Interview with vasudha Thozhur

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.

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.

My Paintings

art and deal magazine,april/june2008

Of Being and Nothingness
The representational world of Babu Eswar Prasad is an ambiguous site of unending tropes. Ambiguity shrouds the paintings via images/ objects drawn from varied sources like historical, popular, art historical and photographic. The viewers are made to respite for a moment from one image to another which leads to a stillness which is not silent. The sound is but not audible. This inaudibility is due to the flatness he thrusts upon the images along with their meanings. The flatness is an imprisonment of not just the objects but also their associate meanings. It moves you to a claustrophobic nothingness. The poetic space of clouds and sky which are referents themselves (drawn from Tibetan tangas or Buddhist scrolls) gives a hint of nature. But it seems a fake promise. The simulated environ though looks real is but a deception. The deception of it is felt when we are trapped in the vortex of interior with a fake exit. This is profligated by its opaque flatness that rejects your flight into the exterior. The moment you imagine to step out you are thrown inside. The paintings head nowhere. Existence is in captivity with meaninglessness or what can be said as overpopulation of tropes. There is an eerie chaotic noise that fractures the sublimity which the huge flat interior is supposed to create. This eerie sound is created by the human absence and the use of fragments. There is an antithesis between the simultaneous presence of stillness formally and technically constructed and the chaos of overlapping permutation of meanings.
His earlier landscapes had a joyous sublimity that takes the viewer to something beyond into the unknown fantastic world. But the present works creates a counterfit promise of this. It exists for a while but soon brings the viewer to the same place. In his earlier works one meandered from inside to outside and vice versa into the surreal world of impossibilities. The impossible architectures open up the space for free speculation. The images were like floating sensations. But now it is a trap. One wanders inside along with the objects which create a world of esoteric enclave. The historical gets trapped in the social, the social in the existential and the existential in the most basic of meanings. Space is trapped in time and the time within time and space within space. Meaning is not created as a whole but lies in its details. It brings different realities.
There is a constant play with meanings. Sometimes it’s in the analogy or in the interaction. Sometimes in isolation and sometimes get trapped in esotericism. It works like a “koan”. It never settles in a particular meaning making and always remains unconcluded and ceaseless and dispersed. Even the titles of his paintings highlight this contradiction and mystery. It’s the strategy of closure which Babu effectively utilizes to create an existential duality and its meaninglessness, its absurdities and illogicality. Everything returns to the now and here. There is no promise or possibility of moving out. It’s an empty fictitious beauty all around with simultaneous concrete existence of alienation and the claustrophobic boredom.
Rolliemukherjee


Videos
As a cinephile Babu’s engagement with the medium of cinema has maturely sourced out in his videos. A big collector of both parallel and popular movies his engagement with these videos has brought another fun loving and simple personality of Babu to the fore.
Notes from my diary is the first video by Babu done in a workshop conducted in Max Muller Bhavan in Bangalore in 1997. The video can be seen as an extension of his painterly language in motion picture. The presence of the being is relegated to the background sounds of noisy city life and other activities. What is seen is only the empty landscape devoid of any human activity. The shadows themselves speak for the life portrayed. The video is a montage of clippings from various films which are now historical classics. The play of shadows and light, the use of sound and silence, the absence of human are all the original sensibilities he has nurtured all through his artistic ovure.
“Splice” and “Dus ka bees” are two other videos which are strikingly in contrast with his painterly personality. Taking visuals from the popular cinematic imageries the videos are more a spoofs of the commercial genre of Hollywood and regional films. “dus ka Bees” is a take on the stereotypical representations in the regional and national films in India. The excess of sex, violence is brought within this short video by using the palimpsest of the cinema posters which adore the walls of the city. Cinema posters are generally aimed at generating the desire through clippings from the films. Machoism, titillating song sequences, romance and excessive violence are the basic scripts/ texts over which the most of the popular film genre dwell. This spoof replays the whole “filmi” with a background which is wonderfully collaged from various regional and bollywood films.

“Splice” is also a spoof of the Hollywood action thriller. It’s a trailer of the never to be made film. This mocks at the hypocrisy of the Hollywood which uses all strategies and technologies for marketing the desire. Here again the themes of sex, violence suspense are made fun of by using the same strategies. The anxiety generated here is a false one or it is about a film which is never made.
V.Divakar

catalouge for shyam Prasad, july2008

No Exit

“One cannot be free unless all are free”- Jean Paul Sartre

Though this quote by Sartre appears an impossible utopic vision, it actually brings forth the guilt every one of us has to live with. When I first saw Shyamprasad’s paintings and prints, what intrigued me is the feminine subjectivity in him. The female figure in his work is always the mother rendered as a faceless figure. What is significant is that she doesn’t become a personification or metaphor, rather stands as an ambiguity. She neither shows a negative nor positive force. His idiom is in between expressionism and realism. This makes his work open and closeted at the same time. Thus his works communicates neither information nor emotional sentimentality. Rather it brings forth the trapped human condition. One can easily connect it with Sartre’s titles of his plays like “The flies”, “No exit”, and “Dirty hands”. His works doesn’t promise any positive deterministic answer for the ‘man’ made atrocities where victims are made vulnerable and powerless.

His early works were generally either mask like figures or self portraits with some floral decorations filling the negative spaces. The way he handles his paint and motifs is very unattractive,* when we try to see his works from the specter of the gallery oriented art world. This haunting specter has left no option for the artists but be carried in its awe. The failures of radical alternatives outside the systemic structures have taught that confrontational aesthetics would be secluded and isolated and in the long run loose its own force against this giant machine of capitalism. The artists now have embarked upon the possibilities of working ‘within the given credos’ yet at the same time finding subversive extensions of their creative productions. This staying within the beasts belly can be seen as yet another strategy to survive the onslaught of the market forces. So this aestheticisation is nothing but strategies of survival.

Shyam’s work doesn’t permit any kind of such aestheticisation. It’s unattractive* ordinariness in rendering makes his work inconsumable and doesn’t end up becoming sensation bound. His loosely flowing lines particularly in his execution of flowers or sprouting branches are so flimsy* that it doesn’t define it and interestingly it works in an abstract level and creates a contradiction between the flower and blood stains. This is more evident in his etching “Rodin’s thinker with my flower seller”.
This ambiguity between something which is fragile and beautiful and something which is generally connected to violence and pain enhances a precarious space in his works. All his works are done in smudgy dusty tones of green ochre and grey. The only primary colour extensively used is red.

In his work there is always an immanent threat the child is to face. The child is recurring motif who is shown in a foetal position. Sometimes protected by a colacacia leave or is kept inside a jar or a flower pot or sometimes circled by a gigantic worm like form.
The images in his work doesn’t synthesis in a harmonic whole rather exist as fragments. This in fact works well in thrusting on an inexplicable fragmented existence. In most of his works he uses direct symbols of violence. The female and child are the victims and the pawn s of belligerent, phallocentric forces which is parochial and never permits a safe existence in a democracy.
His titles never talks about the tragedy [except one work which is titled as “lamentations”] but works as a mock at the upper and middle class aspirations for an unproblematic and optimistic world view and our unawareness about the societal ills and the lack of care for female gender. The thinker of Rodin is another leitmotif in his work which works as a symbol of an intellectual/artist and the failure to bring about any radical changes in majoritarian mental make up.

Rollie Mukherjee,
Art Historian,
Bangalore.

*Words like flimsy and unattractive are used in a positive connotation in his work.

august 2008,artconcerns.com

Primitively Modern Artist

Shreyas Karle is the winner of Bodhi Art Award 2008. A post graduate in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, Shreyas work with several mediums including video and photography. Interested in public art projects, he would like to see himself as a nomad who moves from place to place, ideas to ideas. Rollie Mukherjee speaks to Shreyas to know more about his art and views. Excerpts:

Rollie Mukherjee: Tell us something about your early works.

Shreyas Karle: The works I did during my bachelors were figurative and done in mixed media. I was dealing more with daily subjects and experiences, very mundane things around me. Right from the beginning there was some kind of narration that has continued in the works I am doing right now. When I look at those works, I feel they are like telling stories. Earlier it was more on the subjects around me.

RM: How did you happen to shift your works from paintings to public art?

SK: While in Mumbai I always wanted to do three dimensional works, but because of the space constrains I couldn’t. The whole transformation happened after coming to Baroda during my masters. In my earlier works and my recent works there are similarities in the sensibilities. Though the medium and approach has changed but the sensibilities I feel have remained the same. In Baroda I got a larger space and understanding faculty which gave way to convert almost all my works. The video on lizard which was titled as “rukavat ke liye khedh hai” are all part of our mundane experience.

I generally start with an idea and that leads to implementing it in different mediums. Like I did a graphical representation of an installation. These were rubber shoes of 5 feet which were hung above the eye of the viewers. Whatever I think I put it on paper and visualise how it will look if I make it an installation. There are a series of 13 episodes, which are compiled in a book format. It talks about certain visual narrative. Two classes in a society, they metamorphosis as shoes and how a man wants to conquer a shoe and the shoe in turn puts him down. The series goes in 13 episodes. There is another work called the number game.

At Sandarbh, (Chintan’s workshop) in Rajasthan I did bolta pahad. This is a huge hillock almost 100 ft. basically the importance of this work is that the site is on the highway. So people, who generally pass through stop there to relax, look at the site. So something you are looking at is looking back at you. Even if you see the deities in Rajasthan look very raw with huge eyes attached to them. So it was something kind of someone watching you. It remained for 6 months.
It was part of a residency in SANDARBH, Rajasthan last December. I was in this village called Partapur in Vagad district of Rajasthan. In this village there is a practice of eating pohas. So there are 60 to 70 kinds of pohas available. They have pohas for breakfast, lunch... They served these pohas on paper. Simultaneously I was also working in a different project in Rajasthan. One was also a collaborative project with another artist from Baroda (Hemali Bhuta), where we made metal painted boards which contained the information about the villages we were working in and placed them at the entrance of those villages. The other I was working was on the stories on the names of villages. I found some of the names of the villages very exciting, so I made an enquiry into why certain villages are named in a particular manner. So I got a story behind one village, I started hunting for the stories and asked different people. So I got other stories also related with the villages. What I wanted was to advertise my work. I wanted more people to come to me and tell all these stories. So I did this work so as to reach more masses. I made sun signs and there is very interesting matter written for every sun sign. I xeroxed it and distributed to the poha walas and told them to serve poha on this paper. It was interesting to see people how they would read it or somebody would only throw it the message was like after eating please throw it in the dustbin. Sometime there was no dustbin. Zodiac is something, which everyone is interested to know. The very first thing every one of us would read when we pick up the morning paper. Whether the person ids from a rural or an urban setup every one of us is interested to know about the future. So I wanted them to read it.
Another time what I did was I had printed the stories of the villages giving them the image of a stamp paper, where it kind of authenticates the stories. There is a kind of advertisement saying that if you are aware…
There are videos on the pohawalas and I documented them and interviewed how their business is and why they chose to do that.

RM: Most of your works has a tendency of mythologies and have primitive quality?

SK: I always was like being primitive. I feel that era was much better compared to today. I use generally the term that you should be primitively modern” I like to be primitively modern person i.e. are staying in contemporary times but with a primitive thought, the primitiveness within you which is very raw because it is raw it gives more possibilities of exploration. Because primitive age was something when everything started when you see in historical terms people had so many things to explore now we have come to point when everything has been contaminated.

RM: The work you did on identity, you seem to want to get into the skin of the other. You are going to different locations and trying to be like them. There is where in the public projects one can feel an identity crisis.

SK: Trying to be like them is not about my personal identity crisis. It’s like something where I don’t want to keep my identity as a kind of supreme thing. I mean I am not someone who is different from them. Here I enjoy two positions- one is an outsider, I become a third person so I look at the situation through a different angle. Second is because I am with them at that place I also enjoy being in the position of being one of them. When I am in Bombay, I never see Bombay as an outsider may look at it. Traveling in train is problematic for an outsider. But as a Bombaite I feel it as part and parcel of my daily routine. Probably for an outsider it may look very interesting; he may work on a project. That’s how the whole train culture in Bombay come out with a work. I may but not really but would pressurize myself to work on it because I am part of it. Because when you are part of the crowd you don’t realize what happen, you just move with the crowd. But the moment you stand apart from the crowd, you can see which way the crowd is moving so as I am in Bangalore I am trying to see things in different light.

RM: I feel when we are with the crowd we become more auto critical about the community and the people we are trying to study. Different kinds of things like sociological structures; studying different cultural habits come into question. This is the whole problem in some kind of interactive public projects, i.e., this is the whole problem of getting into the other culture. Like what happens when you enter into other cultural space as an outsider always we tend to maintain a kind of distance and we just try to neglect in getting into the complexities which otherwise we do when we see things within our culture or as an insider we view the community or culture.

SK: I don’t need to get into the complexities because I am not engaging myself as a person who has come there with a particular intension to do a kind of social activity or I am trying to convey some message.

RM: How you position yourself as an artist who is into public projects because we know generally public art is connected to activism?

SK: I really don’t want to position myself. I like the position of a nomad who doesn’t have to say that this is my identity and this is my position. I like toy around with an idea may lead to different things. I am just spilling the beans. So it depends on the viewers to analyze the situation in which manner how and where why. I am not sitting here to analyze why I have done these projects.

RM: One thing one can sense that you are taking a public project but ultimately it is becoming somewhere formalistic or becoming visual oriented which art has always been. Now how you see this take of public art, which has always been connected to sociology and economics. A lot of artist have taken this further and have done some developmental projects and some kind of activism they have worked over. How you feel you are moving because you are bringing at the end the aesthetic of it?

SK: I don’t really want to get into the intricacies of developing something for the society. I don’t start with that intension. My basic intension is to work with something, which I find it very amazing something that tickling my senses. That thing when it develops it may or may not involve social activism or certain social messages. I am not pressurizing anything. I am not getting involved in society. So I am kind of open to everything. I want to flow with how the involvement is going like. If you see the sign boards made they were made not with the intension to help those people and tell them that you are deprived of this so we have come as a messiah to help you out from this. It was an interaction with them. We became so close to them that they started seeing us as their family members they used to invite us for tea etc. we have to somewhere our role as artist and role as a human being. You can’t separate these two positions. If you are involving with something as an artist you need to involve with all your human qualities. Art is not something, which you can separate from your daily living that art becomes mundane activity then you enjoy something on day-to-day basis.

RM: You went to one village and recorded the whole oral tradition and oral history behind the naming of particular villages. As in one way you are working as a documenter like how earlier photographers and artist went to some cultural site and they documented the entire thing and write it down and this become part of a sealed history. Its not just a living history which oral tradition other wise permits like something fades with time and something gets molded itself with new age and comes in new form according to the contemporary demand. So it is always living. This is how oral tradition functions. So In a way don’t you think you also acted as the earlier documenters?

SK: If you want to put me in that position I don’t mind. Then I would say that yes I like to play the role of documenter. I like to play that role of an historian but that doesn’t make me a historian or a documenter because my approach with what I started is totally different. I have taken these roles to kind of reach a particular stand but I don’t know even by taking these roles where it is taking me. That I do not know point how the work going to be completed, which formats it, is going to come into what it will look like. I am totally clueless about this. What is more enjoyable for me is that process itself that I am going to some place talking to some people and getting feed back. When you imagine then you force something what you want to see, so it’s very mental thing. I think we need not make ourselves so saturated much that by positioning it somewhere or even questioning the artist somewhere how he is as social activist. If you are interested in activism then don’t stand in two positions you work as social activist not as an artist. You can’t be an artist and a social activist at the sometime. When you say that the project one has done is a contribution to the society then it is a manipulation of your own work.

RM: So how you see this new avatar of artist who is interacting constantly with the society and enjoying the process of such making?

SK: I see it more as a flexible position. Since you are coming as an artist for the third person you are a harmless person, you are not attached to any party or you aren’t attached to any particular school of thought. So he welcomes you. He opens up in front of you and because for him you are just going to depict certain things which he is giving then you can say. Those roles are time specific, those role are there because certain situations needs those roles. That situation demand a role of a person who is enquiring who is documenting things otherwise, I couldn’t have got what I have got from that.

RM: When art becomes interactive and social we come to know the criticality of certain area or community. We somewhere try to criticize some of the things. How you see this non reactive ness of your approach because if art is not connected to activism I am not saying a very hard edge activism, if it is not activism then it is better that we sit at home and do some sculptures and paintings i.e. what art in modernist period was. It was insulated. But when art decided to go outside it was with that intension of social criticism and it is not similar thing as we go somewhere and romanticize people of other culture.

SK: There is difference between of being a medium and being something, which is more rigid than medium for example a flowing river is a medium you put anything into it carries to the ocean. Ocean becomes a more rigid position it takes everything and settles it down and I feel it’s better for an artist to be a medium rather defining his position and also for others not to define him because art has always been a medium. Whether it is confined to a studio space or public space.

RM: Do you think your identity every time stays without problem when you interact with other communities? For example as person belonging to other community you face different regionalism. It is not that in certain situations our identity is not questioned and it is always that there is some pressure to define the identity.

SK: These are some initial public art I have done so probably what ever you are saying I feel right now I am still in the process of knowing. I cleared my position by saying that I don’t want to have any position I don’t want to decide whether I am doing something for the social cause or something related to particular society or a bunch of people. I am enjoying being a nomad not tagging myself with any thing and just being a medium i.e. transformed it into something else. It is more about transformation from one thing to another. It is not that I am only doing public art projects; I come back to studio and work. Many projects I started from my studio and I have gone outside and that accumulation has come in form of different works so why can’t they be called public art. It is not necessary that you should be with a society or outside the studio to do something to do public art. What does a cartoonist do? When he does political cartoons for paper? He is not necessarily part of that politics or part of the daily living of the people but what he does is he experiences all those things come back to his studio and sits at one place and narrates his experiences through the common mans view. I feel rather than making a more serious or jumbled up position for an artist it is better to keep him as a person…

RM: What do you think about the function of art in society?

SK: I am not saying that I am not achieving the function. I am trying to use art to do whatever I can for the society I am living in. Right now I cannot say that I am doing art because I want to solve someone’s problem because I am not in a position that I can do so but the day when I am in apposition I can use it for the betterment of say my immediate society is society of a group of artist. So if I can do something for them then there is larger community outside. Right now I can’t show that art is such a powerful tool for social change etc. everything has a phase you need to pass through. There is politics in larger term.

Right now I am not working for any social cause. But knowingly or unknowingly if there is any social cause conveyed through it I am happy about it. I don’t want to say that I totally want to negate it. I feel the way art plays a very vital role in making a person realize what he actually should be doing. Art guides you through a particular channel to actually show what you are suppose to do. For this you need to pass certain phases of life. Probably I am in those initial phases.

RM: Tell us about your present project?

SK: Few things I am working now but I don’t know whether I am going to take them ahead as works to be done. It is a basic research I am doing a series of informal interviews with different people probably artist/ IT background/ science background. Some people randomly on street. These interviews are not really intended to anything. I am not going to document them, keeping the thing open on what ever they want to talk about their personal view about the city or probably not about the city if I am talking to an artist he might talk about an artwork how it communicates to people etc.