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Intimate Geographies: Counterfactual Narratives
Artists Pooja Iranna,
Gigi Scaria, Sathyanand
Mohan, and Sumedh Rajendran explore
the complex field of interpretation in the visual arts, in a way that
privileges neither the historical nor the contemporary, neither theory
nor practice, but put them all into a constructed correspondence, as it
were, a conversation represented by its double focus. They call
attention to the significance of connecting issues of place, location,
and cultural diversity, to those of nationality, imperialism, migration,
and diaspora. Their personal - intimate geographies lie in the images
that imply the issues of cultural difference and the specificity of
location, which is cultural and social as well as political. Along that
axis, we align a series of narratives that are theoretically informed
and historically researched posed by a specificity around
representation. A representation that finds a space to acknowledge the
more durable temporalities of each artist's creative negotiation of time
and historical, social, and political circumstances.
It is in their
diversity, that they find a common cause in thinking through the
problems posed by artistic practices. They do this by means of the
resources provided by interventions in philosophy, narratology,
semiotics, psychoanalysis, geography, history, and politics. Their art
reveals an aesthetic density and cognitive complexity only after a
detour through the terrains of cultural framing: each with a specific
story, a particular experience of the configurations of class, race,
ecology, displacement, secular rationality, alliance...the list is not
limitless, but it reflects our social and imaginative realities -
mediated by the forms of representation.
There is some system to the patterning of
signs into meanings. We need, however, to find the codes that lend the
symbols to generate resonance and meaning, both within the context of
their production and across time and space, to other contexts. These
codes, as I name them, are not merely semiotic signs, but those shaped
in concrete social and historical conditions, which in turn shape and
are shaped by the psychic life of these artists, framed, and formed in
specific trajectories of a socially constituted but psychically lived
subjectivity.
Pooja Iranna’s
diverse spaces and places
of lived histories mark the beginning of an attempt to ensure that her
practice is written about through the prism of a fissured and
self-critical alterity and dissidence of what has been denied, negated,
erased, and refused – urban/environmental
degradation, along with the stark reality of climate change. What is the
cultural dimension of sustainability? How has modernity degenerated
into a culture of unsustainability? How does one then change our actual
culture of unsustainability into a sustainable one? Does one go beyond
the utilitarian rationality that is so very common in our contemporary
culture?
“To make a good metaphor
means to recognize similarity”,
as Aristotle said. It is this very similarity employing the dense
referential structure in the paintings and sculptures that stories
become metaphors – implicitly. They express something that
characterizes the modern worldview, which is atomistic, materialistic,
and individualistic
– quasi – a flash of the present, that has always been a part of
metaphors that create narratives.
Iranna engages us in a fundamental rethinking of our culture, our ways
of knowing, thinking, and seeing the world. Where we must learn not to
be afraid of the complexities but to re-awaken a sensibility to patterns
that connect.
These patterns have been destroyed by
time and circumstance, but Gigi
Scaria attempts to reconstruct the
blind spots in an art – historical or archeological sense, trying to
make the complete image visible again. Honing in on the impact, the
significance of the gaps, and the process by which he creates
repositories of cultural memory - an important theoretical moral in his
work. Which is marked by an increasingly incisive investigation of the
self, and political power, urban spaces in a fast-globalizing India,
migration, and the social, urban, and institutional mechanisms within
the Indian context. The pictorial program of Scaria follows the
political transfer that concerns economics, power, and discourse, but is
primarily one of the forms that evolve as a sequence of narrations, a
weaving of stories that encompass different times or qualities of time.
This palimpsest–like layering is heightened by numerous interpretations
that open a new version of temporality. The artist gives space back to
time. He exposes himself to the opening of the image, which resembles
the structure of the symptom, namely an opening to time. “History is the
object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and
empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here – and – now”, in
the words of Walter Benjamin in his essay On the Concepts of History.
In art, contrary to all probability, it is always a matter of finding a
‘form with present time’. Scarias' work opens a space in two ways. As a
pure painting, it ties in with the tradition of classic modernism, but
the forms are also linked associatively to cartography: that is, to an
art capable of inventing space and representing interactions. Both in
painting and sculpture the works open out; they are pictorial panels,
carriers of far more than just themselves. This expressive action
expands the connotations of a specific place and related themes.
Photographs serve as an index, a print of a former
life left behind as a ghostly referent, or are they marks or traces of a
particular cause? the cause is the thing to which they refer, the
object they signify, a mise en scene providing a form of indexicality
where the trace and imprint of the material world are made. “I attempt
to explore this double bind – between the freedom that knowledge
promises, and the inevitable failure and limits of this promise”
Sathyanand Mohan
contends and questions this parallel duality that
we inhabit, the modes of living we aspire to, and the truth that we
believe in, activates his works towards a multivalent modality of a
‘thinking’ photograph/s. An index requires form: in imagery, and the
small units that comprise of stories and histories. The surface of
images and objects is impregnated in the place where content is stored.
But looking – at and listening – to open the stories that the individual
carries within, but which are also and above all inscribed into the
collective. These photographs reproduce paths no longer remembered –
places, therefore, where the remnants store memory – disclosing the
fragmentary nature of every memory. In the same places with their
essential fragmentary quality, the hegemonic, violent transcribing of
interests becomes visible, and the individual's memory is expanded into
‘collective’ knowledge.
Artistic
practices which give form through specific articulations produced in
time and place are an important site for critical self-knowledge about
our world.
This is not simply a political problem but a deep-rooted existential
anxiety that life is brief and largely out of our control. Samuel
Beckett in Waiting for Godot (1953): “They give birth astride of
a grave, the light gleams an instant then it’s night once more.”
Sumedh Rajendran
questions this relation between “familiarity
and unfamiliarity, land and distance, intimacy and identity, visibility
and invisibility, with the organic transformation of materials in the
layers of time…to contrasting elements drawn from the earth with its
multiple meanings and emotions, transform into hardened structures. The
gravity of immobile time brings cracks on these walls. Through the
cracks…we can see our fallibilities, our prejudices, our fleeting
humanity". He creates a world of a landscape that acquires the quality
of a haunting and melancholic reverie – but its value here is in its
invocation of an emotional state which suggests departures from a
realist narrative and crafts instead an interiority onto the canvas and
sculptures.
He weaves a dense network of fragmentary
narratives, within his work, which is oriented on empty spaces, gaps,
and negative forms, that contribute to the debate on the perception of
the world, recognition, and memory- an imprint of time. They correspond
to a narrative, at times are fragments from a compilation of stories.
His motives are combined with historical events and other heterogeneous
and narrative elements to create a story. It is in this repository of
narratives that the conversation takes place.
There is a particular significance in
this new historical configuration. Artistic practices are a form of
witness, a testimony of survival, a promise of imaginative projection as
well as the commitment to honest appraisal, to stories that must be
told.
© Author and The Guild
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