Artists Statements

Annalee Davis, Barbados, West Indies. Â

1. Spinal Adjustment. Red marker on plastic tablecloth, red marker on transparent plastic, 3 children"s dresses, plastic toy plane, 5 wired saris. Approximately 8"x 30"x 35".

2. Spirit Level. Spirit Level inset into the trunk of a tree and steel scales hanging from a branch. Dimensions variable.

Before I came to India, I was preoccupied by thoughts of small island migration in the West Indies. After soaring across islands, oceans and continents, I made Spinal Adjustment – a spinal column that sprouts wings across space and time, between seas and skies.

And then I registered Bombay  a city bursting at its seams; its colonial grandness; now defunct mill lands; the wretched ship breaking yard; the denseness of Dharavi and the sterile guest house sanctuary at Vasind. The confluence of slum, steel factory, marketplace, chai, heat, wild drivers and a most beautiful people made me think about the negotiation of space all over again.

I saw a people's ability to balance life with so much grace. And then I made Spirit Level  "scales hung from a branch weighing things not of a physical matter. Nearby, a spirit level was inset into the trunk of a tree."

What matters? I am marked by the fine balance of these people. India made me want to dance again!
 

Anup Mathew Thomas, Bangalore, India.

Light-life: 10.5 minute photographic loop.

Light-life is a 10.5 minute photographic loop comprising 90 images of 6 dance bar interiors in Mumbai. The Congress Party-led State government had already ordered the closure of dance bars across Maharashtra, saying that they were corrupting the youth.

Ayisha Abraham, Bangalore, India

Landscapes Or Reality is neatly framed from here. Site-specific installation. Digital video camera, television, computer screen, sofa, windows and text on paper.

"It is the juncture where the slow meets the fast."

Landscapes, Or Reality is neatly framed from here, is a view of two sides of a highway number 3 on the Mumbai-Nasik Route. The Western Ghats make their presence felt here. The rocky hills represent a geological time. I focus on one such imposing hill, Maoli.

The culture of the highway speaks of another passage of time. I record a day in the life of such a highway dhaba: The Hotel Chakradhari Garden Family Restaurant and Permit Room. I deliberately choose writing as a form for these notes, as opposed to video. The presence of the camera changes reality, while writing allows anonymity. I try to direct the viewer to a time that ties together random daily happenings into a narrative, that reads as part documentation and part pure fiction.

These two parts, two sides of Highway 3, come together as an installation.

The viewer is invited to come to the top floor of the guesthouse where the artists have been living. The bay windows in the bedroom overlook the Maoli hill. The audience is invited to sit and look out of the window. The camera is focused on the hill and in the process omits a group of tribal huts visible outside the window. A close-up tightly frames the hill and a cable directs this moving still to a television situated on the floor. The camera records the changes that occur through the day. Its mike is switched on to provide a kind of feedback, an amplified signal  "the sound is both subtle and ominous. The view outside the window repeats itself in the form of a screensaver on a laptop. It reflects the very same view left behind in the room as the viewers rise from their seats. 
 

Deniz Gul. Turkey.

Rase les murs. (Shaving the walls).

Photography. 59" - 47".

"Those who have fear and always close the windows go shaving off the walls.â"

- Gilbert Caty

"Walls don't bleed."

- Deniz Gul

Rase les murs shows gloved hands holding a razor blade and stretching the walls trying to shave. The work basically portrays the act of shaving in a hygienic way, all set and done on the walls, where there exists no chance of blood transfer. Yet the viewer sees the wall bleeding; the hands in the image cannot help but contain the blood. Ironically these hands are amateur and the wall cannot serve its function of being stiff and hard as a border, because it simply bleeds. The nature of insecurity still remains.
 
Gilbert Caty, France.

Bushtrou is loving you. Performance on the Open Day at a bar in Vasind.
 
Since this day of summer 1992 bringing us back from "The Summit of the Earth" in Rio de Janeiro, bringing us to north Brazil, and from there, bringing us to the discovery of Ren d'Azur, hero of the Renaissance born five centuries earlier, the herald of resistance, the dissipated disciple of Leonardo da Vinci, the inveterate inventor (*). Since this day, the Ren d'Azur Foundation was founded with the interminable mission of restoring the existence of the forgotten greatest genius of History and of his long dynasty through the centuries on this earth.

We have seen in the "annals of Ren d'Azur" (*) that it all started in Siberia some 30, 000 years ago with the discovery of a prehistoric rectal print fossilized in an unknown black rock known as "black series", an ancestor of the Sumerian god Assur, a serial killer and one of the first ancestors of Ren d'Azur.

The series continued with a no less surprising discovery made not far from Babylon in the desert of another identical anal trace in a very elegant gypsum flower called "pink series" betraying the illicit loves of the Mesopotamian gods during the dynasty As'Ur, 5000 years ago. Their descendants emigrated much later to Venice under the name of Lapis Lazuli between the first and X° century leaving us a seal in the stone of the same name and with the same crude "effigy", a family jewel preserved until the birth of the Renaissance by Pietro di Azuro, father of Ren d'Azur, who closes the blue series in 1499 (*).

To finish, the local and special correspondents from the north of Brazil delivered us an agglomerate of gold nuggets supporting the same rectal mark which would have belonged to Ren d'Azur himself, inaugurating the gold series (*).

From which we deduced then: "The reincarnation today does not have any secrecy for modern science. It was indeed proven recently by the teams of the Ren d'Azur Foundation that the resurrection of the flesh was carried out starting from the openings (or mouths: input/output). For example: let us take a mouth (or opening) and cut it in two, just like with a ground worm, we'll obtain two mouths which in their turn divided in two will produce four mouths (or openings) and so on" (*)

We have also seen that, after the prehistoric serial killer, some of Ren's Siberian ancestors went East to America to become the Indians in Occident, the other ones going West to Asia to become, some of them, Indians too, in the Orient (*).

Recently our stupid researchers just discovered in the Indus Valley a lot of identical ground prints 4000 years old coming from an Aryan yogi (certainly the first yogi). This holy god could be the ancestor of Indian gods and would be called Bushtrou. Forgotten since a long time, we just rediscovered in a little place, Vasind close to Mumbai, a survival of this god. He would have been a fucking god (an ass hole) and a liar (a mouth) proselytizing kissing poor people on the forehead (or anywhere else) and telling them "Bushtrou is loving you!", trying to get power.

We don't know anything else at the moment. We are now waiting for more information about Bushtrou, probably one of Ren's ancestor, but also about the relationship between Ren d'Azur and his cousin Sultan Babur (@).If anybody can help us, G. CATY, president of the Ren d'Azur Foundation in France, Europe and around, will be happy to greet you among his collaborators.

 web site: www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/caty

(@) but this is another story

Mariam Suhail. Pakistan.
 

Notebook entry: 18-06-05

Hot and sticky.

Guesthouse sign.

They say there's one spare bed in an occupied room.

The roommates are sweet and accommodating. But they constantly talk about Art and Mangoes. They also sleep a lot.

I watch TV.

Notebook entry: 19-06-05

The weather is better today.

Nice big lawn.

There are lots of people here.

They hover over me and stare.

Idiots don't realize I'm not asleep.

I've just been watching the clouds.

I stare back.

They can't tell though.

So I stare some more.

I'm trying to hypnotize them.

It's great when people can't tell what you're really up to.

12. Paula Sengupta. Calcutta, India.

O Maoli¦. Site specific work. Multiple: iron and steel scrap, and serigraphy on cloth. 30" x 30" x 15" approx.
 

O Maoli ¦ is a site-specific art project executed in collaboration with the workers of the Jindal Vijaynagar Steel Ltd., the children of the Jindal Vidya Mandir and rural women and teenagers in Vasind. Cradled by the Western Ghats, the hill, Maoli (meaning "Mother") dominates the horizon at Vasind and is considered sacred by its inhabitants. The ramparts of a medieval fort stand silhouetted atop the hill, halfway up are a Jain and a Hindu temple, and wafting down are tales of tigers prowling its upper reaches. Steeped in mystery, Maoli drew me inexorably " unable to detach myself from her power, I, and the resident community, built a shrine to her. "

O Maoli ¦was executed in a dairy, on an open terrace looking out on to the hill, in the tradition of Buddhist shrines in the high Himalayas. Using materials and means that constitute the greater livelihood of Vasind, six prayer flags were made from steel scrap and erected vertically, silhouetted against the hill. Thereafter, 500 cloth prayer flags were executed and the prayers of the resident women and children serigraphed on them. These were strung horizontally across the terrace like festoons. To complete the shrine, a stupa and a sacred tank were created from fodder troughs. As the weather turned and the skies grew grey, the wind whispered our prayers from Vasind to Maoli, to the high Himalayas, and to the heavens beyond .... Personal prayers, prayers for the needy, for wars to end, and for peace to prevail.