International Residency Nov-Dec 2003

The artists collectively demonstrated a diversity of concepts, methodologies and media.

Mamoon was trained as a painter, but his works have gradually shifted to issue based installations in specific environments that make a direct use of space in relation to objects / tools. These translate into signs describing intentions that change in the hands of the aggressors, as he has been a witness to in recent past, the context both personal and particular.

Louisa translates statistics into colour fields charts, as a conscious human she researches the collected numerical data compiled by agencies such as Australian Government / UN / CIA regarding emigration / progress / development / disparities the world over. She explained this in a set of recently made works. In an analysis of the trade movement, language, ethnicity and nations the final user of the CD could identify individual or community human behavior as greed or corruption, these in a certain way are representative of world politics. The question raised is how one defines corruption.

Zuleikha's oeuvre is light. Artificial light is an essential intangible source to realize the form and give shape to the stage and to lead a story or an idea. In a graphic drawing she marked the aerial view of a set, and explained "seamless light". She described light design, and the problems of working with light in an auditorium not really equipped with solving complicated solutions as posed by the text, and the needs of a director. With reference to some of the productions she explained light as it gets translated into the feeling of the text ˜Seamless light" is the conceptual framework she reached when the stage design compartmentalized like rooms, for an actor to enter. The nature of things as she responds them is fragmented.

The significant determinant of Keith Harrison's work are clay and electricity, the relationship solved by exploring syntax that is imaged by the artist in a lab by layering, trial, error etc in a time and space used for such experimentation. The functional constructed with inventiveness incorporating the safe energy in an ordinary circumstance as a restaurant, a subway, home etc.

The English dictionary, a source material to be learnt by the masses of scholars / emigrant / asylum seekers who travel to the first world seeking opportunities, was visualized in a frontal close-up of a herd of cows walking outwards to the viewer. This may have been a realisation that made Jagannath Panda make these recent works at the Royal College of Art. These are inflated sculptures shaped like a ball, a cargo box precariously balanced inscribed with words picked randomly from the dictionary. Such is the rope knot that metaphorically knots the world as a whole and in a fragment.