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Jui Adhvaryu: Hello everyone, and welcome to this conversation between artists Zakkir Hussain and T. V. Santhosh. This conversation has been organised by The Guild in context of the ongoing exhibition Traces of Light Amongst Ruins, being held at the gallery in Alibaug currently. First a brief introduction of our artists.

Zakkir Hussain is a contemporary Indian artist whose works deal with the issues that are ever-present in our world today. His works have been curated in various exhibitions, including at the Lapidarium in Croatia, The Guild in Alibaug, the Zuzeum Art Centre in Latvia, the Uru Art Harbour in Kochi, the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, amongst others. He was invited to be a part of the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. His recent solo exhibition Traces of Light Amongst Ruins is on view at The Guild in Alibaug currently, after first being shown in Kochi in the December of 2025.

T. V. Santhosh’s art cites histories of violence, injustice, war, terrorism and media propaganda, and has stood as a strong commentary on the current social and political crisis of our lives. His works have been shown widely in museums and biennales including the Bengal Biennale (2024), the Kochi Biennale Pavilion (2024), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), the Venice Biennale (2015) and the Colombo Art Biennale (2014). His art practice has been widely written about, including in three books, History Lab and the Elegy of Visceral Incantations (2024); Blood and Spit, Living with a Wound (2009) and T. V. Santhosh: Unresolved Stories (2008).

A little bit about the show before we begin our conversation. Traces of Light Amongst Ruins makes a careful negotiation between the vulnerability of consciousness and the cynicism of the world. Zakkir Hussain brings together daily objects that might be discarded in the everyday, together with the human form, revealing a hidden world that establishes connection to diverse realms of experience. The abandoned, erased and denied become a point of tension, a failure of orthodoxy that he navigates with great attention in his constructed world. The images he brings out connect dilapidated ecosystems and fragile lifelines across time and space, moving past convention and into a new state. Welcome to this conversation, Santhosh. Welcome, Zakkir. Let’s begin.

T. V. Santhosh: Thank you Shalini and Jui for inviting me. I'm very happy to have a conversation with Zakkir Hussain. We had studied together in Baroda, same time, so a lot of memories. I have a few questions, I have written them down so I will try to read it out. Zakkir, I have been following your works ever since we were students in Baroda. I think, stylistically speaking, they were influenced by some form of neo-expressionist style, especially the use of bold and stark, yet very spontaneous, outlines. And there were certain recurring images like amputated torsos and limbs, man carrying mountains, which can be seen even now in your recent works. Tell us something about your journey from College of Fine Arts Trivandrum to Baroda? How have both the places influenced you?

Zakkir Hussain: Thank you, Santhosh, for being part of this conversation, and of course I really express my thanks to Shalini also, and Jui, too. The first thing I want to say to you is that there is a kind of a dialogue with your works also, an area in which we are practicing, while we are using different language. I think there has been a continuous dialogue with you, starting from a very early time in our student days in Baroda. I’m really happy being part of this ongoing dialogue starting from the ’90s. And as you know that the ’90s raised an open global market, in time with the rising violence in the national scenario and the global space. So before we enter into important social and political history, I have to reply to your question about my experience in Trivandrum. In short, not very elaborate, I’m not going to do here, but very minimally, I am going to say that the College of Fine Arts Trivandrum provided me with a basic understanding about art, because the erstwhile Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association had a great impact on us, mainly those who joined in the ’90s. I joined the College of Fine Arts in the ’90s. There were two important Malayalam texts. One is Prathiloma Drishyabodhathinethire, that was printed by the Radicals as their manifesto, which was translated into Malayalam from [Artists Against a Reactionary Aesthetic Sensibility]. Another Malayalam book was available, Kalavimarsam, edited by Chintha Ravi, and there was an essay by one of the important art historians, R. Nandakumar. These were the only two Malayalam texts available about art. There was another book translated into Malayalam by Shelvy of Mulberry Books. It was some… I am not using the word ‘studies’, but an introduction of Dalí and Vincent Van Gogh. And Vincent Van Gogh’s book was very interesting, because they published his letters with his brother Theo. These are the things which we used to read, and as a student this was an introductory note to us to enter into the world of art.

Before I joined the College of Fine Arts, I had experience with poster making. One of my friends, Sabu Dinesh, when we were studying pre-degree, he used to come to my home. I didn’t know about poster making, nothing. He came with translated poems in Malayalam, and it was the time of movements against social injustice, like the Mavoor Rayons strike led by the extreme political group CPIML Red Flag, and the environmental movement against the power project in the Silent Valley forest area, led by the poet Sugathakumari. We used to do posters based on translated poems from Africa and Latin America, and Malayalam modern poetry. One day he approached me to do posters. I didn't know how to do this, but from an immature aspect of understanding of art, I did some drawings and designed posters based on the poems. We used poems to attract people, and at the same time Sabu’s intention was to break the conventional idea of posters. Most posters are slogans, instead he used poems to address the issues. And it was eye opening for me, because somehow when I go back to that space, I understood that there is another way to introduce these issues without using very direct images. Somehow it has become part of my understanding to making art, and at the same time a kind of distance, of making such direct political imageries. At that time the College of Fine Arts was a centre of heated debate on art, and the library was also very interesting. And you said something about German neo-expression?

Santhosh: Yes, neo-expressionism. I didn't specifically say German, we have the Italian movement, which is also something similar to that.

Hussain: In the ’80s there was a rejuvenation of figurative painting, mainly in Italy. India in the ’80s was the time of narrative school in Baroda, like Bhupen and Gulam Sheikh.

Hussain: Yes, the Italian transavantgarde was a great inspiration for us that time. And I remember that there was a dialogue in that time, a tension between tradition and modernity. That was also part of that. And the transavantguardia artists took images apart of their own cultural tradition, like India and Africa, and those images were reborn in their context. The context of globalisation and the distribution of these very heavy-loaded in meaning images perhaps inspired us to open our thinking process surrounding images which hold a very heavy meaning in cultural memory. That is also very important. I agree. But I recently read a book on Gerhard Richter, Doubt and Belief in Painting, edited by Robert Storr. In one of his interviews, Gerhard Richter said that he started to be influenced by pop art when he and Sigmar Polke visited Paris to see the exhibition of American pop art, like Roy Lichtenstein and those artists’ works. When he came back to Germany, he got influenced by American pop art, and Sigmar Polke also started doing works inspired from pop art. Then in an exhibition opening, he met with Georg Baselitz, one of the main figures in German neo-expressionist painting, and he directly said, ‘Gerhard, you are cheating your own fatherland.’ Inverted quotes, ‘Fatherland’. Then I look back at those images of German expressionist painting, and Italian transavantgarde doesn't have that very closed space to receive images from the other side of the world. But in Germany, things are much more concentrated on the nation’s tragedies in the Second World War. The discourse of art in the post-war period was centred around the fractured hero figures and tragedy of the nation’s failures. It was the historical guilt that haunts the cultural mind which mainly reflects in the paintings of George Baselitz. I was curious in search of paintings that have traces of the post-war cultural climate of Germany, then Gerhard Richter’s October paintings came to the surface long years after their creation. The fifteen paintings done by Richter in the ’80s embodied the idea of the extreme left-wing groups in Germany and their tragic deaths, the aspects of institutional violence and injustice, its impact brings violence, produces unrest. The extreme left-wing movement and the death of its leaders in suspicious circumstances is the basis of Richter’s paintings, inspired from magazine and news photographs. The blurred quality of the paintings gives a more unclear atmosphere as the uncertainty of the events and its moral questions and murders veiled by the complex times. What I mean is post-war German society and its turmoil is found and recorded in Richter’s paintings more than any other artist. When I recently looked at these paintings of Gerhard Richter, only one or two figures are in the painting, mostly broken figures coming from the very devastated landscape of the Second World War. But I am living in a society where every day at so many levels we are receiving images from the street, from the newspaper, from media and even advertisement. We are going through this.

I just mentioned this, we will come back to it while we connect with my works later. We were talking about Trivandrum. In Trivandrum, I think somehow they were reading very modern books about paintings, and general literature mostly. Milan Kundera, Neruda, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka. It had a very huge impact upon some of the senior artists’ works, especially Jyothikumar. Jyothikumar developed a very strong criticism against the Radical group, because of his connection with existential philosophy and political ideology in his works, and that is also very important in a sense. When we look at that time, most of the campus, most of the students were very seriously practicing in the campus without any critical approach, they were just following the Radicals’ language, and it became a criteria, nobody could move from or break that language. It was a very tense time, and there were lot of accusations against those who were trying to break that, those who were trying to think of a political language in their works aligning with their personal experience and political experience. These were two contradictory realms, but at the same time there were possibilities to connect these two aspects. There were very few artists working at that time. Jyothikumar was working, Alexander [Devasia] was there, and Shibu Natesan. When I was in the second year of university, Shibu Natesan had a studio near our college. We used to go to see his works, and he had done very big works. I remember new figurative painting from the British, like David Hockney and Kitaj. Kitaj also had a great impact.

These are the basic things. In college we used to go do regular sketching. In the morning we would go to the Palayam market, and then at night we would go to the Trivandrum railway station and bus stand, and we used to return very late at night, at 12 or 1:00, early morning. It was very disturbing for some student political party leaders and their wings, sometimes they would stop us. ‘Where you are going?’ And sometimes they would threaten us, ‘If you are going outside, we will attack you.’ But Fine Arts has very diverse people. Fine Arts students are people who enjoy freedom, we never bothered about that. Even though they are practicing or reading these things, there was a certain parochialism in that practice, not even in artists, but amongst students.

Then I joined MFA Graphics in Baroda. It was in, I think, 1994. And the thing that I realise now is, when I travelled by train to Baroda, the lush green landscapes slowly disappeared, and the brown earth colour and burnt sienna is prominently coming to my eyes in my visuals. Another thing is that it is a very vast landscape. We never experienced such a vast landscape in my place, because of heavy coconut trees and other trees are thick in our land. So these are the first experiences, and then the very stark climate also had a great impact on me because of the heat and cold, that was the first time I experienced that. And in Baroda, I was confronted with a very regular daily-based practice by students and in studios. Like Bhupen’s studio. We used to go there and meet him because he was regularly working at that time.

Another thing I found very interesting was a very huge format of painting. When I was in first year, there was a show of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s going to the Bhopal museum. That big work was exhibited in the Jawahar Bal Bhavan I think.

Hussain: Tree of Life. I remember that. It had a great impact on my practice because the lines he used came from Mughal miniature painting. I never experienced that approach towards painting while I was in the College of Fine Arts Trivandrum. And the space is also packed, but the figures are very small, things we could see only in Mughal miniature painting, Pahari school, and the early Renaissance paintings. I think that was also a possibility, so many artists using that burnt sienna line in their works, and filling the watercolour inside. And a very definitive division of space with form. Those things I noticed in Baroda, mainly in Gulammohammed Sheikh’s works. That was really an interesting inspiration in relation with my practice. I was really confused at that time what I should do, where to start. Then I just left all the things I had done in the College of Fine Arts, because I had faced a lot of criticism when I joined in Baroda. Especially from K. Prabhakaran and Alex Mathew. Their criticism helped me a lot to go deep and seek something substantial in my practice.

Hussain: Very interesting. And this was also a period of very intense reading, and intense art practice. But somehow somewhere, I changed my drawings and came to a certain area, a space to develop some more things. Alex Mathew very much supported me at that time. And I started on some images which were very nearby, in the sense they were very close to us. While passing a certain area from faculty to hostel, there was a land with some cut trees. I began with that work, the cut body of a tree, with a ladder and some flowers, that was my first work. I did a lot of works, but I didn't want to show them, but this is I think the beginning of the cut torso you mentioned from your question, because the cut torso or the cut form of trees has always remained as denied life. That is the main aspect. I don’t want to categorise it as trees or human bodies like that, it reflects both in us, it is dual. It is not one, but it contains a denied life in a human body, or even in a tree’s body. This denied life I could understand that, and I could visualise that.

Hussain: It is a very complex area. Of course it is violence, and violence in the succinct sense of the word is only by cause. It should be: there is a cause, and what is the cause? How we can relate that cutting, or that cut aspect of images, and how we can direct it to a cause? There is a space for something else coming into our thinking process. It might be political, it might be social, it might be religious, and it has so many levels. An image cannot exist alone. Even though you are working on a single image in a painting, that image cannot be alone. If it has a potential to transcend its being to another level of meaning it generates, then it is logically related with the artist’s person, or artistic thinking process… And at the same time, the space and time where he lives, and the space and time designated by the dominant system or cultural hierarchy, and its impact on daily life. That is how I relate with violence in art. When I did my presentations in college, I always faced these questions. ‘Your work is violent.’ The work cannot, the work never propagates violence, but it always points out the violence surrounding us in our daily lives.

Santhosh: We will come back to this issue of how violence is different in real life and how violence is reflected in a work of art. It generates a different reaction. You are one of the artists from Kerala who have come up with a very distinct and unique vocabulary. One of your visual strategies is a process of repeating Images into a pattern. In some cases, it seems like a well-organised cluster of images, but in some others, it is piled up over one another, suffocatingly claustrophobic, or heavy like an uprooted mountain. Can you tell us how did you arrive at such imageries in your work?

Hussain: After my studies from Baroda, I started working based on some of the drawings I had done for linocut. There is an image, a wounded animal kind of human body holding a fire in his hand, with another hand holding a sword. I didn’t want to continue with this kind of imagery. At the same time there was a kind of practice that mostly people were doing at that time, a human figure composed in a very familiar landscape. That idea was coming from the Baroda school, I think. So this kind of continuity, plus Radical paintings and with a kind of Prabhakaran school, and the artist who is very close with Vincent Van Gogh, what is his name? Paul Gauguin.

Hussain: Their references were based on the existing norms of art, mainly based on an idealised way of representation of reality, plus the worn-out attitudes of the left, which mainly focused on class struggle rather the complex realities of the ’90s and beginning of the 2000s, with genocides and communal tensions. Globalisation has been the determining factor of impact in life. I had a critical approach to such practices, because they were too idealised in the sense that while adapting such tools to analyse reality, in some way they were depicting reality as a colonial subject without understanding the real situation that determines the surrounding world, just imposing a somewhat art historical language in their work. I think it was very far from the reality of the culture that I was living in. Then I started working on some images. I drew some repeated row of stools and on that I put some different images, like a melting candle with a hand, a broken tree, the head of an animal, the head of a man, and this kind of thing I arranged in a space. I also experimented with trees, those kinds of works, a man looking through the cut body of a tree. Meanwhile, I got an invitation from K. P. Reji. ‘If you want to come to Bangalore, you have a chance to work in a residency program.’ It was really good support for me from Reji’s side, and I joined there. It was a Swiss and Bangalore artist group supporting this residency. At that time, I saw people moving household objects, they were changing one place to another place, they were changing their rented space. Then I started with these drawings, like fan and other objects. I did a lot of drawings, and suddenly these houses came. First I did a woman sitting with a lot of houses on her lap and in her hands, but I thought it would not work, it is something I didn’t like, and I left it like that. Then I started drawing these row houses, very playfully I drew, and then suddenly put a small half female body underneath it. Then I thought this would work well. And I started the first drawing of the Exiled Home series of works. That is the way I started working.

This group of works I did there, and later exhibited in Draavidia Gallery as my first solo show curated by Kathleen Wyma, I think in 2002 or 2003. And one of the main important artists came to see the show, and he saw the works and he told me, ‘You cannot go further with these images. This will be the end of images like that.’ Then I thought, why should I not explore the same repetition using different images and with the female body underneath? Then I started looking back at my drawings, like the falling birds, and the repeated images coming from that area. It is a kind of accident, and the repetition is a part of our life in some way. The regular intervals of war, and the same sort of advertisements we regularly see on TV and in newspapers, and somehow the derogatory ideas that are coming back, it has become a prominent space in our daily life. This cyclical repetition which is controlling, and which has imposed ideas on human life, has become part and meaning of the repeated images.

Santhosh: Yes. Most of the works you have done in this series, where this repetition is being used, there you will see a small figure carrying the whole image, almost like carrying an uprooted mountain. Does it have any connection with one of the graphic prints that you had done during the Baroda time, where a monumental human figure is carrying mountains on the shoulder? Is there any correlation between them or is it a transformation that unknowingly happened?

Hussain: I noticed it, but you looking at that image, and making a question towards it in relation with specific images, I think it is a very wonderful observation. Thank you so much Santhosh for that. The seed is there in that work.

Santhosh: The use of the Greek metaphor ‘Procrustean Bed’ in your works as an underlying concept plays an important role both as a visual strategy and as a commentary on social reality and violence… would you talk a little bit about it?

Hussain: “The task of a critique of violence may be defined as summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice.”[1] Actually the first case of this bed image came to my mind referencing the images which I had done in Baroda time, a bed lying on outside, with some very disturbing, very violent images placed on it. Then later I thought that I should develop this. It was there in my sketchbook. I was waiting many years to do these works. I planned first that there would be a lot of images on a hospital bed, and when it has grown to the top, on top they are fighting each other. That complexity, that enmity between, that hatred for each other, those social aspects I wanted to concentrate in that work. I had planned a very simple title. In the first series of that work, the first work titled Procrustean Bed, I simply put a simple title like Hospital Bed, Figures and Woman with Umbilical Cord. Later, Kathleen Wyma came to see my studio for the exhibition The Guild organised in 2017, and she began to talk about Procrustean Bed.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit who had a house near by the street, somewhere in Greece, somewhere between Athens and Eleusis. He used to invite travellers to spend a night in his house, and they were attracted to his hospitality and warm welcome. He offered a pleasant food and a night’s rest in his special magical bed. Later Procrustes compelled the guests to lie on the iron bed, and then he would tie them on the bed and start his cruel treatment. If the body is bigger than the bed, he cuts the body of the victim according to the size of the device. If the body is smaller than the device, Procrustes uses special equipment to stretch the body based on the size of the bed... This act reminds me of prison punishment in the Abu Ghraib jail or the recent case of Father Stan Swamy who died in prison, and at the same time, of very tense situations happening in our political and social history, in recent times and in history as well. The whole scene became a hospital scene, where people are forced to bear various social diseases. The atmosphere propagated a certain violence which cannot be escaped in day-to-day life. These aspects are very much embedded in those works, like concentration camps in the Second World War. And Procrustean Bed is a metaphor tracing human history. It describes any situation where people or ideas are ruthlessly forced to conform to an arbitrary and inhuman standard for a set of conditions to which everyone is forced to conform. That is part of this Procrustean Bed series. It was a wonderful take from Kathleen Wyma’s part, that she has interpreted the way and contextualised the hospital beds with human forms to Procrustes and his attempt to cut and stretch the humans according to the size of the cot. Her articulating this shed light on the political realities of our times. The situation could be anywhere in the contemporary world where everything is under norms of control and punishment, which justifies the cruelties of the power.

Santhosh: The large painting, a diptych titled Light Among Ruins, is like a story without a protagonist, but every character in it plays an equal and important role. It looks like there is a turbulent world out there set in endless motion, immersed in an enigmatic but unsettling play... It is like a hospital seen ‘inside out’ with each character being part of a much larger phenomenon of pain, violence and injustice. Could you elaborate on it and how you arrived at this painting?

Hussain: I have visited hospitals several times, mainly general hospitals. The first very important thing I felt is that there is no specific individual in the hospital, because the identification is either by number or ward. Mostly… ‘687 patient, please go and give the medicine.’ Or the bed number, or something like that. And that kind of situation has inspired me perhaps to explore the idea of disappearing individuality in very complex times. Even in situations where people are targeted or punished because of changing laws and justice. These things happen in history, or they have happened a long time back, and in present situations is happening too. I think the project of art is… plans or terminologies, or ideas of deportment, aimed at resolving the painful contradiction inherent in human life. That is the modern or postmodern project of cultural engagement. It is desperately demanded in the present time. Now, how to resolve the inherent contradictions? How to reveal this aspect of inherent contradiction which is normally masqueraded in the norms of predestined reality that we are being taught from school, or from society as such.

To resolve the kind of contradictions inherent in our daily life, we have to redefine the reality which is conceived and imposed as reality from the structures and institutions, that is what I am trying to convey to you. In that way I am trying to evoke a certain reality which is completely hidden, completely masqueraded by the dominant culture and its practice even in visual art, even in literature, and even in social relationships. And it has become an important role to play one’s own destiny throughout history, even in our social system. How we can explore and elaborate further on that is the very important and very complex task that artists have been carrying on in his life or in her life. I never saw any such depictions in art. I couldn’t find any hospital scenes in art, and I couldn’t find any presence of police stations in art, but it is there in the social system.

I was very critical towards certain aspects of idealised, normalised and even orthodox practices that were claimed as modern. The painters working in those times were following norms of somewhat Gauguinesque landscape and figures, highly romanticised subjects, illustrative painting with claims of spiritualism, figures in idealised landscapes, workers toiling in paddy fields and such very idealised concepts of the stagnant left-wing party’s cultural distribution, while safeguarding the cultural hierarchy that has been prevailing without hindrance, and the thoughts reflect and justify those practices. I realised that this accepted way of art practice failed to recognise the realities of the social and political atmosphere of the ’90s, designing and targeting the cultural inner realities of those times and present times. They did not even consider painting as a language, as poetry and other literary works. I felt that it was limiting the artist’s thought process and I had an urge to find an alternative language. The language should be decentred, process oriented, the negotiation between thoughts and the dialogue should stem from the work itself. The mistakes lead to possibilities, repeating daily routines in daily life as the images repeat in the painting’s language, the daily incidents give birth to an image which is not illustrative of the same, connecting bodies with discarded electric objects as something which is not metamorphosing, but rather consciously joined together. Emancipation of the self from the mere journey of fantasy, human forms in hospital stretcher rather than idealised landscape, immobility of human forms against the weight of force and system, human reactions to each other in unfriendly circumstances, to the stark reality of the times, identifying the vulnerability of the self with other bodies in a patriarchal, hypocritical and male-centred society. Shed the idealised concepts on human life, thus on art, think against all man-made constructions that divided life in segregations and walled territories…

So I wanted to break these very idealised and romanticised depictions of reality in art. That is why I used, or referred to, that kind of space. And when I look at Light Among Ruins, you can see a female body balancing under the whole mountain of images. I have not idealised the woman, but I am trying to evoke a certain kind of brotherhood with all people, with all structures, all religions, all kind of people. I want to connect with that simple presence of that umbilical cord, I don’t want to idealise.

One of the novels by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Shabdangal, ‘Voices’ in English, is about the Second World War and its impact on our social relationships, how society has become part of the ongoing struggle and chaos of the Second World War. The protagonist, who was coming from the war, had a very bad experience and he said to the writer that he doesn’t have anyone on the earth, he is an orphan. And the writer replied, ‘Do you have a sign in your stomach, that sign of umbilical cord? Then you are connected with the whole world.’ That was a kind of revelation for me, that is why I put a female body underneath the whole weight of the image. She is not carrying, but she is connected with it. It incorporates a relationship between the image and the body which is lying underneath this pile of images. Somehow I am trying to connect… you mentioned about pain. Pain is a very inherent nature of human being, we cannot overcome that. But social violence, inflicted structural pain on others’ bodies, on minority bodies, or socially weak bodies, we should address that through art. I think there is a wound series of etchings and prints done by Somnath Hore. It is an important inspiration for me in some ways, because even though he did prints, he brought the textures of wounds in etchings and paintings. And I could find those lines somehow reflected in his figure works also, even on dogs we can see that very fragile nature of existence. The fragile nature of holding pain, that weight we can see in his whole body of works. Even though sometimes the print is only the mark of wounds, but the marks of wounds reflect in his drawings of figures, on his dog drawings, and even reflects on natural bodies. These kinds of things I always admire, it is a great inspiration for me.

Santhosh: Somnath Hore is a political artist. Today, all kind of art is made side by side, yet there is a clear divide between political and apolitical approach in art... What kind of art do you respond to more? It is a very personal question.

Hussain: My response is very clear. My response is very selective, and I am looking for very political art in recent times in India and the global scenario, that is very clear. But I have some scepticism. When we were talking about German neo-expressionist painting, I referred to Gerhard Richter having a dialogue with Baselitz. Once I considered it political art, that these German artists’, Baselitz’s works were political, but now I have certain doubts regarding the recent wars and recent chaos which is surrounding us in our time. And when I was searching for the right answer to your question, actually I found a poem by a Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, the title is “Children of Our Age.” Can I recite it?

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
and though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one.

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.[2]

I think this is very interesting poem. I was struck by a few lines like, ‘To acquire a political meaning/ you don’t even have to be a human./Raw materials will do,/or protein feed, or crude oil.’ This touched my soul, it touched my understanding of what is political art. I love this poem very much. This is my answer. I have only this answer.

Santhosh: Initially we started with this issue of violence. There is a saying, violence breeds more violence. Violence can never be a solution in the real world, though there may be some exceptions in history. But violence in art has a different purpose. What is your take on this? It is also an aesthetical question.

Hussain: Both are there, I think. Because when I am just connecting some experience of mine with the paintings… I was thinking about how to answer this question, because it is a very deep question, and it has a lot of layers. And as we are artists, we also have good experience to look at works which are depicting violence. One of the works which comes to my mind is Bruegel’s painting titled as ‘Massacre of [the] Innocents’. The narration is connected with Christ’s birth. The king had a dream that a prophet is going to be born who is going to kill him, he is going to dethrone him from his country, that was the nightmare of I think the King [Herod], I forget the name of the king. He ordered the soldiers to find the child and kill the particular child who is going to be a threat. At that time there were a lot of women giving birth to newborn children, and they searched the villages near the kingdom, and killed a lot of children. This is a very intriguing aspect of visual images and narration in front of our humanity. Without blood, how we can portray this tragedy? That is the very moral question that as creative persons we are all facing. This has also confused me a lot.

There is a short story by Paul Zachariyah, titled as “Arkkariyam,” (“Who Knows”) dealing with the same story. After killing all the newborn babies, a soldier came to rest in an inn, a restaurant, and he met a lady there and had a dialogue with the lady. This is all from my memory, there will be some mistakes, I don’t know. And the story ends like this. The woman asked the soldier, ‘Could you find and manage to kill the real child who is destined to dethrone the king and send him away from his country?’ And he replied, ‘Who knows?’ Who knows. The story ends in that dialogue and it leaves lot of thoughts in us, and the possibility of artwork is rising from that dialogue. Who knows? It gives a lot of questions to the reader.

Thus the painting gives a lot of questions and evokes a certain understanding, or a certain sensitivity. It may raise a certain humanity in us. So even when we are looking at Francis Bacon paintings, not only the violence, and how he handled colour in contradiction with the main theme, most of his themes are in a violent situation. People are wounded and vomiting, or people are distortedly shitting on toilets, and sometimes vomiting. But there is a distortion which helps the violence. How he treated space and colour also has a very important role, because the central subjectivity of the human being is totally contradicted with the presence of colour. Most of the time he faced a lot of criticism based on that, and even John Berger had also a long time back criticised his works, but in his later period, John Berger said that his criticism was not right towards Bacon’s paintings, because the world has become a brutal killing house. And I think the artist’s responsibility is to express the real aspect of life and its complex existence in space. Is it right? And in my case the violence is not imposed from my side, but the present system is imposing violence on human bodies, and we are witnessing it. And the visual images or the paintings are the document of our time, that’s it.

“The task of a critique of violence can be summarised as that of expounding its relation to law and justice. … The sphere of these relations is defined by the concepts of law and justice. With regard to the first of these, it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means…”[3]

End and means are also very important. How we achieve justice, and which path we are taking to justice. And means also can be destabilised. It is based on the justice system and moral reality. When the moral reality is getting fractured due to the control of justice system by structural power, the justice system can be destabilised. That evokes a certain kind of violence. Even in the French Revolution, violence was a means to justice. Sometimes history has played a very crucial role to achieve such justice, we cannot make a very clear line what is justice and injustice in terms of changing structures in relation with power system.

Santhosh: Is your imagery directly linked with your life in some way or is it a conceptual experience? Or do you have in your life a time you have come across any such brutal or violent episodes or incident?

Hussain: I think it is a very difficult question to answer, because… personally I had a very bad experience in my life. It is related with my father’s death. But I don’t want to go to that area because it will become very subjective

Santhosh: Just out of curiosity, I am asking whether there is a very direct connection with the images that you paint.

Hussain: How can we differentiate between the very direct and distant when we receive so much news, or when we go through magazine photographs? Recently there are a lot of people receiving violence on their homes and on their bodies, in our country and the world around. I think we as artists, or we as human beings, are always thinking about equality, democracy and peace to rule all over the world. We always want a brotherhood without national borders. But unfortunately, we are living in a kind of open prison. And we are always making artworks to liberate ourself and the society we are living in. We want to break all these manmade prisons and boundaries of caste, religion and divisions because of the changing justice system, law and order, and implement new laws and make new amendments. Targeting constitutions, aiming for constitutional changes. There will be a very artificial and very deliberate set of rules that makes people clearly divide into two sects. One is protected by the law and the other one is unprotected, and there is an undercurrent of purity working there, of ‘noble blood’ working there. It started from a very long history in the Second World War, and before that it was also existing because of Karl Marx’s observation on the Jewish question. I’m just mentioning this as it is also on my mind when we were talking about this. And that division is beyond the boundaries of nation, those divisions are there in the scenario, while all the people are proclaiming about democracy and justice. But these impure divisions still exist. And when we are looking at these unprotected people and the existing dominant cultural system also looks at these unprotected people as animals, that is why I join cut animal bodies with the figures in my works. It is not a metamorphosis, it is a joining together two very disturbing parts, the killed body of an animal, with a human body, because they are deprived from the whole rights that modernism has promised. That is how I develop images. That is why what you said is a conceptual thought rather than my personal experience, and I can differentiate both, just like in the poem I read.

Santhosh: Very well explained. This is a technical question. In our usual practice, one work leads to the next... often as an extension of the previous one. When you start a work do you plan everything beforehand, or does it evolve during the process? When you start a work, what do you start with? Do you start with an image, or how do you do it?

Hussain: The repeated works I continuously make are very well-planned works. I know what is going to happen in the repeated images. But there are certain chances it will offer while I am creating works. Because when I was doing the Procrustean Bed works, I thought of people who were suffering and were connected with hospital equipment. When it grows upwards, then I really changed the whole concept which I preconceived when I was beginning the work, because when it is coming up, the people are burning each other and fighting each other. But they forget they are in hospital while they are indulging with violent activity. They are killing each other, they are burning each other, these things were growing on top. And some works with the repeated red dressers balanced on ceiling fans with three female bodies, that was a very well-planned sketchbook. While I am doing these repeated works and my mind is working, it forces me to do certain other works. That is why I began this very chaotic series, what looks like chaos but is very well-planned chaos. I do a lot of drawings before I start such works. The main figure normally I will place in the centre of the paper. First I almost complete the main figure, then I think of how to connect with the next figure, to the next one. Then I refer a lot to my sketchbook, and I slowly draw it. Sometimes I didn’t get the connection but I will look for a long time, sit with it a long time to get the right thing to connect with the whole scenario. Then the work slowly begins.

Sometimes I don’t have a very specific plan. With the works titled as Premonitions of Obliteration, they are performing with different images which usually appear in my works, like exiles on boards, and newborn baby with numbers, upside down houses, fan, cut animal bodies, trees and such images. I started with those six main figures. Then I find relations in my sketchbook. Then I transfer the sketches in various sizes in the big works. Sometimes if because of the watercolour I don‘t like some area, then I will refer again to some small watercolour studies and cut those images from the paper and paste it on the big works. It is a process-oriented work.

Santhosh: Take one of your large works, how long does it take to be completed? You choose watercolour as a primary medium. Tell us your process of working.

Hussain: Actually when I began these works in 2002, I planned very strictly that it will take only one month, the majority of the Exiled Home works.

Hussain: No, no. Those were very large works, 8’ x 6’, something like that. I exhibited a two-person show in The Guild Art Gallery, Soft and Sharp with Viraj Naik in 2006. And those images, six works took only one month. But nowadays it takes a long time because the size has increased. It was vertical at that time. Now some works are horizontal. The bed works are horizontal, and upside-down houses with flags are vertical. Nowadays when I am working with repeated images I start with other chaotic image works there, otherwise I can’t finish it. It will take at least three months nowadays because of some health problem.

Hussain: Three months for both, six panel and repeated works. Sometimes it will take longer, because of health conditions. But I have a lot of drawings for this Premonition of Obliteration. I have hundreds of drawings, small, and even small watercolour and ink drawings. You can see them in the background also. This is for the next work. It started there and here also are a lot of drawings. I have some other… These are drawings like this.

Hussain: No, this is my regular practice. When I come in the morning to my studio, I start with some drawings, I regularly do drawings. Sometimes I see an image in photographs and I get inspired from that. I never copy that image, but I get some thought process charge, inspiration from that photograph, and I do that as a drawing because sometimes I face a scarcity of images. At that time I refer to my sketchbook, and from there I take things into my big works, that is how it develops.

Santhosh: So just for general knowledge, what kind of books do you read? And can you tell us any book or movies which you think have influenced you?

Hussain: In movies, nowadays I very seldom watch movies. Last time I watched a movie because one of my friends told me I should watch. It is a Spanish movie. Very violent movie. It’s a prison, where food is coming from the top prison to the lower prison. The title is [Platform] I think. But the visual is very important. It is a prison. One set of food is coming from the top jail. Sometimes they eat and sometimes they spit and it is coming down. It is not food anymore. I think it is a very disturbing film, but it evokes our thoughts in relation with the structural violence that has been happening in life. Another way I am watching some of the films which I had seen in 2002–03, when there was an international film festival in Kochi. At that time I saw some African films like Xala, I forget the director’s name, but I'm searching for that, I want to see it again. When I was thinking about cubism and expressionism in the present day, I reread some books like Berger’s The Success and Failure of Picasso. I want to read again Permanent Red, and I just completed Success and Failures, which is a great book, I read it some years back. I was talking about Berger and African films, which is also very important because when I am thinking about this, German expressionism and cubism are actually derived from African art. Mostly European historians think of African art as primitive art. But we cannot agree with that because of colonialism and because of the trade. The sculptures, even paintings and masks, came to the markets, museums and even private collection of Europe. Picasso and his team began to take inspiration from that, and when Picasso did it—inspired from the masks and sculptures—they were considered modern, and the real images coming from Africa had been considered as primitive.

Recently I read a novel based on these issues of colonialism, Teju Cole, Open City. He is a migrant student and a doctor in New York, and he settled there and he is collecting his memories, and while he was traveling through the main European cities, Brussels and Frankfurt, he’s describing the colonial experience. And I was reading Edward Said, Orientalism, and he referred to Heart of Darkness, a very important writer and an important novel… but Said criticises a lot about that novel. He got inspired from that novel. And that when we are looking based on a decolonised mindset, the political aspect of reality is much more relevant, and it sheds all its decorations just before the present time. And at the same time I was reading the Nobel prize winning writer from [Tanzania], Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea, it is a very important novel. I took a long time to complete it because of its stark disturbing imageries and experience. These are the kind of things I’m reading. And recently Paul Celan, one of the poets referenced in most of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings. Like ‘Your Golden Hair, Margarete’, like that poem. I was waiting for his complete collection, some four or five years ago they published and I bought it. Sometimes I read interview of contemporary artists. Yayoi Kusama and Anish Kapoor and another British sculptor, I forgot his name. That is how my reading is moving now. Pasolini’s movies are very important for me sometimes. I regularly watch his movies and his novels also. A Violent Life. His poems also I very much like.

Hussain: Very rare thing, but no. Some time ago I watched something with the central lead acted by Mammootty. It was interesting, it’s addressing the class and caste issues. Mammootty’s, I forget the character’s name, sister is marrying to…

Hussain: I forget the title of the movie. It was long back, during the Corona period, that I watched that. It was a good movie. Violence based on caste hierarchy is the subject. And in other movies, Indian Kitchen was also a very good movie.

Hussain: Great Indian Kitchen. That’s right. I also love that movie because the woman has a suppressed body and voice in the patriarchal system. If some friends tell me to watch a movie, then I will watch that. Mostly I read books and poems. I have a complete set of poems of Neruda. Sometimes when I get time, regularly I read one page, two poems, it is also part of my inspiration.

Santhosh: Neruda, in one of the poems, he says, I don’t know which the poem is… ‘Come and see the blood in the streets.’ You remember which one is that?

Hussain: Yes, I remember. ‘Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see…’

Santhosh: My last question, now. Generally, artists in Kerala dream of making movies. In spite of the fact that they have great fascination towards cinema, very few artists make video art. Why do you think it is? There is an irony, contradiction. Is it connected with a leftist oriented approach in art, or is it something else?

Hussain: Leftist idea of it is a very complicated question. What is left? We have to redefine left in Kerala.

Santhosh: Do you think that it is something else? In the contemporary art scene, making videos is an important process of creating art. It is supposed to be breaking away from the tradition, breaking away from the conventional modes of making art. I think very few artists have made video art in spite of their fascination towards movies, cinema. Is there any connection with the leftist ideological stance or is it something else?

Hussain: I don’t think so, I don’t think any kind of challenging video art has been produced from Kerala. I don’t think so. Perhaps it is beyond my knowledge, but I haven’t seen any very striking video works in Kerala. And if they are thinking in terms of breaking the traditional norms of art practice like painting and sculpture, I think that painting itself is breaking the norm of art. You can see contemporary painters doing a kind of art which is very upfront and it touches your skin, touch your thoughts, what you are doing. And that is a kind of challenge in painting, because artists like you break the traditional norms of art-making when you’re indulging in painting. And making or putting forward certain specific imageries which come from your conceptual thought process, and the conceptual thought process of your art practice. That is a kind of challenge because it doesn’t have support from the traditional preconceived notion of art. And these people never try to understand that, and they never try to understand the historicity of video art. It is so connected with Nam June Paik and Fluxus group, and how they revealed their body in front of the camera. They revealed themselves as tortured bodies because of the destruction that happened in the Second World War. I'm looking at the imageries, which have layers of political meaning, and I couldn’t find anything substantial in video art in what is happening in Kerala. Perhaps I don’t have such kind of experience, maybe somebody will do that. And breaking the traditional norms of art, or breaking the traditional way of making art doesn’t mean that you should go for video art. You can even do it in painting or in drawing, and in video, but how you break the norms, how you critically engage with the medium, that is very important.

For my case, if I'm making a film, it needs a lot of technical clarity, a lot we should know about where the light comes, left and right movement, the continuity of the next scene, editing… And there should be a narrative, not necessary that there should be a narrative to follow, but we can put together different or contradictory images and make a language. But in my case, I want to make a very big installation related with my drawings, and I dream to do it in a very big space. Three rooms filled with the images of what I have been doing from the past period to recent works, with different size of objects just like a construction site, with beams and steel tubes building together, and I will arrange these images in this space. And perhaps after completing this installation I will make a video regarding these images in the space. And slowly I want to move out from the gallery and it will go to some other references, some street references and some newspaper, and from that I’m planning to do perhaps a film, or perhaps a video. That is my dream, to do a big installation first out of my drawing practice. That is why I did a very recent sculptural installation at Kochi, Draavidia, organised by The Guild, my solo show here in Draavidia. That is why. Just an experiment with the images of sculptural images which is put on a trolley, that is my experiment with the three-dimensional form. And the title is the A Memorial for the Lost Sky. GI pipe, GI sheet, silicon rubber is the material. So that is my dream, to make different sized objects and display it in a very vast space.

Santhosh: Okay. So, my questions are over. Do you have anything else to add? Anything else I have missed or you have missed in between?

Hussain: There are lot of things I planned, but I think I forgot to connect them together.

Santhosh: Talking about the titles, sometimes titles can be something like a threshold, something of a window through which you can enter into the work. The title can end up an extension to the work. Something that adds dimension to the work. There are ways of connecting with the work, or generating different meaning. Do you title beforehand or you title in between, or do you title after you finish the work?

Hussain: No, I give titles after finishing my works. After finishing my works, I look for a long time, and there is a conversation with the main image, and then from there I will find an exact title for them, because most of the main images are part of a performance. They are performing in front of me, and in front of an audience. What they are going to show the audience, and how it is related with the conceptual thought that is generated from the space they are living, those things play an important role and help me to find the title for the work. Mostly these figures are performing in an enclosed space with very little opening. Perhaps I am living in a city space, and I consciously avoid a very idealised landscape to place these images, because in the images I am trying to portray a deprived life they are leading, that is from my imagination. And if I put those images, those figures, those lives in a very idealised landscape, then I think that it will lose the generated meaning the figures are supposed to deliver to the audience. That is why I use the word ‘premonitions’. Premonitions of Obliteration.

Hussain: Because I think in an artwork, there are a lot of revelations when we are working as an artist. And I don’t think when we are giving the title we are fixing the meaning into that work, but as just moments ago you said, the title is a window, or a threshold. And at the same times it also opens up a space of imagination to enter into that work. And I am not working for a meaning rather than layers of realities. The work should be generative for layers of realities rather than meaning. Meaning has a certain limitation. That is why I put a lot of images in my works. I am really afraid of vacant space in paintings or in drawings. I call it a drawing because I use watercolours and soft pastels. I call it a mixed media work, and sometimes that emerges from some area that I don’t like, then I use pastels to cover it. Then another area of meaning is generated from that mistake. These are very tense works in between the failures and the layers of realities that I am trying to create in my works.

Hussain: Yes. Thank you, Santhosh. Thank you so much for spending your time with me. Thank you Shalini and thank you Jui for organising this wonderful talk with Santhosh.

Santhosh: But I think still there is a space to further dialogue that we could do in the future maybe.

Adhvaryu: Thank you, Santhosh. Thank you, Zakkir. Thanks for giving your time for the conversation.

[1] Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of Violence’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)

[2] translated by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

[3] Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of Violence’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)