Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga

Tagore’s Universal Allegories

Exhibition Press view

19 September - 23 November 2013 Wednesday 18 September 2013, 10am – 12 pm noon Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) presents a unique collaboration between artists Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga centered on the work of one of India’s most important figures of the early twentieth century, the poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore.

Tagore’s Universal Allegories features two unexpected responses to Tagore’s legacy and suggests how his work and ideas still resonate for artists today. We see how Tagore’s approach to art and culture as well as subjects including ecology, education, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the universal, compel our interest and demand to be translated into terms that reflect the contemporary world.

‘Tagore has the capacity to make us think about our times through the filter of shattered ideals.’ Indian cultural critic, Rustom Bharucha.

Taking Santiniketan, Tagore’s school, university and utopian community in West Bengal as a starting point, the two artists create installations that in different ways reflect this environment. Shown in separate galleries, the installations are conceived in relation to one another and include several overlapping elements.

This exhibition is Anna Boghiguian’s first significant showing in the UK. She premieres a new commission for Iniva, incorporating a group of works made during several months spent at Santiniketan this summer. A small stage at the centre of the gallery populated by papier mache figures elicits Tagore’s love of theatre and directly references his allegorical play, The Post Office. Also on display are a new series of the artist’s drawings, photographs, small scale sculptures and embroidered fabrics. Volumes of Tagore’s poetry, drama, literature and essays are shown in a bookcase alongside Boghiguian’s own sketchbooks. The intuitive and expressionistic rendering of figures and use of text recall Tagore’s own artworks produced later in his life.

Goshka Macuga reworks When was Modernism? (2008) an installation that evokes Kala Bhavana, the art college at Santiniketan, realised after a field trip there in 2006. With stone benches arranged around a tree, the piece echoes the outdoor campus of Santiniketan, while a display of over thirty discarded student test pieces can be seen as fragments from a little known history of modernism extending across different geographies and time periods. The continuity of materials and aesthetic allude to the school’s early modernist roots in the 1920s and correspond with the formal exercises Macuga herself undertook as a student in .

There is a display in the education space of books, documents, photographs and a film from the specialist library and archive of the Tagore Centre UK, giving audiences an opportunity to engage with Tagore’s work and teaching. The exhibition will be accompanied by a dynamic programme of events, including tours, talks on themes raised, music and performances delivered and curated by artists.

Tagore’s Universal Allegories is the start of a research project on Rabindranath Tagore realized through an AHRC funded partnership with Goldsmiths College and the Dutch Art Institute Arnhem and an exhibition in partnership with NGBK Berlin.

Editor’s Notes

Anna Boghiguian About Iniva Anna Boghiguian (born in 1946) is an artist and writer, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) works at trained in visual art, music, economics and political the intersection of society and politics. It engages with science. Using drawing and painting, her work is new ideas and emerging debates in the contemporary influenced by the multidisciplinary experiments that visual arts, reflecting in particular the diversity of investigate mutual relations between image and sound. contemporary society. We work with artists, curators, In the late 1960s she composed musical pieces based on creative producers, writers and the public to explore the sounds of the city and translated them into the vitality of visual culture. ( www.iniva.org ) Iniva is paintings. The artist is a constant traveller, and the supported by Arts Council England. speed of different cities is an important aspect of her work. Boghiguian studied art and music at the Concordia About Rivington Place University in Montreal and political science and Opened in 2007, Rivington Place is home to Iniva and economics at the American University in Cairo. Autograph ABP. Designed by architect David Adjaye OBE, this award winning building is dedicated to the Goshka Macuga display, debate and reflection of global diversity issues Goshka Macuga (born in 1967) is an interdisciplinary in the contemporary visual arts. An ongoing artist working across a variety of media, including programme of exhibitions and events is presented by sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and Iniva in the 2 project spaces and Iniva’s Learning Space. design. She fuses various sources together into one It is also home to the Stuart Hall Library, Iniva’s unique cohesive, meaningful narrative. The Polish-born artist research library with specialist resources and now lives and works in London, having completed her collections about contemporary international visual studies at the Central Saint Martin’s School of Art art. and Goldsmiths College. In 2008 she was nominated for the . She has exhibited widely across Europe Exhibition listings Information and America including (13) and solo shows Exhibition: Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011), Kunsthalle Tagore’s Universal Allegories Basel (2009), and Britain, London (2007). Dates: 19 September - 23 November 2013 Venue: Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA About Santiniketan Rivington Place public opening hours: A unique experiment, Santiniketan was an early Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 11am – 6pm Twentieth Century hub of avant-garde art, craft, Late Thursdays: 11am – 9pm music, dance, literature, alternative pedagogy and Saturday: 12noon – 6pm rural development, originally created as an ashram by Admission: free Tagore in 1901. Founded on ecological principles, [email protected] individual creativity and community, Santiniketan www.rivingtonplace.org mixed progressive ideas with aspects of traditional Tubes: Old Street/Liverpool Street/Shoreditch High St Indian life such as the ‘forest school’ (tapovana). Rivington Place is fully accessible, for parking & wheelchair facilities call +44 (0)20 7749 1240 Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore is a prominent figure in the Further information cultural world of the Indian subcontinent and the first For high resolution images please contact: Asian person to be awarded with the Nobel Prize. Even Sheena Balkwill, Communications Manager though he is predominately known as a poet, his work [email protected] or Tel 020 7749 1246 also encompasses music, theatre and art. A political and agricultural reformist, Tagore’s anti-colonial and pro-Dalit stance in the early decades of 20 th Century Bengal brought him to widespread attention. He was also an educational reformist; particularly in the context of his development of art and pedagogy.