As on 25th May 2007

As I wake up, make my tea and sit on the couch the moment of interaction begins right there in the Khoj residence. As we the five peer artists and my-self the supposedly critic stay together it yields to a rich experience of sharing our thoughts with each other. We do it right from the time we wake up at the breakfast table that is carried on to the studios and continues with the dinner session. As we venture in to cooking and sharing domestic jobs apart from our travel together to the studios it feels like a unique experience living in commune. Arguments on religion and ritual based communities gave rise to the question whether the idea of ‘religion’ as a ‘major’ could accommodate the beliefs of heterogeneous ritualistic communities which are the minors in its logic and homogenized philosophy. Long discussions are carried out on the issues of art and freedom of expression.

The initial two three days were spent by thinking about what to do. The video presentation by Hemant Sreekumar on the previous Khoj residencies gave everyone new energies. Almost everyone in the crew is keen on capturing and translating the essence of everyday life practices in the form artistic expression. This made us to take a long journey in to Chandni Chowk area under the hot sun drinking water in the Gurudwara and passing through the Light and Paper Bazaars. We took photographs in the metro, whole sale shops and shopped in the lane of glowing colourful tapes. Hunting for a spark that would give a push I could see Aishwarya and Aditi roam around with pensive mood while discussing on several budding ideas. Uma Roy had already started working on a notice board recording day today thoughts, sticking bus tickets and scribbling on top of it with marker pen. She had chosen the room that was painted with black on all four sides. The reasons she said was that it helps her to get her thoughts align internally as the place looks consuming the person in to its surface. The thought process gets lost in its journey and it travels along non-linear streams and gets out of coherence as she kept on writing. This was not only found in her work but also interestingly in discussing over a particular issue while we engaged in to conversations. She often dropped the word id-ego and referred to Vedantic philosophies. She seems to propound the idea of the existence of the self that can happen only with the help of the existence of consciousness. But the moment expressed my opinion that it is very Decartian Cogito Ergoism she seems to be deny it. I just had a feeling that with a little bit of lingering over the philosophies of the self and consciousness both in Indian philosophies like advita and Buddhism as well as that of the western philosophic thoughts proposed by Descartes,Spinoza to Kant not only her thought process can be set in to a solid philosophical ground but also there are possibilities of her enjoying their modes of approach.

On the other hand Shaakar had chosen the romantic blue walled rooms. On the very first day of his arrival he seemed to have determined what to do. He climbed on to the roof and pulled bamboos, loose steel rods and ropes. He tied them all together. Attached wine and beer bottles to it and started playing frantically. In the evening when we opened up the discussion for the day, he introduced himself as a sound practitioner. He expressed his concerns over the need to differentiate between sound and music. As he explained further he said his aim is to make even the born deaf to understand the rhythmic vibrations of the music through the laser made Spirographic display. The experimentation of Shakaar was very innovative and distinct. He seems to have grabbed the idea of the sound mechanisms and the visual manipulations resulting in the mechanization but then while theorizing the need for such experimentation he had no solid points that could stand convincingly enough. I look forward to more of an interaction with him.

Pratap Modi with an expertise in large woodcuts draws inspiration for his work from the tickets issued by the weighing machines. He plays with the pun and fun of the statements that predicts the character of the consumer. He started taking photographs of the fellow peers making them stand on to the scorching sun on top of the roof. He converted the images using photoshop and pasted them in the middle of the tickets. After this process he blows it up almost to the life size painstakingly carving it on the surface of the hardboard. The process and mechanism through which he generates sounds are very innovative and interesting. The woodcuts escape the irony of mechanical reproduction by way of replacing the portrait in the center with multiple personalities. It pulls interest when the viewer interacts with the text.

Aditi is planning to stick on to the thoughts of time and space which she had also used in her earlier works. But this time she plans to use 10 TV sets, Cable transmitter and six chambers with which she will make the audience understand the expressions of time and space. During the presentation earlier she was suggested by the audience to use the concept of time and space elaborated in the epics and Indian philosophy. Aditi later expressed that she would like to look in to them rather as elements in relation to the ontological expressions. This made me to meditate upon Foucault’s idea of Heterogeneous space where multiple things happen in one specific space be it a monument or a shopping mall, Webber’s homogenous empty time and the Diachronic times propelled by the history as against the synchronicity argued by the concept of genealogy. We indulged in a discussion where Aditi showed a lot of interest to give a reading on to the above texts.

Aishwarya as she did in her earlier work places herself in the midst of happenings around her. She plans to work with the idea of how memories are generated and the biological and verbal references of ‘heart’ as such. She has a long way to go by way of concept as well as how to go about the work.

Let us wait and see how the projects shape up……

Jayashree.V< Critic in Residence