Three very different artists…with completely different approaches to the medium called lens…some very decent chemistry…and some great hunger to explore…and you get the makings of a good artists camp. Not that all work produced there is very good, the artists have their own tryst with failures. But then again, the point is not always centered on object-hood.
When I approach a theme-based workshop, it is always important to be able to grasp what influence the structure of the workshop has on the artist and his/her methods. It has been quite interesting to grapple with the way Atul Bhalla, Himanshu Desai and Gigi Scaria have tried to impose a structure on the workshops and how they went on to take different roots. The workshop started with the artists going on early morning walks, taking still/video footage and meeting people in the neighborhood around Turkuman Gate. Quoting a line from the concept note, “The idea is to intervene or understand the city in which we all live more closely.”
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| Atul Bhalla documents piaoo in the old city |
It seems that structure of the workshop was predefined by the desire to be the flâneur: to intervene ‘visually’ into a romanticised space, armed with a certain greater access to ‘knowledge’, and with the certain desire to explore and re-present the ‘other’, may be in an attempt to understand the 'self' better. At an overtly political level, there was a positioning of this workshop in the discourses around identity.
“The walled city of Delhi also poses certain questions on the “modern” identity of an urban citizen. What exactly makes the old city different? “What exactly contributes to a city’s boundaries to exist? The ‘boundaries of a city’ function today more as a metaphor than specific geographic locations.”
However, the workshop was not really about macro political concerns like the schizophrenia of urban identities; it was more about a focused retreat, which inspired a particular kind of self/artistic introspection often playing out intimately political articulations.
Atul Bhalla has had a long run with water, centered on its aesthetics and politics. Coming from a sanitised environment and dependent upon ‘bottled’ water, he has been drawn to the various (still) available sources of free water. For Atul, the walled city has been like a resource overflow, harbouring in it an infinite collection/variety of free drinking water sources: Piaos established by Muslim, Jain and Hindu institutions. Still surviving as the only visible source of free drinking water, in a city where even the middle class accepts branded water as a reality.
But reading this nature of involvement only through the prism of politics is a single-layered reading of Atul's engagement. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos. Atul revels in being consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategising the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction, usually passed over as 'mundane'. Through this last month, Atul has had a near meditative engagement with his process; the early morning walks, exploring the space, discovering the histories, it has been a journey in many ways. A journey rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take. The still photographs clicked in the course of the month, document various Piaos in the walled city, shot with a great fondness for ‘form’ and a fine talent for locating beauty.
Atul’s experience and his notions of art production took a completely radical turnaround in the second week of the workshop. Researching on the various lore and legends around water, Atul stumbled across the phonetic connection between Bahisht and Bhishti. One, the Urdu word for life and the other, a water carrier made from goat hide. Atul was fascinated how Bhishti, a product of an act of killing, could have a semiotic resonance with Bahisht. The semantic overlapping is, in fact, because of a long-standing understanding of water as life. Drawn and intrigued by this phonetic parallel, Atul set off on a journey to create a Bhishti from the very scratch…to create a source of life by taking life first. The entire experience of learning the mechanics of Halal and eventually doing it and from then on to getting the Bhishti made was a parallel performance played out in the backdrop of the workshop.
The video, which captures the Halal, strongly challenges the ‘image’ of a Halal embedded in our psychic. The focus is rooted in the experientiality of the artist…showing the blood and struggle of the animal were easily available means to make a startling video, but that is simply not Atul’s style. The video is instead a very disturbing piece, more because an artist has become a 'butcher' for a morning, and yet ‘the event’ is showcased in the most tranquil manner possible.
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Himanshu Desai created an entry ticket for his cinema |
Himanshu’s engagement with work production led to an interesting duel between imposing his gaze on the walled city and learning back. However, Himanshu Desai is more of an ‘actor’ than a listener. His video, ‘Scenes from a Hallucination’, is a revelation of a new age re-visitation of the flâneur. In a certain sense, the video is also an introspection of the artist’s own engagement with hallucinations. Using fragments from others’ stories, Himanshu tries to communicate his own anxieties.
What takes the video to a greater aesthetic realm, beyond an outcry of an introspective soul is the artist's long-term engagement with sound, a role he highlights through his use of the visuals. Himanshu revels in making sound videos but this particular one has been a jump for him given the manner in which he has treated the visual dimensions. However, it needs to be pointed out that the video has many elements of class voyeurism, and in a certain sense it does come from his ‘high speed’ work production mode. Sometimes, I have found the video a shade over-rendered but mostly 'tripped' on the artist’s construction of 'hallucinations'.
It was even more interesting to follow the artist in his post-production phase, when he moved into making posters and various other paraphernalia, needed to give a screening a 'movie hall experience'. But the efforts of this phase will be witnesses when it all comes together on the open studio day. Meanwhile, Himanshu has gone on to shoot and edit another video, a lens-based critique of the workshop.
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A scene from Gigi.Scaria's Video |
Gigi Scaria's involvement was that of an artist and more crucially as the conceiver and the keystone of the workshop. One must admit that simply as a workshop concept, it was a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the "project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture is a model that needs to be picked up”. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spending a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid-back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact, Gigi was the active energy point throughout the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts, choosing instead to 'listen' to his environment.
The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his 'listening'. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city, mostly focussed around the poor, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanise them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the 'private' dimension of their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.
The artist's rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. He also succeeds in not letting the 'aesthetic' make the work any less intimate and engaging.
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