The Auroville Film Festival 2024 promises to be an electrifying immersive experience, if we are to go by the jolly good show of the opening ceremony. It sizzled and popped. What josh! The most scintillating part was the Kalaripayattu performance. With swords, and shields and steel whips and spears, I thought someone would get hurt! There was a dancing to it, a whirling, a spiralling. But the artistes were deft and adept and showed a remarkable dexterity, and I will let you know: nobody was hurt, and nobody died! The degree of control with which the artistes commanded their deadly weapons was frighteningly amazing.

There was also a minimalist musical ensemble (I am afraid I do not know the technical term for the kind of music), which began hauntingly like a whisper, a dainty whistling, before it sprang into a rhythmic, thumping display that exulted our ears.

Finally, there was a fire-dancing performance by a woman, who made sure nothing, and I mean nothing, was burnt to a cinder.

The film that grasped me by the scruff was “All That Breathes” is a quaint (as in “unusually beautiful” not “old-fashioned”) quixotic tale. It’s spacetime-gravity is warped by beautiful philosophical and metaphysical speculations. Two brothers in the convoluted mega-metropolis of New Delhi, take care of the birds of prey, the black kites, which are essential to the ecosystem of Delhi, yet are being suffocated out of existence. In their aviary of a basement, a makeshift hospital is set up. The narrative contains the story of one brother’s dreams and aspirations since childhood of becoming an astronomer or geologist, till he makes it to the US for higher education. There are striking lines in this charming film like, for instance, on the profound reality of Darwinian evolution—how that over generations kites have altered themselves to fit in with the whole mess of a city that is Delhi. The images in this charming movie are visually-vibrant; it’s top-notch cinematography. The story is direct and told with candour and clarity of the kind that drags you into its narrative. Deep, explorative with sly, light humour, this is a jewel of a film.

Overall, the first day of the Festival was pregnantly expectant (as they say—I guess). It started with the right dazzling kind of ambience, through the Opening Ceremony, which drew the crowd in, to anticipate some sheer artistry, be it the Ceremony itself, the music, the food, and of course the films.

Fotos by Marco Saroldi

So, to get a feel, an “aura” even, of the myriad films in the festival, I took a gander at the Auroville Film Festival website (filmfestival.auroville.org) and looked at their synopses and trailers and where possible looked up the full films on YouTube.com. Here is my humble selection of the best that the Film Festival has to offer….

The first film that leapt off the screen and tightly grasped my attention was the charming little documentary, “Bangla Surf Girls”. This is a story of three slum-dwelling Bangladeshi girls who discover surfing which turns out to be an outlet from the grid-locked rigid societal structure they live in. The film contains a counter-friction, dissent and resistance to the prevailing social mores… which goes to the point of the girls being slut-shamed for surfing. The three protagonists—the “Bangla Surf Girls”—immediately won me over to their side as I felt an expansiveness with their “escape to the sea”. Poignantly, one of the girls says she is only happy when she is surfing, while the rest of the time she is depressed. The fact that the girls have to battle limiting social pressures is, as an overarching world-building, deftly handled by the documentarian as the central conflict of a well-wrought tale. The girls’ increasing self-confidence and growing prowess at surfing gets us to cheer on and root for these girls as the documentary evolves as a delightful, yet gritty, coming-of-age story.

“Dagh Dagh Ujala” (“This Stained Dawn”) is a timely documentary on feminism in Pakistan, centred around a multi-city Aurat March (Women’s March). The film wishes to portray the combat with patriarchy and orthodoxy, and establish feminine bodily autonomy through the slogan “My Body, My Choice.” What is alarming is the backlash by Pakistan’s extreme Far-Right, which labels the movement as “vulgarity, lewdness, irreligious and heresy.” Shockingly the March is met with counter-protesters who throw rocks at the women. The film provided for me the notion of the dire immediacy of a need for a feminist movement in Pakistan. The film also relays a strong message about the formations of political organizing, strategies and movements, just as the film “The Square” did for Arab Spring in Egypt.

Out of the Auroville entries, which are mostly short films, the movie “Adithalam” (“Basic Education”) hollered at me. It’s a charming low-budget film. The most striking feature is its believability. There seems to be nothing fake or phony about the film, it comes across as genuine and authentic, from the acting to the simple plot to the reality of education in a small backward village. The young girl who plays the protagonist Saraswathy steals the show. Saraswathy struggles with her studies—she is in the sixth standard and can’t even sign her own name. Dismissed from school by the principal, the heart-warming turning point occurs when a dedicated teacher takes a personal interest in teaching Saraswathy. The film ends with Saraswathy not only taking part in an essay-writing competition, but winning it.

“The Clean Up” starts with a whimsical and even incongruous question as a premise: is a clean-up of the mind a prerequisite for the clean-up of a room, or vice versa? This short film is done in an abstract, wordless way with a lot of dancing. The best part of the film is that most of the cleaning has to do with cigarettes!

“Galaxy & Ganesha” consists of various renderings of Milky Way Galaxy-shaped designs, reifying the vision of transforming Auroville’s shape into such a pattern. The technique starts with sketches from tree bark that are rendered Galaxy-like through computer enhanced modifications. The idea is to signify the beauty that is created by the symbiosis between humanity and nature. Pretty brilliant!

Next, we come upon a little gem called “Island Reverie”. It is about a man returning to the island of his childhood and realising that he had never left…the most precious thing for him are the people. The film is so profound with artful gravitas that it can only speak for itself. Just take this line: “The golden light shining from within…revealing the weightlessness of the world.” The takeaway: learn to trust so that you can open your heart to new experiences. A must watch!

“A Maatram” (“A Change”) is a movie in which several lives are intertwined in the course of a day. From the initial few scenes, the film throws hints and suggestions of the connections between the various plot threads, which really are sub-plot threads. Although, I must admit the various sub-plots were not well delineated. In the attempt to “not give too much away”, the filmmakers hold back on the clarity of the intertwined connections. Although the connectivity is revealed in the end, the lack of more being revealed makes the film a little confusing.

“Fallin’”, another short, is through interpretive dance a kinetic expression of what love does, stands for, and means. In the end, however short the film was (five minutes), I had to think: “Okay, that was good.”

A very scintillating documentary on the list is “Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness”. Using premises such as “What is life?”, What is consciousness?”, “What does it mean to be aware of being aware?” the film deepens its adventure through the research of six experts in the field. Starting with these basic questions the film unfolds as a compellingly magical entity. The main crux is that consciousness is irreducible and is fundamental, not matter. The argument is that everything, including objects arise in consciousness, and that it is not consciousness that is emergent from the brain. The documentary is an odyssey that tries to portray consciousness as an all-pervading field. It is a journey to the final frontier of science and spirituality themselves—at the confluence of neuroscience, mysticism and metaphysics.

Alrighty then, I saved the best for last: “In the Light of Aurobindo—Plays and Savitri in Auroville”. It is about theatre and the artists involved who perform with devotion in, through and from the plays and the epic poem Savitri of Sri Aurobindo. The film delightfully dances with the inward thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the actors as they portray Sri Aurobindo’s works and the actual output on stage. Here, Sri Aurobindo’s work expresses the possibility (and inevitability) of human evolution. One actor cites the very act of performing takes the texts from the mere intellectual to being truly understood. Another says that he had to let go and trust the text. Yet another says acting became an immersion, a stepping into a hallowed, sacred space, which I saw manifested in the clips from the plays. The whole pivot of the documentary is how Sri Aurobindo’s works are purely, beautifully and powerfully put forth transforming the actors, the audience and the very space of the theatre, into a palpable collective experience. The refrain of the “invisible” sticks with me—the ineffability of the works coming to life with the actors as mediums and agents, at the same time, where their inwardness coheres with the collective expression of the piece acted out on stage.

Hey! My name is Gautam Emani. I moved to Auroville almost three months ago. I love the (once again, brace yourselves) “feel” of the place and find myself connecting with a lot of like-minded people, so I have decided to live here indefinitely. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from New Mexico State University in the US. But please do check out the films I talked about—and as many of the ones I didn’t, as you can. This Film Festival will grant you sheer delight. I promise!

Peace n Love,

Gautam Emani

“The Lands for Auroville are to be bought and can be bought.
The Money is needed, will you help.”
-The Mother

We welcome you to participate in this summer’s Art for Land Exhibition which will take place in August, at the Unity Pavilion, to conclude Sri Aurobindo’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations. The theme for the exhibition is:
Individual and Collective – Auroville – Moving Forward Together

We are grateful to each one of you who, over these last years, has supported the Art for Land Exhibitions through your solidarity. We warmly invite you to participate once again by generously donating artworks for this year’s Art for Land Exhibition – Agust 2023.

Please visit our Art for Land website www.artforland.in where you can follow the display of artworks which are now available for viewing and online sale throughout the year. Artworks and information are also available at our Art for Land Boutique outlet at the Unity Pavilion. On the website artist descriptions, you can also see if you would like to have more information or social media contacts, etc. added to your profile. Art for Land is part of a flow of generosity to secure the lands for Auroville, and part of our initiative is to showcase Auroville and Pondicherry as a center for artistic creativity – so if we can help in creating visibility for you, our participating artists, we are very happy!

The 2023 AFL Exhibition will be inaugurated at 11am on Sunday, 13th August 2023
and toward that, the artworks need to reach us between 5th to 25th July 2023, so that framing and curating can be completed in time.

If possible, please bring your artworks directly to the Unity Pavilion or if they need to be picked up within the Auroville/Pondicherry area contact us at: unitypavilion@auroville.org.in or (+ 91 413) 262 3576.

As much as possible, we prefer to receive works unframed.
We have full framing capacity of up to
S: 40cm X 60cm M: 60cm x 80cm L: 90cm X 70

The Land for Auroville needs to be secured and the Art for Land initiative has been an important support for this goal. Fundraising and contributions for the land are the only sources for consolidating Auroville’s designated Master Plan area. AFL’s sale and events proceeds as always all go to the Acres for Auroville land campaign for purchase of the City of Dawn’s still-missing land.

Looking forward to your wholehearted participation, and with all our gratitude for your support,

The Art for Land Team, Unity Pavilion
in collaboration with the Acres for Auroville campaign

Prior to Covid, the exhibition was reserved for female artists as it is International Women’s Day and Shakti is a female goddess that embodies the creative principle. However, there was a suggestion that such gender division was not appropriate in today’s world. So, the 2023 exhibition is open to all. It’s nice that this was adapted in such an uncomplicated way, although the topic will certainly be discussed further by the organizing team. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of workshops on various artistic practices, as well as presentations and a film series.

A little over 100 years ago, Sri Aurobindo asked: “Whether the future hope of the race lies in a rational and an intelligently mechanized or in a spiritual, intuitive and religious civilization and culture, – that, then, is the important issue.” In times of ChatGPT and an AI image generators, this question sounds topical again. What about the creative force, in 2023? Sri Aurobindo wrote in the same text:

“Whether we shall actually find a greater expression than the past gave us, depends on our own selves, on our capacity of response to the eternal Power and Wisdom and the illumination of the Shakti within us and on our skill in works, the skill that comes by unity with the eternal spirit we are laboring in the measure of our light to express; yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam.” (CWSA 20, p.76)

Sri Aurobindo is referring here to Indian art and culture, its self-understanding, its distinction from Western culture, and its mission. Shakti in us is what ‘still’ distinguishes us from AI.

Shakti is the driving, creative, creating force of consciousness. The certainty that we as humans are filled with a force infinitely more powerful than an algorithm, no matter how complex, is present in many parts of the world. And while Europe and the US are arguing about copyright, here Shakti is being evoked. How does that look?

I have seen many ‘last minute’ miracles. They are part of the cultural operation. Artists tend to be good at improvising. That may also has something to do with creativity. A few days before the exhibition opening, there was the last coordination meeting. An inventory was followed by setting up a WhatsApp group and a kind of evocation of Shakti, not in a ritualistic sense, rather in a brief discussion of how it should be understood, what kind of workshops can be set up, etc…. Everyone in the room agreed that something unique could be created. 

The exhibition had been announced for a long time, artists of the bioregion knew about it and were waiting for the starting signal. What followed in the coming days is hard to describe. A tsunami of creativity rolled towards Kalakendra Gallery, many volunteers helped, a self-organizing force seemed to be at work. As has been the case in Auroville, hierarchies were flat. Participation was straightforward, the energy collaborative, supportive, open. At the opening, the French Consul General of Pondicherry inaugurated the exhibition; short speeches were given on the theme of International Women’s Day and there were some quite critical tones regarding the global human rights situation. A tribute to the Holi festival, which fell on the same day, brought colour into play.

Curated by Silky, the show featured more than 50 artists from the region. The result was an exhibition that symphonically depicted the diversity of the region. The circular gallery literally vibrated and sang. A wide variety of styles were represented. Many artists expressed Western classical modernism, exploring spiritual symbols, or materials and techniques, as well as social issues. However, they did not lose themselves in a technical formalism, but brought in stories, classical motifs, traditions. Talking to some artists, it was fascinating to learn about their different paths.

Sathya is an artist from a surrounding village of Auroville, who felt the impulse to paint as a young child and learned impressionistic landscape painting from a master in Auroville. For over a decade, he explored the landscape of the bioregion, temple sites and viewpoints to meditate on in his painting of nature.

Kirti Chandak, an artist, the owner of TASMAI gallery in Pondicherry, and a graduate of the Sir Aurobindo Ashram School where she teaches art today, explores in her artwork the inner emotional landscape.

Gopal Jayaram, a very established painter who started his artistic career in South Africa, is presently the acting Director of IGNCA (The Indira Gandhi National Center of Arts Pondicherry chapter). He also took part in the exhibition and gave an opening talk. His journey as an artist is multifaceted, his work represented his abstract period.

Radja Perumal’s poetic abstract 3D works are vibrating structures mounted on canvas, that allow for a deep connection of the inner world of nature and the self.

Kashmira is an artist who picked up painting only in the last few years, but her composition, colour treatment and choice of subject are powerful and show a soul that wants to express itself.

Hufreesh Dumasia is an artist from Auroville who has shown internationally. Her work comes from a place of inner light and illuminated the exhibition.

Kalaivani’s large-scale cyanotypes illustrated the complexity of the medium.

Puneet Brar’s flower wall pieces were a wonderful example of the rich ceramic artist tradition in Auroville.

There is not enough space to give proper credit to all here. It was an event that built a solid bridge between Auroville and Pondicherry by showcasing the richness of the art scene in both cities as well as the bioregion villages.

Just a few of the workshops offered at Kalakendra gallery should be listed to complete the picture:

Grace offered a workshop on ‘Mahakali in Kolam Yoga’;
Claudia, ‘Floralis Humanity’;
Sri Amitabh Sen Gupta, ‘Slide Show & Discussion’;
Hand of God ‘Intuitive Drawing through Visual Expression’;
Kashmira & Anwar Khan, ‘Painting & Demo’;
United Tesla Hemp Company, ‘Handmade Hemp Paper’;
Kalai’s ‘Cvanotype Printing’;
Women Builder Collective, ‘Dorodango – Japanese Mud Art Workshop’;
Sridala and her father K.K.Segar gave individual workshops on acrylic painting;
Anand and Soukumarane gave an acrylic on canvas workshop;
Matej Ukmar gave a talk and slide show of his process of digital creations.

The atmosphere of these workshops was open, inviting, hands on and the participants enjoyed learning new creative techniques in an architecturally inspiring and unusual gallery setting. This former community dining room is circular with many open levels that invite these types of activities. It has an attached artist-in-residence studio which has received artists from Denmark, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Both Indian and international artists are invited to apply for short-term residency programs. To apply write to:  bharatnivas-kalakendra@auroville.org.in

The exhibition was on view at Kalakendra Gallery from March 8-April 2nd.

by Christoph Kluetsch 

for AV Art Service

Centre d’Art, Monday, three o’clock in the afternoon.
About fifteen people are working on the photograph of the Auroville banyan tree which is spread out over seven meters in front of the large picture window.
Some are sitting on the floor, some standing, others are mounted on chairs.

The Roots from the Sky ⵣ performance started only in the morning and the result is already striking.
On the huge image printed in very light shades of gray, the speakers redraw the volumes, from black to light, making the tree reappear barely perceptible.

The artist who created the performance, Cedric Bregnard, provided them with precious calligraphy brushes that allow them to vary the line to interpret the thickest shadows of the trunks to the finest details, such as the veins of the leaves.

To create the monumental composition, Cedric took numerous shots of this tree, as vast as a forest, in the early morning when the light was still hazy. 
It is the juxtaposition of these shots that allowed him to recreate the image of the tree of more than thirty meters in span that serves as a support for the performance.
He then enlarged elements such as some of the trunks and hung them in the gallery, bringing them down from the ceiling like the pillars of a temple.
Several schools will take these photographs to do the performance alongside the gallery’s in their own facilities with their students. 
Once completed they will join the gallery for the opening of the exhibition.

As the days go by, the drawers follow one another and little by little connect the trunks, the branches and the roots.  Together, each with his own stroke, impetuous or restrained, strong or light, they work to give the great banyan a new dimension. Some stay a few minutes, others forget the hours, but for all the experience is pure happiness. They admit to entering a kind of trance, spellbound by the movement of the hand. 

It is a choral experience where Cedric intervenes in the background, sometimes giving advice or encouragement.
After having given birth to forty-four performances, for him the emotion is always new.
He still remembers the first one, during which a total art form was spontaneously born. Dancers, poets, musicians had intervened.

At Centre d’Art, the magic has already worked. Several musicians came to improvise small concerts, and the sounds of their instruments seemed like the breath of the tree itself.
It is a new form of art, intrinsically linked to life, that Cedric Bregnard brings to Auroville today. An art that has definitely left the studio, that addresses each of us to put us back in touch with our creative potential. A regenerative and curative art, since through the form of the tree it is our humanity that is recomposed.

Dominique Jacques for Centre d’Art

On February 17 2023 Centre d’Art opened the exhibition “CHRONOTYPE” with Experimental photography of the late Giorgio Molinari. The show is dedicated to a special technique developed by Giorgio Molinari. Marco and Pietro explained the technique during the opening. Two strong light sources in form of high-power projectors are facing each other. Each one is behind a curtain with a vertical gap, so that two very clear vertical light beams crate a sort of light shower. The person in the photo walks and moves in and out of the light curtain, moves the arms, the body, the head so that the long exposure of the camera captures the movement. Giorgio Molinari portraited many Aurovillians and captured their physical body in motion. What we can see is not a static portrait but a passage through time on a two-dimensional plane. It is a moment, a living expression of that person. Although no image can capture a person or a spirit as a whole, his images give a more subtle, observing, free image of a gesture that witnesses the life force of the person.

The technique is unique. The photos look like they have been edited in a heavy postproduction process, but they are single shot photograph with an aperture of a few second on a digital camera.

Born in Milan, Giorgio was drawn to photography from a young age and had a deep interest in Oriental philosophy. Throughout his career, he worked with top names in advertising agencies, record companies, theater productions, and architectural designs. In 2003, during the “Auroville 35 Years” celebration at the UNESCO center in Paris, Giorgio learned more about Auroville and eventually became an Aurovilian in 2006.

The exhibition will be open to the public until March 3rd, 2023. Gallery hours are Monday to Saturday, 2 PM to 5 PM.

by Christoph Kluetsch for AV Art Service 

At the beginning of Saravana Deivasegamani’s exhibition ‘Divine Seeds’  there are 9 bronze objects on the floor. They are in the center and represent 9 grains that are just beginning to sprout. Navadhanyam is the title of this work. Hindu temples have vessels on the roof—usually made of copper—filled with seeds. Every 12 years, the seed in these kalasams are replaced. It is there in case there is ever a severe natural disaster, and the seeds are needed for reconstruction. The 9 different seeds are called Navadhanyam. They are a widely used as offerings. Saravana Deivasegamani has symbolically brought them down from the temple roof, the grains of Kalasam sprout now. We live in a time where this seems to have become necessary. At least symbolically – because our planet is not in good shape. 

We see this in Tamil Nadu with the Palmyra palm. This palm tree, which is part of the identity of Tamil Nadu, is an endangered species in Tamil Nadu now. It grows very, very slowly and gives way to the so-called civilization. The 2.35-meter-high sculpture ‘Beginning of all Things’ is mainly made of palmyra seeds attached to an iron and copper construction. The Tirukkural was inscribed on the leaves of palm trees. (This classic work of Tamil culture from the 5th or 6th century consists of 1330 double verses and contains the wisdom for the right way of life.) 

It is this vitality of tradition, wisdom and spirituality that is felt in Saravana Deivasegamani works. The imagery comes from a place of meditation, from the heart, a connection with nature. The sculpture ‘Beginning of Things’ is juxtaposed with ‘Outburst of Joy’. The 65cm high sculpture stands for itself with its title, from the root grows an organic structure, a symbol of life. Trees are sacred for Saravana Deivasegamani.

A few months ago, Saravana Deivasegamani bought a pair of digital glasses for welding. These glasses go dark only for the fraction of a second it takes to set the welding point.  Saravana Deivasegamani worked as a metal craftsman before coming to gallery art. The filigree works like ‘Small Joys’ or ‘Private Signs’ consist of thousands of welding points. 

Many of his works were created without these glasses. The approach then is different. The ‘pointillistic’ welding work is created with closed eyes. You must imagine this for a moment. Every time a mark is made, the artist must close his eyes. It is the opposite of Impressionism, which was entirely devoted to vision and the theory of how light on the retina becomes a mental image, and how that mental image is then in turn put on the canvas. Saravana Deivasegamanis however does not stretch a canvas, but welds a sheet of metal onto a three-dimensional structure that serves as his base. 

I do not want to stretch this parallel here, but it appears to be helpful in understanding the process better, because there are other interesting references here. Saravana Deivasegamani’s art comes from meditation and is opposed to empirical science. The sculptures, however, are additive, as is the pointillism. Saravana Deivasegamani took a long time to get the color of the metallic surface right. He tried different metals, acids, and techniques until the result was right. The objects are not painted over or alloyed. He is a purist, proud of his technique. This is also something you often see on the streets here in India. People mastering their simple tools with a technique that leaves one amazed. Saravana Deivasegamani pushes this to perfection. His practice is devotion; meditation. His art sprouts and grows, leaving one to wonder and open spaces of association.

The small series of ‘Small Joys’, ‘Private Signs’ and ‘Depth of Silence’ reminds me of parts of the human body. The curves and openings, the organic shape of the iron, the surface that resembles a porous skin associates with discourses of the abject – something that is neither subject nor object – and therefore somewhat uncanny and irritating. When I asked Saravana Deivasegamani about this body association, he laughed heartily. Yes, he would have thought of a belly button too. “See whatever you want”, and his eyes sparkled.

Artist’s bio

Saravana (b. Puducherry, 1984) is essentially a self-taught artist. He began his career as a metal craftsman and decorative grill designer. Over time, he honed his skills in fine art sculpting through self-study, experimentation, and rigorous practice.

His first major exhibition was held in 2016 at Gallery Square Circle, Kala Kendra (as part of a two-person show with eminent painter and fellow-Aurovilian Juergen Puetz). The same year, his sculptural installation titled ‘Creators’ made entirely of natural Palmyra seeds won the National Award of the Lalit Kala Akademi. His award-winning work was displayed at the 58th National Exhibition in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. He was also invited to the national artists’ conclave in February – March 2017.

Since then, Saravana has participated in a number of group exhibitions, artists’ camps and workshops in Puducherry, Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi, and Hampi. He has also conducted lecture demonstrations on how to convert scrap/found material into evocative art objects

The New Indian Express. „Once part of Tamil Nadu’s identity, Palmyra in need of saving“. accessed 12. January 2023. https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/2018/apr/22/once-part-of-tamil-nadus-identity-palmyra-in-need-of-saving-1804734.html.

Art beyond darkness – Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022/23

Why do we need a biennale? I have often asked myself this question. Before Covid, I had been to many major international cultural events. During Lockdown, I co-organized an artist-in-residence program to think about what the implications, threats, and opportunities of Covid werefor cultural creatives. Everything turned out quite differently than we had hoped, the great upheaval failed to come about, and in a time marked by crises, many are now simply trying to return to the status quo. Have we really spent the trillions of Euros and Dollars so thoughtlessly and without reflection, only to maintain a system that urgently needs change? 

The concept of biennials or major cultural events was already devalued before Covid. They are dominated by the art market and influencer posing. An international chic and hipster community, old intellectual hardliners, head-shaking know-it-alls, and naive do-gooders meet there to applaud an impotentself-promotion of artist-curators and gallery owner egos. Many sincerely demand that the world should become better, but with what example do they go ahead?

Kochi-Muziris Biennale

I was at the Kochi Biennale for the first time in 2016, and even then thought that something different was being done here – better – with the heart in the right place and a vision oriented towards making a concrete, real difference. There were children’s art camps; public events where anyone could and did come; School children and their mothers came from the villages of Kerala; Run-down barracks, warehouses and docks were opened so that art students from all parts of India could exhibit there; International artists were invited to preview the locations before they conceived their site-specific installations. There were a large number of art educators; Many projects were focused on ecology, social impact and critique of the ruling class. Little children, who spend their school vacations looking at art, laughingly ask foreigners on the street where they come from, only to ask even more joyfully with great pride and charm if they like Kerala. 

Fort Kochi is a melting pot of India, where spiritual, colonial, indigenous, national, political, cultural influences have converged for centuries. Kochi is an architectural jewel covered with Che Guevara graffiti and communist election posters. Goats and cows walk among the rickshaws and everything smells of Kerala’s spice garden. Fresh fish is sold on the beach, while container ships and military reconnaissance vessels pass in the background. It is a vibrant city.

The fifth edition 2022/23

The 2022 Biennale started with organizational chaos. This is not really surprising in India, but it does show the challenges left behind by Covid. Many buildings stood empty for four years, or were only used for storage, which further damaged the already fragile building infrastructure. An incendiary online letter at e-flux from participating artists bears witness to the frustration. Organizing a major international event in India may not be an easy task in itself, but doing so after two years of pandemic is actually impossible. It is even more surprising that after two weeks of terribly communicated delays, the miracle of the Kochi Biennale happened again. Some things are still under construction even three weeks after the official partial opening – but most of it is professionally installed in warehouses and barracks. The power of many artworks shines through the chaos.

Some large video installations, such as the commissioned work “Bombay Tilts Down (2021-2022)” by Mumbai-based CAMP at Aspinwall or “Such a Morning (2017-19)” by Delhi artist Amar Kanwar at Anand Warehouse, have transformative power. CAMP uses CCTV Surveillance footage and mixes it with percussive chants about solidarity, oppression and hope in Mumbai’s poorest neighborhoods.

Kanwar’s work is poetically quiet, a journey into darkness. A mathematics professor, perhaps going blind, prepares for the darkness. What a task for a visual artist – preparing for a life without sight! This is not only about the existential questions of survival, but about the limits of art, how far does art reach beyond perception? The video installation is extended by the installation of mini-projectors, in which elements of the film are selected and captured in settings. Lined up beside one another, the film thus becomes a linear co-presence, which allows the visitor to walk around between the images. The visitor is in a place of reverberation, of memory; the film’s images are faded, transformed, surreal.

A general trend is also intensifying here. More and more artists are using the medium of film. Projections and screens are everywhere. Magically disturbing is the installation of Jitish Kallat “Covering Letter” (2012). The work has been seen many times before, but in the south of India it unfolds a completely different power. Ghandi sent a letter to Hitler on July 23, 1939. It was addressed ‘Dear friend’. Ghandi emphasized that Hitler was the only person who could prevent the brutality of this war. The letter is projected continuously by Jitish Kallat on a cloud of mist. A touch of history is felt.

Since we are dealing with time media, it is impossible to cope with all of this, and so there is a competition of screens and projection sizes. Many works on political, ethnic and social conflicts are there to be seen. Every story is worth retelling here. But the narrative medium reaches its limits here. The visitor needs time, but she is rewarded with a variety of perspectives from the point of view of the oppressed. In the age of portable pocket screens, it is right to rely on this medium, because our viewing habits are changing, the static image and text without dramaturgical staging are lost in the battle for attention. 

It is pleasant to see a great diversity in display curation. Large rooms with picture areas completely devoid of text panels are beneficial – these hang in the hallway of Aspinwall’s administrative wing. The biennial gives the works space and the walls never feel crowded. This invites one to linger. 

Art for the mind

Yohei Imamura “tsurugi” (2022) is a highlight in technical mastery. Over two years, Imamura has created a layered, 3D model of a mountain, via a silkscreen technique. A video explains the process. The reflective layers are almost as varied as the more than 1000 layers of paint making up the 3D model. It starts with the topographic maps, which are themselves a layer of abstraction from reality. I think of Baudrillard’s simulacrum; of postmodern concepts of mapping. Imamura traces each elevation plane, in order to transfer it individually to a silkscreen plane. This meditative tracing also serves as a preparation for mountain climbing; knowledge of the terrain is essential for survival. 

By reproducing the mountains in 3D through layering, we are reminded of geological processes. It would be interesting to know what are the geological stratifications of the mountain itself; is there any correlation? Probably not. The whole could be created on a 3D printer, but the inner design principles would then be radically different, algorithmic, vector-based, technologically scanned. Criticism of a wide variety of technical media is clearly implied here. And so we find ourselves confronted with an object that combines different levels of representation and abstraction, created through an innovative form of masterful screen printing. Technical reproduction, imagination, construction, the intertwining of space and plane, of creativity and precision, all meet here.

A radical increase of the conceptual can be found in the works of Iman Issa. “Lexicon (2012-19)” questions the relationships of language, image and imagination. The starting point is art-historical descriptions of images that are not shown. Instead, Issa isolates from these textual descriptions formal elements which can be seen as sculptures next to the descriptions. It is an intellectual game, which can seem a bit out of place. This kind of textual, Western, critical discourse, perhaps based on postcolonialism, does not really resonate. 

Biennale of the people

This Biennale of the people has a different accent: political, participatory, inviting. This becomes very clear and evident in the works of Marcos Avila-Ferero “Theory of the wild geese, notes on the workers gestures (2019)”.  Avila-Ferero asked retired Japanese workers to repeat the movements of their work processes from their professional life. We see workers moving air in human chains. The whole thing seems so absurd and senseless, so revealing and inhuman, that the whole exploitation of labor becomes immediately tangible. The technical tracing of the physical motion sequences illustrates how rationalized labor uses the human body as a tool. We see how, after decades of routine, the body contorts, adapting to the work processes. Over the duration of the exhibition, dancers will be invited to respond to these work processes, which is exciting to imagine. 

The curatorial statement reads, “even the most solitary of journeys is not one of isolation, but drinks deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the works of the Student Biennale. You can feel the verve of young artists, the poetry that unfolds in the warehouses from the colonial era. The works of young artists “drink deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas,” – they take a big gulp. 

This in itself is not unusual, as it is done by  art students all over the world. In Kochi, however, they are not alone. They are represented at the Biennale and visible to an international audience. They are heard, their voice amplified and resonating in chorus. They represent a whole generation – the one to which the future belongs; A future taken away from them by selfish old men. 

The work of Nilofar Shaikh of VNSGU, “Healing Map, Bench”, is one such example. A bench, with murals in the background, invites the viewer to confront the issue of violations and to enter into a dialogue with the environment.

Dheeraj Jadhav shares his way of seeing with his strong and compelling installation “Planting Conversation”.

Nabam Hem, Taba Yaniya and Ejum Riba invite us into the world of the Tani clan with their large installation “Tani Nyia Nyji Muj”. It is moving and thought-provoking.

Bhumi, a community art project, has worked with a community in Bangladesh during lockdown. Local materials and traditions result in a round of figures exemplifying the heart of this Biennale. It can be seen on the Biennale’s sidelines, at the TKM Warehouse.

I always try to spend a few days at a Biennale, as I find it important to interact with the environment. In Kochi, I drink my chai on the boardwalk and laugh heartily with the people from Kerala, even though we don’t have a common language. The south of India is incredibly hospitable, warm, carried by a spirituality that perceives life in everything. These encounters are the real energy of the Kochi Biennale; without them, none of this would be possible here. And I am beginning to understand what it means to truly live differently. It is the nature and the culture, the people and the spirituality, the harmony of the world that can be heard here. It is a radical countercurrent to the oversaturated affluent societies.

As expressed in the Biennale’s curatorial statement: “The human need to think freely without proscription, in spite of, and sometimes because of repression, all point to the way we react to conflict. The only enemy is apathy. That has no name or face and it lies entwined with its bedfellow – self-censorship.”

It is the Biennale of the people.

Amitabh Sengupta was born in Calcutta in 1941 and graduated from Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Kolkata in 1963. From 1966 to 1969 he received a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he witnessed the ‘68 student revolts. From 1977 until 1981 he joined the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, where he became Head of Creative Arts. He has exhibited in India, Nigeria, Europe, and USA and currently lives in Kolkata.

The works by Amitabh Sengupta show a vast spectrum of styles. It is impressive to see how much he engaged with western modernist tradition and yet maintained his roots in Indian traditions. We can see this in the colours, the traces of written words, the iconography. Going through the exhibition there are echoes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulage, Jasper Jones, Paul Klee and many more.

I was wondering about that rich reference and the echoes of western modernity, and found the answer in Amitabh Sengupta’s writings. In his “Memoir of an Artist” from 2014, he refers several times to Rabindranath Tagore; most people will be familiar with his name as the first India who was awared the Nobel Prize. At the end of the chapter ‘Indian Contemporary Art – an alternative modernity’ Amitabh Sengupta writes: “In the absence of social dialogue, art is facing another challenge. The priorities of art commerce and global marketing are imposing pressure to remain ‘modern’ as constant reference to global trends. This was predicted by many, for example, Tagore, expressed admiration about western cultures, at the same time warned against the risk of coercion, which they saw a built-in process in the system.” Amitabh Sengupta being part of the Bengal Art school takes Tagore to heart.

Art historical narratives

We can recall Rabindranath’s poem Namaskar to Sri Aurobindo published in 1907 as it is well known. Rabindranath admired Sri Aurobindo’s fight against colonialism and oppression and supported him during his time in prison. Aurobindo’s book Renaissance in India with articles from 1918-21 comes to mind. But while the western eye can learn from Aurobindo how to see Indian Art through the Indian perspective, Rabindranath warns of the power of modernism in the visual arts for the Indian Artist.

Here lay the roots of the negotiation between western modernist and Indian culture in the 20^th century. We see why the big show of Amitabh Sengupta fits into the Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. His work is informed by these discussions and addresses the struggles which western academic art theories have with non-western art. Sengupta’s oeuvre speaks to the difficulties Indian artists faced during the middle of the 20^th century to be seen internationally.

Sengupta’s “The History of Modernism in India” was published in 2021; a 200-page book that celebrates diversity in India and warns of the misconception by the west of a “uniform and monolithic Hindu structure”. Chapter 6 deals with Rabindranath Tagore’s Dialectics of Art. How should the art of a young nation like India, that also has one of the oldest cultural histories in the world, respond to the dominating western modern concepts? We know that western modernism drew inspiration from its colonial exploitation of the other parts of the world (the prominent examples are Van Gogh, Picasso and Gaugin). That mistake need not be repeated by artist in countries that gained independence through painful paths.

Fluid mixtures

On Dec 20 2022 there was an artist talk organized at Kalakendra. Art historian Dr. Ashrafi Bhagat gave an introduction lecture on the relevance of Amitabh Sengupta for the defining decades of the 1960s in India. Artists had to find their voice, while connecting to the dominant western discourse, maintaining, and developing their own style. It was difficult, as there was criticism from all sides, either it was too western or not western enough, too traditional or not traditional enough, too subjective or not expressive enough… Amitabh Sengupta was an extraordinarily productive artist, who mastered many techniques like painting, drawing, printing and writing on the highest level. He is rooted in Indian history and its visual language and creates pictorial spaces that contain cultural memories, realistic spatial representation on an abstract plane, juxtaposed with remanences of signs and geometrical forms.

1. „Ashrafi Bhagat-on-Amitabh SenGupta“

19:23

Walking through the exhibition, one sees that the pictorial spaces in his series called ‘Pyramids’ or ‘Inscription’ are abstract compositions with semiotic echoes, that activate an inner space that is associated with the path of mediation since the Vedic texts. Amitabh Sengupta’s art is not explicitly spiritual, but it becomes sensible that the inner experience, the conscious mind, the creative expression, and the pictorial representation are interlinked within his body of work. Amitabh Sengupta however does not shy away from commentary on global issues with his drawing relating to the Covid-19 crises or his paintings relating to topics of urbanization and globalization.

Amitabh Sengupta’s voice is strong and manifests an intermiscence, i.e. a mixture of sensations, styles, thoughts, signs, space and memory that reminds me of movement of thoughts in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and Sri Aurobindo’s commentary on the Kena Upanishad. There that strange word of ‘intermiscence’ appears at a place that explains the creations of rhythms and forms.

For Deleuze art is thought in matter, it is also a territory in which we build our home – literally and metaphorically. The different material elements in Amitabh Sengupta’s work, the planes of composition, the connection of signs, the yantras of geometrical shapes, the pictorial space and memory invite the viewer to explore his/her inner space, where one defines home. It doesn’t matter from where you come, Amitabh Sengupta’s work invites everyone on that journey. Whether this is some sort of ‘post-post-ism’ is not relevant. That is the power of art that dares to address existential questions.

By Christoph Kluetsch, for AV Art Service

Further readings:

artamour. „Amitabh Sengupta: Explorer of Art“. artamour, 18. Juni 2021. https://www.artamour.in/post/amitabh-sengupta-explorer-of-art.

Sengupta, Amitabh. „The History of Modernism in India“. Swati Publications, 1. Januar 2021. https://www.academia.edu/45131805/The_History_of_Modernism_in_India.

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1996. Sri Aurobindu. The Upanishads-II: Kena and Other Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Dept, 2016

Centre D’art “Unseen Realities” by artist Aparna Ashok

Article by Christoph Kluetsch for AVArtS

The exhibition “Unseen Realities” by Aparna Ashok in the Centre D’art, Auroville is oppressive. The entrance of the gallery is closed, the visitor is asked to enter via the back entrance. At the entrance is a notebook to take away to record one’s own thoughts. Aparna Ashok does not want to present the visitor with pleasing art. Instead, it is an installation with video, photography, objects, sound around the topic of identity, discrimination, anxiousness. You could say it is a typical multimedia installation based on performance art. One might have seen something like this before, the medium and format is not new, it is not surprising that a young artist who graduated with a master’s degree from the Royal Collage of Art London does something like this. One might think so.

But after just a few minutes in the exhibition, I find myself questioning myself, my surroundings, the art world. Aparna Ashok points out right at the beginning of the exhibition that she is reflecting on her own situation as a young Indian woman in London, a colonial power here and there, and her own insecurities, hurts, fears are the topic of her art. Everyone should ask themselves, reflect, that’s what the notebook at the entrance is for, you can and should of course take your notes home.

What is it like to see this work by a young artist from India living in London, here in Auroville? To say it right up front, it’s shocking.

In a video installation, the artist is seen smashing a plaster bust with a heavy hammer. She asks whether she should destroy herself, if she must change. “I never felt the need to fit in…why do I feel that way now…. Have I become mentally ill or intolerant toward other people and sentient beings? …. Maybe I should break who I am, maybe I should kill who I am.”

Another installation shows a video of a performance in a park. Passersby were asked to throw balloons of red paint in their direction and say out loud what they think. It’s exposing, cruel, contemptuous. My hands are still shaking as I write this. We hear them saying things like: get a college degree/family, stay in line, get married, learn to forgive, be observant to man and so on … While the white-dressed artist gets more and more colored by red paint, sprayed on her by passersby. At the end of the performance, she gets up and at the same time we hear in the background a public fair starting with a commercial welcoming.

The largest installation, on the other hand, is a bit weak. Almost life-size photos of her with her face covered, sitting on the bed in a nightgown, are contrasted with bulky black objects that may stand for nightmares. The set-up bed with a video monitor showing the artist struggling with herself is somewhat unmotivated. So, this part seems a bit voyeuristic. The reflection layer is missing.

After passing through these installations, I find myself in the back part of the exhibition. It is empty and gives space for reflection. This is brutal and good. I need to collect energy before I go back through the exhibition, out through the back entrance. On the way I talk to some people in the exhibition. We talked about the difference between sympathy and compassion, discrimination, the role of art, whether it should be uplifting or critical. We talked about education, politics and much more. We were all just asking questions. There are no simple answers, and that is one important aspect of contemporary art, to make us ask real questions. It doesn’t have to beautiful, neither do we need to be presented the answers. Art creates spaces, be it spiritual, comfortable, homy, representational, reflective, or experimental spaces in which we can get a different look on the world and on ourselves.

Bio:

Aparna is a multi-disciplinary designer and self-portrait photographer based in India. She is driven by research and curiosity about the complexities of human experience and identity. 

Before studying MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, Aparna completed her BA in Visual Arts at Stella Maris College in Chennai, India. 

Aparna’s work centers around social benefit through the creation of scenarios and opportunities for interaction. She works across the fields of graphic design, photography, art direction, curation, and filmmaking. Her practice is rooted in creating curated designed experiences.

https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/aparna-ashok

The exhibition was on view from 9th to 24th December 2022

Gilles Grimaître visited Auroville for a few days during his Pro Helvetia artist residency in Bengaluru, Chennai and Puducherry to engage with Carnatic music. The program he chose for the evening of Dec. 17^th, 2022, was a passionate, loving introduction to usually not so accessible Western avant-garde music.

Grimaître started off with Johannes Brahms – Drei Intermezzi op 117, a romantic crowd pleaser, followed by a more challenging piece by Olli Mustonen (*1967) called ‘Jehkin Iivana’. Nobody would know the composers he selected after Brahms for the evening unless they were a very dedicated avant-garde music enthusiast, he said. But he wanted to show, that avant-garde music can be fun and playful. We all smiled and laughed when he played Daniel Moreira(*1984) – Rhythmic Study no 4 (“Ludvan ven Beethowig”). Moreira plays with Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, which almost everyone who likes piano music knows. He cuts and samples, loops and collages pieces in such a light and playful way, that we lose all fear of contemporary music.

„Gilles Grimaître plays Daniel Moreira Rhythmic Study no 4 (Ludvan ven Beethowig)“ 

I recognized Moreira’s teacher, Marco Stroppa, as a personal friend of mine was a student of his as well. I find his students are funny, serious, eloquent. Gilles Grimaître played with astonishing lightness, joy and precision.

The next piece was by Beat Furrer (*1954) – ‘Voicelessness. The snow has no voice’. Grimaître laughed when he said that he chose that piece as a Christmas tune for Auroville. Snow around Christmas may be a rare event here and should trouble us deeply if it ever happens. The piece is sincere, concentrated, I saw the snowflakes dancing, losing any sense of time, there was no beginning nor end, no dramatic structure or storytelling, just meditative, minimalistic concentration.

„Gilles Grimaître plays Beat Furrer Voicelessness The snow has no voice“ 

After the piece, it took Grimaître an eternity of stage seconds to come back into the room. The intensity of concentration was palpable. The last piece was special, it was written by a composer from Ukraine, and we might guess why that fits into the year 2022. It was written many years ago by Valentin Silvestrov (*1937) called ‘Davos Lake’, for the Davos festival. There was a concept to play piano concerts one on one. The piano player would play for 5 minutes for one person in a small room. I thought that this was pure capitalism. But when I heard the music – so tender and heartfelt, intimate, and loving – I saw it as a guerilla tactic, to melt the hearts of the listener and create an intimate connection between performer and audience. This concept came up during Corona again, i.e. at the Kammerorchester in Stuttgart.

The encore was Frank Zappa’s ‘The Black page’ the avant-garde Rock Star, with classical training and the enfant terrible of the hybrid music world that blurs genre boundaries and doesn’t care about high and low brow culture.

Thank you for a beautiful, joyful, memorable evening at the end of the year, that was globally so troubling.

Bio:

Gilles Grimaître was born in Geneva in 1988 studied improvisation and took an avid interest in composition and contemporary music. He entered the Hochschule der Künste Bern where he continued his musical training with Prof. Pierre Sublet. He also studied the organ with Pascale Van Coppenolle and composition with Xavier Dayer. As soloist and chamber musician, Gilles Grimaître performs regularly in Europe. He often plays with Ensemble Contrechamps, Collegium Novum Zürich, Ensemble Proton and Ensemble Modern. He specializes in the accompaniment with vocalists, working often as an opera accompanist. He is also an active improviser and plays in the experimental band [bleu]. Gilles Grimaître won the first prize at the 2013 Nicati competition for contemporary music and received scholarships from the Marescotti Foundation, the Irène Dénéréaz Foundation and the Gabriele De Agostini Foundation. He was scholarship holder at the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt/Main for the academic year 2013-2014.

https://www.ensemblelemniscate.com/gilles-grimaitre

Article by By Christoph Kluetsch

Aabhas Mahindre’s exhibition “From my organized chaos” is currently on display at Centre d’Art in Auroville (until 3 Dec 2022). Aabhas Mahindre is showing works from the Covid Lockdown period. 

Over 600 works on 5×7 inch paper were created. On view in the exhibition are a selection of about 60 works. They are reflections, meditations, observations, exercises in composition and conception, homages, experiments, memories, feelings and moods. They form a web of artistic thought and go far beyond the format of a visual diary. 

Those familiar with works of Classical Modernism immediately recognize references to Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein. Aabhas Mahindre was represented as a student at the 2014/15 Kochi Bienniale with a painting also inspired by Mark Rothko. In his blue work (3ft x 4ft acrylic on canvas) from the period he illustrates his fascination with the color blue and the spiritual power of Yves Klein. Klein is often reduced in the West to his conceptual purity, but he is a deeply spiritual artist. In his homage to Klein, Aabhas Mahindre therefore includes trapezoidal planes (planes): 4 triangles on 3 planes communicate in dialogue with three floating dots. Aabhas Mahindre already showed here his sense for subtle image composition and how complex mystical relationships can be visualized. “The lines are a reference to my grandmothers stitching, they go into the sky”, he says.

His Instagram account (@aabhas.m) includes photos of his work as well as enchanting snapshots of everyday life. His eye is trained in the narration of existential configurations of the material that points to its spiritual source.

The 60 works in the exhibition vary in intensity. Some are playful in their attempt to imitate Yves Klein’s works with fire. The idea of using cigarettes is probably due to the circumstance of the covid lockdown, as the materials were limited in lockdown. Other works, such as the homage to Warhol’s Banana, hint at the dreaming of exhibitions. Powerful are works like ‘I watched this paint dry’ or collages like ‘Crowned’ as well as poetic works like ’Can’t you just smell that old Rose?’

Aabhas Mahindre got his Master of Fine Arts in painting from Government Institute of Fine Arts, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, where he was also teaching as guest faculty from 2017-18. He has participated in over 20 group shows and half a dozen Art Camps. In 2019/20 he received the Madhya Pradesh Rajaya Rupankan Kala Award and the Exhibition – Lakshmi Shankar Rajput Award.

Inspired by John Baldesari, Aabhas Mahindre prepares a new series of works on Instagram, his conceptual images are a sarcastic play of the ever-same Instagram posts. “I enjoyed the freedom I was given by the Centre d’Art gallery to exhibit my works, but the Instagram work will be a challenge to show, I am working on it and already have some ideas….”

A new LP by Berlin-based Auroville youth

One person’s paradise can be another’s prison. Conceptually this is a very simple idea to wrap one’s head around, but a surprisingly difficult one to accept and integrate fully. Wine and music is one thing, but beauty? Values?

            “We must draw the line somewhere…”

            Others might argue differently, and Auroville youth and Berlin-based electronic musician Aarnav Bos would certainly be one of them. His new LP Temptress chronicles the emergence and realization of a creativity that owes as much of its newness to frustration as to tranquillity; yet this manages to make it one of the most honest pieces of contemporary music your reporter has subjected his ears to in many months. Bos and myself caught up with all this as best we could in a late-night interview fuelled largely by cigarettes and the spoils of my listening obsessively to the album over the course of the past 24 hours.

            “Is this a Berlin album or an international one?” This is the one question that’s been hanging over my head like an omen the whole day, because I truly can’t answer it; Aarnav’s answer, predictably, sets up the rest of the conversation.

            “Well, all composition is derivation. I can’t say Auroville didn’t have an impact on it because it did. There are experiences and sounds derived from both Berlin and Auroville combined in these songs.” He pauses. “Wouldn’t really be mine if there weren’t.”

            I ask him for an example. “You take ‘My Tourist Dystopia’, for instance- that’s just about the innate disrespect of modern tourism. And where to experience that better than Auroville? Most of the tourists barely even know where they are, let alone why they’re there. When I saw it in that light- as an invasion in which both sides are actually losing- I felt too strongly about it not to try and make something out of it.”

            A damn fine something it is, too. “How else have your musical ideas been influenced by location?”

            “Well, this idea of live music being a catalyst for something was only really first exposed to me in Berlin. You get a different idea of how music sounds in different environments, how people respond to various elements… For example, I had always felt many of my compositions were missing something. Almost as soon as I heard this kind of music, electronic body music, being played in a club, I realized my music needed vocals. Then of course, finding a vocalist with whom there was just a- click– chemistry… That was a huge catalyst, to find somebody with whom there was enough synergy to do a maximum of three takes. And we’d usually end up using the first or second.”

            Always a good sign, I think to myself… Artistically, you’d be hard-pressed to find a worse sin than repeating yourself. “Nothing worse than repeating yourself,” says I, in the process of ashing a cigarette on myself for the fifth time today. “Did she change the direction of the project, in a sense?”

            “In a sense, yeah, every new element you add changes the direction. But this was collaborative in a sense, she was contributing lyrical ideas, melodic inflections… Direction of a particular track is one thing, but this actually changed the aesthetic of what we were doing, which was very specific before. Actually working with someone else was a different process, an additive one instead of subtractive. Instead of refining an idea until it’s polished, one person has a rough idea, then the other improves upon it in an empathetic way, and the process goes on until you agree it’s gone as far as it needs to.” I hear the sound of a glass bottle on a wooden table. “This album was technically written three times. And each time was a sort of evolution, a reinvention of a basic idea.”

            Now, Aarnav, to friends and acquaintances, is not always known as the sort of fellow who takes criticism lightly. So naturally, I want to get to the bottom of this intensely collaborative spirit.

            “Where the hell is all this coming from?”

                        Pause.

            “Everyone who challenged my own assumptions and idealism was a contributor to my work. When I sent a first ‘draft’ of music to Zanias from Fleisch Records, what I got wasn’t your run-of-the-mill rejection. She said she heard something unique, but she felt that I could take it further.”

            I almost light myself on fire again while imagining how quickly I’d pack my bags if Manfred Eicher sent me an email like this.

            “And in that whole process of reinvention, adding vocals, etc., I just let go of a lot of the assumptions I’d been carrying around with me, almost out of necessity. It required a kind of passiveness that I had to build up, and that had a huge impact on the music- letting go of any kind of perfectionism, per sé, and learning to accept boundaries to further one’s vision.

            Is this album political?

            “‘Temptress’ is rage against both stagnation and longing, which is more of a personal politics. I think that’s the only kind we can write music about. Other than that, not directly, no.”

            How about spiritual then?

            “No.”

            Moving on… “We haven’t yet delved into your influences.”

            “My main idea for the album was something pretty removed from the mainstream techno scene, more of a shadowy, vague kind of sound. Certain sounds, the way they reflect in different ways can conjure up a whole range of emotions, just from reverb. So this approach of using reflection instead of FX to create a more organic method was pretty central to the album. A lot of dread, different emotions… More shades of grey than most techno or even EBM, I feel. The genesis for the album was basically- ‘how to speak clearly without talking?’ And I just took it from there.”

            “These reflections you talk about… I mean, a reflective atmosphere is kind of rare in this music, isn’t it?”

            “Yeah. That’s sort of the point, really. I was listening to very different music during the pandemic, a lot of goth and post-punk and shoegaze. So, naturally, the old itch to play guitar came back- I bought one and started messing around on it again. I think that’s partially what gives the album a more complete sound, but not homogenous… because so much of it was envisioned with guitar.” He pauses again. “You know, so much music is escapist, in various ways- it lets you forget about your troubles for a few minutes. That’s fine, but I never wanted that from my own stuff. For me, music is supposed to help you admit whatever it is you don’t want to admit.”

            I scribble it down to digest later. “This focus on ‘organic’ sound, though… It seems kind of out of step with whatever I know of the electronic scene. So I’m still hung up on it- where did that come from?”     

“Living in the middle of nowhere, I spent a lot of time digging for music, hunting for interesting sounds. I’ve been down several rabbit holes. Having discovered music like Clan of Xymox, Zanias, Years of Denial, Cocteau Twins- it provoked this fascination for reflective, ‘organic’ sound sources… Their approach to making sound just really resonated with me.”

            And, just like that, it clicks for me too now. This is music for the club inside your head, where the lights never go out and the mirrors force you to see from all angles.

By Dhani Muniz           

Listen to the music here:

Single: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N6K_O3s5QA

Full album:  https://permanentdaylightberlin.bandcamp.com/?fbclid=IwAR0ZKpdCRluMBOO49fs0DQMWa_NfLAIYtwB34IMWEY_tp_X5vDNW8FEkbOM

            The length of tape that Schöne’s work is recorded on winds around the room, lending a physical aspect to the music (the piece itself is in fact a loop) that might be otherwise lost on some. Yet the music on its own is highly physical, situating the listener firmly in space (if not time), with individual sound combinations that are distorted and lent more immediacy by the flutter of magnetic tape. It is a sort of folk avant-garde, with a spirit and sound that evokes Stockhausen in the 1960’s- the alien ethnic collages of Telemusik or Hymnen- yet projected in a much more immediate and down-to-Earth way, the individual loops taking their time to fulfil their contribution to the whole. There are no jump cuts, sudden breaks, etc., which naturally makes for difficult analysis and a unique listening experience. The closest comparison that sprung to mind while it played was that of the quieter, rubato sections of Miles Davis’ final two concerts in Osaka before his first retirement in 1975, captured on the live albums Agharta and Pangaea. Ethnic percussion and synthesizers dominated the mix there, creating a calm, world-futurist feel that is here sustained across 23 minutes in a wash of pure sound.

            If indeed the process of creation is a response which ensures its newness, then the process of listening ought to be one as well- a necessarily repetitive cognition of that unrecognizable ‘something’. In its seeming organization into indefinite ‘moments’, as well as its use of a Tascam Portastudio as both a 4-track recording machine and an effect, André’s personal distillation of his surroundings takes on a distinctly folkish aspect. One can safely say there is little such music being made (crickets, frogs and birdsong excluded) in the midst of most any other jungle in the world, including ours. It is near impossible to analyze or dissect such a work as this in any satisfactory way; it is too layered and too far-reaching. The most that can be discussed at a time is a few individual moments. 

            At around the ten-minute mark, or just before, the extended decay of a gong begins to blend with a loop of low, creaking frequencies a major-sixth apart (the airport interval, I always call it; though here the effect is quite different). The loop is rhythmically morphing continuously which adds to its unsettling nature, aided and abetted by an odd electronic jingling in the background similar to that of sleigh bells. Over two-and-a-half minutes, the gong decay dissipates entirely, the loop gaining volume until it overwhelms the piece entirely. Emotionally, this is a space of intense claustrophobia, damp, dark, paranoid. A change then occurs that isn’t exactly texturally sudden, but mood-wise is akin to a weathervane swinging. The low creaks slowly fade into warmer, percussive tones; a few tape self-oscillations on top signal the last gusts of a flash flood. Out of nowhere, around 13:30, the sighing, sonorous murmur of what sounds like a flapamba ushers in a new day… The closest description of this moment I can give is perhaps the sound every fibre of a human body makes when exiting a storm cellar unscathed after an F4 tornado and seeing a slight sliver of sunshine licking the horizon.

             André Schöne’s work in Auroville adds up to far more than your average residency; this is a true artist exposing himself with no external agenda. Who even knew such things were still possible? This is a residency that matter-of-factly presents something that I had begun to doubt myself; miracles do still happen… As Woody Allen likes to remind us, if not in life, then in art. 

By Dhani Muniz

Andre Schöne was an artist in residence at La Petite Maison, a collaborative platform that engages with artists to facilitate an in-depth experience of art projects in Auroville (lapetitemaison(at)auroville.org.in, @lapetitemaison.auroville).

Photo Credit: Marco Saroldi

            And what a blast. As a primarily electronic musician (as well as a bassist), Schöne nonetheless feels that it, in his own words, “often lacks the dimension of acoustic recording with microphones…certain aspects of such recordings cannot be replicated through electronics.” The problem, he feels however, is manifold.

            “This process of setting up microphones, being in the moment, and having the musicians or yourself recorded in this particular room, at this particular point in time. Of course, you’re recording the sound of the room itself too, which is unique. This could never be recreated… And this is the dimension I’m talking about. I want to marry these two worlds, I think they could learn a lot from each other. One completes the other, in a sense.”

            And so, recording to a Tascam Portastudio 4-track with (borrowed) Neumann microphones that any recording musician would sacrifice a non-essential appendage to have, André amassed recordings from Svaram at Kalabhumi to be used as raw ingredients, processing them after the fact to create his soundscapes, which run on a loop of tape that travels physically around the room to create a truly physical listening experience. “Working with [the instruments at Svaram] was emotionally very overwhelming. I mean, how they create these waves that go through the room is amazing… It’s something so simple but so rich in sound…something that has changed my whole way of listening… I think when I go back I’ll be paying much more attention to acoustic phenomena and trying to incorporate them into my work.” 

            ‘Incorporation’ is too weak a term for Schöne’s own approach, however. His ‘world music’ inspiration came first from Jon Hassell, jazz trumpeter noted for his work with Brian Eno, Talking Heads and others, but whose solo albums were an example of what he called ‘Fourth-World music’. In this concept, the idea of a so-called crossover is unceremoniously dropped, to be replaced by a uniquely minimalistic and expository blending of traditions and textures creating something quite entirely new. While other luminaries pop up in conversation as inspirational figures for André- Coltrane and Don Cherry, for example- it is Hassell’s influence that is most telling, both in the music in its elemental form and in its unwillingness to stick firmly to a category of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. “This was something I really like and I try my best to do myself,” he says of Hassell’s influence. “Not just taking some elements here and there and using them for effect or emotion, but actually diving into these individual cultures. I’d like to use sounds not because they sound exotic, but instead dig deep and find out where they’re coming from, and use them consciously.” Naturally, the trumpet great studied with Pandit Pran Nath for years, a privilege that hasn’t been afforded (this time) to Schöne, which only makes his work more remarkable.

            “Unconsciously, all the music I’m hearing while I’m here in Auroville- different Indian and international folk music and things- all this is somehow finding its way into my piece.” The nature of the piece, or tape installation rather, is ambient, as is much of Schöne’s work, even though he continues to work and explore the Berlin techno and house electronic scenes. This ambient factor is something he considers an integral part of his identity as a musician. “When there is too much sonic information happening, I get overwhelmed very, very easily. Because even one sound can mean the world.”

By Dhani Muniz

Andre Schöne was an artist in residence at La Petite Maison, a collaborative platform that engages with artists to facilitate an in-depth experience of art projects in Auroville (lapetitemaison(at)auroville.org.in, @lapetitemaison.auroville).

Presented by Art World-Sarala’s Art Centre and Bharat Nivas

Until March 18 2022

            Unity in Diversity is a spacious idea, and therefore one well suited to Auroville and its artists. Wandering through Kalakendra’s latest and aptly titled new exhibit, I found myself wondering- what other verbal umbrella could fit all these perspectives under it?
Upon walking in, I was immediately confronted by a series of visions almost as large as myself, angular visions bathed in a warm, diffused light. 

            Tapas Ghosal’s work here conveys a Chagall-ian touch, childlike yet gaunt. But the spirit of Chagall was a Slavic one, deeply rooted in the soil of his homeland of Belarus and his own identity as an Eastern European Jew; in his cerulean portrayals of Jewish weddings, the taut communal energy seems to be the only thing keeping the paint from floating cheerily off the canvas. Ghosal’s work here has no national or communal spirit in such a sense. The architecture of the houses and huts blends with that of nature; there are no people, whether walking, talking, sleeping or flying. In one, a light blue sky hangs over a light blue village; in another, a stony settlement- reddened by sunlight, blood, or pure will plus paint- fragments piecemeal into a calm ocean of dark blue. There is an eeriness here that can only stem from natural beauty or its recognition, a melding of the human urge to create with nature’s tendency towards deconstruction. The combination of such polar elements creates a tension that gives the entrance of the exhibition more than its fair share of impact.

            Bodhiselvam’s series of portraits of Gautama Buddha are striking in their similarity- with the repeated lowered gaze and right side of the faces dissolving, the viewer is drawn to the chaotic tangle of the left, in his hair smudged and piled high; the hidden sides of his face thus resemble a mirrored visage (partially obscured by angle) in one, a tree trunk in a darkened wood in another, shifting tectonic plates in another… The effect could be said to be deconstructive, as the subject seems to be progressively melting or shattering. Taken in a Buddhist context of course, the elements take on a redemptive quality- parts of a whole, continually shifting and breaking apart, the better to come back together. This aspect of Eastern thought and the unique way in which it influences the arts is brought to the fore in Bodhiselvam’s centerpiece, a one-canvas compilation of a quasi-generic shape-shifting Eastern deity in 60 different poses or angles, Warhol-Monroe style. But if Warhol succeeded in mythologizing Monroe in deadpan Pop fashion, the effect is somewhat the opposite with a work such as this, taking a spiritual figure such as the Buddha and humanizing him, albeit with an ethereal and violent palette. The artist’s dense, mandala-style ink works pale when compared side-by-side with these creations.

            Nele Martens’ contributions are a ray of pure energy, an even more direct injection into the proceedings; her paintings refuse to be subsumed into their surroundings, instead blooming hurriedly in bright, skylit shades of blue and yellow. Calligraphic fragments drift over- giving the impression of eye floaters on a cloudless day- with all the careless intent of good calligraphy. The breadth and impact of her palette, while only sticking to two principal colours and refusing to blend shades in any attempt at impressionism, is unusual to find in any contemporary artist of the avant-garde- still more so is the blitheness with which it is presented. In a world brimful of artists who might be said to take themselves too seriously, contemporary art such as this is a constant, and constantly needed, form of cultural redemption.

            Sajal Sarkar’s contributions also seem to deal with the mythological figure, but this is a great deal more generalized; he transfigures the body itself into something holy, a grail of life and death. Indeed, there is in the presented works something (also androgynous) that carries simultaneous elements of both- in the dense cross-hatching and scribbling which fill the outlines of some of his bodies, or the intensely divided palette he utilizes in another canvas, or the cave-drawing miniature men on the middle panel of his triptych that so resemble birds. An all-acrylic canvas, of a body obliquely divided by a line that appears to define night and day- the former feminine, latter masculine- here in midst of a pose that brings to mind Matisse’s circle dancers, confirms Sarkar’s subject of choice, but the power and abruptness of the painting invites introspection more than overt excitement.

            At first glance, Pramathes Chandra’s work seems to be of close kin to Sarkar’s; their recurring interest in the basic mould of the human body and earthy colour palettes, when viewed quite literally side by side, is striking, to say the least. Yet Chandra’s figures occupy a more cerebral space, a more neutral space; the body is now treated fully as an object of study against an abstracted background – the ‘doubled’, time-lapse effect of one of the canvasses recalls Da Vinci’s studies before it does any of Duchamp’s nude women or sad young men, although the latter seems to be whispering in the wings, composition-wise.

            The relief work of Ashwameda by Emmanuele is sublime, taking on an ancient appearance that is impressively unforced. The images blend into their material, the mark of all the best 3D art. The other two contributions are somewhat weighed down by a tendency toward opaque symbolism.

            Kirti Chandak’s work, while also veering occasionally toward insular and colloquially Indian postmodernism, is enchanting in two multimedia works (if one includes a piece painted on cloth), one of a woman who appears to be asleep, the other of a featureless boy staring up at the moon with a dog at his heel and a sack full of rubbish (or treasure) slung over his shoulder. The image is prophetically striking; the type of thing that could probably be interpreted and reinterpreted for years to come if the Real Critics ever got their hands on it. All I can say is that it possesses a profound sense of both joy and sadness, with each amplifying each other, as they should, in all the best things. The sleeping woman is uncommon in the texture of its muted palette against the blue-grey linen. She is cut in three as well, with a ‘blank’ woven section between head and shoulders, torso, and lower legs, the cloth covering where her body would be. The sense of peace this work exudes is quietly foreboding, as if the subject is beckoning the onlooker into a much more permanent slumber.

            Unity in Diversity, being the steepest of all challenges, is a tall order and a hard title to live up to- yet Kalakendra’s exhibit boasts enough shining lights to squeeze the mantle.

By Dhani Muniz

Like so many more interesting artists, Harsha Durugadda’s work comes from a place of intense focus. This focus on the world around him does not lead him to conservatism; rather, it sharpens his view of his surroundings. 

            With an appreciation for sculpture kickstarted by growing up in a family of artists, he claims vernacular architecture- churches, temples, monuments- as one of his biggest influences. Yet his work also shows a singular resistance to the ideas of control that lie behind most of these great pieces of architecture. “As a civilization, religion has exploited the power of sculpture fully to hypnotize people with form and shape. This is where my work departs from and continues its journey into finding new meanings in form.” Durugadda describes his creations as “objects of enquiry into human behaviour,” that is, not something strictly visual, but a vision to be experienced holistically. 

            This thoroughly ‘natural’ quality is something that is difficult not to translate into an ‘anti-humanist’ ideal of art- as the artist says himself, “we are nature”- so it was hardly surprising to hear of the influence of indigenous arts and lifestyles on his own. While Harsha himself prefers the term ‘non-human planetary approach’, his ideas on coevolution and “natural human arrogance” seems to plant him firmly as a middle-of-the-road anti-humanist; not a bad place to be these days, considering the contemporary artistic void in these ideological regions. “To move away from the human obsession and to bring the smallest microbe to the forefront” is Durugadda’s stated goal, in life and in art. 

            But this practice of finding new meanings in form is a tricky one to formulate in language (again, a watermark of interesting contemporary art); verbally, it would seem that the abstraction of experience is Harsha’s goal, when really it is a modus operandi, a method of connection with the viewer. Freeing sculpture from traditionalist moorings, in this case, is truly an architectural practice, with scale being the only differentiating factor. Contemporary sculpture has become obsessed with scale- the idea that anything can be impactful if it’s big enough. Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Louis Bourgeois, Vasconcelos, Chihuly… how many of the big names have made careers out of this simple premise? Scale offers instant prestige,  and even more importantly, confers upon the artist that unique ability to make anything seem impressive, genius, necessary even (all of these, and perhaps Vasconcelos in particular, are complicit in a postmodern tradition succinctly identified by Lester Bangs in his 1971 review of a Captain Beefheart album- “pretenders by the truckloads have failed…to make the crucial distinction between art commenting on society and flat-out polemics.”) One can see in Durugadda shades of a different tradition, one that hasn’t been worked on or tinkered with since the days of Maria Martins, Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Hepworth. This is a tradition of natural evocation, a flipside to the contemporary discourse. When I heard his greatest influences were architectural, I wasn’t fazed in the least (in fact, the aforementioned sculptors emerged as points of reference later while shifting between observing and writing). The first associations that came to mind upon looking at his work were the alien yet natural structures of Frank Lloyd Wright (the Guggenheim in particular) and, especially, Antonio Gaudi. In their monumental work, scale is more incidental than a primary focus; if anything, it is a factor to be overcome, in order to bring a sense of intimacy and movement to something grand and necessarily stationary.

            Harsha Durugadda’s work is neither grand nor stationary. The qualities he strives for and brings to the ever-widening world of 3-D art is, currently, largely unique; in the end, it’s the artist’s own words that describe his creations best- “I draw from dynamic living practices… whirling dervishes, Buddhist prayer wheels, fluttering of leaves- none of these are static forms. This is what makes my work occupy a more fluid form.” Indeed it does.

Suite; THE Expatriate, An interview with Dhani Muniz

Introduce yourself. What is your background in Auroville? 

Hi, I’m Dhani Yukteswar Muniz, 23 years old and from a (very) mixed Brazilian-Indian background! In terms of Auroville, I was about two months away from being born here when my parents up and moved to New York, and a good chunk of my family was educated in the Ashram, so I always ended up coming back to this place one way or another.

Tell us about your music. What style of music do you make or perform? 

It’s hard to make verbal statements about what kind of music I make, perform, or even enjoy- but I started out wanting to basically be a blues musician in a jazz band, and that’s still where I am. All that’s changed is how huge I realize the blues really is; I hear blues in Herbie and Eric Dolphy, but also in Satie and Elliott Carter. It’s more of a musical mindset than anything. We all like to talk (and hear) about “the individual that gives a voice to the group”. In music such as this, I feel the opposite is closer to the point- the group gives a voice to the individual, by putting it in context with other voices.

How did you start your musical journey? How long have you been involved in music?  

I’ve been playing music since around the time my memory begins- age 4- so I don’t really recall any part of my life when it was not a central factor. I remember breaking the toy drum kit my brother gave me for Christmas while playing along to “Get Back” at 5, learning Zeppelin songs on bass when I was 6, moving to Alaska and getting into jazz and bluegrass… Every stage of my life has music that I immediately associate with it.

Where do you perform live music? Any memorable performances to mind?

Since moving to India in 2016 I’ve played mostly in Auroville and Pondicherry, with only a few outside gigs. There has been many memorable ones, but one in particular always stands out- a trio show at CRIPA with Edmund Held (https://worldmusicevolution.net/edmund-held-trumpet/). He was visiting from Germany, on trumpet. I was playing bass and Suresh on drums, playing standards- “Maiden Voyage”, “Time Will Tell”, a version of “Caravan” with the groove lifted from the ‘Money Jungle’ album- and the whole hour and a half, we turned the place out. Guitar is my first love, instrument-wise, but being a bass player in a rhythm section where you know everything is ‘ON’… nothing beats it.

What things do you like about Auroville’s music scene? Is Auroville a good place for musicians?

The AV music scene is good for musicians because it affords them room to breathe, which is a rare commodity. A lot of people get pigeonholed because they simply don’t have the time to explore and practice in a way that can actually expand their horizons, and here musicians generally have free reign to do this. Between having good practice spaces, a few good venues, and just the nature of the place- artists in general have a very long leash, which is a breath of fresh air.

What things could be better for musicians in Auroville? 

I’ve always felt that we work best and grow under a little pressure- whether that comes from outside or a more internal thing.  Auroville doesn’t put any pressure anywhere. Which is a good thing in general, but it leads to views and approaches that I sometimes find strange; namely, the concept of music as something therapeutic for the musician. In many ways playing can have this effect, but it’s incidental. To play music with this in mind generally makes it very staid for me. Music is first and foremost something to contribute to.

What are your musical inspirations? 

Musical inspirations are far too many to name; off the top of my head, Miles Davis, Albert King, Gil Evans, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman would all be up there. Extra-musically, Albert Ryder and Bill Burroughs have had just as much impact in their own way.

What are your musical aspirations? 

My aspiration is to keep a band together! All my favorite (non-classical) music has been made by ensembles that played together long enough to develop a particular rapport, so that it really was like cogs working in a machine. Suresh and I have played together so long together, but in a full band it’s something else. I don’t really care if I have to tour endlessly or kiss certain comforts goodbye- if I could play a show every night I would!

Do you have any upcoming concerts that you will perform? 

Upcoming concerts are always tricky these days of course, but I hope to finally start working with my own band, suite; the expatriate, this coming December! It’s incredibly exciting- not only finally playing my own music, but working with such amazing musicians! Maarten Visser from Chennai, Aman Mahajan in Bangalore… These are some heavyweight guys, and just to be able to be in the ring with them, so to speak, was and is a real privilege.

How can we find your music and support you? 

My band’s debut album ‘Chimu Fiesta’ is set to be released on the 15th of October! Recorded in December, 2019, it’s finally seeing the light of day- follow me and my band on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. at https://linktr.ee/suitetheexpatriate to find out more and help support a truly ‘homegrown’ music.

George Docking is a music and travel journalist from London, UK. He has been living here for the last six months and is passionate about the Auroville art scene. 

A review of the exhibition by Jasmine Storey

Held at Last School, July 20 to August 7 2021

There is something in Jasmine Storey’s installation that smacks of a particular lineage; not in a stiff-collared academic sense, but one more transcendental, Borgesian- indeed, “every writer creates his own precursors.” Well, the same may be said for all the arts, and here at Last School on a hot summer late afternoon, I was privileged enough to commune with them myself, through Storey’s monumental installation. 

The first striking aspect was the play of natural light on the paintings, which indeed was not at all accidental. “I wanted it to be about the space first,” Jasmine explains, and true enough, perhaps the most remarkable facet of her work as a whole is that it manages to make the space breathe. This is something perhaps taken for granted, yet one look at an overview of contemporary installation art quickly shows how rare this facet actually is. Due to the school’s open structure and her use of transparent plastic as a substrate, constantly changing light hits surfaces and edges at varying angles at different parts of the day, adding another dramatic layer to the work. This aspect only now reminds me of the first artist that came to mind when viewing Storey’s exhibit, Georgia O’Keefe. There is an obsessive simplicity, a precision of both intention and execution, and a vision of nature as an unblemished whole that the two artists share to an exhaustive degree, with Jasmine’s cloudscapes leaning more toward abstract impressionism- her huge pink canvas catches, or rather produces, light in a way I’ve only otherwise seen in Philip Guston’s early masterpieces. Similar, her stormy skies had a distinctly negative quality, a feeling of light being sucked inward, toward some indefinable break in the firmament. 

“Well, Monet, obviously,” she answers, when I ask about her influences. At first I pass it off with a semi-confused wave- ‘obviously, of course…’ But it makes more sense the more I puzzle over it. What I saw as a Rothko-esque expressionism in the size and alchemic light properties of her canvases was not a single emotional outpouring, but the adoption of “a medium of contemplation”. The clouds are Storey’s personal water-lily pond- to observe, to feel that curious sense of both ownership and amazement over, to try and capture as world-within-world- a friend, an object, a subject, and a continual source of inspiration. This is art that invites the viewer not into an alternate universe of fantasy, only a different stratum of their own; this is the aspect that still gives such a pastel, dreamlike exhibit the ability to shock. 

“But after breath and breaking shadows,

Past the grandiose glow,

What am I left with?

And where do I go?”

So reads one of the canvases of poetry that hang side-by-side with the paintings, and it is a telling one. Where does one go at the end of any journey, including and perhaps especially the AV school system? Walk In The Clouds is a crafted space of gentle defiance, against any sense of finality. There is beauty to be found in chaos, it says, if we only look up with a serious eye once in a while.

Article by Dhani Muniz

This sluggishness extends furthest in the realm of his painting, the area of Tagore’s artistry that has been roped off most sullenly by his detractors and People Who Know Best. These gatekeepers are of the opinion that his visual works are ‘amateurish’, the obsessive doodles of an old man and a great mind that finally required an outlet for its more mundane wanderings. After all, this aspect of such a respected figure is almost too much to bear for educated India- an old man who took up a discipline as enduring and demanding as painting at the age of sixty? While still cranking out stories, poems, and lectures at a mile a minute? And not even calm, reflective paintings. No, these are pictures of a sort that  makes sour-faced old Brits cough up their tea- cadavers like Brian Sewell and Mark Currah have labeled them “abysmal hash” and “expressionless”. “Repetitive and uniformly non-committal”, oozed William Feaver in the Observer… Precisely what they were saying about Rothko before the reliably intelligent started praising him enough to drive the prices up.

And where were they for Tagore? Naturally silent. Indeed, these sorts of posthumous evaluations are the best place to observe outdated criteria in the heat of action. The strange, haunted colors of his work were lambasted as “muddy”. So Impressionistic? For the same accusations were leveled at Monet. In truth, Tagore puzzled the Western art establishment, in much the same way that his  staunch anti-nationalism puzzled many of his fellow citizens. Here was someone who, by all indications, was a desert rose of the scene. Poetry, politics, drama, music, everything came to him apparently without effort, with all the subtleties one might expect from a man whose education truly never ended. So that when he finally landed on painting, the expectation was an immediate mastery; but the terms of that mastery were never discussed. Writing and music don’t carry the weight of the whole visible world with them; in this sense, they are easier to dismount from expectation. A certain playfulness of intention is there which is harder to bring out in line and colour. 

A key element here is the inherent non-Western approach of his art. The lack of spatial perspective in his paintings, together with a clear favor for mood and colour over all, betrayed an important element of Tagore’s artistic practice- the grey area of intention. A key feature of his writing is  a particularly subconscious sense of language that seems to evoke images and emotions with uncommon immediacy, tying the word directly to its contextual ‘place’ and eliminating the middle man, so to speak. Almost like breaking the fourth wall- forget the narrator, you’re in it now. In painting, he seemed to view his job as a similar one, that is to bring the world and the viewer a little closer together (similar ideas seem to lie behind some other groundbreaking Indian art of the time- works by Ramkinker Vaij, Rathin Mitra, Nirode Mazumdar, for example- but their focus on a single discipline made them harder to ridicule). 

Relatively few of his works are named and dated, so discussing them can be difficult. But it is time they were discussed properly, for at root I believe that within Tagore’s artistry lies the way forward for all arts. Influenced by German expressionism, the scrimshaw art of New Guinea natives, and the Haida carvings of the Pacific Northwest, there is a panhuman artlessness in these paintings that conveys an almost palpable compassion and sensitivity. In one, a faceless nude- only legs, raised arms, and part of a torso visible- reclines on a carved red divan in a darkened room. A shadow falls on the side of the seat, while an extinguished lamp stands sentry-like behind. What is it about these shapes and colours that evoke something so particular, so distant and yet so real? The meaning of Contextual Modernism is crystal-clear here, as Tagore’s intentions seem to be inverted from those of most artists; instead of singling out elements and taking them out of context to create an effect, he changes certain elements in order to create an effect that is still dependent on the whole. The grey skin of the woman and the red divan are both coloured and textured in a way that make them stand out, not only as elements in a greater whole, but objects in their own right, imbued with particular power but taking direction from their surroundings. The thick black etchings he uses for outlines thus take on a sculptural quality. In another, dated 20.10.37, several times of day appear as if interwoven, as deep daytime blues highlight a strip of sky while the trees are engorged by a rusty twilight. The hardness of the dappled trees that lean this way and that, yawning in and out of the foreground, betray Tagore’s brisk, often violent technique. And in the lower right-hand corner, a band of five men and/or women who appear so utterly cloaked in dim evening that any assumption of ghostliness would be natural; all in robes, it is impossible to tell whether the figures are moving or stationary, smiling or frowning. They appear to exist in some in-between world, heightened by the strange dreamlike blending of perspectives.

Of course, Tagore’s favorite visual material, much like his writing, was the daily life of the materially poor of India, the Dalits. Most of his scenes are culled from the slow but deep grooves of life in rural India, yet it is not their ‘reality’ that makes his work so meaningful, but the way in which it manages to straddle worlds. It now remains impossible to overlook the viscerality, not only of Tagore’s brushwork, but his vision- of an art created not to honor the past or attempt to shape the future, but to amplify the absolute present; where the violence of hues that so many critics decried as “muddy” is revealed as a rush to capture the fleeting impression of the Thing upon the Soul, and the strange murky light that travels through his work like some bright shadow to be the light of Memory.

By Dhani Muniz

I’ve heard the phrase “I have no country” quite a bit… In a place like Auroville, it’s an inescapable sentiment. Built right into “Imagine”… I got a shirt with part of the line about dreamers written on it from one of the Visitor Center shops when I was 6, and refused to stop wearing it until it was weatherbeaten beyond recognition. They had to force it off me… Good times.

That kind of basic fraternal spirit is built right into the whole idea of Auroville. And the idea is what really comes through when you see this kind of place on vacation as a six-year old. But how does it pan out in day-to-day life? More often than not, we tend to retain our boundaries- with people, thoughts, language- simply out of comfort. Which makes this place a remarkable exhibit of the role art must come to play in any society, and especially in an international one- more than ever, it must be relied upon to communicate those things which are too important, vague or unwieldy for verbal description. 

There’s a touch of the Indian in basically all the art that comes out of this place- how could there not be, after all? A fascination with the East and all it seems to stand for is almost a prerequisite for discovering Auroville in the first place. But then what is “Indian-ness” in say, painting? At first glance, it’s a concoction; M.F. Hussain’s Cubist deconstruction, Jamini Roy’s bold decorative patterns, Abindranath Tagore’s Japanese-style wash-painting, F.N. Souza’s oft-tormented expressionism, Satish Gujral’s intensely personal symbolism, Ram Kumar’s all-out impasto abstractions- all these figurehead creators, no matter the sometimes radical differences in their styles, share a deep connection. They were/are the product of the common reliance among Indian artists on outside source materials in trying to depict a modern view of their own country. 

The artistic symbols that we associate with India are real, tangible things; tigers, clay pots, courtesans, depictions of rural life, classical musicians, etcetera. Even the more abstract works of Biren De and Om Prakash are still quite culture-specific, in that their choices of form, colour and line clearly reflect a holistic worldview with a philosophical center that has remained relatively unchanged in the modern world. But are these still the images that fulfill the role of art in contemporary India?

Traditionally, art in India has carried a specific role/function, and one that is becoming less and less functional as the combination of secularization and (especially) the growing affiliation between religion and politics continues to undermine the deeper significance of many cultural symbols. This makes much of Indian art difficult to grasp, not only for cultural ‘outsiders’, but for many Indians themselves. The class boundaries that set artists apart here was once a primary issue for the first wave of ‘moderns’ to tackle- painters like A.N. Tagore and B. Sen were among the first to reach into the earth  and sky of their homeland to come up with a distinctly Indian art that had little to do with any sense of nobility. The boundaries that still separate so much of the country from each other have since become more of a talking point in art, a central theme rather than an issue to be solved. The postmodern reliance on irony and juxtaposition has merely created its own sub-genres, without resolving any of the problems inherent in the domestic arts establishment. 

There are many factors contributing to this strange state of affairs, many of which I’d like to talk about separately, but one stands out as being perhaps the hardest to overcome. Perhaps because of the upper-class history of much traditional art, great artists themselves are not afforded anywhere near the same kind of public respect as they are elsewhere. The Indian government does not bother itself with promotion of the arts, especially as it attempts to modernize the nation while keeping the culture ‘intact’ (the ultimate fool’s gold of post-colonialism). The ultimate realization of this strange mixture of disinterest and ineptitude took place more than thirty years ago, yet still casts a long shadow. It had to do with two of the greatest figures in Indian art, years after they were both dead and their work was thought to be beyond routine question. The first of these two men had once offered this plea to his fellow countrymen, against an ethnocentric, overly polemical approach to the arts:

“When in the name of Indian art, we cultivate with deliberate aggressiveness a certain bigotry born of habit of a past generation, we smother our soul under idiosyncrasies unearthed from buried centuries. These are like masks with exaggerated grimaces that fail to respond to the ever-changing play of life… I strongly urge our artists to vehemently deny their obligation… to produce something that can be labeled as ‘Indian art’ by conforming to old-world mannerisms. Let them proudly refuse to be herded into a pen like branded animals that are treated as cattle and not as cows.”

It’s remarkable that such strong words uttered almost a century ago have not diminished in their instructive value. The speaker was the subject of my next article, Rabindranath Tagore himself an astonishing late-bloomer of a visual artist whose lack of formal training was if anything a boon, granting him a textural and chromatic sensitivity that was riveting in its perfectly integrated, seemingly casual balance of calm and violence. This overwhelming sense of will manifested through medium also imbues the work of Tagore’s colleague at Shantiniketan, the great sculptor and painter Ramkinkar Vaij. Neither men were interested in classical notions of what art ‘should be’, in the Indian nor Western consciousness, instead aiming to create a unique new form- one that reflected its origins without being focused on them. 

In 1984, a bronze bust of Tagore, made by Vaij, was installed on a promenade along Lake Balaton in the town of Balatonfure, Hungary, where Tagore had received medical treatments in 1926. When West Bengal’s Cultural Minister, Jatin Chakraborty, unveiled the bust in a special ceremony, he remarked that it didn’t really “look like” Tagore, and that it would probably have to be replaced. Eventually, enough outcry from figures such as Satyajit Ray meant the upset was forgotten. The bust has since been replicated by the Indian government and gifted to countries such as Israel and Finland.

What is there to say to an arts establishment like that? Not much that Tagore didn’t already sum up so succinctly- that it is, sadly but finally, up to our contemporary artists to “refuse to be herded into a pen like branded animals that are treated as cattle and not as cows.” 

After a healthy bit of frustration, I recently decided to try and make it a point to go to all exhibitions with a clear head- not even necessarily stone-cold sober, but without having read even the tiniest blurb about the artwork itself, what it’s about, nothing. The dry run is the master take.

            It was a desperate shot that worked out in spades. My eyes were no longer on a leash; my brain was not looking for anything in particular, thus allowing me to see the work and connect with it as part of my surroundings, rather than searching the canvas for hieroglyphic clues to its meaning.

            This attempt at seeing differently coincided uncannily with Claire Iono’s exhibition Hidden Cities at Centre D’arts. Works like hers would once have had me examining them like alien minerals, to try and understand them, rationalize them. Just in time, then, for paintings like these would once have been a source of sleepless nights… There is a longing for purity, even self-effacement, in the cloudy whorls of colour that make up Iono’s canvases, which once might have been lost on me; I would have been too taken up with the dyke-like structures and quietly violent textures of In The Middle of Something to look beyond associations with Atlantis, the pursuit of martyrdom, and musings on the cyclical nature of man’s evolution.

            Which would have been missing the point, naturally. It is precisely the lack of solid context that makes Hidden Cities as a whole so liberating; it stands firmly outside the Venn diagram of contemporary art, where abstract expressionism and social realism each rally behind their mutually estranged political passions without much thought (ironically enough) for the right context that might actually get people out of their chairs. Iono’s work is full of both vagueness and intention, as if she is fully aware of the physical impossibility of expressing what she wants to express in physical terms- indeed, there is an ornery humor standing alongside the blue calm of Somewhere In The Light, with the gold-centered squares offering a perfect (and consequentially, non-dogmatic) balance with the submarine world abstractly depicted. Barnett Newman liked to say that if the common man could understand his work, there would be peace on Earth. The Thin White Stripe, God, the All-Powerful- how could you sin after that? Iono’s feels more about balance than the One Truth- where would God hang without our billions of blue backgrounds?

            My first thought upon entering the exhibition was “oh, wow, another Brion Gysin fan!” Indeed, Claire’s washes of mineral colours (carefully balanced between tempera, acrylic, and watercolour textures), large empty spaces, sparse compositions and evocations of large indeterminate swathes of land and sea seemed to me to come straight out of Gysin’s chameleonic book of ideas- even the netted ink lines of the ‘dykes’ carried a strong whiff of something like his 1974 Plateau Beaubourg prints. To my surprise, Claire had never heard of him, but seemed to enjoy the fact that I could relate her work to something that already carries a great deal of personal meaning for me.

            This was a fascinating idea. In her draughtsmanship and textures Iono brings me into contact with another part of myself, a part that I had previously thought was linked to only a handful of very particular shapes, colours, ideas. It seems now that this link is more dynamic than concrete in nature; it relies on motion, natural expansion, to indicate its kinship with all things. Both in the inner mechanics of her work and her pleasure at the range of interpretations it inspires, Iono too is a chameleon- offering an intense spiritual loneliness in two dimensions, in order to afford us some spiritual comfort in the realm of three.

By Dhani Muniz

Installations are the Biggest Deal in the contemporary art world. In terms of both influence and prestige, they’ve arguably outstripped old standbys like painting and sculpture (and it really wouldn’t be much of an argument), while lending an entirely new air to the galleries, museums, plazas and public spaces they populate, each piece a bigger question mark, an eyebrow raised ever higher in the direction of the age-old capitalist institution of buying and selling art.

            So why then, are some of the least visceral, least human, and most conceptually dense works of the past quarter century or more installations themselves? Artists like Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons (just as Robert Morris and Frank Stella did before them) shamelessly exploit the Western upper-class need for over-intellectualized art that also doesn’t need to be explained- any rich collector or institutional representative can look at the work, understand it (based on intense theoretical explanation, naturally), and then forget all about it; it has been digested, understood.

            With its roots deep in the reactionary politics of the Cold War era, Conceptualism has decreed that the process is the only thing that truly matters when evaluating art, since process is the only artistic element free of the capitalist model- one doesn’t require paint or clay or a studio to think, does one?- and thereby the only element off of which one could theoretically base a non-capitalist art world. Unsurprisingly, the Conceptualists might be the movement most mired in capitalist excess themselves, with their own works and public feuds only illustrating and embellishing the unbridgeable wealth gap that exists between the famous and the less so, taking massive payouts from morally dubious sources (Rockefeller Foundation, anyone?) in order to present art that is itself a mirror for the moral bankruptcy  of the (post)modern world. And so on and on it goes, both the exploitation and ‘sign systems’ growing ever more macro… Meanwhile in the galleries, Marcel Broodthaers nomadic museum brought out the Zeitgeist with greater verve than anyone and remained unpurchased, while Jeff Koons’ metallic balloon dog sold for $58 million.

            All this gave me a distaste for much Conceptual art, at least in the forms in which I’d encountered it previously. Coming to Auroville changed all that, however. I realized my distaste stemmed from a feeling of disconnection that accompanied most of the works I had seen or experienced, a feeling it seemed the artist(s) had gone to great lengths to create and amplify in order to make a statement, whether political, social, or simply as a comment on the fragmented nature of consciousness. In Supriya Pava’s work I found a different and particular kind of installation, a Conceptualism greatly aided by its surroundings in making its point.

            Supriya’s installation for Aurinoco is a many-faceted work that still manages to stand unified. Built largely from plastic waste, the toxic material is used here in a completely different way than her installation at Solar Kitchen. There, the trash had changed form totally, it was reborn as a completely different material, with the warm earth tones of the Thermocol bricks suggesting a return to nature for even the most unnatural and man-made of materials. Here, that unnatural quality is on full display.

            My very first impression was of an old illustration of the Tower of Babel; it’s chaotic and there are several languages being spoken at once, yet there is undeniably something happening, something moving forward, a progression. The centerpieces are two huge faces confronting each other, one male and one female, constructed in a skeletal fashion from welded metals and coloured with an astonishing range of waste material. Cellophane and polypropylene wrappers, woven industrial plastics, single-use bags, old string- all of it is present, and what’s more, it is used. This is the critical point here, for in these particular environmental/social ventures, ‘art for art’s sake’ can take somewhat of a heavy aesthetic toll. But Pava demonstrates a very big eye indeed, as she worked through the tangles of waste with amazing dexterity, both emotional and physical. The integration is quite seamless, particularly in her use of checkered weaving techniques that create an evenness of surface that’s balanced out by the more  wayward materials. The colour scheme and the way it differs in the two faces is also notable, with silver and reds at the ‘center’ of both, a range of blues highlighting the male face and yellows accenting the female one.

            The centerpieces on their own are not the whole work, however, and the accompanying elements have an equal role in the creation of the installation. On each side of the heads is a large painting (although they don’t act much like paintings in context; more like flat sculptures). Painted on waste plastic as well, they depict black stick figures on bright, torn backgrounds full of indefinable shapes. While the style first brings to mind the great Basquiat, this is too easy an association, based on a superficial similarity- the real question here is “who is the primitive?”. The one who paints strange, joyous images on bits of waste plastic, or the one who throws away all that precious material without a second glance?

            Right in between the two faces, acting as a sort of moderator, is the last piece of the puzzle. A sheet of plastic, the top three-quarters of which are covered with coloured squares, L’s, and arrows, while the bottom quarter is a chess board. What a chase! Back to modernist symbolism we go, and isn’t it wonderful? Arrows, letters, shapes pointing in all directions-  what else but the confusion of contemporary life, with its material and emotional surpluses driving back all forces of reason? At the bottom of it all, the great chess-board, where everything must be spilled out sooner or later, to be either kept or discarded. And on each side, an archetypal force, brimful of memories and associations but also  quite naked, self-aware yet animated by the unconscious as if by ancient runes.

            This is an installation, and it is meant to be absolutely present; it is made of trash, after all, and coming within a meter or so of it your nose will tell you as much. And, sitting outside in the elements, it’s naturally expected to have a shelf-life of sorts as well. But, unlike so much of the art that falls under  these categories, Supriya’s creation for Aurinoco strives to exist on several planes at once. It is a form of protest- as Conceptual and environmental art often are- but her usage and manipulation of space, the psychological implications of her work, and its stubborn refusal to be tied to either Matter or the self-consciously temporary stylings of many of her peers, entitles her installation to a unique position- that of something that can live on, if it only wishes to.

By Dhani Muniz

(Photos by Piero Cefaloni)

Morton Feldman, the more I dive into his life and work, seems increasingly like a quiet prophet that is still being digested by humanity. His fierce individualism was indeed just that- he was not interested in taking theoretical concerns to their limits, like his musical adversary Pierre Boulez. Feldman, together with John Cage, Christian Wolff, and a handful of other New York-based composers, were somewhat outcast from the rest of the avant-garde crowd of the 50s, largely in part due to their absorption in the Cedar Tavern scene that was birthing the NY-school of large-scale abstract art.

            The relationship of the arts to one another is something that has deteriorated since the dawn of postmodernism. The idea of analyzing and using concepts in different forms in order to try and attain some measure of objective truth is the mark of all art that considers itself ‘problematic’- a defining feature of all late modern-era work. I often find myself missing this element in many contemporary sounds, so it is a factor I’m trying to make an essential ingredient in my own music.

            I stumbled across something that helped me along quite by accident, in one of those happy alchemical formulations spurred on by the right mixture of stimuli; in this case, the writings of Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, and W.S. Burroughs, a long afternoon walk, and a listening session of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. It was simply a structuring of all three major art forms within the greater context of space. I hadn’t yet read of Feldman’s views on space that he’d inherited from Varese, this idea of the sheer physicality of sound in its right context, but I felt it somewhere.

            Through Burroughs’ radical restructuring of language, I saw the word as taking up space. With his prose hallucinatory and vivid in the extreme, and his grammar being thoroughly unusual and often revelatory, it seemed to me that words occupied space first and foremost, since the sheer amount of information/ideas that could be gleaned from one page stayed in my head all day or longer, alien words vibrating like sympathetic strings.

            Visual art, in the form of Rothko’s daunting canvasses, gave me the strongest impression of art being space. It takes a space and makes it into something else; physically, there is no more nor less, only a rearrangement. To me, this aspect makes the visual medium the most easily sustainable of the three, at least intellectually and spiritually.

            Music, finally, is tasked with creating space. Out of silence there comes sound, the bell of a horn or the f-hole of a bass/cello taking up an entire concert hall, or a record of Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic making the walls shake, breathe, and expand. Spatially, it’s perhaps the most intimidating of art forms, but one of its main distinctions makes it much more forgiving; the aspect of time plays the biggest role in music. Time here isn’t quite analogous to scale in visual art- a bigger, grander painting doesn’t necessarily translate to a longer piece of music. Rather, time translates into detail and, especially, immersion. We can see examples of this from Feldman’s visual inspirations. In Rauschenberg’s Black Painting, which Feldman bought directly from the artist, textured canvas lends an impression of endlessness to the monochrome composition. Light changes suddenly when one views it from different angles, making the two-dimensional work seem, in a way, even more ‘real’ than three-dimensional canvasses; it appears to have been plucked straight out of nature itself.

            In Feldman’s close friend Philip Guston’s abstract work, however, lies his perfect visual counterpart. Discussing his companion’s painterly style, the composer always had plenty to say. “Neither close nor distant, like a fleeting constellation projected on the canvas and then removed, suggests an ancient Hebrew metaphor: God exists, but is turned away from us.” Talking about Guston’s famed canvas Attar, which he himself had purchased, he remarked: “I have the feeling that if I moved it to another wall, it would be an entirely different painting. It seems to be reflecting rather than ordinating phenomena… This explains the painting’s complete absence of weight. But the sensation of what you see not coming from what is seen is characteristic of all Guston’s work.” The phenomenon he describes as being so integral to his friend’s work is evidently something Feldman strove for as well. His method of always composing is completely intuitive, yet careful; he always wrote at the piano, so as to be able to ‘weigh’ the sounds. Feldman’s is a music free of overt system, yet always with a clear goal, and his interdisciplinary approach to conception and composition was absolutely integral to this.

            In the end, it’s this slow, organic approach to composition that gives away Feldman’s innate romanticism. His devotion to sound in itself is unparalleled by any figure since in the world of music. On one hand, it’s easy to point to his more aggressive pronouncements on certain topics, particularly where his heritage was involved. “Because I’m Jewish, I do not identify with, say, Western civilization music. In other words, when Bach gives us a diminished fourth, I cannot respond that the diminished fourth means ‘O God…’  What are our morals in music? Our moral in music is nineteenth-century German music, isn’t it?” Or, perhaps more succinctly (and tellingly): “Polyphony sucks!”

            In this miniature flash of polemic, two of Feldman’s personalities are on display. He makes clear his disdain for Boulez, Berio, and the entirety of self-conscious academic modernism, whose systems often seem to eclipse their own musicality. But, more importantly, it shows Feldman for what he actually was- a sensualist, a deeply sensitive individual whose lifelong goal of ‘not pushing the sounds around’ was less a combative intellectual stance than an act of devotion.

            From a 1975 interview: “For me, sound was the hero, and it still is. I feel that I’m subservient. I feel that I listen to my sounds, and I do what they tell me, not what I tell them. Because I owe my life to these sounds. Right? They gave me a life.”

By Dhani Muniz

Art in itself is a balancing act. But art that attempts to contribute something of worth to the contemporary dialogue, whether politically, socially, or in other forms of commentary, runs an exponentially bigger risk of falling flat. The artist that tries to do this is either consciously or unconsciously going against the very idea of timeless creation; they run the risk of dating themselves, tying their works down to an all-too-specific place and time. The ideal, as so often it is, is a hard-fought middle ground- a happy medium, between what speaks for itself now, and  what can speak for itself later.

            This middle ground was what impressed itself upon me while first looking at Supriya Pava’s new hibiscus sculpture at Solar Kitchen gardens. There was none of the self-conscious, gimmicky feel that accompanies much environmental art, where the process and the proclaimed ‘meaning’ behind the work is responsible for most of its emotional resonance, leaving the structure itself as a sort of Christmas tree of ideas. This was an integral work, a whole.

            Sitting down with Supriya, my questions reflected my curiosity regarding all areas of her work. I was struck by her openness, as well as her well-deserved confidence in her own ideas.

D: Your forms seem to take inspiration from both nature and a more surrealist, unconscious space. Would you say they’re based on a direct dialogue with the subject, or more of an abstract conception?

S.P: Well, my initial inspiration was a hibiscus flower, an orange and pink one. As I was sketching it, it started to move away from the actual form of a flower, toward a more general organic matter. I think I just took the essence of the flower as I felt it… It was done subconsciously. The images, ideas, forms, tones, and compositions that I am daily surrounded with also took shape, took refuge in that sketch. So calling it an abstract conception would be accurate, or perhaps expressionistic art would be most fitting; more based off emotions

that are awoken, as in when looking at a particular object– living or inanimate.

D: How would you envisage your art in relation to its environment? Would you say the setting has more of an impact on your expression, or is it your work that projects itself onto its surroundings?

S.P: Well actually, a good example to use here would be the decision for the colours! In the original design the colour chosen was orange with a hint of pink, much like the flower. But we decided not to go in that direction. The colour of the soil influenced me, and so did the walls of Solar Kitchen … we felt red was a more powerful and correct representation of this form. We wanted to embody the spirit of the environment and the structures around the piece. We wanted it to integrate and not be a foreign body. So, the final plaster was made of that colour… And now we can see how it is, blending in, being accepted in its habitat. The birds rest on it, cobwebs are developing, and plants are shooting up from it. There is no resistance. A toxic material like thermocol has been given a new life. It has been resurrected in nature, as a part of nature.

D: So which would you consider more important in your work, the form or the material? Which has a bigger impact on the final work?

S.P: The shapes, the forms came first. I had the idea of the material I wanted to use, the choice was between plastics and thermocol bricks. The blocks were considered, because it was easier to carve into the forms.

D: And would you consider your art more as recycling or upcycling? That is, is it more a matter  of finding discarded magic in waste and using it as raw material? Or more a matter of finding an aesthetically pleasing way of dealing with trash, and making that in itself the focal point of your art?

S.P: I am an artist whose main area of interest is upcycling art. That’s what I like to dedicate

my time to. I have briefly studied sculpture, and used traditional methods, but it’s not really for me. When I look at pieces of trash, on the streets or in junk yards… I am not repulsed, and I don’t ignore it. I get excited by the discarded items. The possibilities are endless. If I had enough space, it’d all be filled with junk that I collect! Also, I can’t afford to work in the traditional way. The things I find are free, but I don’t like to show the raw materials that are

at the core of it all- I don’t want them visible. So this sculpture could be made of clay or brass for all you know. Knowing that I have taken some trash off of the environment, makes this piece, this process more meaningful for me. As long as I don’t limit my imagination, I have plenty of raw materials to work with.

D: The construction of this work is really unique in that respect; the raw materials aren’t meant to appear ‘raw’, which gives it a completely different feel than so much environmental art these days. Can you walk us through the physical process of creating it?

S.P: Well, we’d contacted a company in Auroville that manufactures thermocol bricks- they use them for making housing structures. We commissioned them to make a large sized block, then drew the shapes on it and then carved it out with the entire sculpture. Honestly, it’s been an experiment, lots of trial and error! The final carve looked very 2d, rigid, very square, not curvaceous as I had envisioned. So we decided to carve out each individual piece to give it autonomy and flexibility. In the process of moving it to Solar Kitchen though, we encountered breaks in the forms. It was really beautiful to witness the carving, with little pieces of thermocol like flakes of snow falling to the ground in the middle of summer.

            The thermocol balls mixed with cement gives it durability but it’s still brittle; the sides break, cracks come up. It was raining too, and sometimes that was affecting its composition. I had a welder build the structure around these thermocol shapes from the ground up. Once erect, we added waste pieces to it- green net, some fabrics, and a little plastics to give it the shape I

desired.

D: So, all in all, did the piece accomplish what you wanted it to accomplish?

S.P: Well, the practical process was successful… and as for the flower, it is just not a flower anymore, it has taken on a life of its own. That’s what I was after. It is soft, while the look of it is hard. It lives in this dichotomy, in this interplay of contradictions; hard and soft, intimidating

yet vulnerable, good nature and toxic nature, beauty and ugliness etc, all together, to be discovered.

            Sometimes though, when I look at it, I forget about all that. It towers over me, providing me with shade. It becomes a place of calm reflection; I see the figure of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, or sometimes a flower as painted by Georgia O’Keefe, or the bright colors of Matisse. Other times it ceases to exist, it blends in with its environment, camouflaged. This piece is open to subjective perspective. It’s open, it’s limitless.

                                                                        —–

                                                            Much like nature.

                                                                                                            – Dhani Muniz

                                                                     ****

‘A New Beginning’, an upcycled art sculpture, is installed in the garden near the outdoor eating area of Solar Kitchen. Made by Supriya Pava, it was funded by AVI USA and organized by AV Art Service with the help of Chandresh, thanks to the support of Angelika and Suhasini.

    Jazz and the visual arts have become fast friends during the past half-century or so. For a genre that’s been represented, for the greater part of its existence, by stark B&W portraits with lots of cigarette smoke and a bluish tint, the range and scope of album covers has grown tenfold since the splintering of the fusion era. Perhaps the immediacy and spontaneity of the music simply demanded a bigger picture, a better way to depict its existential reality? Either way, lo-fi photography, paintings in the style of Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Optical art… these wide-ranging choices of visual representation betray the infinite possibilities of improvised music in our age. Possibilities that, sadly, are being quite under-utilized by many of its exponents.

    The change in artwork mirrors the postmodern dilemma that jazz partly helped to create; how to stay relevant in a style of music that in itself was based off of other music? Early bebop was simply Tin Pan Alley pop changes, played at blistering tempos so as to weed out the weak from the herd on the bandstand, leaving the last ones standing to weave their individual strands of melody until the original tune was all but forgotten. These young black musicians were the virtuosi of their day; Charlie Parker hunted down Edgar Varese on the streets of New York to ask for composition lessons, and a young Miles Davis bragged about being able to hear a door creak and name its exact pitch. Although the term and all the ideas that come with it hadn’t been coined yet, jazz at this stage was very much “black classical music”. Its sophistication came from its concept, its internal logic; the idea of taking the skeletons of popular songs and using them as a springboard for a sort of sustained group dialectic.

    This is an aesthetic that is alarmingly on the wane – it seems to have been dropped by the wayside in favor of more easily summarized ideas. Jazz is assuming part of the Pop mantle; that is, finding the weak points in our endlessly flawed society and gnawing at them. A respectable mission, no doubt, but one that often fits the music like a bad rented tuxedo. Pop music is perfect for social commentary, because of its formula and audience. A pop musician can reach more people with a message, whether it’s simple and direct or winding and intense. The music, by nature, is something that’s meant to move precisely with the times (the Rolling Stones being a shining exception), feeding it and feeding off of it, part of the ever-changing face of the ‘contemporary’. Pop lives existentially, moment to moment, and is therefore able to communicate structured ideas more effectively than other musical forms.

    Now, considering the terms ‘structural’ and ‘existential’ as two philosophical poles, jazz could be the exact opposite of pop. In Robert Palmer’s liner notes to Charles Mingus’ 1960 album Mingus at Antibes, he states “…Mingus and his musicians…were proposing a brand of freedom built on black folk forms… This album captures their freedom-with-order, which was to become a principal influence on Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and the other structuralists of the Midwestern avant-garde almost ten years later, at a peak of interactive intensity.” We see here that in music, unlike most philosophy, structuralism and existentialism can in fact peacefully co-exist. In digging into the structural ideas of African-American folk forms and combining them with the combative existential reality of everyday life (in the form of the aforementioned ‘group dialectic’ approach), jazz was and is able to tackle other, perhaps more ineffable regions of human experience and rationalize them, voice them as pop may voice the looming darkness underneath the daily news. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and CSN&Y’s “Ohio” can thus share the stage without a shred of redundancy.

    This is the dynamic that’s missed more and more today. As the sheer amount of music grows, the closer different styles move – not only toward each other, but toward an obsession with the existential ‘moment’ and the ability of the artist to inform it through structure. It seems like a perfect time to re-evaluate what we consider to be the “essence” of our favorite artists –  what makes/made them tick, and why does their music persist and continue to find new meaning in a world that demands art tailored to its headlines.

by Dhani Muniz

What makes a city a city? Not population, because then we’d be more of a Hamlet of Dawn than a City. Not big buildings, since Citadines, Town Hall, and Solar Kitchen are about the most imposing public structures we have, aside from the Matrimandir. No, the word ‘city’ denotes pace, it denotes movement. Auroville is a city because it’s the site of such a massive experiment because it churns out an almost disproportionate amount of important and relevant ideas about a wide variety of issues- the world of conservation, for example. Water management, plastic alternatives, eco-friendly building materials; Auroville is at the forefront when it comes to new developments in many such fields. But the purely practical side of innovation is still only one side. It’s the universally acknowledged need of these inventions that keep them being consistently produced and improved. But cities are also centers of aesthetic and intellectual discussion, constantly giving birth to new artistic and philosophical concepts due to the natural friction of people of different backgrounds rubbing up against each other.

Now Auroville has no real shortage of this friction, so why isn’t there more discussion when it comes to these subjects- visual art, music, books, poetry? Because people still feel like they live in a small town. You see the same someone on the road six or seven times a day, there’s a good chance you don’t want to criticize their work. Unfortunately, this is the responsibility of the city-dweller! Things move faster in a city, new ideas circle around like vultures, some are shot down by peers… And this is the way things grow. Art has an incalculable impact on our views and our mindset, both shaping and being shaped by it. The most common opinion to hear around these parts when it comes to a concert or an exhibition is something along the lines of “it had a lot of heart in it.” This kind of polite vagueness makes very little sense when you think about it.

Why are we all here in the first place? Because fifty-plus years ago, some crazy, wonderfully passionate people saw the end of the counterculture looming and realized that the work was far from done- so they packed up and found a place to complete it. We are still the counterculture- that is our role- and our art must reflect that in some way if it is to be valid. Sure, we can say something has a lot of “heart” in it, but not without reflecting on the why and the how. We must value experimentation, but only if it is, in fact, experimentation and not subjective posturing. If we criticize it should never be personal- only subjective- geared towards constructive debate and nothing else. When in Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo lambasts Lord Byron’s verse and exalts Walt Whitman’s, he doesn’t do so because he has a vendetta against Byron; only because he sees the greater and more vital of two creative personalities, and praises it as a reflection of his own values.
Auroville is a common dream. That’s what makes it special. But in all shared dreams, there are some aspects that are more precious to some than others. As perhaps the most concentrated melting pot in the world, I would love to see Auroville give birth to its own forms of music, its own art, its own style. I want to see the rest of the world looking here to see the newest expressions, the latest thoughts. But for this to happen, we need a deep sense of exploration wedded to a concentrated, ongoing dialogue about the nature of our creations, why we create, and above all why are our creations necessary. The sense of exploration is already a fundamental characteristic of our community; I hope we can slowly start to bring about the dialogue.
– Dhani Muniz