or intelligent. The 'inverse snobbery' of 
the artist towards the demanding vocation of asking difficult questions 
needs to end, as does the patronizing condescension of the intellectual for 
the artist.

Having said that, one would have thought that more amongst the speakers 
would have taken the trouble to relate or inform their presentations with a 
sense of the contemporary political/social/cultural context that they were 
encountering in india. The 'Asymmetry of Ignorance'  between Europe/North 
America and the rest of the world was quite visible. The audience always 
knew (or was expected to know) something of the history of the holocaust or 
of the course of European intellectual history, or even of the history of 
ethnic conflict in Africa or the middle east. But many speakers made little 
(barring token attempts to invoke Gandhi's notion of 'Experiments with 
Truth') effort to relate their concerns with their listeners lives and 
environments.Perhaps one function of events like this is act as gentle 
reminders of the need of transcultural intellectuals to enlarge their 
horizons of curiosity.

More Later...

Shuddha

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net