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N a v j o t A l t a f
Touch IV
On view till January 1, 2011
Bhimawa Golar, Rajendra Naik and Pandurang from
Sangram,Sangli
will be in conversation with Nancy Adajania, Gita Chadha and
Navjot Altaf on December 16, 2010 | 6:30 pm
at The Guild, Mumbai
The Guild is proud to
present 22 monitor video installation Touch IV by
Navjot Altaf at The Guild, Mumbai.
“The video installation 'Touch IV', whose central protagonists are
sex workers and members of the third gender community, is a
culmination of Navjot's three-decade-long preoccupation with
representing the voice of the subaltern in art. I would contend
that at the core of Navjot's practice lies her unceasing awareness
of being a linguistic subjectivity, an image-maker who nonetheless
forms her social and political associations through language.
Navjot has a deep commitment to language in all its various
manifestations, its ability to unmask power asymmetry and the
occlusion of truth, with its wager on multi-pronged articulation.
But her commitment to language is held in counterpoint by her
apprehension of being stalled by word-induced aporia, of being
interpellated or otherwise reduced by language, of being trapped
by language.
…In
'Touch IV', unlike earlier video installations like 'Mumbai Meri
Jaan' or 'Pavan Kumar', Navjot's subaltern protagonists discussed
and even at times dictated the terms of how they wished to be
represented. In the Spivakian sense, Navjot has traversed the
journey from the difficulties of inter-subjective communication,
as immortalised in the question 'Can the subaltern speak?', to
clearing the ground to make such speech-acts possible. This should
not mislead the viewer into thinking that if the subaltern speaks,
s/he will be automatically heard. As in Navjot's earlier works,
the viewer has to make an effort to understand what is being
enunciated, with 22 voices available on the headphones of
television monitors.
These voices belong to people who are part of a movement of
resistance against societal norms that consider their sex-work as
a social aberration and their sexuality as deviant behaviour.
Their solidarity has been manifested in a large 5000-member
organisation, Sangram, which has been working with women's
collectives on prostitution for the last 15 years…”
(Excerpt from an essay by Nancy Adajania)
Navjot Altaf’s work has been shown in Lacuna in Testimony, Patricia
and Phillip
Frost
Art Museum, Florida,
2009;Curated
by Julia Herzberg
Public
Places Private Spaces, Newark
Museum, New
York
and
Minneapolis Institute
of
Arts,
Minneapolis
2008;
Curated
by Gayatri Sinha and Paul Stern Berger,
Tiger
by the Tail: Women
Artists Transforming
Culture, Brandies
University / Museum
Boston and
New Brunswick Rutgers University, Douglass Library, Newark, 2008;
Curated
by Wendy Tarlow Kaplan, Elinor W.Gadon and Roobina Karode,
Continuity and Transformation,
Provinciadi Milano,Italy, 2007;Curated
by Daniela Palazzoli,
Zones of Contact,
15th Biennale of Sydney Australia, 2006; Curated
by Charles Merewether, Australia.
Groundworks, Carnegie
Mellon University,
(RMG) Pittsburgh,
2005;Grant Kester Another
Passage To India, Theatre
Saint Gervais and Musee d’ Ethnographie, Geneva, Switzerland,
2004; Curated
by Pooja Sood,
Zoom – Art in Contemporary India,
Edificia Sede de Caixo Garal de Depositos,
Lisbon, 2004;
Curated by Luis Sepra and Nancy Adajania, Century
City - Bombay/Mumbai: City
Politics and Visual
Culture in
the 90’s, Tate
Modern, London,
2001;
Curated by Geeta Kapoor and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, subTerrain:artworks
in the cityfold,
,Haus
der Kulteren der Welt, Berlin.
Curated by Geeta Kapur.
8th Havana Biennale:
Art together with life,
Cuba, 2003;Curated by Hilda Maria
Rodriguez; LimiNAl zoNes,
Curated by Pooja Sood, Apeejay Media Gallerry New
Delhi,2003;
Solo exhibitions include:
Touch IV,
Video Installation,
Talwar Gallery, New Delhi, 2010;
A
Place in New York
an interactive photo based project, The Guild, Mumbai, 2010;
Touch-
Remembering Altaf,
Video
and motor based sculpture
Installation,
Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2008;
Bombay Shots, an interactive photo based project,
The Guild, Mumbai, 2008; Water
Weaving, Video
Installation,
Talwar Gallery, New York, 2005; Junctions
1 2 3, The
Guild, Mumbai,
2006 and
Jagar
Multimedia Installation, Sakshi Gallery Mumbai,2006
among others. |
