EXPRESSIONS
In search of Khoj
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Khoj 2003 offered Bangaloreans an opportunity to flex the framework of their art vision, says ADITI DE.
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AUTORICKSHAWS have been transformed forever for Bangaloreans. Ever since three illuminated, yellow-black ikkat fabric-draped, auto tops appeared in a weed-filled moat, their windshields an exquisite whorl of mehndi-like patterns, a conceptual response to urban India by Mexican artist Betsabee Romero. Ever since Argentina's Melina Berkenwald created a pink rexine tent enlivened by auto-borne painted landscapes, while a looped film within reinvented city traffic scenes. Ever since Indonesian Pius Sigit Kuncoro hired nine city autos for two days, offering free rides to unspecified destinations such as the Frazer Town cemetery or an abandoned temple tank in S.R. Puram that could alter the passenger's gaze.
Betsabee, Melina and Sigit were just three of the 11 overseas and 12 Indian participating artists at the seventh Khoj International Artists' Workshop 2003, held at the Venkatappa Art Gallery from December 6 to 21. Following five earlier workshops held at Delhi's Modinagar, the event, affiliated to the U.K.-based Triangle Arts Trust moved to Mysore in October 2002. Bangalore's Khoj innovated by hosting the event within the city-heart museum complex on Kasturba Road.
Organised by an all-artists team, in collaboration with the local Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, what did Khoj signify? In a 2001 brochure, its central coordinator Pooja Sood observed that the global initiative, "more in the nature of an impetus rather than a period of sustained reflection", has provoked over 150 artists to redefine conceptual boundaries.
Betsabee, who has worked prolifically since 1977 to re-invent the car as a symbol of an industrial, consumerist, macho society, saw the auto-rickshaw interior in her Safety Veil for Urban Traffic as an indisputably feminine space, gaining meaning and memory within a specific context. Of her visual commentary, in the lineage of her paintings/ drawings executed in Buenos Aires or London, Melina, 31, explains. "I was re-contextualising the landscape, through my experience of Bangalore's chaotic traffic, of the painted havens of the auto-drivers." Sigit, 29, tried to trigger unusual dialogues between the passenger and the driver through his exercise, free of bargaining and route disputes provoking as unusual a perspective as his earlier imaginary family for himself and his Japanese girlfriend, with a digitally re-mastered "child". Laughing, he asserts, "My creativity is always changing." That proved vital at Khoj. The eye was stunned by fluorescent plastic pots translated into lotuses that floated around the gallery's clogged, shallow water body, re-invented by Thailand's Sakarin Krue-On, 38, to cross-question tradition-technology definitions. A colonial museum building poured its terracotta hues down the waterfront through cloth swathes weighted down with clay pots, powerfully evoked by Sri Lanka's H.D. Manjula Priyadarshana, 27.
What other take-off platforms are worth recall? A hoarding featuring Govinda and a Tamil actress, below a Robert Burns line from "To a Louse" rendered in Kannada, by Scotland's Aeneas Wilder, 36. "I've used aspects of popular culture to communicate," he says, of outsize peepholes overlooking the swirling traffic. "The Burns line says: If only some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us." An alternate intelligence imbues Japan's Kazue Sato, 38, whom local craftsmen assisted to fashion 33-foot long cane baskets filled with peepal leaves soaring beyond the terrace, potently re-envisaging inside-outside and art-craft notions. Tanya Preminger, 56, from Israel, created three breast-like mounds offering the Earth Mother's fundamental gifts: milk, blood and oil, teasing existential and environmental terrain.
German video-installation artists Dagmer Keller and Martin Wittwer, provoked by sterile spaces, painstakingly construed a global cityscape with local elements on a rotating table within a darkened room with a large screen, so that "the art is made with the audience." Dagmar confides, "We're dealing with issues of the city sub-culture. Later, we hope the audience can make a movie by themselves, though we will compose it." Other issues, other identities, surfaced as Khoj survived ideational border-crossings.
Kashmir-born, Delhi-based performance artist Inder Saleem, 33, and France's Laura Martin, 32, chose head-on collision as their means of delivery. An outsize poster featured Inder in a black shirt emblazoned with "We are all women's issues," teasing the thought as threadbare as his ripped trousers. Laura's anti-dowry banner was less ambiguous. It rendered her in a pink sari, surrounded by white goods slashed out in red! Much subtler, more potent, was Ahmedabad-based Karl Antao's tribute to riot victims in relief camps through a pristine water mattress impaled on 24 sharp knives.
Mumbai's Baiju Parthan foregrounded insensitivity to images of violence through digitally-adapted telecasts. His city-mate Jehangir Jani commented on national milestones through three tombstones and a grave, signifying images from the 1947 partition to the Gujarat carnage. "Are we learning any lessons from incidents that breed hate and revenge?" he asks passionately.
Individual quests marked the majority of Bangalore's participants. The most haunting was Sheela Gowda's assemblage of media images and family photographs removed from reality as water colour visuals, rendered as grey copies, then shielded by glass. Each was installed on grey mesh outdoor shelves, echoing the gallery architecture, while earth-hued pats of incense gently smoked against the midday haze, blurring memory and meaning, historicity and transience, a continuation of an original media experiment Sheela initiated at a 2003 Dublin exhibition.
More cued to clues within were the delicate photo-stencilled forms on Prabhavati Meppayil's gum-bichromate treated lime gesso canvases, imbued with inner resonances from a woman's life. Rajani K. Shettar, 26, melded the sculptural with the sartorial in a jute fabric spiral festooned with mirrors, in a personalised voice.
Bangalore's K.V. Raghavendra Rao explored space inside-out through a green-inspired booth with a peephole onto a desolate landscape, while Suresh Jayaram placed himself within the cityscape through a Korean grass patch surrounded by blooms while a photographic self-portrait surveyed the scene from a hoisted easy chair. Nanaiah C.R. took a scathing look at floral tributes that drape our ancestral images, more plastic than pleasing today.
Hassan-based K.T. Shiva Prasad, 56, invited viewers to lock their dark memories onto an impressive door, and toss the key away.
Like the Tibetan thangka painter Panpaal Yaseel, who participated at Mysore, Bhopal's traditional painter Nan Khushiya Shyam introduced a folk dimension to the creativity. "I took up painting to keep alive the memory of my husband Jangad Singh Shyam, who worked with J. Swaminathan at Bhopal Bhavan," she says, evoking intricate mythical birds and gods on her canvas.
"I don't think this experience will change the way I paint, but I like being with artists here. It makes me wonder about their styles. And why Kazue has made such a long basket. What will she use it for?" These questions, these shifting foci, are the perpetual essence of the Khoj.
What distinguished the Bangalore event? Ramesh Kalkur of the organizing team, who attended Khoj 1999, reflects, "All the artists plunged straight into their work from day one, often choosing labour-intensive themes. At other Khoj camps, it's often taken a week for ideas to be born."
Khoj 2003 offered Bangaloreans an opportunity to flex the framework of their art vision. And to watch their everyday world rendered as art without boundaries. Do they now look at their city, their selves, with eyes reborn?
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