Writing a blog is kind of like working out regularly - while you are engaged in the routine, it comes naturally, but once you stop - the pain of getting back to it can be a real deterrent.
In any case, I am now back after some more recent entertaining. My hostess skills are now dried up for the next few months....
Other than hospitality management chez moi, however, I did have the opportunity to hear part (alas, had to leave!) of a lecture by Raqs Media Collective, the members of which are doing a short residency program at the San Francisco Art Institute. The collective is comprised of: Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
The image at top is 8 Pieces of Evidence, done for the 2003 Venice Biennale which I had the pleasure of seeing - might I add, the only South Asian artists represented at that event. This, of course, was remedied this year with a whole section devoted to S.Asian artists, which seems to indicate a sudden spike in interest from the international art market. At the 2005 VB, the work was A Measure of Anacoustic Reason:
All of this is virtually impossible to show in these still images - because so much of it is in multi-channel video format, with sound and large-scale compositions for the projections. Both VB pieces, tackle, among other things, considerations of mapping urban and geographic spaces and raise provocative questions about the unmapped spaces in between constructed borders, in between monuments and underneath city scapes. They are about inscribed identities and their uncounted or desacralized counterparts - and about the processes of this making and unmaking in the city, and in the "world" (or many "worlds" for that matter).
In any case, I won't do the layers justice here - but the sumptuousness of their focused/unfocused video images, the slow-moving capturing of spaces that are specific or nebulous (Pieces of Evidence is about Delhi) is seductive and always makes me want to uncover more.
What I particularly appreciated at the talk was that although its primary purpose was to explain the missions and realizations behind their work, they refused to assign a bottom line of literal meaning to the work, nor did they resign it all to the domain of unguided public interpretation. They tried to explain their motivations, but clearly stated that their struggles and avenues of interrogation were designed not to yield answers or truth-claims, but to point them in new directions. They admitted that this shadowboxing could be frustrating - and yet kept them going - as it keeps those of us who admire their work continuously going back and reevaluating its meanings and encrypted messages.
They articulated this with a fascinating parallel to K.C Bhattacharya as seen through Ashis Nandy, whose own hybridity of pre-modern, modern and industrialist attitudes in Nehruvian India was akin to their own unstable, or fluxuating positions and attitudes in their art (modern/postmod/postcol/). - Or at least, that is how I understood the presentation!
Well - that's the end of this story for now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend their next public event - but I do think that they are producing some of the most compelling contemporary art in India right now. Is it "postcolonial" - is it "post-postcolonial"? - It never ceases to make me think.
In any case, I am now back after some more recent entertaining. My hostess skills are now dried up for the next few months....
Other than hospitality management chez moi, however, I did have the opportunity to hear part (alas, had to leave!) of a lecture by Raqs Media Collective, the members of which are doing a short residency program at the San Francisco Art Institute. The collective is comprised of: Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta.
The image at top is 8 Pieces of Evidence, done for the 2003 Venice Biennale which I had the pleasure of seeing - might I add, the only South Asian artists represented at that event. This, of course, was remedied this year with a whole section devoted to S.Asian artists, which seems to indicate a sudden spike in interest from the international art market. At the 2005 VB, the work was A Measure of Anacoustic Reason:
All of this is virtually impossible to show in these still images - because so much of it is in multi-channel video format, with sound and large-scale compositions for the projections. Both VB pieces, tackle, among other things, considerations of mapping urban and geographic spaces and raise provocative questions about the unmapped spaces in between constructed borders, in between monuments and underneath city scapes. They are about inscribed identities and their uncounted or desacralized counterparts - and about the processes of this making and unmaking in the city, and in the "world" (or many "worlds" for that matter).
In any case, I won't do the layers justice here - but the sumptuousness of their focused/unfocused video images, the slow-moving capturing of spaces that are specific or nebulous (Pieces of Evidence is about Delhi) is seductive and always makes me want to uncover more.
What I particularly appreciated at the talk was that although its primary purpose was to explain the missions and realizations behind their work, they refused to assign a bottom line of literal meaning to the work, nor did they resign it all to the domain of unguided public interpretation. They tried to explain their motivations, but clearly stated that their struggles and avenues of interrogation were designed not to yield answers or truth-claims, but to point them in new directions. They admitted that this shadowboxing could be frustrating - and yet kept them going - as it keeps those of us who admire their work continuously going back and reevaluating its meanings and encrypted messages.
They articulated this with a fascinating parallel to K.C Bhattacharya as seen through Ashis Nandy, whose own hybridity of pre-modern, modern and industrialist attitudes in Nehruvian India was akin to their own unstable, or fluxuating positions and attitudes in their art (modern/postmod/postcol/). - Or at least, that is how I understood the presentation!
Well - that's the end of this story for now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend their next public event - but I do think that they are producing some of the most compelling contemporary art in India right now. Is it "postcolonial" - is it "post-postcolonial"? - It never ceases to make me think.
