[Reader-list] Ranjit Hoskote: Pavillion as Laboratory: Introduction to the Indian Pavillion at the current Venezia Biennale

Tue Jun 7 04:58:15 IST 2011

54th Venezia Biennale
http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html
June 4th to November 27th, Venezia (Venice), Italy.
page of the Indian pavillion:
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/first-time/india.html

India was represented by a national pavillion for the very first time.
Curator Ranjit Hoskote, artists and team made for an exceptionaly
unorthodox, thrilling, and yet subdued, unsensationalist display. This is
the introductory text to the exhibition. From and by permission of the
author.

PAVILION AS LABORATORY
A Tool Box for Everyone Agrees: Its About To Explode

Ranjit Hoskote

1. The Logic of National Representation

The national pavilion may no longer enjoy the same pre-eminence as it once
did, as a node of location and unit of cultural measurement, on the global
biennale circuit; but it retains its grandeur and centrality in the oldest
and most auratic biennale of all, la Biennale di Venezia. And, while the
nation-state is not the only or even the major locus of activity for many
artists in our fluid, entangled and transcultural present, the national
pavilion remains relevant as a site where the idea of the nation (and its
relationship to culture) can be subjected to productive engagement,
experiment and debate.

The logic of a national pavilion at a biennale obliges us to attend to the
question of how we can best represent a specific moment in the
art-historical life of a nation. How do we arrive at a national
representation within the temporal framework of any edition of a
biennale, which takes the 18-month period preceding it as its calendrical
hinterland? What, to put it simply, can a national pavilion represent? The
path of least resistance, for a curator confronted with these questions,
is to reach for the most characteristic practices and most identifiable
artists associated with a national art scene: to identify and throw into
high contour the key tendencies and ascendancies that have dominated that
scene. A variation on this approach would be to picture a national art
scene as a balance of stakes, illustrating its various contending centres,
its alternative subcultures. Or then, in defiance of such cautious or
merely lazy metonymy, a curator might decide to mobilise a partisan
counter-choice: to cast an emergent or contrarian position into the teeth
of orthodox opinion.

In all these cases, the source of value for the curatorial choice lies in
a machinery of validation: whether platforms of circulation such as the
gallery system or the museum circuit; venues of opinion such as journals;
hierarchies of recognition that evolve around awards, fellowships,
residencies and commissions; or a combination of all these. In the Indian
context, the machinery of validation straddles three institutional
frameworks: the gallery system and the auction-house circuit, as the
principal manifestations of the art market; and an emergent network of
residencies and fellowships, which is part of a global ecology of artistic
exchanges and collaborative projects. A majority of the Indian viewing
public looks to the art market to define excellence and relevance in art,
and takes its cue from the galleries and the auctions. However, if we were
to follow Arthur C. Danto in his celebrated description of the art world
as being, above all, a conversation in which the rules of making and
recognising art are continuously negotiated, we would see that the Indian
art market is only the loudest circle of speech within a much larger
conversation that includes critics, curators, theorists, historians,
enthusiasts, and ordinary viewers and readers who participate in cultural
life, rather than the economy of culture.

In this loudest circle of speech, art is metered through a speculators
enumeration of winners and losers, a guide to whats hot and whats not:
nothing more complex than a Top Ten. Over a period of time, as this
list-making reflex becomes entrenched, its expectations masquerade as
criteria, and only those artists who meet them pass the test of relevance.
Many of them become names, associated with the narratives of success:
figures of arrival whose artistic gifts are eclipsed by the scale of their
operations, their social saliency, the portability of their images, their
ubiquity at home and overseas. And since the choice of artists for any
major representation of Indian art tends to keep emerging from this list,
it generates (among patrons) a self-perpetuating reassurance as to the
rightness of the expectations it makes of artists, and (among artists) a
complacent continuity with those expectations.

When I was given the mandate of curating the India Pavilion for the 54th
International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, by the Lalit Kala
Akademi, Indias National Academy of Art, my aim was to mark a sharp
rupture with these pre-existing notions of how Indias national art scene
should be represented. Since I have long argued that contemporary Indian
art is defined by multiple horizons of value, I wished to take the
emphasis away from the usual Top Ten. Instead, I wished to disclose
artistic practices from locations other than those synonymous with the
Indian art market: practices that transit among disparate economies of
image-production, traverse asymmetric cultural and political situations;
that are nourished by diverse circulations of philosophical ideas; and
that grow, often, from improvisational forms of research and
collaboration.

Accordingly, as my rhetorical trope for this pavilion, I chose the non
sequitur: that which does not necessarily follow from something said
earlier in the conventional flow of conversation, an unprecedented
suggestion that overturns the fixities of an existing language game. The
non sequitur is a departure phrased at a deliberate tangent, a shifting of
the coordinates, a calling of attention to alternative loci of
significance. It was crucial that this non sequitur should make a strong
symbolic statement about contemporary Indian art.

And therefore, instead of presenting a large number of artists to
illustrate Indias burgeoning art scene, I have chosen four powerful
artistic positions, each of them conceptually rigorous, sophisticated in
their aesthetic strategies, and robust in expressive power: all of them
unexpected choices from the viewpoint of conventional wisdom. While some
of these positions have been incorporated respectfully into the gallery
system, both globally and in India, and have received the attention of
museums, foundations and galleries, they have not been neutralised by the
systems embrace. Rather, they enjoy the critical acclaim that attends
dynamic practices that keep transforming themselves instead of settling
into anxious formulae.

Zarina Hashmi, Praneet Soi, Gigi Scaria, and the Desire Machine Collective
act as compass points for an alternative atlas of references. An
idiosyncratic line of latitude connects them across the globe, running
west-east to link their theatres of life and work across New York,
Amsterdam/ Kolkata, New Delhi/ Kerala, and Guwahati. Since this is the
first time in 117 years that India has its own curated national pavilion
at the Venice Biennalealthough, as I will remark presently, it has had
occasional national representations in previous decadesit is vital to
honour this historic occasion with a set of positions that incarnate the
linkage between contemporary Indian art and the landscape of global art,
while retaining the distinctiveness of sensibilities engaged with the
South Asian predicament.

2. From Identity to Positionality

My curatorial proposition is that the India Pavilion is a laboratory where
the idea of India, to deploy a phrase made famous by the political
scientist and essayist Sunil Khilnani, may be tested. Through the four
artistic positions presented there, I bring into play some of the key
propositions concerning the nature of contemporary India. I note, among
these cultural practitioners, a shift from the emphasis on a fixed and a
priori national identity to a positionality that extends itself across
plural anchorages of belonging. Such a shift allows us to view India as a
conceptual entity that is not territorially bounded, but which extends
outward into a global space of the imagination, in the form of arguments,
dreams, memories and visions.

The artists I have chosen for the India Pavilion explore complex histories
and volatile lifeworlds. Taken together, Hashmi, Soi, Scaria and the
Desire Machine Collective embody impulses from diverse regional
modernities, religious lineages, subcultural locations, aesthetic choices,
and philosophical standpoints.

Zarina Hashmi (born in Aligarh, 1937; lives in New York), works across
printmaking and sculpture realised in various media. Her art emerges from
the questing of a subjectivity profoundly shaped by the trauma of the 1947
Partition of British India. In a profound sense, it embodies Indias
birth-moment, when Independence and Partition occurred together, producing
lifelong questions of identity and belonging for South Asian Muslims. To
this crisis of self-definition was added the experience of diaspora, as
Zarina (she prefers to use her first name) embarked on a life of travel.
The map, the architectural layout of a home, the border and the journey
are her recurrent motifs, each austerely yet delicately delineated. The
act of naming, and holding on to places, things, experiences and
sensations by naming, occurs constantly in her art. She crosses uncertain
terrain, looking for lost countries that might offer the nomad an oasis or
anchorage. Her work also demonstrates a fascination with epiphany and
illumination, whether these spring from the decipherment of calligraphy, a
cascade of goldleaf-covered bulbs or a rosary, or a tablet woven from gold
and light. I have chosen three of Zarinas works for the India Pavilion:
the major 36-piece Home is a Foreign Place (1997), Noor (2008), and
Blinding Light (2010).

Praneet Soi (born in Kolkata, 1971; lives in Amsterdam and Kolkata) is a
painter, sculptor and mixed-media artist. His transcultural practice,
based on engagements with both global and local economies of production,
testifies to a significant transformation of the studio. Instead of a
single fixed address, the studio, for Soi, is a series of fluid
situations, organised around interactions with collaborators, assistants,
technical specialists, and such interlocutors as architects and curators.
His studio practice refers, also, to a series of open-ended researches
expressed as drawings, photographic archives, notations, and preparatory
layouts. In geographical terms, his studio can stretch from a biennale
site in Europe to the small-scale industrial units of Kumartuli, northern
Kolkata, where he works on projects with sculptors who make traditional
festival icons, letterpress printers, and other entrepreneurs. Soi has
been preoccupied with war as an existential condition, as manifested
through his figures of refugees, people escaping catastrophe, and victims
of bombardment: in his drawings and paintings, self-portraits are often
wrapped around or inserted through these figures. In scale, Soi shuttles
between the miniature and the mural, the drawing-as-memoir to the
monument-as-trace. His contribution to the India Pavilion is a new
recension of a slide-projection work, Kumartuli Printer (2010/ 2011), and
a mural that he has painted onsite.

Gigi Scaria (painter, sculptor and video artist, born in Kothanalloor,
Kerala, 1973; now lives in New Delhi) reflects on the complexity of
everyday life across social strata and political asymmetries in
metropolitan India. Processing the architecture of housing and
entertainment, probing the phantasmagoria thrown up by the real-estate
boom and the fantasia of delusional urban planning, Scaria sets, within
this larger armature, the intimate textures of personal life, as
constructed by migrants and transients attracted by the promise of the
metropolis. As a southerner long resident in the north of India, Scaria
has a precise purchase on the sociological processes and psychological
pressures of internal migration. In his video works, especially, he plays
on the politics of everyday discourse as an exchange between dissimilars,
a tangled conversation. The productive tension in Scarias art is that
between discursivity and the visceral, things put into words and things
that slip beneath the radar of language: the aspirations, anxieties,
resentments and resignations that form the substance of much metropolitan
existence. Scarias practice also attests to an expanded form of the
studio, as when he works with a set of collaborators, ranging from
software programmers to production engineers. He presents, in the India
Pavilion, a 3-screen interactive video installation, Elevator from the
Subcontinent (2011).

The Desire Machine Collective (DMC) was established by Sonal Jain (born
Shillong, 1975) and Mriganka Madhukaillya (born Jorhat, 1978). A media
collective based in Guwahati, Assam, DMC works across film, installation
and public space projects. While committing itself to the necessary
interiority of its own art, it articulates a need for interlocution by
organising workshops and conferences at Periferry, a residency platform
based on a boat moored on the banks of the river Brahmaputra. DMCs
activity signals a vista of artistic production and critical energy in the
north-east of India, a region that has suffered official neglect and is
often regarded as separate from the mainstream. In a context where
political conditions obtrude dramatically into everyday life, DMC bypasses
the all-too-obvious choice of creating an art that is, in a generic sense,
political. Instead, it chooses to layer the viewing encounter with
intensities of awareness and sensation, inviting viewers to attend in a
full-bodied manner to subtle shifts in a sensorial environment they are
invited to occupy, whether this is a sound installation in a street or a
film based in an abandoned thermal power plant. Indeed, the Desire Machine
Collective is represented, in the India Pavilion, by a 35 mm realisation
of the latter, the film Residue (2010/ 2011).

As is evident, these artists do not guide us to an end-point or discursive
destination called the nation, but rather, they return us to
starting-points: to see if we can re-imagine what it means to belong to
India. They achieve this by adding, to the figure of the citizen, the
figures of the participant and the contributor: in a world that offers
many alternative affiliations, they have chosen to remain connected to
India, to take part in its ongoing theatre of self-definition, to
contribute to its cultural life, without being conscripted into any narrow
ideology of the nation.

In the early 21st century, we must accept that the nation is not simply an
apparatus of conscription or a synoptic totality that overrides its
heterogeneous contents. It is, rather, the product of the political and
cultural imagination: an administrative, juridical and territorial entity,
to be sure, but also an entity materialised through the accretion of
mythologies of identity and self-assertion. And increasingly, as diverse
internal energies manifest themselves and a polyphony of voices begins to
emerge from within the nation, it becomes transformed into an array of
fragments, each casting illumination on a possible whole. Such is the
understanding that informs the title of this exhibition, Everyone Agrees:
Its About To Explode.

My eye fell on this sentence, from a text by an anonymous group of
theorists called The Invisible Committee, which was shared with me by
Mriganka Madhukaillya of the Desire Machine Collective. It was a
fortuitous, magical moment; transposed to our predicament, this messianic
sentence holds a reservoir of multiple meanings. It could speak of a
society whose confident energies, simmering discontents, plural and
productive articulations are all set to explode. It could speak of a
national art world whose heterogeneities are on the point of bursting in
all directions. It could speak, also, of a cluster of ideas about identity
and subjectivity, post-postcolonial location and transcultural
shape-shifting, whose time has irresistibly come.

3. The Roles of the India Pavilion

On a research visit to Venice in the autumn of 2010, I chose the
250-square meter site for the India Pavilion in the Artiglierie section of
the Arsenale. It occupies a salient position in the Arsenale, the former
ship-building yard and weapons store of the navy of the Venetian Republic
(15th-19th centuries), when it was a great trading and maritime power that
dominated the Mediterranean, before it collapsed under Napoleons attacks
and was eventually annexed into the newly formed nation-state of Italy in
1866. The Arsenale is a site of fantasia: gritty, redolent of history, its
exposed concrete and unfaced brick walls eloquent, its huge columns and
vast empty bays underwriting the magic of the Biennale. The constraints of
the site summon forth a curatorial response that the cultural theorist and
curator Nancy Adajania and I have designated as ju-jitsu, a working
around rather than against the site, a mode of using the power of the site
to coax it into cooperation. My first aim was to develop a conversational
plan among the four artistic positions. I designed the pavilion along a
quadrature, dividing the space into four quadrants of nearly equal
quadrants: one diagonal connecting the open spaces and near-monochromatic,
graphic programmes of Hashmi and Soi; the other diagonal connecting the
enclosures of Scaria and DMC, Scaria invoking a visual stratigraphy of
class with his elevator, DMC resonant with the aura of industrial ruin and
the remainders of hubris. The quadrature itself is intended to relay the
deep spatial archetypes indwelling in Indian culture: the mandala or
universal map of Hindu-Buddhist sacred architecture, the chahar-bagh or
quadrated garden of paradise from Islamic architecture. At its basic
level, the India Pavilion has been designed as a cosmogram.
Simultaneously, however, it is intended to act as a space for the release
of various temporalities, the compressed histories of Partition, diaspora,
travel, apprenticeship, conversation across borders; and, as it viscerally
allows for this, the pavilion is also a chronogram.

Beyond this spatial level, at the performative levels, the India Pavilion
is intended to play the roles of a laboratory (as I have already
indicated), a school, and a stage. As laboratory, it test-runs the idea of
a non-territorial cultural citizenship (such as Homi K. Bhabha has been
considering), under which a cultural practitioner may live away from India
and yet belong to its extended national space in crucial ways, by
affirmation and critical affiliation (Hashmi, Soi). The pavilion also
test-runs the conception of a multi-local cosmopolitanism, one that is
independent of a metropolitan basis (DMC); and in its acceptance of
strangeness as a dynamic for creativity, whether in the form of encounters
with other milieux, societies, discourses, disciplines and
specialisations, it emphasises the need to re-draw the geographies within
which we constitute our selfhood (Scaria, Soi).

As a school, the pavilion has catalysed several forms of learning and
extended pedagogy, parallel and sometimes convergent, for all
participants: artists, curator, producer, collaborators, and assistants.
The pavilion has acted as a production studio for various refinements of
practice, the improvisation of new protocols and mechanisms, and
extensions of various modes of research, design and delivery.

As a stage, the India Pavilion marks Indias return to the Venice Biennale
after a long absence; and, for the first time, with a professionally
conceived and curated exhibition commissioned by the appropriate
institution, the Lalit Kala Akademi, the National Academy of Art. This
performative dimension of Indias presence is vital. It marks the renewal
of an almost-forgotten internationalist momentum (India has had various
forms of official exhibition presence at the 1954, 1956, 1958, 1962, 1966,
1978 and 1982 editions of la Biennale di Venezia, routed through the
Embassy of India in Rome). It thus carries forward the desire to formulate
a claim to assertive participation from the global South, which was
embodied by the visionary Indian writer and cultural organiser, Mulk Raj
Anand, in Triennale India, which he founded in New Delhi (1968) and of
which the Lalit Kala Akademi has since hosted 11 editions. I have
elsewhere referred to Triennale India as a major example of the biennale
of resistance, and it is a matter of significance to Indian art that
these two histories, those of Venice and of New Delhi, meet in this
pavilion today. It is to be hoped that this encounter will produce fresh
narratives, renewed conversations, and spirited exchanges of perspective.

To conclude, I would suggest that this India Pavilion is what Nancy
Adajania and I have elsewhere termed an nth field, a site of unexpected
transcultural encounter and coproduction. In Notes towards a Lexicon of
Urgencies (October 2010:
http://www.curatorsintl.org/index.php/dispatch/posts/notes_towards_a_lexicon_of_urgencies/),
we write: In structural terms, nth fields are receptive and internally
flexible institutions, rhizomatic and self-sustaining associations, or
periodic platforms. In spatial terms, these are either programmatically
nomadic in the way they manifest themselves, or extend themselves through
often unpredictable transregional initiatives, or are geographically
situated in sites to which none (or few) of their participants are
affiliated by citizenship or residence. Temporally, the rhythm of these
engagements is varied: it traverses a range of untested encounters, from
face-to-face meetings and discussions through email and Skype, and can
integrate multiple time lines for conception and production.

These nth fields certainly throw into high relief the vexed questions
that haunt the global system of cultural production: Who is the audience
for contemporary global art? 
 Is it possible to translate the
intellectual sources of a regional modernity into globally comprehensible
terms? What forms of critical engagement should artistic labour improvise,
as it chooses to become complicit with aspirational and developmentalist
capital and its managers across the world?

Thus the India Pavilion poses questions, not only to the nation-state, but
also to the system of global art.

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Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. He is the author
of 20 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005
(Penguin, 2006), Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006), and I,
Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd (Penguin Classics, 2011). He has authored
nine artist monographs; most recently, Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das
Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2010). With Ilija Trojanow, Hoskote has co-authored
Kampfabsage (Blessing Verlag, 2007), a critique of the clash of
civilisations thesis phrased from the perspective of cultural confluence.
With Nancy Adajania, Hoskote is co-author of The Dialogues Series
(Popular/ Foundation B&G, 2011), an unfolding programme of conversations
with artists. Hoskotes essays have appeared in numerous anthologies; most
recently, Biennials of Resistance, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal
and Solveig Øvstebo eds., The Biennial Reader (Hatje Cantz, 2010). Since
1993, Hoskote has curated more than 20 exhibitions of Indian and
international contemporary art, both in India and overseas. In 2001, he
curated Bombay: Labyrinth/ Laboratory, a mid-career survey of Atul
Dodiyas work (Japan Foundation, Tokyo), and in 2005, he curated a
lifetime retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala (National Gallery of Modern
Art, Bombay and New Delhi). Over 2000-2002, he co-curated the trans-Asian
curatorial project, Under Construction (Japan Foundation). Hoskote and
Hyunjin Kim co-curated, with Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor, the 7th
Gwangju Biennial (Korea, 2008).

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