Baroda based artist Vasudha Thozhur has been actively involved in a community art project, The Himmat Workshops, since 2002. The workshops are collaborative in nature and have the support of practitioners from different disciplines. It addresses a range of issues like violence, displacement, personal loss, rehabilitation and relocation. It involves a group of girls who lost members of their families in the carnage at Naroda Patiya, Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002. The community was re-located at Faizal Park, Vatva, and the workshops took place at the community center in Mayur Park, set up by Monica Wahi and Zaid Ahmed Shaikh. The girls made paintings, quilts, wall scrolls and also shot videos which were documentary in nature. They represent an individual story as a collective voice on the one hand and on the other a collective voice as an individual experience. These paintings and videos bring about the possibility of women claiming status as speaking subjects, talking about their lives after a particularly violent upheaval. Often one emphasizes art as a cathartic healer of collective trauma. In the wake of such uncertain and volatile situations like riots these community based projects help people overcome their economic, physical and psychological devastation. The Himmat Workshops, apart from creating political awareness, also opened possibilities of intervention through visual means. These community projects are seen by Vasudha as an ongoing process, and as “the recording of the process through writing, painting, digital media, as an archive against forgetting and creation of a context specific resource”.
The significance of such projects, apart from the support it gives and options it creates is, its stress on mourning and remembering such tragedies. Since there are often attempts by the state and fascist powers to forget such genocides and normalize social thinking, there should be attempts by the people to willfully remember such incidents and disrupt normalizing the systemic violence of the state. Vasudha’s project, seen in such light would be one of those willful acts of remembering which she herself opines as an ‘ongoing project/process’. The following is a recent interview with Vasudha Thozhur on her collaborative projects in particular and her other engagements with society through art.
“The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting” -Adorno
Interview with Vasudha Thozhur
Question: When did you first start such community based art projects or such collaborative ventures?
Vasudha: In 2002, during the right-wing pogroms in Gujarat. It was a situation which needed to be confronted. One couldn’t continue working as if nothing had happened. We took part in rallies and demonstrations against the violence, but one also needed to do things which could actually be effective at ground level. I decided to apply to the IFA (India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore) for funding because I was entering a new area of functioning and therefore needed a support system.
The project had to be collaborative in nature because it was community-based, and dealt with a complex socio-political predicament. I approached an activist writer, Bina Srinivasan, and worked with her during the first phase of the project. Later, I worked with Himmat, a collective initiated by Monica Wahi and Zaid Ahmed Shaikh.
Question: How do you intervene as an artist activist?
Vasudha: One needs to be able to apply one’s intentions to a workable format - otherwise things will just not happen. There were several aspects that needed to be addressed, and it had to be sustained work. One needed to create a serial workshop situation - it couldn’t have been been done in a week or two.
Question: How do you work out your ideas? Do you approach things with premeditation?
Vasudha: In the initial phase there were a lot of discussions with Bina Srinivasn and also with some NGOs, since we were meeting fairly frequently as concerned citizens. You begin to see what people expect from you. Usually, a very limited role is assigned to the artist – like making posters, etc., and one is told exactly how to do it. There is a lack of trust, or confidence, in the language that we use – it is seen as elitist and not truly communicative. So you see there are a lot of prejudices which one needs to overcome. I saw that as a challenge and I wanted to prove, to myself as well, that art practice is not merely something which happens at an intellectual, individual level in a controlled environment. It is a vital ingredient of the human spirit, has great healing powers and facilitates expression within communities at the collective level. Of course, collaboration can be a very problematic thing when one party begins to dominate the other, and the question arises as how not to do this. How do you retain complete freedom and continue to collaborate at the same time? So within a collaborative space, you create pockets of autonomy. What comes out of it is what comes out of it – one pays attention to the grammar of making as opposed to imposing a pre-meditated form on the outcome. An object that is actually shaped by working together - I don’t look at it critically in terms of aesthetics, in the way that I would look at my own painting.
Question: Often while talking about your project, the cathartic or healing power of art is emphasized.
Vasudha: Healing is just one aspect. The space we created for the workshops was experimental in nature – and involved a lot of research. For instance, we couldn’t have the older members of the community working in that area because it was not going to bring them immediate or significant returns. The economic factor was something which was very much on our minds when we worked out the format. Monica identified the girls for me. Some of them were deeply disturbed by the loss that they had suffered and had dropped out of school for that reason. They were given a small stipend during the time that they worked with us. Some of their mothers were working at the center that Monica and Zaid had set up, at Mayur Park, in Vatwa on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.
Question:
Often it is considered that art and films can really make a difference in society, particularly in such an uncertain situation like riots.
VASUDHA: Yes, but it should not just be within a small circle of concerned people, rather it should directly enhance the life of the affected community. For instance, through the workshops, the girls acquired a range of skills. They learnt screen printing, handled cameras; they learnt to draw and paint, to write, and so on. We made several field trips to art institutions in Ahmedabad, like NID and the School of Architecture. A kind of working model evolves which could be implemented and developed further. The organizations that we work with also begin to understand what can be done via art practice.
Question: Have you ever felt a sense of guilt in response to a situation like this?
Vasudha: Till I did the project I often felt a sense of guilt, but not anymore. I would wonder why I was painting in my studio while people were dying or suffering around me. I think this guilt is all the more acute for artists who live in developing countries with turbulent histories. But having put so much energy into a public project, I know my own limits – and also realize that working with people can happen in very different ways. It is not always necessary to do an art project. One needs nourishment too, as an artist there is a need to paint, to retreat, to go back to the studio. It gives one the strength to go out and work with people again. One can’t hold on to a certain way of doing things for life. Certain abstract questions are also very important, and need to be communicated - like the relationship between a community project and one’s own work.
Question: Where did you display the final outcome of the project and how was it displayed?
Vasudha: Segments of the project were displayed at several places, all within the Vatva area. We also mounted a major exhibition in the beginning of 2007 at the Hutteesingh gallery within the CEPT campus in Ahmedabad, on the 5th anniversary of the carnage. The work had earlier been shown at the Khoj premises in New Delhi in 2006 while I was in residence there to edit video footage which the girls had shot. Six films have so far been edited from this footage. Most of them are of a documentary nature. The longest film, Cutting Chai, is about visiting the girls’ homes in Faizal Park. It has been screened independent of other exhibits by Vikalp in Bombay and at an experimental film festival, Experimenta 2007. Another exhibition that we participated in was “After- images” curated by Ranjit Contractor. Some of the paintings were also shown at the WSF in Delhi, at a social forum in Nairobi and at a peace festival in Mumbai.
Question: Do the paintings and videos done by the girls in the workshops show images of horror or violence?
Vasudha: They don’t. Very few of the images actually depict violence. One of my basic concerns was the consumption of such images, which can be problematic and sometimes counter-productive. There are other ways of working around it, which are more about coming out of the predicament.
For example there are some narrative scrolls which talk about civic problems like lack of water, issues of education etc., and an interesting painting of a news reader speaking about the film ‘Parzania’ being banned in Gujarat.
The girls also chose images from their paintings and translated them into motifs that could be used commercially, as embroidery or block prints on fabric.
Question: Tell us about the books, which were also a kind of collaborative venture?
Vasudha: We have completed four small books using written documentation compiled via the project – ‘The Story of Five Posters’, ‘Mahakali versus Megacity’, ‘The Project’ and ‘Bibi Tere Naam Himmat’, which is in memory of Bibi Banoo. There are also photographs which will be printed as photo essays - ‘Gandhi Ashram to Faizal Park’ and ‘Mahakali versus Megacity’.
Question: On the one hand your painting seems to be autobiographical but when it comes to a public project how do you cope with this highly personalized and autobiographical idiom?
Vasudha: It is all about intersections. At some point our personal lives intersect with the public domain in a very powerful, revealing way. One experiences a very deep connectivity that collapses the difference between the public and the private. My painting, for instance, is not just about myself, it is about ‘being’ and how important it is to actually relate to what is happening outside of yourself from within yourself. Unless the ‘self’ comes into play, nothing is ‘real’, it remains at the level of abstraction. The self is in a way very important and also not important because it is merely a framework through which you can view the world. But it is still unique, and owes its value to being so, like a thumb impression.
Interviewed by Rollie Mukherjee,
Artist and Critic,
Baroda.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
In Praise of Folly
Lavanya Mani’s recent show titled “In praise of folly” held in Chemould gallery Mumbai from 4th to 28th September utilizes fragmentation and hybridity as a stratagem. The non linear narrative unfolding and the exploration of wide range of scales are powerful subversion of the late modernism’s principles of sublimatory abstractions. Her main thrust in this show is on the colonial Victorian education system and its repressive power.
The colonial state saw itself as parens patriae i.e. the white man’s burden was constructed as a paternal one – that of looking after those who were civilizationally underdeveloped and of disciplining them into obedience. Along with such a racial discrimination we also see the subjugation of women to the male head of the household. We can get reference to such practices right from the humanist writings. (Ironically the title of the show “In praise of folly” a book by Erasmus was one of the significant catalyst of protestant reformation and an important document of renaissance). In Indian colonial situation the discussions on women’s education reflect these earlier histories but they are also more complex because of the racial and colonial hierarchies ingrained in its mediation and application here. The early 19th century saw mixed responses in Bengal and other regions concerning women’s reform and to the formal English education. The complexity of the situation was characterized by the varying view points. On one hand colonialists claimed to reform women’s status by offering them education, while the nationalists (revivalist) countered it by providing a parallel process of education to protect them from becoming de-cultured. In the 19th century discourses, the educated women are represented as becoming Memsahib’s neglecting their household duties. Thus while talking about women’s education one need to see intersection of westernized colonial education with that of nationalist withdrawal into patriarchal Indian tradition. The colonial nationalism gave rise to a new patriarchal order. There existed a dichotomy of outer and inner and this defined the roles of women anew. Also one need to note how the colonized becomes hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education blurred the distinction between the new enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted indigenous native practices. Her works represents these dilemmas of such hybrid subjects caught in the still continuing definitions of colonial order and the repealing upper-caste patriarchal traditionalist ideologies.
Lavanya takes the commentary /instruction mode of the European history paintings but deconstructs it by a feminist undertone. For instance her works “keep within compass” / emperors new machine/ the study for monument of folly/ red labyrinth (Ariadne’s thread), songs of innocence (frogs in well) is an open satire on the colonial Victorian moral lessons in particular and patriarchy in general. The work “study for the monument to folly II” comments on the patriarchal gendering of knowledge in an interesting manner. Seen centrally is a bust of a female whose head is measured by an enormous measuring compass held by a (male?) hand. The work can be read in the light of recent scientific experiments and observations about the capacity of female brain, anatomy and related other physiognomies which are out rightly gendered and rationalize the subservience of female to male domination.
The proposed monument in the work “study for monument to folly I” would stand on the maze carrying the signs of cultural, economic, racial and gendered discourses. Does the donkey refer to our present situation where we willingly accept these hegemonic inscriptions on the edicts we would carry? Incidentally in architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration, having none of the usual purposes of housing or sheltering associated with a conventional structure. In the 18th century English gardens and French landscape gardening often featured Roman temples, which symbolized classical virtues or ideals. Lavanya reconstructs such monuments of folly not just in a lighthearted nerve but also tries to read the political and hegemonic inscriptions they referred to. One can also see the repeated use of the English garden motifs along with the reference to the maze structures and gardens in her works.
Most of her work can be seen in the light of how the colonized and their world is seen as strange and fabulous. Her other work “signs taken for wonders” is a direct commentary on euro-centrisicism. It represents the mi-reading/ misinterpretation of the native signs which has contributed to the exoticization of the colonies by the western powers. She also emphasizes on the Victorian hierarchy – how they saw Indian art as backward /anachronistic and lacking scientific objectivity. Her work “study for the monument to follyI” can be seen with the lens of Edward.Said’s “Orienatalism”. How western imperialists define the “other”. How one with power defines/ represents the other and gives them no rights to (re)present themselves. This politics of knowledge and the power to represent can be read within Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. How the ruling classes achieves domination not by force and coercion alone but by creating subjects who willingly submit to being ruled.
Lavanya’s attempt seems to be a kind of post revivalist in terms of its textual weaving and anti-colonial re-narration. But her subversion lies in her fragmented narratives and the use of techniques which are not “pure” per say. Her techniques never refer to a pristine history but refer always to intersections and intermingling of traditions and practices. She uses a great variety of techniques in her works like appliqué/tie and dye/embroidery//batik/ kalamkri and dyeing and very unapologetically cast her reservation for craft and textile.
Once the most valued cultural form of medieval ecclesiastic culture, textile was progressively depersonalized and domesticated and feminized by patriarchal logic. The feminist have challenged these hierarchies of values. With colonialism and rapid industrial revolution thousands of weavers and potters were forced to give up their workshops and enter factories as laborers. They produced catering to the British taste. Colonialism also eroded many matrilineal or women friendly cultures and practices and intensified women’s subordination in colonized lands. Lavanya brings in the complex relationships between art and social experience of women through textile. She says the imposed Victorian education has the obvious trace in our lives even today. The over crowdedness of her motives decoratively encumbered in fact mocks at the austere classicism of the British art on one hand and on the other it critiques the patriarchal restriction of craft /decoration for female. Her images look comic and there is a distinguished pun and carnivalisation. She uses the strategy of representational excess. She uses a wide range of designs from varied traditions. There is recurrence of English and French motifs called chintz also one can see reference to African quilts which were commissioned by English and also motifs like gaghi (muslim/gujarati fabric) and also colonial fabric motive called “toile de jouy”. One important element in her works is the spilt over letters, numbers in most of her paintings. These letters numbers are stuck arbitrarily on the surface. Though they don’t refer to a certain meaning they always refer to a possibility of a language coming into being and always in the making. Probably we can also read these spilt letters and numbers as those nebulous free floating objects in the universe of language which can make infinite combinations and possibilities for utterance. Like her intermingling of varied techniques these letters too never allow us towards a “pure” already existent meaning, but makes us face the reality of the reading these surfaces through our own subjective combinations. Her technique and particularly the coloring also perform an anachronistic reading by making the contemporary (objects) look old and by making the old perform the contemporary.
With such a vast array of motifs and illustrations she brings in discussions about eroticization /hybridization and also how hegemony affects not only our political /economic domain but also our cultural life.
She also uses motives placed as fragments from common everyday objects to some identical colonial history book illustrations and also textile motives which were in vogue in colonial times. Thus these fragments create micro narratives which help in fracturing the meta-narratives or teleology. Such approach blurs the boundaries between private and public, past and present, personal and political. Her works are most of textual narrative rather a descriptive one. She attempts at a rereading of the archives and text from varied literary traditions and cultures- Indian Greek etc.
Thus one can say when women turn to writing history, the conventionally a-historic marginal is placed at the centre. Feminization of history doesn’t indicate a personal subjective response to history but it endeavors to liberate history from purely masculine pursuits and from hegemonic structures to intimate actual happenings which operates at varied levels. Lavanya’s pursuit also doesn’t necessarily personalize the reading of history, but instead she tries to unearth the various hegemonic layers and intersections which are part of these cultural practices by referring to the actual historical signs and the structures/ practices through which these objects and symbols are viewed. Her unearthing of such intersections breaks the traditionalist anxiety for a pure past and liberates history from these narrow masculine coding.
Rollie Mukherjee
Artist and critic, Vadodara.
The colonial state saw itself as parens patriae i.e. the white man’s burden was constructed as a paternal one – that of looking after those who were civilizationally underdeveloped and of disciplining them into obedience. Along with such a racial discrimination we also see the subjugation of women to the male head of the household. We can get reference to such practices right from the humanist writings. (Ironically the title of the show “In praise of folly” a book by Erasmus was one of the significant catalyst of protestant reformation and an important document of renaissance). In Indian colonial situation the discussions on women’s education reflect these earlier histories but they are also more complex because of the racial and colonial hierarchies ingrained in its mediation and application here. The early 19th century saw mixed responses in Bengal and other regions concerning women’s reform and to the formal English education. The complexity of the situation was characterized by the varying view points. On one hand colonialists claimed to reform women’s status by offering them education, while the nationalists (revivalist) countered it by providing a parallel process of education to protect them from becoming de-cultured. In the 19th century discourses, the educated women are represented as becoming Memsahib’s neglecting their household duties. Thus while talking about women’s education one need to see intersection of westernized colonial education with that of nationalist withdrawal into patriarchal Indian tradition. The colonial nationalism gave rise to a new patriarchal order. There existed a dichotomy of outer and inner and this defined the roles of women anew. Also one need to note how the colonized becomes hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education blurred the distinction between the new enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted indigenous native practices. Her works represents these dilemmas of such hybrid subjects caught in the still continuing definitions of colonial order and the repealing upper-caste patriarchal traditionalist ideologies.
Lavanya takes the commentary /instruction mode of the European history paintings but deconstructs it by a feminist undertone. For instance her works “keep within compass” / emperors new machine/ the study for monument of folly/ red labyrinth (Ariadne’s thread), songs of innocence (frogs in well) is an open satire on the colonial Victorian moral lessons in particular and patriarchy in general. The work “study for the monument to folly II” comments on the patriarchal gendering of knowledge in an interesting manner. Seen centrally is a bust of a female whose head is measured by an enormous measuring compass held by a (male?) hand. The work can be read in the light of recent scientific experiments and observations about the capacity of female brain, anatomy and related other physiognomies which are out rightly gendered and rationalize the subservience of female to male domination.
The proposed monument in the work “study for monument to folly I” would stand on the maze carrying the signs of cultural, economic, racial and gendered discourses. Does the donkey refer to our present situation where we willingly accept these hegemonic inscriptions on the edicts we would carry? Incidentally in architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration, having none of the usual purposes of housing or sheltering associated with a conventional structure. In the 18th century English gardens and French landscape gardening often featured Roman temples, which symbolized classical virtues or ideals. Lavanya reconstructs such monuments of folly not just in a lighthearted nerve but also tries to read the political and hegemonic inscriptions they referred to. One can also see the repeated use of the English garden motifs along with the reference to the maze structures and gardens in her works.
Most of her work can be seen in the light of how the colonized and their world is seen as strange and fabulous. Her other work “signs taken for wonders” is a direct commentary on euro-centrisicism. It represents the mi-reading/ misinterpretation of the native signs which has contributed to the exoticization of the colonies by the western powers. She also emphasizes on the Victorian hierarchy – how they saw Indian art as backward /anachronistic and lacking scientific objectivity. Her work “study for the monument to follyI” can be seen with the lens of Edward.Said’s “Orienatalism”. How western imperialists define the “other”. How one with power defines/ represents the other and gives them no rights to (re)present themselves. This politics of knowledge and the power to represent can be read within Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. How the ruling classes achieves domination not by force and coercion alone but by creating subjects who willingly submit to being ruled.
Lavanya’s attempt seems to be a kind of post revivalist in terms of its textual weaving and anti-colonial re-narration. But her subversion lies in her fragmented narratives and the use of techniques which are not “pure” per say. Her techniques never refer to a pristine history but refer always to intersections and intermingling of traditions and practices. She uses a great variety of techniques in her works like appliqué/tie and dye/embroidery//batik/ kalamkri and dyeing and very unapologetically cast her reservation for craft and textile.
Once the most valued cultural form of medieval ecclesiastic culture, textile was progressively depersonalized and domesticated and feminized by patriarchal logic. The feminist have challenged these hierarchies of values. With colonialism and rapid industrial revolution thousands of weavers and potters were forced to give up their workshops and enter factories as laborers. They produced catering to the British taste. Colonialism also eroded many matrilineal or women friendly cultures and practices and intensified women’s subordination in colonized lands. Lavanya brings in the complex relationships between art and social experience of women through textile. She says the imposed Victorian education has the obvious trace in our lives even today. The over crowdedness of her motives decoratively encumbered in fact mocks at the austere classicism of the British art on one hand and on the other it critiques the patriarchal restriction of craft /decoration for female. Her images look comic and there is a distinguished pun and carnivalisation. She uses the strategy of representational excess. She uses a wide range of designs from varied traditions. There is recurrence of English and French motifs called chintz also one can see reference to African quilts which were commissioned by English and also motifs like gaghi (muslim/gujarati fabric) and also colonial fabric motive called “toile de jouy”. One important element in her works is the spilt over letters, numbers in most of her paintings. These letters numbers are stuck arbitrarily on the surface. Though they don’t refer to a certain meaning they always refer to a possibility of a language coming into being and always in the making. Probably we can also read these spilt letters and numbers as those nebulous free floating objects in the universe of language which can make infinite combinations and possibilities for utterance. Like her intermingling of varied techniques these letters too never allow us towards a “pure” already existent meaning, but makes us face the reality of the reading these surfaces through our own subjective combinations. Her technique and particularly the coloring also perform an anachronistic reading by making the contemporary (objects) look old and by making the old perform the contemporary.
With such a vast array of motifs and illustrations she brings in discussions about eroticization /hybridization and also how hegemony affects not only our political /economic domain but also our cultural life.
She also uses motives placed as fragments from common everyday objects to some identical colonial history book illustrations and also textile motives which were in vogue in colonial times. Thus these fragments create micro narratives which help in fracturing the meta-narratives or teleology. Such approach blurs the boundaries between private and public, past and present, personal and political. Her works are most of textual narrative rather a descriptive one. She attempts at a rereading of the archives and text from varied literary traditions and cultures- Indian Greek etc.
Thus one can say when women turn to writing history, the conventionally a-historic marginal is placed at the centre. Feminization of history doesn’t indicate a personal subjective response to history but it endeavors to liberate history from purely masculine pursuits and from hegemonic structures to intimate actual happenings which operates at varied levels. Lavanya’s pursuit also doesn’t necessarily personalize the reading of history, but instead she tries to unearth the various hegemonic layers and intersections which are part of these cultural practices by referring to the actual historical signs and the structures/ practices through which these objects and symbols are viewed. Her unearthing of such intersections breaks the traditionalist anxiety for a pure past and liberates history from these narrow masculine coding.
Rollie Mukherjee
Artist and critic, Vadodara.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)