Experiments from the IFA-KHOJ Curatorial Residency 2011

Experiments from the IFA-KHOJ Curatorial Residency 2011

4 5

is my material as a curator, but adopting this methodology in this case, inventing strategies of archiving the video-shoot and disseminating this, demanded that I myself became embedded in the artistic process, functioning as an amplifier and transformer of all the gestures and interlinked processes at the site and beyond (e.g. in this exhibition).

RSJ: What demands do you place on your audience when they walk into the exhibition? If the exhibit is an ‘appendix,’ as you suggest, how does a viewer access the primary text? Or is that irrelevant/unnecessary?

AR: The audience for this exhibition is deliberately exposed to an absence; the absence of the artists. Viewers come to see a curated show of Ranbir Kaleka’s works, but what they encounter is an absence of their works. In place of their artworks, the archival exhibits derived from their studios offer reflections on the artistic practice of Kaleka.

I call my acts parenthetic exercises, and position the exhibition as an appendix, because I want it to evoke a certain ‘incompleteness,’ to allude to what it is not. More importantly, I want to suggest the proposition that the content within parenthesis can simultaneously exist as independent text and be much more revealing of the practices of artists.

AR: Why did you decide to choose films on different political and social issues in variation to your earlier idea of exhibiting documentary films on a specific thematic or concern? How did that idea evolve curatorially?

RSJ: My curatorial concept has evolved immensely over the course of the residency. With respect to your specific question, which has to do with the selection of films, I worked very closely with Gargi Sen at Magic Lantern Foundation. A documentary filmmaker herself, Gargi established an alternative distribution system for such work and is deeply committed to promoting and pushing the genre’s boundaries. Perhaps influenced by the more traditional conception of documentary film, I came in with the idea of looking at work around a specific social or political concern. However, as I began to watch a wide selection of films made over the past two decades, interesting commonalities emerged in terms of underlying themes and preoccupations. Highly nuanced and layered understandings of violence (enacted by capitalism, communalism, sexism, globalization…) underscore the films included in this exhibition, which also question notions of truth and representation.

AR: How do you see ‘activism’ in relation to the production of documentary images? I like your idea of bringing political videos from Youtube and Samadrusti TV into the exhibition space. Is this done to produce a counter-point to the other exhibits?

RSJ: Around the world, the documentary image (still and moving) has an intimate connection with political and social activism. One can think back to Jacob Riis’ work on the sordid living conditions in tenement houses on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century or Anand

In the polishing and editing of formal essays, fleeting and casual ideas and conversations are often lost, resulting in an impoverished portrait of the curatorial process. In place of an introductory essay, we offer you a series of conversations, which we hope will provide insights into some of our more informal thoughts on curating the three exhibitions in ‘Augmenting Practices.’

Rattanamol Singh Johal (RSJ), Akansha Rastogi (AR) and Leon Tan (LT)

RSJ: What determined your selection of artists for this project? Was it something about the nature of their practice, a prior experience visiting their studios, their willingness and interest in collaborating with you… or some combination of these factors?

AR: This curatorial residency is part of a larger ongoing project in which I would like to experiment with archiving the studio-based artistic practices of Indian contemporary artists, whose works respond to the impacts of media on contemporary art since the 1990s. For this residency, I wanted to work

with Ranbir Kaleka, whose works superimpose and problematise the two mediums of painting and video. As it turns out, the residency has functioned as a space for my initial laboratory-experiments, to develop the ideas and framework for the larger project ‘Archiving the Studio.’

RSJ: How do you see yourself challenging and expanding the traditional role of a curator by incorporating performative elements, artistic production and direct intervention into artists’ studios, into the process of exhibition making?

AR: This project has been extremely challenging, where I am pushing not just myself, but the practice of archiving itself. The whole project is about EXHAUSTION, obsession and absolute madness (though it failed for me at many levels, for example, I could not mentally get out of the framework of producing meaning while inhabiting the studio space, when I had proposed the opposite theoretically). The performative elements you mention grew out of inhabiting the studio spaces themselves; they involved the use of equipment I brought with me, camera, dictaphone, excel sheet, measuring tape, diary, logbook, etc., to produce documentation and subsequently, the exhibits in the show. They were a means of recording time as well as its interruptions and distractions.

When Kaleka invited me to the shoot of his new video-work, I was excited about the challenges that such as site offered, where the artist would become one of the many materials in a quasi-studio space. One could say, the artist

6 7

I have always been interested in creating an expanded field around an ‘artwork,’ which can consist of researched, processed data as well as associated images. To put it in another way, I am interested in curatorially de-sanctifying the unique position of an artwork while simultaneously re-asserting aspects of the work through an experiential field. The idea of role-playing the artist comes from a deep anxiety, of getting heavily involved with an artist’s practice, to the extent where you begin to imitate. Imitation in such a case can open up a new productive field. LT: You are involved not only in curatorial practice, but also explicitly as ‘artist’ in the collective ‘WALA.’ How do you distinguish your role as artist in this setting in comparison with your role as curator, whether as a Khoj curatorial resident or as an associate curator at Kiran Nadar Museum? AR: My practice is multi-faceted. As part of the WALA collective I have been (along with my other two collaborator-artists) applying for various artistic grants, doing performances and public-art projects. I am also participating in a different project, in a forthcoming exhibition with a group of artist-friends at Baroda Fine Arts Faculty, which is self-curatorial in nature. Further, to continue the funding of my larger ‘Archiving the Studio’ project, I plan to interact and participate in other curators’ exhibitions.

I may seem to be doing ‘my own thing’ at an artist’s studio but it is more importantly about the responsibility and risks that I take to expand, challenge and

create productive chaos within my own discipline of art-history. As a curator in the IFA-Khoj residency, I am exploring the obsessive dimension of researcher-curator as a parasite, experimenting with the institutional notion that archival processes are supposed to generate cultural and historical value.

LT: Your documentary interests in relation to the artist you chose to work with is clear, as is your emphasis on the conscious collection or selection of material to exhibit. I wonder though if you have given thought to unconscious dimensions of both artistic and curatorial practice, and to what extent this notion of the unconscious might be relevant to the exhibition?

AR: Yes, I am aware and excited about the unconscious aspects of the exhibition-making process. I myself have done certain things during the residency-period that I am not yet able to comprehend completely, or arrive at an evaluation of. I will leave the unconscious reading to the last, to my audience and also to myself, when I transit from the ‘making’ process to the ‘viewing.’ Let’s see how that turns out.

AR: In your project, you talk about creating a virtual historical layer. Is the route of access to this layer connected to the historical linearity of time, or is it random? How is time embedded in your project?

LT: Yes I have mentioned the creation of virtual layers, the superimposition of such layers over actual sites through the Layar augmented reality (AR) browser. The idea was to create chance encounters,

Patwardhan’s films over the last three decades. Broadly speaking, the full length films included in this exhibition indicate how the connection between activism and documentary has evolved over the past couple of decades. The underlying subjects and themes remain largely political yet the documentary maker’s traditional role as an ‘objective interlocutor’ is discarded in favour of a highly personal, subjective, engaged voice.

The Samadrusti came into existence as a response to the corporate control over national and local media in Orissa. With the assistance of documentary filmmakers Surya Shankar Dash and Amar Kanwar, the group began producing films and short videos, which highlight the disparity between what is said (by government officials and corporations) and reported in the news, and the actual situation in villages where police coercion and brutality are regularly used to quash non-violent protest. These works do produce a counter-point to the other films shown in the exhibition. At the same time, all the works question and complicate the idea of fixing and representing truth.

AR: Could you explain your thoughts about political documentary in ‘traditional’ channels and in the exhibition space? Can it be said that the obsolescence and softening of the political aim (and its corresponding subjectivities – i.e. of the maker) of the documentary film with passing time strengthens it for the ‘exhibition space?’

RSJ: I don’t know if I would say that the

political aim of the documentary film has softened or become obsolete. The politics of the filmmaker have always been present in the documentary but the Griersonian definition of the medium and its established aesthetic conventions sought to obscure this from the viewer. In recent years, as these conventions and definitions have been undermined, the medium has transformed to allow for these subjectivities to emerge. This transformation has been read as an ‘artification’ of the documentary film, which alongside the art world’s expansion of its parameters has created a space for such work in the galleries of museums and international biennial exhibitions.

LT: In creating an exhibition of two artists sans artworks, could you describe your thinking in detail regarding the notion of curating as art?

AR: I am more interested in expanding the nature of ‘exhibition-making.’ I want to create chaos and problematise generic markers like ‘artist,’ ‘theorist,’ ‘curator,’ ‘artwork,’ ‘museum,’ and ‘gallery.’ In this project I think it’s the gestural act that is most significant. By choosing not to display my own notes and other material collected during the entire process, and exhibiting only those documentation-parts that reveal an artistic practice, I exercise my curatorial power. In incorporating the role of performer-artist within that of a curator, I have taken extreme liberties, such as ‘mutilating’ artists’ images, in order to present my own argument, particularly where I think this provides a better understanding of the artists’ practices.

8 9

collective in the format of an exhibition. The other ideas included the creation of a ‘virtual’ Khoj in 3D, as well as a series of experiments in digital curation involving the Khoj archives. Upon my arrival in Delhi, I found a significant amount of site-specific material, perfect for experiments with platforms such as Panoramio, Google Earth and the Layar AR browser. Since the call for proposals explicitly stated an interest in ‘new media’ and the archives, I decided on this project.

RSJ: You speak of curatorial responsibility and associated privileges being concentrated in the West and the nation-survey exhibition model being one response from the celebrity curator/Western museum to the sweeping currents of globalization that demand some form of recognition and acknowledgement of the so-called Third World. How do you see your project as breaking away from this tendency to represent ‘contemporary Indian art’ as a whole? LT: The highly privileged world of (offline) curating and artistic practice in the ‘West’ is largely addressed to an elite art crowd. Where non-Western practices are incorporated into biennials, triennials or nation surveys, there is frequently an attempt at constructing a coherent or totalizing representation, in this case, of India and its history of art up to the present day, which is also often an attempt at reconciling currents in non-Western practices with canonical (Euro-American) Art History. In the online world, when one looks at art platforms such as Smart History (http://

smarthistory.org/), one would be led to the conclusion that India and Indian art history simply do not exist. My project does not seek to ‘represent’ a canonical Indian art history, nor does it seek to present a coherent narrative of contemporary practices in India. It is not aimed at an elite art crowd, but rather at ordinary users of online platforms. In embedding archival material from Khoj in platforms such as Google Earth and Maps, this project seeks to facilitate chance encounters between users worldwide and documentation of artistic practices in India. Its objective is to insert into the world-wide-web, which Pierre Lévy conceptualizes as a kind of collective intelligence, the idea that artistic practice and experimentation are alive in India. It may be conceived as an attempt at ‘reverse globalization,’ if we understand globalization to mean (historically) the transfer of technology and cultural practices from North to South. RSJ: What kind of response, in terms of views, is your project already getting before it is officially unveiled at KHOJ in November? Other than the exhibition in New Delhi, are there any plans of publicizing this widely? LT: Without any promotion, archival material online has already attracted in excess of 5000 views. The intention after the exhibition is to hand over the project to Khoj itself, as I understand that Khoj wishes to expand its social media outreach and presence (the project was designed partly with this in mind). Thus Khoj may continue to build on online

for example, when someone with a smartphone switched on Panoramio in the Layar AR browser within the vicinity of Khoj’s historical art activities, s/he would encounter digital images ‘augmenting’ the actual sites within which the artworks were made or exhibited, through the phone’s in-built camera view.

The on-site exhibition juxtaposes my experiments in digital curation with an analog exhibit, a paper map with archival prints pinned onto specific sites; both however are mnemonic devices, concerned with cultural memory. Perhaps the on-site arrangement portrays my ‘philosophy’ of time best, by suggesting that the present (new) does not succeed the past (old) but rather, present and past coexist, just as the Khirki Masjid of the 14th century co-exists with the new multiplex across Press Enclave Marg, and just as (virtual) memory always co-exists with the experiences given in a present (actual) moment.

AR: The two elements in your project ‘panoramic/bird’s eye-view’ and the ‘zooming in’ give a different perspective of looking at the site of art-production. What is the nature of the relationship between geographic-location and specific art projects curated in ‘Khoj-Online’. Is that relationship a prior event in itself? Does your project alter it in anyway?

LT: If we consider the component of Khoj Online whereby site-specific works were embedded into corresponding locations in an online map, yes, we could say that the relationship between geographic location and art project

pre-existed the project. Khoj Online however, alters things by exposing the relationship between artistic activities (Khoj workshops for example) and sites of production to an online and global audience. I should mention that one of the challenges I faced was in ascertaining the precise locations of the historical art activities; in many cases I had to settle for approximate locations due to the lack of sufficiently detailed information. This would not be a problem today if documentary images for the Khoj archives were to be taken with a geotagging camera.

The bird’s eye-view and the capacity to zoom into a site in Google Earth does perhaps highlight aspects of sites of artistic production that might not normally come into view. The fact that the site-specific archival images are embedded within a population of other geolocated images adds another dimension to how we think of such sites, for example, it is easy to see that they exist side by side with sites of religious practice, state institutions, commercial enterprises, and so on. In some cases, sites were even ‘repurposed’ for artistic production, Modi Bhawan in Modinagar for instance.

RSJ: Could you describe your initial proposal to KHOJ for this curatorial residency and how that changed as the program progressed? LT: To be frank, I had a number of ideas for this residency, but the original proposal involved the ‘staging’ of a fictional Indian artists’ collective, attributing archival materials to this

10 11

flawed premise, I decided to select one venue for the entire exhibition. Khoj, a distinctly non-commercial space for interdisciplinary experimentation that draws a slightly broader demographic than any of the other sites under consideration, became an obvious choice.

LT: The exhibition of documentary as art suggests an expansion of the concept of art, such that we might also claim that certain forms of activist journalism function as art. What is the philosophy of art that underpins your project, and more generally, your role as a curator and art historian?

RSJ: The exhibition of documentary as art suggests an expansion of both – the concept of art and of documentary. Activist journalism has indeed been exhibited in an art context, Samadrusti being a case in point. The coming together of ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ is an essential condition of contemporary visual culture’s critical engagement with politics, a relationship that relies on a strong discursive framework to produce meaning.

I choose not to ascribe my art historical or curatorial explorations to a single philiosophy of art or model of exhibition making. However, in the current context I will revert to Michael Brenson’s The Curator’s Moment, in the introduction to which he says that contemporary curators ‘must be at once aestheticians, diplomats, economists, critics, historians, politicans, audience developers, and promoters.’ One of the most valuable things I have learnt about curating from this experience at Khoj (and I have to thank Pooja Sood for constantly

archival content, and increase visibility of its activities on platforms with inbuilt audiences numbering in the millions. Apart from the catalogue publication, I may also incorporate this project into my ongoing research into media-arts in India, out of which I am planning to write one or two journal articles.

LT: Dissent has varying relations to the Law, as we have seen in the Arab Spring as well as in the Wall Street occupations recently. To what extent do you think space exists for dissenting views and actions in India, without such dissent becoming ‘incorporated’ into what has been described by some as the ‘spectacle.’

RSJ: I think the trivialization of an artist-activist’s political engagement through its incorporation into the realm of ‘spectacle’ is a pressing concern. In an interview published in Marg, Amar Kanwar states,

The mass production and consumption of the spectacle is not only a problem of cinema but also of the gallery and actually almost everywhere. Is it not true that all life, all relationships, all transactions seem to be ‘redistributed, transformed, mimicked, and reinstalled?’ What does one do then? The answer to this question does not lie only within the realm of the aesthetics and grammar of cinema. The answer probably is to keep finding a way to live, to confront and to resist, and to nurture and to continuously create as you go along.1

My discussions with Amar and the experience of his larger practice (including his work outside the art

world) have shaped my understanding of the sites, spaces and forms of expressing dissent in India. The cycle of confronting, resisting and finding a way to create and circulate work that subverts or questions the status quo has a lot to do with navigating the ‘in between spaces’ that exist in this country, allowing for the circulation of images and ideas that would not usually be allowed into the mainstream.

LT: The formal ‘art space’ is in my view inherently caught up in the political-economic tensions characterizing an epoch in which practically all values have been reduced to financial/monetary value. How do you think Khoj as an art space figures in such an epoch, and how does this inform your choice to show exclusively at Khoj rather than in multiple sites?

RSJ: There were two concerns that influenced my decision to show exclusively at Khoj. The first had to do with budgets and audiences – a largely pragmatic concern about how I would pull off an exhibition scattered over multiple sites without grossly exceeding my budget and dispersing the audience. The second had to do with the nature of the spaces I was considering. When I initially proposed this exhibition, I envisioned different audiences and viewing experiences between museums, commercial galleries and independent/experimental art spaces. During the course of the residency, my first extended experience of the Delhi art scene, I realized that a fairly homogenous set circulates between these spaces. Instead of trying to spread myself too thin testing a proposition with a

reiterating this during our weekly meetings) is that one needs to create the context within which to curate. It is in the process of creating this context that one performs the multifarious roles listed by Brenson. In this sense, the residency exhibition is just the first in a series of exercises aimed at destabilizing the categories of art and documentary and allowing for new juxtapositions, resonances and forms of spectatorship to emerge.

Endnotes

1. Amar Kanwar, Interview by Shanay Jhaveri, Marg

No. 3, Volume 61 (March 2010), 102.

12 13

I want to explore some of the paradoxes or contradictions engendered by the presence of artists’ film and video in the gallery, which challenges both our relationship to the museum and our perception and interpretation of moving images.

Mark Nash, Art and Cinema: Some Critical Reflections1

It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple.

Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)

Over the past decade, the pre-eminence of the documentary form within the global biennial circuit is highly intriguing, testifying to a trend that is ripe for academic and curatorial scrutiny. The locus classicus in this regard – an indispensable resource for the study of this phenomenon – is Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002). This edition of the quinquennial exhibition, touted by many as the most significant showing of what’s important in global contemporary art, was revolutionary not only for its geographic de-centering of the exhibition sites (or “platforms” as Enwezor called them) but also for the form and content of the work presented and the nature of the artists included. As one review of the exhibition noted, “The weight carried by documentary film and video…seemed to be split by a curatorial imperative both to highlight artists who move between gallery and cinema spaces - such as Kutlug Ataman, Isaac Julien and Pavel Brãila - and to reinstate the case for the mixture of formal experiment and political inquiry that characterized the idea of Third Cinema.”2 Just as calls for a Third Cinema were raised in the tumultuous political milieu of the 1960s and ’70s in Latin America, contemporary political documentary is informed by recent large-scale political and economic upheavals and the corporate colonization of mainstream media, responses to which demand new forms of expression and seek new techniques of evading censorship and expanding circulation.

The genre of political documentary now encompasses work that explores and complicates themes of economic and social inequality, ecological devastation, communal violence, trauma and memory.

In this milieu, Griersonian notions of documentary as defined by the medium’s conventional didacticism and employment of an “aesthetic of objectivity” have been gradually discarded in favour of non-linear narratives, personal histories, poetry, song, opinion, even propaganda, pointing to the existence of multiple/subjective truths and the complexities of representation. These shifts have also allowed for such work to be considered ‘art’ alongside made-for-gallery film and video with which it shares thematic and formal concerns. In principle, this broadened view of the documentary allows such films another channel of distribution and exposure, yet in practice there have been relatively few successful and sustained crossovers from the documentary fraternity into the art world.

My postgraduate research into the practice of Amar Kanwar, whose work lies at the crossroads of art and cinema, prompted this curatorial proposition – an attempt to catalyze thinking around the increasingly porous boundaries between the worlds of art and documentary. The idea is to present both new and established voices from the evolving documentary tradition – film, photography, video and installation – over the past two decades to an audience largely unaccustomed to sustained viewing in an art space. The history of documentary film and its exhibition in contemporary art venues is referenced at various points through the text but this relatively recent international phenomenon has gained little currency in India, where galleries have focused largely on painting, sculpture, installation and video art.

The initial impulse was to exhibit such work in a variety of art world venues (museum, gallery, independent space) and screening formats (multi channel, single channel, looped screening, scheduled screening) to meaningfully investigate the works’ changing relationship to the viewer depending on its content, context, mode and site of display. However, the scattering of exhibition sites around the city offered challenges that could not be adequately addressed within the brief period of this exhibition’s conception and installation. Hence, KHOJ – an experimental, not-for-profit space that has actively fostered interdisciplinary crossings and collaboration – is the chosen venue.

The exhibition includes four full-length documentary films – Monica Bhasin’s Temporary Loss of Consciousness (35 min., 2005, India), Simon Chambers’ Cowboys in India (76 min., 2009, UK), Anirban Datta’s .in for motion (59 min., 2008, India) and Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like A War (52 min., 1991, India), juxtaposed with a text excerpt from Sheba Chhachhi’s installation, Raktpushp (1997), the Blue Book (2008) series of photo postcards by Dayanita Singh (published by Steidl) and two short activist videos from Samadrusti TV. The diverse body of work included in the exhibition, presented in hitherto unexplored configurations, negotiates both the white cube and black box models of display – neither fully replicating the cinema in the gallery nor choosing to impose the stark, sterile, elevatory qualities of a contemporary art space. French film critic Raymond Bellour describes the re-emergence of film installations in the realm of contemporary art,

14 15

The throng of installations today is defined mostly along the lines of video art or of the somewhat forgotten history of film installations that are now beginning to reassert themselves. These installations, and the forces that animate them, may seem to be the effect of the so-called ‘crisis’ within cinema and to the difficulties of contemporary art, of which installations are probably the most vivid manifestation.3

Erika Balsom discusses one response to the ‘crisis’ of cinema in her article A cinema in the gallery, a cinema in ruins where she argues that the increasing presence of celluloid in the rarefied domain of art is a consequence of the medium’s obsolescence.4 This elevation to the status of an art object allows film to be preserved and confers upon it an aura quite antithetical to the original Benjaminian notion of the medium and its historical use by artist groups and political parties. As a result, a new stratum, that of ‘Gallery film’, has emerged alongside and out of the large body of work categorized as ‘experimental cinema.’ Radically different from established system of licensing, distribution and revenue generation through screening fees etc., this work is produced in highly controlled editions, introducing scarcity (and subsequent value) to an essentially mass medium, and distributed through the global art world where rarity, exclusivity and privilege govern value. The case of political documentary film is unique since its distribution, even through the conventional channels available to ‘experimental cinema’, has been fairly limited owing both to the lack of screening venues and to the highly

political (often controversial) content of such films.

In India, Magic Lantern Foundation, set up by documentary filmmaker Gargi Sen, has been instrumental in creating “a fair, transparent and accountable model of distribution” in a non-exclusive manner (allowing multiple distributors and unrestricted reproduction), while still allowing the filmmaker 65% royalty on the sale of every copy. Public access to the Foundation’s curated selection of films has expanded enormously through collaborations with bookshops, film festivals and the official website, which also serves as a point of sale.5 Persistence Resistance, their flagship film festival held every February (since 2008) at the India International Centre in New Delhi (sections of which have travelled to other cities in India and abroad), showcases developments in the aesthetics of political documentary while exploring screening formats (installations, video booths etc.) and drawing in new audiences. This exhibition is, in numerous ways, an extension of Magic Lantern’s efforts to foreground the documentary filmmakers’ questioning of the ideas of truth, justice, privilege, power and representation, by re-contextualising their work and putting it into dialogue with similar traditions within and outside the art world (documentary photography, feminism and video activism).

It is widely believed that art venues provide a space outside the conventional zones of censorship and policing for the exhibition of subversive content. However, art historian Julian Stallabrass’ arguments in his book, Art Incorporated, are centered around the fallacy of the art world’s self-

perceived autonomy (he shows how it is inextricably linked to the neo-liberal order and big business), providing a guiding lens through which to explore the tension between the highly political content of the filmic material produced by documentarians over the past two decades and the effects of its display in a gallery setting to an art world audience.

If the work is shown without any prospect that it will have an effect, its display becomes mere performance and its viewing a form of entertainment. It will be said that the art world is not separated by impermeable barriers from the rest of society, so these displays may have a wider effect, and that may be increasingly true if art’s autonomy continues to erode. Yet current art’s marginality, when compared to the rest of the culture, means that those effects are likely to be minor.6

Art’s marginality, especially when it comes to effecting real, political change, is perhaps one reason why such work is even allowed to be shown, falling below the radar of censors and other government authorities.7 Such freedom is rarely accorded when it comes to content aired on mass media sources – television, newspapers, magazines or even the conventional ‘black box’ cinema. In her article, On documentary sounds and images in the gallery, Elizabeth Cowie writes, “Documentary as installation in the gallery disturbs the categories of both ‘art’ and ‘documentary’.”8 Within the history of exhibitions, the shifting conditions for showcasing films, prompted

by an expansion of the very idea of art, are evident in the comparison between two landmark editions of Documenta, three decades apart – Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 (1972) and Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 (2002). Gregor Stemmrich makes some pertinent observations about the differences in venues and contexts of screening between the two exhibitions in his essay, White Cube, Black Box and Grey Areas: Venues & Values.

The integration of films into the exhibition concept of ‘documenta 5’ was based upon a sharp distinction between films made by artists and films made by film-makers. Those by artists were either made on or transferred to video and shown continuously within the context of the exhibition, while the other films were shown only once and screened in the Kino Royal in Kassel, outside the exhibition area. The defining criterion that a film was made by an artist, however, didn’t imply that the film itself was seen as a work of art in its own right; instead it was seen as a by-product… Films that were shown within the exhibition area were thus mostly documentaries – for instance, land art projects and performances… Film was understood as a means of documentation and reproduction, not as artwork in its own right…

If we compare the documenta of 1972 with that of 2002, thirty years later, we can see that the distinctions that were operating in 1972 have collapsed. There was no polarisation between self-reflexive art films and films with

16 17

a clear political intention. All the films were shown inside the exhibition and listed in the catalogue. There was also no official distinction between films by artists and films by filmmakers. All the different categories seemed to have been merged or condensed into the same format.9

This convergence and, to some extent, collapse of traditional categories – art and cinema, white cube and black box, single-channel and multi-channel, experimental/artist film and political documentary – have allowed for a number of visual, historical, social and political resonances to arise between works within the common spaces of screening and exhibition. At Documenta 11, Amar Kanwar’s film A Season Outside (30 minutes) was presented at the Museum Fridericianum, one of the exhibition’s main venues, in fairly standard art gallery conditions for the exhibition of video and film (darkened room, backless wooden benches, looped screening).10 Kanwar shared the venue with the likes of Shirin Neshat, Chantal Akerman, Fiona Tan, Eyal Sivan and Alfredo Jaar, all prominent for their work with still and moving images, investigating notions of ethics, subjectivity, fact and fiction, while treading sensitive political territory.11 His other film, Of Poems and Prophecies (60 minutes), was presented at Bali cinema in Kassel under the Documenta 11_Filmprogram, a vital part of the fifth platform that allowed the “appreciation of film appropriate to the specific technical, spatial, and temporal needs of the medium.”12 Twenty films were selected for the Filmprogram, of which three were screened per day over the course of the exhibition’s 100 days in Kassel.13

The other ‘disturbance’, within the documentary medium, has had an equally significant role to play in transforming the reception and circulation of these films. Since the late 1980s, non-fiction filmmakers in India (and arguably worldwide) probing historical traumas and contemporary instances of violence, brutality and repression in the name of economic liberalization and social progress, began to subvert the medium’s established conventions of representation. Using highly nuanced and sensitive juxtapositions of personal histories, memory, poetry and folk song, testimony and filmmaker narration, they created works that allow for immersive encounters, spawn numerous interpretations and dispel the conventionally objective narrative voice of documentary film, replacing it with a highly lyrical reflection on today’s issues and inequalities. Czech curator Vít Havránek theorizes this trend in the evolution of documentary, as it stands in relation to its subject and mass media representations, saying,

The contemporary documentary approach in visual art has buried once and for all the myth of the “uninterested” or “objective observer,” a cliché ceaselessly trumpeted by the mass media such as television, radio, and daily newspapers. Thanks to the experiences artists have had with these media and their strong theoretical background (from media theory to media sociology), they define their position as “engaged.14

The filmmaker’s approach is neither that of an ethnographer nor of an insider and the visual language represents a distinct

disconnect in the indexical connection between image and referent. These developments have been read as an ‘artification’ of the documentary, further broadening the notion of ‘expanded cinema’.

The exhibition at KHOJ includes both film and non-film works, with an underlying thematic connect, that represent formal innovation and unconventional modes of dissemination and display. Deepa Dhanraj’s landmark film Something Like A War, which dissects India’s family planning program for its brutal violations against women’s bodies, rights and freedoms is juxtaposed with text from Sheba Chhachhi’s 1997 installation Raktpushp that draws on three dominant discourses in India around menstruation: “Brahmanical attitudes of control and fear towards women’s sexuality based on ideas of purity/pollution; Shakta, rural and Tantric celebrations of fertility and female power (shakti) and Western medical/colonial erasure of bodily processes through law and technology.”15 The activist videos by The Samadrusti, widely available on YouTube, offer a radical counter-point to representations of Orissa’s rapid industrialization on popular media sources. Simon Chambers, in his film Cowboys in India, reacts to the traditional flatness of the documentary using a humorous and telling game of investigative journalism to subtly uncover widespread fear, exploitation and obscured, inaccessible truths. The crisis of representation extends to Anirban Datta’s .in for motion, which begins in the hills of Northern Orissa and traverses the towering corporate headquarters and call centres of Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata,

returning to the idea of an “information hole” that constantly plagues “the other India.” Dayanita Singh’s postcards from around the country confront us with the image of the ‘emerging superpower’ in a distinctly quiet, still, mournful avatar. One may be tempted to draw parallels to the rich documentary tradition of photographing industrial sites exemplified by the Bechers in Germany and the likes of Charles Sheeler in the United States. However, as Aveek Sen points out, Singh’s Blue Book images imbue the “industrial landscape with the luminous mystery and spaciousness of human emotion.”16 Monica Bhasin’s Temporary Loss of Consciousness emerged as a response to the genocidal campaign against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, looking back at the legacies of Partition by tracing communities and individuals across the country living on the margins of society. Bhasin’s film explores the possibility of a suitable aesthetic language to grapple with the enormous residual trauma of the historical events that continue to define the “partitioned times” we live in.

The overarching idea is multi-faceted: to expand the horizons of socially and politically engaged art practice by including documentary films, previously unseen in a contemporary art space, within the exhibition installation; to encourage critical questioning around the inherent tension that arises from the exhibition of activist documentarians’ works as art; to meaningfully investigate the work’s format, content, duration and relationship with the viewer and the other works presented as part of the show.

18 19

Endnotes

1. Mark Nash, “Art and Cinema: Some Critical

Reflections” in Okwui Enwezor et al., Documenta

11_Platform 5: Exhibition (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje

Cantz, 2002), 129.

2. Mercer, Kobena, “Documenta 11,” Frieze, Issue

69 (September 2002) http://www.frieze.com/issue/

article/documenta_113/ (21 March 2011).

Also see: Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino,

“Towards a Third Cinema” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies

and Methods: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1976), 44-64.

3. Raymond Bellour, “Of an other Cinema,” in Tanya

Leighton (ed.) Art and the Moving Image: A Critical

Reader (London: Tate Publishing/Afterall Books, 2008),

408.

4. For more, see Erika Balsom, “A cinema in the

gallery, a cinema in ruins,” Screen Volume 50, Issue 4

(Winter 2009), 411-42.

5. See http://magiclanternfoundation.org/ and http://

www.ucfilms.in/aboutunderconstruction/.

6. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of

Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2004), 191.

7. An interesting point regarding government control

over the exhibition of political art is made by Coco

Fusco writing about the situation in Cuba, specifically

the Havana Biennial, where authorities allow for very

controlled viewings and exposure of critical work to

foreign curators and the art world elite, demonstrating

their liberal character to a select international audience

while keeping local viewership and press coverage to a

minimum, confident that this will prevent any political

fallout.

See: Coco Fusco, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” in

The Bodies That Were Not Ours (London: Routledge,

2001), 154-162.

8. Elizabeth Cowie, “On documentary sounds and

images in the gallery,” Screen Volume 50, Issue 1

(Spring 2009), 126.

9. Gregor Stemmrich, “White Cube, Black Box and

Grey Areas: Venues & Values,” in Tanya Leighton (ed.)

Art and The Moving Image: A Critical Reader (London:

Tate Publishing/Afterall Books, 2008), 431-432.

10. Lev Manovich, author of The Language of New

Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001)

reviews Documenta 11 on his blog, making a

comment on the proliferation of film and video work

and detailing screening conditions:

Going through the show I also had the feeling I

was in a kind of artist’s cinema multiplex. Although

I have not counted, it felt that at least half of all the

Documenta artists presented “video installations”

which almost all followed the same standard

exhibition format: a projection presented in a small

room. At least in a commercial movie theatre you

get comfortable seats, Dolby surround sound, and

you can bring in a coke, but since Documenta was

about “serious art” and not the pleasures of mass

culture, a typical room had hard and uncomfortable

benches. Somebody pointed out to me that all

video and film installations presented at Documenta

together added up to more than 600 hours of

runing time. Somebody else noted that the size of

video and film installation rooms varied accordingly

to the prestige of a an artist

Source: Lev Manovich, “Welcome to the Multiplex:

Documenta 11, New Generation Film Festival

(Lyon), LA Film Festival’s New Technology Forum,”

http://www.manovich.net/Documenta_11_review.

html (27 May 2011).

11. Indian curator and critic Gayatri Sinha, in her

review of Documenta 11 for The Hindu, gives an

account of other works in the exhibition that are

similar in theme and content to Kanwar’s films.

Kanwar’s position was echoed in the work of

artists from seemingly disparate parts of the world.

A powerful work by Chantal Akerman “From the

Other Side”, was shown simultaneously on 18

monitors. Its subject is the check posts of New

Mexico, in which America is the desired land,

one which Mexicans try to slip into, to be caught

and incarcerated or tortured to death. The voice

of the displaced or homeless is very movingly

demonstrated in a powerful collaboration between

Fareed Armaly and Rashid Masharam who present

little reported aspects of Palestinian life, living on

the margins of separation and homelessness in their

own land.

Source: Gayatri Sinha, “Diatribe or art?” The Hindu,

1 September 2002 http://www.hinduonnet.com/

mag/2002/09/01/stories/2002090100340200.htm (28

May 2011).

12. Okwui Enwezor et al., Documenta 11_Platform 5:

The Short Guide (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002),

240.

13. For the full list of selected films, see Okwui

Enwezor et al., Documenta 11_Platform 5: The Short

Guide (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 241.

14. Havránek continues,

The second dimension gives rise to the following

consideration: if we define the position of

the documentary maker as “unobjective,” the

subjective assessment and graduated relationship

the documenter enters into (is it a contract?)

with the documented along with the distance the

documenter takes with respect to his or her own

medium (film, video, photography, but also drawing)

reveals itself as a key process.

Source: Vít Havránek, “The Documentary

Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries”

in Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (eds.), The Green

Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and

Contemporary Art. #1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press,

2008), 141-142.

15. Sheba Chhachhi, Email to Rattanamol Singh Johal,

September 23rd 2011.

16. Aveek Sen, “A Land Called Lost,” Dayanita Singh

(Madrid: Fundación Mapfre/Penguin Studio, 2010),

168.

20 21

1.

2.

3.

4.

All stills courtesy Magic Lantern Foundation

1. Still from .in for motion (Dir. Anirban Datta, 59 min., 2008, India)

2. Still from Cowboys in India (Dir. Simon Chambers, 76 min., 2009, UK)

3. Still from Something Like A War (Dir. Deepa Dhanraj, 52 min., 1991, India)

4. Still from Temporary Loss of Consciousness (Dir. Monica Bhasin, 35 min., 2005, India)

22 23

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

1. Document 1 Still from the video-essay, Ranbir Kaleka’s studio

2. Document 2 (Image 1) Tracing of Ranbir Kaleka’s installation Reading ManOne of a 74 slide installation of Ranbir’s tracings, drawings, studies, preparatory sketches, layouts and details of Paintings

3. Document 2 (Image 2) A tracing from Ranbir Kaleka’s studio. One of a 74 slide installation of Ranbir’s tracings, drawings, studies, preparatory sketches, layouts and details of Paintings

4. Document 3 One of a 6 light-box installation. Docu-mentation image taken during the instal-lation of Ranbir Kaleka’s work Fables from the House of Ibaan

5. Document 4 Still from the video-essay, Ranbir Kaleka’s studio

24 25

1. Augmented reality archives © Khoj and Han Bing

2. Yog Raj Chitrakar Visits Lal Chowk © Khoj and Nikhil Chopra

3. Khoj Online - Networking archival im-ages in Google Earth © Khoj and artists

1.

2.

3.

26 27

I quote myself. My alibi. A record of my presence. A Microsoft Word Document ‘diary-feed’ of my first day or the first visit to Ranbir Kaleka’s studio for this project. Self-inscription.

I, as a performer tried to inhabit the Ranbir Kaleka’s studio, initiated certain continuums, attempted to document the artistic processes, the environs (which is very much part of the making of an artwork). I call my acts parenthetic exercises - pauses, bracketed movements rather than complete sentences. In several of my visits to his studio during the curatorial residency-period, I tried to inhabit three different spaces of his artistic production (the basement studio, the private studio and the rented studio for video-shoot and editing), with all my devices in place – audio and videos records of each visit, each conversation with Kaleka, his assistants, house-helps, driver and wife Rashmi, notating the slightest of observations, my every-day diary entry recording my own actions. For me all of this was part of the process of reading the studio-space, exploring it in my own ways, taking liberties, opening the drawers, asking what is what and where, interfering, interrupting the otherwise unquestionable space like an intruder – getting introduced, interacting and also simultaneously getting habituated.

I started with several processes like making an inventory of objects in the studio and collecting narratives about each object from all the occupants of the space. The collection of material, the beginning of these processes was a work in itself and by itself. Its translation and dissemination

“Here I am at the Studio. The space is inspiring. I am in an observer’s position right now. Everything I see is exotica. All this while thinking about the ‘studio’ (i.e. before entering the real site, negotiating with it in my head / mental space) I had always considered it as a unit, a whole, a collection, that needs to be sorted, archived, parametrised and classified. But as I begin to occupy my space inside, I feel the need to understand the logic or the order that the space already has. So, the model of archiving that I will arrive at should be based on the way it is arranged, and what can be deduced from that order.”1

into an exhibition-form is a separate process. For this exhibition I chose to reflect and elaborate on the artistic practice of Kaleka which I had engaged with and investigated by documenting different aspects of his studio.

A PROPOSITION WHICH IS STILL UNDERWAY

This exhibition is a text (in parenthesis and not the main body). The main text (the artist’s artwork) remains outside. But this is not the inside, nor even a fragment. It is assigned the function of an aside. It is an exhibition sans artworks. Each Exhibit or The ‘document,’ as I call it, is an appendix to artists’ practice, to studio space, to artworks, to the multiple sites of artistic production. This exhibition explores the performative aspects of an ‘appendix,’ its relationship with the artist’s works, the studio-context from which it comes from and the possibilities of its independent existence. These Exhibits are not traces that are voluntarily or involuntarily left behind only to be discovered later ; they are neither residues nor by-products of ‘some’ natural process of sedimentation. They are consciously collected, constructed, chosen and distilled data / databases, aimed to highlight the less visible aspects of an artist’s practices.

I create this field to evade the final image. I am consciously playing and mixing up the question of authorship itself. Who owns whatever is on display? Not me. Not the artist. The singular authorial voice as well as its claim is intentionally adulterated and disrupted in the exhibition space. Does that imply the absence of the artist and/or the presence of something

else? Can it be read as the curator’s smooth assertion of power? In my earlier articulations, my intention was to exploit and tame the artworks, to control the narrative. Within this whole process, the curator (or researcher or archivist) is also positioned as an artist, participating in the authorship, performing two roles at multiple levels: that of a parasite surviving on the nourishment from the host while simultaneously harming the host; and that of an epiphyte that grows on ‘another’ for support.

‘The host’ here is the artist (Ranbir Kaleka) who is absented from the ‘act of artistic production for an exhibition.’ A dictionary defines an ‘absentee’ as a person who absents himself or herself, as a landowner who does not live on his or her own property or a voter who is permitted to cast a ballot by mail. In the case of this exhibition, the host-artist has been consciously absented and translated into a ‘subject,’ not by choice but by a curatorial strategy whereby all the artistic decisions (for the sake of an exhibition) have been hijacked and taken over. The artist is treated as material, conceptually as well as physically. The objective however, is not to denigrate the artist (I am working with); it is an aspiration, a shuffling of roles encouraging more confusion, and an attempt to understand my own position.

With this exhibition-format, I construe a situation where repetition, multiples and constant movement with no peculiar points of arrival are the only possibilities. It is a small experiment with artistic autonomy and curatorial practice that makes of the exhibition space a performative container-device providing

28 29

structures for multiple readings of the absent artworks of Ranbir Kaleka.

ARCHIVING AS A FORM OF WRITING / REVISION

I am still at a preliminary stage in this project where the text (a supposed curatorial note) for my exhibition could easily have been just a series of questions. I am far off from even attempting to look for answers, and definitely in no position to fully read, comprehend and assess what I have done. As I initiated this process of seeing and being an intruder in Kaleka’s studio at the beginning of the residency, I began laying out the bare minimum, the absolute basics. I focused on my very first annotations, observations, the first sentences, and began to expand it through successive thoughts.

Understanding and mapping the materiality of Kaleka’s pace, his sense of time and movement, his pauses and intervals, and translating his peculiar poise into different grids (see Document 1, a video-essay) was one of my first urges. The video-essay documents the staircase, an intermediary zone between his private first floor studio and the basement studio which is also his assistant’s work-station. I decided to edit and use only Kaleka’s descent because it is easy, a pact with the nature of things. Ascent goes against the force of gravity, it requires force and is thus a distraction. The downstream motion forms a counterpoint with the still-photographs inserted for a duration of two seconds. This produces a moment of relaxation, creating space for an imagined rebellious upstream movement.

Kaleka’s first floor private studio is adjacent to his mother’s room. His mother is usually knitting. He had once mentioned in a conversation that most of his family members from Patiala are great story-tellers. However, it was the artistic labour, the hands that I documented. Document 4 (a video-essay) shows Kaleka “crossing the hump in my [his] creative process” by indulging with his tool-box and trying to make the pulley work.

Document 2 shows the leftovers of “artworks,” of the completed final images. I found many old drawings, tracings of Kaleka’s paintings in his studio. These mappings, plans, preparatory sketches and layouts made during the process of achieving a final product are not “artworks,” but the traces and markers of the artistic process which involves sample-making, imitation and the constant perfecting of the image. In the form of slides, these traces resurface along with certain interventions and juxtapositions which I structured as a narrative. This installation also presents a layered reading of his work Reading Man.

I spent hours watching Kaleka’s assistants completely engrossed in superimposing a projected image (video) over a painted image. Document 3 is a set of six light boxes, carrying the ‘third’ image of Kaleka’s video-installation Fables From the House of Ibaan, that I had documented during the installation of the work. In some ways, I almost imitate him, taking extreme liberties in mutilating his final conceived image / the final product, at the same time presenting a solid, tactile image of otherwise immaterial projected figures of pure light. My idea was to highlight the

elements that Kaleka plays with such as light, and to open up the artistic process in terms of what precedes what, the moving image or the still image.

I was very fortunate to be part of the shooting of Kaleka’s new video-work Reading Man 2. I archived that complete one-day shoot, collecting three different layers of time relating to the shoot. Document 5 is a structure of collected notations presented as a script independent of the actual video shoot; it allows the viewers themselves to enter and revise it. Equations, chemical equations, mathematics formulae, derivations, corollaries, products, by-products, residues interest me. Because once the variables are inserted, the answers are dependent on the principles through which the physical world is understood, explained, engaged with and made accountable. It can be said that the formulae are summary representations of an aspect of the material world. I find ‘statements’ as formulaic compositions a useful way of moving ahead faster : short, crisp, biased, opinionated, with fine edges. Statements have ‘full-stops’ that arrive too quickly, belying their short life-spans or validity. Their authority is dependent upon a counter-statement, with possibilities for editing, re-stating; and the game continues to outlive them. “For me exhibition is about making a statement. Because one can keep revising the proposition,” I once said to my boyfriend over a drink. Revisions.

To say that archiving is a peculiar form of writing is to suggest that it is a language, that it has grammatical rules, that it encodes and decodes communication

and information. In order to push the disciplinary practice of archiving and its indexical nature, I located it in the context of a particular physical space, that of the artist’s studio or the site of artistic production, with the modality of archiving changing depending on the artist. All of this involved inventing and chiselling strategies for archiving. For example, I could have taken one photograph per day of the studio from a particular angle, and made a flip book out of it, which would have annotated small spatial changes occurring in the space. There was a plethora of such choices of inventorying the space. My approach in creating these five documents emphasized the exploration of a studio and its integration with artistic practice.

EXHAUSTION AND FUTILITY

Three important acts for me in this project are repetition, imitation and performing futility. In executing this project, I failed in achieving the initially proposed claim / objective of futility. I deferred from the proposed where I had suggested playing with the idea of archival exhaustion, that is, to make extensive tables, excel sheets and to engage myself in noting down everything, which might sometimes be important and at other times futile. I deviated from documenting everything possible, from the artworks being produced to everything inside the studio space – the materials used (brush, colours, scrap, random objects), the stock-images in artists’ computers, books and other referential material. Instead of performing the gestural act of engaging in futile activity (such as measuring the height and width of the furniture inside the studio space), I began documenting selectively.

30 31

How difficult it is to do futile things! The machine of meaning production never stops. The impossibility of futility in the act of archiving was what I constantly struggled with.

Endnotes

1. 8th

August 2011, Monday, 11am, Ranbir Kaleka’s

Basement studio, Sarvpriya Vihar, New Delhi.

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘globalization’ is a concept that succeeded that of ‘development,’ which referred to ‘a set of concrete actions effectuated by Europeans to exploit and draw profit from the resources of the non-European world’1 over the 20th century, typically accompanied by moralizing or civilizing rhetoric. Globalization replaced development as an ideology and set of practices in the 1980s when the latter became untenable due to the spread of Afro-Asian anti-colonial critiques and movements, shared in part by communities in Latin America as well as by indigenous communities the world over. In its late phase, development overlapped to a great extent with what came to be called globalization. Both involved the export of ‘aid’ and ‘advice’ (technology transfer, educational programs, financial reform packages) from the global north to the global south (center to periphery). Notwithstanding the eloquent rationalizations subtending both development and globalization, when one

examines the long duration (longue durée) history of the capitalist world-economy over the last five hundred years, it is difficult to escape from the conclusion that ‘the gap between the top and the bottom, the core and the periphery, has never gotten smaller, always larger.’2

Khoj Online is a curatorial project that takes as its central problem the so-called globalization of art and media, which to date has largely meant the universalization of a Euro-American canon of art history and contemporary artistic practice. Admittedly, the recent proliferation of biennials, triennials and nation-survey exhibitions (offline) has resulted in international exposure for samplings of art from the global south. However, a critical examination of many such events and exhibitions reveals practices shaped and informed predominantly by a Euro-American curatorial canon exemplified by the likes of Harald Szeeman, Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maria Lind, Nicholas Bourriaud, and Barbara van der Linden. When Lauren Cornell and Kazys Varnelis observe that ‘broadly speaking, the art world is vertical’ that is, characterized by ‘escalating levels of privilege and exclusivity,’3 this applies equally to the curatorial sector, such that the (offline) globalization of curatorial practice, with a number of rare exceptions, privileges the theory and work of those located in the global north. Is it any surprise then that historical and contemporary art from India remains relatively invisible internationally, once again with notable exceptions?

Cornell and Varnelis also claim that in opposition to the (offline) art world, ‘the web is horizontal (based on free access, open sharing, unchecked distribution, an

32 33

economy of attention).’4 Yet to look at networked art historical platforms such as Smarthistory,5 a web-based ‘art history textbook’ that expects over a million visits this academic year alone, one is forced to the conclusion that India and its extended history of art simply do not exist. Similarly, art from India of the past several decades has been relatively invisible on social media platforms such as Tumblr6 and Twitter7 (both with user populations numbering in the tens of millions). On the other hand, these same platforms contain so many repetitions of imagery and quotations relating to canonical figures of Euro-American art history, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons and so on, that such content now hovers on the edges of banality. As far as art is concerned then, even if the web is supposedly horizontal, this does not mean, or has not meant, that it has facilitated a reversal of art and media globalization from south to north. One might go further to suggest that Cornell and Varnelis are wrong, that the web is not necessarily horizontal, at least where it concerns art from the south (e.g. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), but instead, tends to preserve the Euro-American art canon within an international ‘economy of attention.’

Against this backdrop, Khoj Online consists of digital experiments that attempt a kind of reverse-globalization. It involves the curation of archival material from Khoj International Artists’ Association (Delhi, India) using networked platforms including Panoramio,8 Google Earth9 and Google Maps,10 with the objective of increasing the visibility of India’s (recent) historical and contemporary

art online. The project yields a selection of geo-located archival material (visual documentation of Khoj’s international artists workshops, residencies, and events) within these platforms such that they become accessible to online audiences, not only to the user base of Panoramio itself, but also to audiences anywhere in the world viewing parts of India in Google Earth and Google Maps within the range of Khoj’s historical art activities. It also builds on Panoramio’s integration with the Layar11 augmented reality browser, such that audiences in India browsing the Panoramio Layar with handheld devices in close proximity to Khoj’s historical art activities across the subcontinent will encounter images from the archives linked to contextual information. For readers unfamiliar with augmented reality, Layar is a browser operating on devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android phones, which superimposes virtual layers (in this case digital images) over actual sites using the devices in-built camera view, in this way ‘augmenting’ the real world with digital information.

The archival documentation embedded in Google Earth, Google Maps and Panoramio Layar is curated with the objective of facilitating chance encounters between everyday Internet users and artistic practices in India. Given that Google Earth and Google Maps primarily showcase landscape photography depicting actual sites, rather than visual documentation of artworks, Khoj archival images tend to stand out to users, drawing attention to the existence of artistic practices in different regions of India. Working with these platforms means that archival material may be inserted

directly into pre-existing user communities, rather than requiring the building of an audience base from scratch. As Google Earth and Google Maps are more or less global default platforms for geo-located information and navigation, the project’s curatorial strategy also means that the likelihood of chance encounters between Internet users and archival documentation is actually quite high.12 On the other hand, one constraint of using these platforms is that visual documentation is limited to images directly referencing actual locations, hence the emphasis on site-specific art.

While the experiment just described focuses on random encounters between online audiences and widely dispersed images of art in India, without any attempt at providing a coherent narrative, Khoj Online also uses another networked platform, Historypin,13 to curate a step-by-step archival tour of the diverse artistic practices facilitated by Khoj over a ten year period. By no means an authoritative art history of Khoj, this component of Khoj Online is intended to serve more as an online sampler of the breadth and scope of Khoj’s work as one of a handful of non-commercial platforms for experimental art in India. As with archival content in Panoramio, the Historypin tour pairs documentary images with contextual information, where possible including excerpts from Khoj catalogues, artists’ websites, The Khoj Book14 and other sources of art historical scholarship.

The on-site exhibition at Khoj Delhi is designed to present a user-centric view of the curatorial project. Thus, audiences engage with a projection display from the perspective of an Internet user searching for different locations in India

using Google Earth and Google Maps, discovering some of the archival images embedded within the platforms, and linking to contextual information on the images in Panoramio. Audiences are also taken through the Historypin tour, and provided with URLs to the Khoj Online profiles in both Panoramio and Historypin. This digital exhibit is juxtaposed with an analogue one, essentially, a paper map of India with photographic prints from the Khoj archives pinned to sites at which the artworks depicted were first shown. The juxtaposition accentuates a temporal gap between two strategies of archiving and geo-location, at the same time bringing two ‘times’ or ‘ages’ into co-existence within the gallery space.

Khoj Online is intended as an ongoing resource that may be used by Khoj the organization beyond the life of the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) - Khoj curatorial residency (2011). The digital nature of the contents and platforms means that the project is easily modified, edited, extended and distributed, in other words, incorporated by Khoj as a growing online archive to include future Khoj activities. It may also be readily integrated into a social media strategy, arguably an important component of any art organization’s outreach activities in what has been described by numerous scholars as an age of networks. Whether these experiments in digital curation prove to be successful or not, in terms of the objective of increasing the international visibility of artistic practices in India, remains to be seen. This is the inherent nature of experimentation; there are never guarantees of success. It is to the credit of the IFA and Khoj to have made such experimentation possible, for the

34 35

experiment is the cornerstone not only of artistic creation, but also of curatorial innovation.

Endnotes

1. Wallerstein, I. (2004). After developmentalism and globalization, what? Keynote address at Development Challenges for the 21

st Century. New York: Cornell

University (1 October).

2. Ibid.

3. Cornell, L. & Varnelis, K. (2011). Down the line. Frieze, 141. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/down-the-line/.

4. Ibid.

5. http://smarthistory.org/

6. http://www.tumblr.com/

7. http://twitter.com/

8. http://www.panoramio.com/user/khojonline

9. http://www.google.com/earth/

10. http://maps.google.com/

11. http://www.layar.com/

12. Views of the Khoj Online project exceeded 5000 prior to the exhibition opening, without any promotion whatsoever, with the majority of views deriving from the Google Earth and Google Maps platforms.

13. http://www.historypin.com/profile/view/khojonline

14. Sood, P. (ed.) (2010). The Khoj Book 1997-2007: Contemporary art practice in India. Noida, India and London, UK: HarperCollins Publishers.

We would like to acknowledge the support of

KHOJ International Artists’ Association (Pooja, Gayatri, Andi, Manoj, Adil, Pratush, Charu, Ramesh, Arun and family, Shekhawat, Bhola, Kishan)

The Norwegian Embassy

India Foundation for the Arts

The Jamsetji Tata Trust

Sun Business Systems (Mr. Ankur Gupta and team)

Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art

Rattanamol Singh Johal thanks

Magic Lantern Foundation (Gargi Sen, Maryam Fatima and team), Dayanita Singh, Sheba Chhachhi, Simon Chambers, Monica Bhasin, Amar Kanwar, Dr. Julian Stallabrass and Dr. Karen Shelby

Akansha Rastogi thanks

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ranbir and Rashmi Kaleka (Raj Mohanty, Rajni, Surjya, Ram, Dinesh), Mithu Sen, Roobina Karode, Kishore Singh, ACUA (Professor Shivaji Panikkar and S. Santosh), Paribatana Mohanty and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Leon Tan thanks

Dr. Lucille Holmes, Amanda Newall, Asia-New Zealand Foundation, and Amanda Miller

Family and friends

36 37

Rattanamol Singh Johal is a graduate of the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York (CUNY) with double majors in Art History and Political Science. Having completed his postgraduate work at University of London’s Courtauld Institute where he investigated the interplay of aesthetics and politics in globalized contemporary art, Rattan has recently returned to New Delhi for the IFA-KHOJ Curatorial Residency 2011.

Akansha Rastogi is a Delhi-based researcher, working on Indian modern and contemporary art. She is currently an Associate Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. She previously worked on a major retrospective exhibition and publication on artist Chittaprosad (set of five books, 2011) with Delhi Art Gallery; and with an Indian auction house and Collection – Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art. Her research areas include visual representation of peasants’ and workers’ revolts in the 1940s works of Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore and Qamrul Hassan, and working with and reading private collections of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art as sites of production of alternative narratives of Indian modernism. She is part of an artist collective ‘WALA’ (Paribartana Mohanty+Sujit Mallick+Akansha R).

Leon Tan is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based between Gothenburg and Auckland. His PhD thesis (Auckland) built on Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to analyze the aesthetics, politics and psychology of digital art and social media. Leon was previously a tenured lecturer in psychotherapy and lecturer in art history in universities in Auckland, has published articles in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects in Zurich, Vancouver, Singapore and Lancaster.

Left to Right - Rattanamol Singh Johal, Akansha Rastogi and Leon TanPhotograph by Pratush Lala, 2011

Published in 2011 by

KHOJ International Artists’ Association

S-17, Khirkee Extension

New Delhi - 110017

Ph: 29545274/ 29542785

email: interact@khojworkshop.org

http://khojworkshop.org

Exhibitions curated by

Rattanamol Singh Johal

Akansha Rastogi

Leon Tan

Invite & Catalogue design

Akshay Raj Singh Rathore

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may

be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, now known

or hereafter invented, including photocopying and

recording, without permission in writing from the

publisher.

© 2011 KHOJ International Artists’ Association

ISBN: 978-81-909761-2-1

The Curatorship Programme is funded by the Jamsetji Tata Trust

F O U N D A T I O N

This exhibition underscores the evolution of the documentary medium – its questioning of the complexities of representing multiple/subjective truths and its exhibition in contemporary art spaces – using four full-length documentary films juxtaposed with text, a book of photo postcards and two YouTube videos. Works by Monica Bhasin, Simon Chambers, Sheba Chhachhi, Deepa Dhanraj, Anirban Datta, Dayanita Singh and Samadrusti TV. Curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal

This exhibition is a text (in parenthesis) but it is not the main text. The curator inhabited and archived artist Ranbir Kaleka’s studio during the residency-period. Each exhibit is an appendix to the artist’s practice, studio space, artworks and sites of artistic production. Positioning the curator as an artist, researcher, archivist and parasite, the exhibition plays on the idea of archival exhaustion, with the artist as material. Curated by Akansha Rastogi

This project involves the curation of archival material from Khoj International Artists’ Association using networked platforms including Panoramio, Google Earth, Google Maps and Historypin, making it widely accessible to online audiences. It also builds on Panoramio’s integration with the Layar augmented reality browser, such that audiences in India using Layar on their handheld devices in close proximity to Khoj’s historical art activities across the subcontinent will encounter images from the archives linked to contextual information. Curated by Leon Tan