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Venue  Lecture: Navjot Altaf: Holding the Ground, Critics on Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New , 19th July 2010

NAVJOT ALTAF: HOLDING THE GROUND

Her exhibitions: With Altaf in schools aetc. Links, Modes of Parallel Practice, Sculptures, BASTAR Three Halves, Dis-placed Self, Between Memory and History, Lacuna, Mumbai Meri Jaan, Water Weaving, Jagar , Various pedagogic workshops all over the world Catch Mumbai- New York photo project, Khoj: Modinagar, Khirkee scooter rickshaws, Public art Barkhamba Rd 2008 Touch, Gandhi

Contents

1 Introduction (art history, projects, pedagogy, praxis.

2. On Representation ‘People’: in lieu of the (Indian) nation; displaced representation.

3. Anthropology/Locality: dialogic models

1 4. Feminist art practice: notation/abstraction

5. Metropolitan ‘communities’ /communal violence

6. Speech, Silence, Erasure

7. Global Nomadism

Introduction Navjot is one of the very few artists in India who insists on the particapatory aspect of her work. This is an ideological choice that inscribes her in a distinct stream of art discourse and practice played out worldwide. Navjot’s trajectory links with precedents in Indian art in that several generations of artists have privileged locality, community, and an art-language based on material processes. Developing an empathetic (broadly) ethnographic discourse around living communities withinm but also ‘outside’m the nation-space, these artists’ work is premised (1) on the sharing of resources and terminologies between art and artisanal ‘traditions’ (Shantinketan, K G Subramayan); (2) with bringing subaltern art-making conventions face to face with an historically articulated modernity so as to see these as viably contemporaneous. (Meera Mukherjee) An even more ideological approach treats the contemporariety of historically wronged communities not only as proof of survival, but as a complementary/ contestatory quizzing of an over-determining (western/modernist) aesthetic, that must be shown to be such through expositional means—museum collections/exhibition, texts, and polemic. (J Swaminathan). (4) This field has been excavated in numerous exhibitions juxtaposing/imbrication contemporary metropolitan art and contemporary ‘folk and triabal’ art. Shown especially in international Festivals and Museum (India Songs, Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in mid-1990; NEW INDIAN ART: home-street-shrine-bazaar-museum, Manchester Art Gallery, 2002; Edge of Desire, 2005-06, Asia Society, New York--widely

2 toured across continents, including Mexico.). The field has been systemisized through a disciplined formatting of anthropology and curatorship by Jyotindra Jain during his years at the Craft Museum in Delhi—an expertise that has refigured in curatorial terms in more recent exhibitions: Other Masters of India: Contemporary creations of the Adivasis, at The musee du quai Branly, Paris, 2010 i where, contemporaraniety is claimed through a politics of anthropology rather than formal and metaphysical grounds. Edge of Desire, an Asia Society inititave, shown across continents, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Asia Society and The Queens Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2005-2006; Navjot’s participatory ethics places her with her Indian precedents and, simultaneously (and somewhat uniquely) with contemporary western art/discourse, that develops out of a Marxist critique of the culture industry (Adorno), of consumerist spectacles (Guy de Bord, 1960s, whose thesis influences Fluxus), and the consequent reification of art within/ by the designated institutions (articulated by conceptual art and institutional critque, 1980-90s). One strain of this criticality, develops an affirmative mode by engaging with locality and site, situation and participation in order to build possible ‘communities’. In the experimental, transitivity is favoured above stability; means and ends are believed to be continuous; the artist makes explicit reference to materials and modes of production, but also pays attention to the relations of production and thereby postulates a living sociality. At its further end, it holds the ambition to address a public in the sense of a ‘people’ turned into individuated interlocutors through the (hypothetically enhanced) democratization of the public sphere, so that creative practice remains open, transparent, vulnerable, and praxis is a shared ‘resolution’ as also something of a paradoxical outcome. It is also of course true that very forms and meaning of the community/ collective as being politically coherent has changed to virtual, transitive connectivities engendered via mediatic networks where the political is disbursed and diffuse and even also hypothetical—and the model here is that of the ‘commons’.ii Not an ideologue in the more speculative sense, Navjot loops herself into a process- based art practice that springs up in different part of the world —from Brazil to Italy—in the radical 60s; she then marks out the specific trajectory of 1970s feminism where conceptual and dialogic practices are emphasized, as is the virtue of supportive collectivities over established institutions. When the participatory paradigm changes in accordance with global

3 (technological and economic-cultural) networks, Navjot is positioned at the threshold. Not privileging the concept of deterritorialized (global) geography, Navjot attributes only so much weight to transcultural exchange; she foregrounds, instead, actual traversal across metropolitan-rural contexts in India. Navjot’s choice of frames can be summed up thus:: ethnographic encounter; interactive art in the public space and a consequent democratization; along with a form of self-implicating interlocution/ participation that qualifies the artist to be a voice within the public sphere. In this role, Navjot can be said to destabilize the somewhat fixed identity of ‘the modern artist’ in India, as also the neo-liberal persona of younger, global artists shaped by the art market. A good part of her practice is a form of pedagogy around the problematic of the (artist) self and (cultural) other; it takes the shape of projects connecting very different life- worlds through conscientiously constructed dialogic situations. Facing the contradictions posed by situational compulsions, authorial command and social praxis, Navjot rests her case with an ethics of interactivity that continues raising doubts, courting failure -- and persevering.

On Representation Given Navjot’s sustained search for a language of communication in an expanded field of the social, and her related sense of responsible politics, I want to play between the two meanings of the term, representation: as resemblance, mimesis, potentiality; and as a form of democratic advocacy, opening up questions of representation of/by/how. Etc. As an art student and artist in Bombay in the 1970s, Navjot Altaf affiliated herself to the left student movement and thence to Marxism (thru her artist-husband, Altaf: both were members of an independent Left organization, Proyom, in 1970s Bombay). This meant, programmed representational practices within an ideological frame held in place over a century under the banner of realism. In a major industrial city like Bombay, the proletariat remains, according to fixed norms of progress, both content and addressee of realism.

4 Realism is frequently conjoined with expressionism where the artist’s subjectivity, charged with anguish, finds a rhetoric for the social malaise. A succession of artists in the 1940s ( Ramkinkar Baij, then Zainul Abedin, Chittaprasad, Somnath Hore) offer a personalizedprogressive representational mode aligned to the Left, but the agenda to always renew the critical language of representation— subsides and allows a more existential expressionism to occupy center-stage. In the 1970s, a renewed engagement with the social develops in Baroda and Bombay into what will become a fully articulated position in the influential 1981 exhibition, Place for People (composed of painters, , Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Jogen Chowdhury, and I, Geeta Kapur, as the critic-author of the catalogue). At this juncture, the realist/expressionist language takes a decidedly narrative turn; and political angst with its related heroism is calibrated into a range of concerns that focus on class, community and the everyday—with, however, the portrayal of commonplace lives lit with fantasy, desire and outright eccentricity in the inimitable language of Bhupen Khakhar. The youngest participant in the Place for People configuration, doctor-painter Sudhir Patwardhan, soon becomes the most steadfast artist of the realist genre in India. Working his way beyond identifactory representation, Patwardhan attempts, in images and discourse, a reflexive (self) alienation, so as to better re-present or, rather, regard the proletarian subject in his/her difficult negotiation with the historically conditioned state of political separation, treading carefully lest the act of solidarity collapse into sentiment. A younger generation of radicals (the Association of Radical Painters and Sculptors) grouped in the mid-1980s in Baroda, offer another approach to the politics of representation. They exhibit, provoke and plot a ‘return’ to their ‘home’ state, Kerala -- a highly politicized region marked with several leftwing to extremist movements. They attempt what might be nearest to agit-prop conditions for making, showing, jolting the status quo maintained by art and artists within well-established genres/institutions. The movement is short-lived, but has lasting ramifications for the discourse on art and praxis and retains the heroic reverberations of a failed expression of radicality. The Dalit movement produces many major writers but few artists willing to identify themselves as such, with an exception in painter Savi

5 Savarkar, who develops an iconography and style for a painterly ‘inquisition’ against upper-caste oppression. The desiccation in the 1980s of the proletarian struggles in Bombay, India’s most advanced industrial (working class) city, had already dismantled the classical form of proletarian class-politics, as it had depressed the scope of representation in the multiple senses of that concept: as realist portrayal, interventionist gestures, and advocacy (with the vanguard documentarist, Anaad Patwardhan as virtually the lone figure tracking the vicissitudes of the working class during this period). Just a little after the defeat of the textile workers’ trade union struggle (1982), cosmopolitan Bombay suffered traumatic conditions of sectarian violence. In 1992-93 (and then ten years later in neighboring Gujarat), artists and documentarists, including Navjot, were pushed to address the travail of the religious minorities: the victims were overwhelmingly from the Muslim community—largely from among the sub- categories of the proletariat, but majoritarian aggression now had ramifications for the trading middle and upper class Muslims. Even as she addressed the sectarian violence that broke out at the scale of massacre, Navjot undertook a deliberate dislocation and went away for periods of time to the tribal heart of India, that is, to an altogether different communitarian structure. She went with fuzzy intentions, hoping to work with or alongside rural artisan-artists. But the encounter had a transformative dimension and she had entered, almost by default, an altogether different space, time and discourse. Within India’s predominantly agricultural society, nomad/ peasant subjects from within adivasi communities (or, what have become configurations of migrant agricultural labour) are placed in the field of radical representationalism with even greater ardour than the larger, more diverse swathe of what is generically designated as the Indian peasantry. While artists in Shantiniketan (NLB to KGS), develop the nationalist agenda for the representation of Indian peoples and traditions, subsuming the issue within the nomenclature of the living (tribal, folk and popular ) arts of India, there is the more radical edge to the valorized embodiments of the ‘subaltern’ subjects – in sculpture, in theatre and in cinema. And this embodiment is often related to adivasis, on whose behalf or, indeed, in celebration of whose roving lives many authorial voices have been raised in protest and song. It is Ramkinker Baij

6 who displays unmatched brilliance in transforming the romanticized presence of the Santals (in Shantiniketan, and more generally, Bengal) to construct a style of representation (in the Santal Family, 1938) whereby he not only identifies them as ‘protagonists’ ( with attributes such as are attached to the ‘original’ forest people, all loaded concepts), he moves beyond these identificatory conventions by deploying pointedly sculptural means: a rhetorical use of materiality, not hewn stone but ‘thrown’ cement adhering to a skeletal armature in an improvisatory and somewhat precarious manner. Similar representational motifs are to be found in the work of filmamker (in, for example, Ajantrik), and the photographer Sunil Jannah (who, among these three remained a committed communist for a considerable period of time). Soon after Navjot also ‘went away’ from the metropolis in order to unlearn her academic training in painting and started to sculpt in wood. At first these were short visits and she worked within the fairly programmed space of Jaidev Baghel’s Shilpi Gram. She embarked on what she subsequently called (as exhibition titles) Figures Re-drawn and Modes of Parallel Practice. Navjot’s representational strategies for the female body and its locational transfer were now conducted to gain coding possibilities different to middleclass protocols of gendered self- presentation. But as Navjot expressed an emphatic preference for a ‘primitivist’ archetype, the question remains: undertaken since the beginning of the 20th century, this legendary move to primitivism is stereotypical of a male-modernist aesthetic. Can Navjot mark the difference at the end of the century? It might be worth comparing Navjot’s pre- Columbian type figuration and the eclectic installation with her Bastar colleagues, with Meera Mukherjee who takes the (lost-wax) casting technique from the artisanal traditions in eastern and central India, and devises a form that is ‘naïve’ as it is styled by an indigenist expressionism; and as she simultaneously works in a human and monumental scale, it is worth comparing her to Ramkinker Baij’s Indian classicist/ modernist melding, and thence, via this detour return to evaluate Navjot’s sculptural mode. In the 1980s, the women’s movement led by activists and backed by a small, strong flank of theorizing feminists (for example Susie Tharu), working on specific historical struggles in Indiaiii provided a context for Navjot to conduct modest acts of

7 displacement and engagement with respect to the category of ‘woman’ and/as ‘other’. She engaged in Bombay with women documentarists, singers, writers, and artists. She drew upon her own (productively insecure) identity as woman and artist to re-figure anthropological pursuits famously conducted by (securely entitled) men in relation to communities classified by sociology and, more crucially, by governmentality. In the subsequent phases of the subaltern discourse, this aesthetic of representationalism reveals its ironies. Knowing that many of these cultures are barely able to survive modernization, this romantic, therefore, ironically, proto- modern attitude to vanishing pasts, has to be systematically corrected by opening up of discursive and activist spaces at once: by evaluating the costs of developmental capitalism, rehabilitation or more precisely empowering work in situ, and, not least, a reckoning with insurrectory movements extending over regions in the countryside. The tribal populations (name tribes), have, in economic terms, moved from nomadic to forest existence to subsistence farming and sometimes better cultivator status, and are now also employed as labour in local industry, trade and service sectors. They remain ‘dispossessed’ nonetheless, as their life worlds and related economies are systematically destroyed, leaving them to subsist at the low(est) level of resources. Indeed, this is precisely the region (within Chattisgarh) where the center and state, and the ‘Maoists’ comprising armies of the tribal poor, are locked in an armed confrontation. In militant phases of tribal and peasant revolt (and projected ‘revolution’) even the consciousness with which Navjot enters into this engagement can scarcely suffice, the hard ground on which any form of representationalism has now to be tested holds seismic projections. It is also perhaps for this reason that her sustained practice has moved away from direct expression of the valorized subaltern to subaltern discourse to a deliberate displacement of subject onto encounters and situations. A non-identificatory understanding of precisely such histories of social alienation where the noble task of representation itself, whether understood as artistic mimesis or democratic ‘behalfism’, cannot be conducted in simple faith. Recognising how the contour of subjectivity is refocused the moment it becomes art practice laboriously working its way into the public domain, the questions of

8 language and ideology go beyond any standard theory of representation. That is also why Navjot’s present concentration on enabling speech-acts where behalfism is bracketed out. But that it is never obliterated is to be noted and returned as a question to an artist like Navjot: the potential fallacy of the ‘plain tale’ aesthetics/ethics; indeed the audio-documentary form’s representational politics (acting in proxy of visual manifestation) and its whiff of a post-realist moralism, needs always to be examined.

‘Artist as Ethnographer’ Around 1997, after some short visits, Navjot adopted a mode of temporary ‘migration’ from Mumbai to Bastar. She dislocated herself from the metropolis, relocated herself and set up a transit-‘home’ in Kondagaon. Unlike any of her peers and comrades, she made this physical move even as she trained herself to engage in ongoing discourse and practice of indeginist aesthetics and social activism. Ten years ago she worked on her own sculptures in the setting of Shilpi Gram, a unique studio-workshop of tribal art run by a famous adivasi sculptor, Jaidev Baghel. Once she had set up her own studio, a series of collaborative art- projects followed, and then large-scale social projects involving functional, site- specific structures. She then began to work directly with adivasi groups of artist/artisans and slowly built up an organization (Samvadh/Dialogue) that is now (after receiving funding from the India Foundation for the Arts for some years) a self-sustaining collective. Local artists of the collective, Rajkumar, Shantibai and Gessuram, as well as Navjot Altaf, continue to produce individual artworks, a proportionate contribution from the sale of which is given over to Samvadh for its activities Navjot is alert to shared utilities, outreach pedagogy (self-pedagogy/social pedagogy), the ‘economy’ of the village and a distinctly articulated and do-able aesthetic. The collective undertakes architectural-scale community projects in utilitarian sites, such as village water-pumps where women make several trips a day to fetch water: the project, Nalpar, addresses the ecological, ergonomic needs of the women and devices an aesthetic for the purpose. They have also built play-sites as informal schools for the village children—what are called children’s temples (Pilla Guddi). For this Samvadh involves the district bureaucrats, the municipal committee

9 of the town and village, and wage labour from among the local population for discussion, activities and building projects. Postcolonial anthropology: Just as the work of modernist predecessors might have related to earlier anthropological theses including and up to Levi-Stauss, the question of how artists relate to community formations, draw on debates in postcolonial anthropology (such as that of James Clifford and Clifford Geertz; George Marcus’ notion of the ‘complicit ethnographer.’). That is to say, as compared to the structuralist use of binaries within analogic/ metaphoric, therefore more abstractly paradigmatic definition of culture; the differentiated intra-cultural ethos of postcolonial anthropology produces a more problematized enunciation where the act of representation is liable to be scrutinized by politicized communities alert to the politics of self-representation. Terms like ‘locality’ in the sense that Appadurai uses it spans from neighborhood to community to the dialectical binaries, of local-global, brought about by globalization itself. Hal Foster’s critique: Hal Foster, in his famous essay, ‘Artist as Ethnographer’ positions a critical frame that we cannot ignore. The inclination (the ‘desire’ and fear) for the ‘other’ takes on the primitivist mode in the earlier part of the 20th century, and contributes to the trope of alterity in both anthropological and aesthetic domains. In the fully postmodern phase of intercultural communication, alterity is sublimated and the artist, smitten with a kind of ethnography-envy seeks the potential for rapport and complicity with the ‘other’ Just as the textual model of interpretation was seen to enhance fieldwork in the theorizings of ‘new anthropology’; the fieldwork model with its contextual, participant-observer ethics is seen to supplement the practice of art, privileging in the process what James Clifford calls the ‘ethnographic present’. This is a form of polyvalent contemporaniaty within which every one, not least the artist (as cultural semiologist, contextual fieldworker or, even, on the other hand, as performative masquerader) is seen to be ‘equally’ implicated and also, hopefully, self-reflexive. The earlier romanticism is expelled to accommodate a critique of the institution, indeed of the system on the basis of context and exigency. identity and subjectivity. But the terms of this complicity remain derivative, there is even in a sense a form of dissembling, a moral masquerade….(my words)

10 Subaltern studies, cultural politics in India : The debate for us has other more historically rich resonances and these are articulated in the (Indian) subaltern studies discourse that develops a remarkably elaborate constituency in both academic and political domains, envisaging a role for the intelligentsia that is a cross between research/ cultural work/ and political activism. (Gramsci’s organic intellectual) The subalternists are above all critics of the State’s development policies and of homogenized governance. This discourse brings together intellectuals and documentary filmmakers, NGO social-workers and cadres on the frontlines of activism  dalits, feminists—as well as independent documentarists and artists. Just consider the highly developed anti-aesthetic based on subaltern solidarities provided by Dalit literature: an incontrovertible take-over by a caste and community of its own representation. This self-representation is evidence of a sentient protagonist deploying the full range of what is an abject and authorial voice, thus bursting through ‘realist-melodramatic’ genres to arrive at clearly visible battle lines. (In contrast, to which a visual artist working through practice more than theory seems to have found the task too daunting.) Anthropology and feminism: The same force of agency has been developed in feminism and Navjot has trained herself to reopen definitional questions: of (anthropological) identity based on a culturally sanctioned language and entrenched social divisions constitutive of patriarchal and capitalist social relations; and, identification as an active form of projection, mimesis, and masquerade, conjuring the ambiguous language of art. Yet, even with careful attention to the means of production and the relations of production, two key concepts in Marxist analysis, questions persist -- how shall we designate the collaboration between Navjot and her colleagues, or even especially her women colleagues like Shanti Bai, or Butt? (see. Ganga Devi’s blunt autobiographical pictures). James Clifford’s anthropological understanding tells us, “identity is conjunctural not essential” ; and this is complemented by feminism’s recognition of the exclusionary nature of all definitional systems, all categorized identities; the interdependency of ideological stances; and a contingent understanding of subject-positions. What Mary Kelly taught feminists way back in 1981 (Screen), and what Griselda Pollock set out, also back in the late 1980s, is useful recall for Navjot’s work even today: one, that

11 feminist materialism is an interrogation of representation as a social site of ideological activity; two, if sociality of art is a question of appropriate strategies of intervention in the institutions which determine the reading of artistic texts, feminist interventions help place art /institutions in a continuum with other economic, social and ideological practices; three, if sexuality is lodged in the crucible of feminist inquiry, it assumes itself to be more than a metaphor for struggle, it becomes, in Foucault’s phrase, “ the truth of our being.” iv Thus to speak up on behalf of Navjot: her preferences are conditioned by her alertness to the Indian metropolitan artist’s anomalous situation within a diverse cultural field of surviving cultures/ divided polity. By situating herself midway in an activist and an aesthetic project, Navjot hopes to develop a double-take: a material ‘grounding’ of her subjectivity within a social project, as well as its reflexive (philosophic, therefore duly distanced) rendering as a discourse of/in art. Given the actual chasm, the disabling distances, still structurally in place within the democratic polity of India, Navjot would believe that modernist autonomy/ iconoclasm does not suffice. So, she devises for herself a complex, consciously conjoined identity: a modernist/indigenist aesthetic within postcolonial modernisms, and thereon a more political position of a feminist with ‘subalternist’ concerns. She assumes the role of a cultural activist in the NGO/interventionist sense, but also functions as a contemporary global artist in a circuit of interactive networks that weave in and out of local community politics and international museum aesthetics. The authorship question: It follows that simultaneously with her social projects, Navjot investigates the possibility of a shared authorial status. She respects specialized knowledges and wants to draw upon and foreground this resource in certain of her co-authored works. I refer to Links, Modes of Parallel Practice, Three Halves and the Dis-Placed Self -- projects where process and installation is conceived together with other artists. On another plane, a work such as Between Memory and History, invites viewers to ‘take away’ fragments of the work. Whatever thematic she chooses, contradictions are so choreographed and enacted, that markedly different protagonists are engaged: there is a participatory language drawn from the vagabondage of young boys, juvenile lumpens, making their way across the big city thru the ‘play’ of vagabondage (Mumbai Meri Jaan); rural labour

12 (in ‘Pavan Kumar’); ancient artisanship (in ‘Water Weaving’) female field-hands (in ‘Jagar’). All these figures can be variously mythologized, and yet so positioned as to yield a polyvocal vocabulary of emancipation -- even plenitude—that has a praxiological effect if not some practical outcome. The reciprocity factor impels her to involve the subjects of representation as participants and to thus question the rights and limits of representation by the artist as well as the efficacy/legitimacy of presentational (curatorial and exhibitory) strategies. The best example, of course is her Bastar project itself, realized through her on site colleagues and adumberated by ‘outside’ interlocuters: I refer to the involvement among others (Shivaji Pannikkar, Bhanu Padamesee) of Nancy Adajania and Grant Kester in Samvadh at Kondagaon, invited to a kind of witness- dialogue at the site where the community project is situated. This form of engagement leads her to straightforwardly pedagogic projects—undertaken frequently in Khoj residencies and also all over the world. Since 2000, Navjot Altaf’s work, a large part of which involves installation/ video, is about a reconstruction of identity through a necessary attenuation of identity, leading her, paradoxically, to the necessity of dis-dentification. Test case: Touch I to Touch IV It should be emphasized of course that Navjot in her double avatar does authorial work in several media, especially video and installations, and these are exhibited in a metropolitan and global context; and that she is engaged in advanced debates on the problematics of a left-oriented cosmopolitan artist in the role of an artist-activist at the grassroots level. Indeed she is both subject and participant of discussion with both proponents and detractors of community interaction projects, and constantly in quest of the appropriate ethics and inclusive definition for the avantgarde in the expanded field of contemporary art.

Navjot’s Abstraction (Feminist Art Practice) minimalism/design; formalism=grids (graph paper): geometry and the ‘pretense’ of measure: repetition/blurring/ optical evacuation.

13 A slow strong evolution of a formal vocabulary and a language based on abstraction which while it came from an immediate point of rather rare reference within India (Nasreen and her formal -mystical quest), it came from another, double layer of art- historical precedents: feminist art of the 1970s (Mary Kelly) which moved away from figurative representation and determinedly deployed conceptual/abstraction, the precedent for which was the 1920s avantgarde (Soviet Constructivists/Supramatists). Navjot’s spare structures and economy of signs, more properly formalist, carry the mandate of conceptual abstraction practiced by 1970s feminists. When Navjot began to introduce videos in her work—first as quotations from documentary films then what she herself shot or had shot or digitally compiled or collaged on the computer, there was again a marked tendency to abstraction-- thru blurring. Even though the overlapping blurs sometimes appear dated, one can see them referencing key moments in film and digital makeovers: Fluxus movies mimicking early television images, as also 1960s-70s underground films, treated the image as a signal, or at best a sign. Not serving as a representational image, it was ‘just’ surface—tantalizing, irritating, ephemera barely to be deciphered. Having rejected representational veracity from the position of what I believe is a feminist strategy of deflection/refraction, Navjot’s somewhat mannered tactic developed into glitchy language of a damaged documentary, layering painful memory and repressed speech beyond a mere haunting into the area of disquiet. Her preference for the use of words instead of sentences, blurs instead of sharp focus, silence instead of speech, and versions of texts like concrete poetry, are aligned to a succession of avantgarde practices in modern and contemporary art: to break taboos, question ruling ideologies, penetrate hegemonies, connect to everyday life and, finally, find formal equivalents (rather than literal representations) to achieve the very praxis that political art committed itself to.

Communities in the Metropolis: urban violence Because Navjot constantly intersperses her Bastar projects with her middleclass/ metropolitan identity, she is compelled to face escalated urban turbulence in an aggressively globalizing India. Since the mid-1990s, a small number of Indian

14 artists, along with a growing number of documentarists interfacing with experimental auteurs, have referred, quite significantly, to the terms of citizenship in a crisis- bound civil society. During phases of rightwing ascendancy and social crises, Navjot Altaf, like her circle of peers, has undertaken mediatic shifts to spell out in different languages the hidden decree of power and possible means of recovery. … Declaring their partisanship towards communities named and shattered through majoritarian violence, towards a population subjected to indifferent governance, these artists have found ways to address the state seen to betray its constitutional commitments, its own ‘socialist’ meta-narrative of equality. But they also recognize in the very depths of the social rupture navigational possibility to investigate fraught sites: via an advanced semiotic, via a carefully worked ‘system’ of heterogeneous and heterodox signs that allows social imaginaries to be assembled, and disassembled. The artworks tend to be metonymically structured, mixed media (object-photo-video) installations, such that an alternative--an avantgarde?—space is opened out. Starting with Links Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994), followed by Between Memory and History (2001–02), Navjot referred to majoritarian assault and state terror (in India as in recent world history), and found material means, monumental structures and a language of abstraction to memorialize social suffering. Links was an installation comprising thick black pvc pipes that looped through domestic door-frames/thresholds; a coiling mammoth both intrusive and binding (it gripped a video-monitor playing documentary film-fragments of the Mumbai riots), this outgrowth was an expression of what was the artist’s first direct encounter with communal carnage. Some years later, when violence seemed to have seeped into the city-arteries – her city, Bombay – she decided to circumvent the representational almost altogether. Between Memory and History was a steel structure that had the convex shape of a reverse proscenium. Its open-grid structure was strung and embellished with thousands of paper ribbons each with a coded ‘message’ prepared by the artist from her archive of witness-speech and poetry fragments in graphic form. These were photocopied sheets of paper fan-folded into flat ribbons and knotted into the metal grille; they were also stacked flat and string- bound to make ‘books’ which were then laid out as cryptic texts to the main

15 installation. Between Memory and History fulfilled the basic principle of installation art, a poetics of dislocation wherein the relationship of the part to the whole (as much as the discreet meanings thereof) holds key significance. The whole is always being reconfigured (by the spectators), the meaning remains indeterminate, to be probed. A mattress on the floor refracted video-images played on three monitors mounted in a facing row. Showing documentary footage to be read as integral part of the enclosing structures, these small-format, low-resolution image-blurs contrived to offer, yet withhold, the actual events to which they referred. As objects, the monitors read something like ET robots flashing signals, equally as beaming reliquaries stationed in what was by inference a shrine. Between Memory and History was a space for recollection, contemplation: a secular space with ritual/sacred icons reverberating so as to make the architectural installation appear all the more monumental. These gave her a hold on a formalisr/conceptual aesthetic: an elegant monument, an architectural setting embedded with coded messages that ‘contains’ the political, foregrounding reconciliation over conflict, reparation over rage. The calm of recollection and reconciliation after the event, an ethic even more than an aesthetic, one might say, with a corresponding type of politics attached. It is not surprising, then, that she moves on to community based interactive projects.

Lacuna: Navjot’s three-projection video-installation Lacuna in Testimony (2003– 06), based on a day’s footage of the changing ocean, was also made after an event that I have already named: the 2002 state-backed pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. Drawing on the testimonies of women who had taken refuge in the Shahi Baug and Shah Alam camps—victims, refugees and witnesses—women whose bodies (or the bodies of their kin) had been violated, Navjot developed a voice archive, patiently recording scores of testimonies of stigmatized citizens faced with rape, violence, juridical lapse and political ruse. She then erased even this vestigial ‘privilege’ of speech acting not from arrogance but from a compassionate sensibility, whereby she hoped that evanescent images may better reflect the pain and bewilderment of over-exposed identities; and that an ambient aura created by the beamed ocean could perhaps lift unspoken narratives to the horizon.

16 In some versions of the video-installation Navjot included a complementary but discreet audio-installation with a selection of testimonies to be heard on earphones. I once again reference Veena Das’s insistence on the quality of attention to what the victim is saying and even more to their silence, to what they are not saying; to listen to the ‘inner language’ of the sufferers since not everything that people have gone through and witnessed can be said. Added to the callousness of the official discourse of the state, especially with regard to women, Das expresses revulsion at what she calls the ‘excess of speech’ and ‘plenitude of words’ in the face of violence—in the media, in theory and in cultural processes. Lacuna in Testimony was a succession of subliminal images appearing on the surging waves of a changing, blue, gray, purplish-blue ocean – the Arabian Sea – striking the extended coastline of Bombay as also the western edge of Gujarat. There was no shoreline for the foaming waves, the horizon was placed high, and a subtle editing rhythm portrayed the ocean in all its splendid indifference. Three adjacent screens developed a visually identical but time-staggered ritual of ‘evidence’: forty- eight small, square, digitally generated windows opened to a steady pulse, one by one, and traced a grid over the water-surface. These windows were brilliantly reflected in three rows of 72 square mirrors placed on the floor below the projection; and the doubled imagery created a space of pain, fear, shimmer. In each of the frosty ‘panes’ you glimpsed gray, unfocused images of aggression and assault, of command and subjection, of ordinary life in Ahmedabad including the fuzzy image of a sufi shrine. In the definitive yet illusory boundary—the ocean’s horizon— in the monotonous murmur of its infinity, Navjot located an ‘oceanic archive’ of submerged and frozen footage. These ghost-scenes of destruction began to fade before you could decipher their documentary content, but before they faded they froze, literally; they froze into identical, caved-in ice-drifts that floated for a few seconds and then, as quickly, started to disappear in a fine-tuned sequence, a recession that completed itself in one and then the next and the next screen, each of the small ice-blocks vanishing one at a time until their count was complete. Once the windows dissolved, the sea reappeared for a moment in its fullness and sound and then suddenly all three screens blacked out. During the interval the words l a c u n a i n t e s t i m o n y appeared and disappeared letter by letter on the

17 surface, followed by the roaring, quickening waves now turned scarlet then deep red. The simple, minimally edited video-recording of the ocean offered a metaphor for the mounting trauma of countless testimonies lashing the shores of the earth—and this was now surmounted by a illegible wail. The bloodied seascape rang with the voice of a child at play in a refugee camp in Ahmedabad. The piercing call found an echo and called back again and again. Like all repetitions, this turned into a portent that materializes in the form of a waking dream within the camp; the camp which as an institution has been named as a paridgmatic structure of the modern state and a defining format for the perverse sustainment of bare life. The boy’s deranged song filled the lacuna that beset the project of assembling testimonies. It filled the lacuna—not only of testimony, as the title of the work proposes, but of memory itself, and brought him, the boy, to a healing station … perhaps: the boy’s voice faded away, the ocean subsided, and the sequence closed with the waves returning to a quiet blue rhythm. The camp, never shown or represented in Navjot’s work, is not, as we know from supporting facts, ever terminated satisfactorily, just as the conversion of citizens into displaced persons never ceases—rather, it assumes the magnitude of a worldwide exodus that we can only ever glimpse in vignettes. Navjot’s spectral vision with no decipherable subject, only a shrill plaint, was one such vignette. Navjot put to the test her engagement with loss by assembling an image- document that altered its signs along the sliding scale of referential meaning. She economized even on the sign, leaving us with a historical residue that is today a kind of electronic sedimentation of spent signals. Thus her video projections took the form of a fluid, spatial-temporal blur, a blurring that was the more disturbing because while the ‘background’ of the ocean was vivid enough, the actual images in the window that opened out in the ‘foreground’ never ever came into focus. But Navjot can be said to have gone further and devised a definite position about the video- image as such. In consonance with the signal-language of the video-tape and the overlapping translucency of images made possible in the editing process (a layering- over, as in watercolour), she positioned her conceptual preference for an aesthetic of erasure. Thus the disappearance of the image had a temporal significance matching its appearance and only ‘existed’, if at all, in the space of recall—as a trace. Here

18 was an archive of images as an index of absence, a repository of loss, faithful to what had been forgotten. It paled while viewing and offered a perceptual equivalent of forgetting. … Condensing the undulating time of recall and forgetting, of anxiety and indifference, of memorializing and denial, Navjot found a shadow-language that was at the same time a precise poetics adapted to the digital medium: ghost scenes translated as material inscriptions, making possible (hypothetical) re-emergences that are beyond memory, within history. And it remained the task of the social, threatened with anomie as it is with violence, to reactivate this illusory material. Even as it is the task of the social to somehow redeem that which is its inheritance, painful and cruel as it might be. Did Navjot’s pared means of representation belie the radical end they signalled? Not including the iconic, nor the photo-indexical, nor even the speech of recorded testimony which, if it is invocatory, is after all embodied, her mode of address signalled, beyond representation, the loss of body in the aftermath of violence. As we tried to work through event, memory, documentation and the archive of social suffering, what surfaced was the peculiar condition of human precariousness: common citizens denuded of subjecthood or, on the other hand, held guilty for an illegitimate bid to sovereignty within the new global. These lives would not even be classified as victims or ‘represented’, in the political sense of that term, thereby pressing open the question: what is the veracity of representation as a key category of artistic endeavor? Navjot’s Lacuna in Testimony relied on an aesthetics of abstraction/erasure. Did it thus dehistoricize tragedy? Or did the moving image, constructed as it was on a monumental scale, yield an immanence of the concrete—historical trails, even perhaps indexical clues, that tracked the bleak and nearly incomprehensible reality of exclusion? ‘… [T]he human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we

19 nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.’v

Geeta Kapur

The museum/exhibition ii Grant Kester systematically argues his commitment to identifying discursive spaces for art, deriving from it his category of dialogic practice, indeed of a dialogic aesthetics that proposes an emancipatory model for art-in- society. Kester ‘s equally systematic opposition to the avantgarde position (as it develops after the historical avantgarde of the 1920s Soviet Union) and within the terms of Euroamerican art practice depending on an individuality in extremis—the heroic anti-communitarian position of the heroic artist in the throes of both trauma and sublimity in avantgarde aesthet. Dialogue, the substance of what would constitute the public sphere (after Habermas) and also the counter-public sphere (Alexander Kluge) dialogic aesthetics looks at this question of social relations and everyday life in more moral terms but also theorizes it through and beyond the preference for interactivity an ideological status. Kester ‘s position stands between that of negative aesthetics (Adorno) developing later into difficult, rude and ‘heroic’ intervention in social processes (Clare Bishop), and that of ‘getting together’ mentality promoted by Relational Aesthetics (Nicholas Bourriaud) makes peace with actually existing politics of globalization and privilege micro-communities as forms of goodwill enclaves where people can party and do their own thing in voluntary, presumably non-alienated bonhomie.

iii (as with her activist collective, Anveshi, in the city of Hyderabad working on historicizing the women’s wing of the Telangana movement and then, in an interrupted continuum taking up womens’ local struggles in Andhra Pradesh), iv Bryson on MK Interim p33. MK ref.

20 Holding the Ground: Navjot Altaf

Geeta Kapur

Khakhar, Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001, oil on canvas, 230 x 354 cm Sudhir Patwardhan Fall 1998 oil on canvas 1524x1067cm hk Rhi i t d i fib l h i ht 91 ik BijSthlFil1938 di t t t td l t Meera Mukherjee, Boatman, bronze, 78 x 26 cm af Images Redrawn: Sculptural Installation 1995 06 room dimensions 9 x 18 metres (variable) af, from Modes of Parallel Practice: Ways of World Making, 1998-99, sculptural/ multipart installation in collaboration with

fllbtijtNl iit ifi t t ( t d i ) t it h d a municipal hand-pump Navjot Altaf, collaborative project Nalpar. egion of central India.

. Navjot Altaf, Mumbai Meri Jaan, 2004, video installation with three projections.

af, Links Destroyed and Rediscovered, 1994, collaborative, multipart installation with audio and video, ensions 9 75 x 10 65 metres (variable) af, Links Destroyed and Rediscovered, 1994 af, Links Destroyed and Rediscovered, 1994 af, Links Destroyed and Rediscovered, 1994 af Between Memory and History 2000 01 multipart installation with videos room dimensions 12 x 11 metres (variable)

Navjot Altaf, Between Memory and History, 2000-01. f LiTti2003 id i t ll ti ith th j ti h 7 i t 21 d i fl f f