This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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Reports by trip participants

Tagore in Bangalore

By Sarah Suzuki

Sprawling and choked with traffic, though lushly verdant, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is likely best known as an international IT hub. So perhaps it is a bit surprising to discover that the city is also a rising artistic center. It is home to Suresh Jayaram’s No. 1 Shanthi Road, a multifunctional art space and residency program that just marked its tenth anniversary. Not far away, Sunitha Kumar Emmart oversees the eponymous Gallery SKE, one of India’s most innovative contemporary art galleries, which is housed in a fairy-tale cottage with gingerbread trim. And in 2000, Bengaluru was selected as the site for the third location of the National Gallery of Modern Art, joining branches in Delhi and Mumbai. In 2009 the former Manickyavelu Mansion, a colonial-style manor built in the 1930s and sited on several green acres, opened following a renovation of the existing building, and an addition to house supplementary gallery space and an art reference library. In the airy, domestic-scale spaces of the historical building, I found a surprisingly rich display of works by three members of the esteemed Tagore family: Rabindranath (1861–1941), and his nephews Gaganendranath (1867–1938) and Abanindranath (1971–1951). Each of these artists made a distinct and exceptional contribution to India’s modernist tradition, but it is quite rare to find examples of their work to study in person.

A brilliantly talented polymath who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the poet Rabindranath was credited with reviving Bengali literature and music, and charted a new pedagogical course for artists at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, where students were encouraged to loosen the tight reins of studio academicism in favor of observation and a life integrated with nature. His own work tended toward studies of vaguely mysterious figures. Abanindranath was a founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, and sought to incorporate traditional Eastern methods, materials, and ideals into contemporary practice. In creating what would come to be known as the Bengal School, Abanindranath sought to rediscover nationalist themes and subjects that predated the colonial period. His brother Gaganendranath was interested in a similar kind of synthesis, but he pushed his formal experiments toward a Cubist syntax, with fractured facets and partial planes, in a visual style that was uniquely his own. The Tagore name echoes throughout any study of India’s recent history of art, and in Bengaluru, one can discover the many moods and moments of its artists’ oeuvres.

North_West_South_East

By Rattanamol Singh Johal

In my new role as MoMA’s C-MAP fellow for Asia, which I assumed in January 2016, my first assignment was to plan the annual group trip to India and Bangladesh—with only a couple of weeks to organize travel for a group of seven people from six museum departments (Media and Performance Art, Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Library and Archives, International Program). The nearly two-week itinerary was to include visits to artist studios, museums, galleries, the India Art Fair, and the Dhaka Art Summit. Though I am tempted to offer a blow-by-blow account, I trust that the collective publication of the group’s individual reports on post will achieve that end. This, then, is a collection of short snippets—highlights, if you will—from each city.

New Delhi, India’s capital, is also arguably the country’s busiest hub of art-world activity. The city’s network of institutions range from the imposing state-run museums and academies to prominent galleries dealing in modern and contemporary art, small nonprofit spaces, and a range of cultural activities supported by foreign embassies and foundations. In the midst of this, there is also a private museum founded by Kiran Nadar, which is housed in a largely unoccupied (in terms of commercial establishments) shopping mall. It is here that Dayanita Singh had set up her Museum Bhavan, or “Bureau of Museums” (bhavan loosely translates as ‘building,’ but often connotes an institutional site for the activities of state bureaucracy). The artist’s intervention took place through a series of specially designed wooden structures—boxes, columns, screens—that housed selections of black-and-white images from her vast photographic archive. These “mini-museums,” which she constantly arranged and rearranged as she conversed with invited interlocutors, appeared thematically organized along a logic largely governed by subject-matter associations—for example, the “museum of little ladies,” the “museum of chairs,” etc. Over the course of the afternoon we were there, the “museum of erotics” slowly emerged as the result of a dialogue between Singh and Shanay Jhaveri, observed by a small group composed primarily of art-world insiders.

Our next destination was Goa, known for its extensive coastline dotted with beautiful beaches and its lush hinterland scattered with sleepy villages. The current state of India’s metropolitan areas, riddled with issues of uncontainable population growth, pollution, astronomical living costs, and insufficient infrastructure, has pushed many artists, across different generations, to relocate either full-time or for part of the year to Goa. Indeed, one wonders how long Goa can sustain this inflow, given its already bustling tourist economy, but for now it offers a lifestyle that is scarcely available elsewhere in India. Nikhil Chopra, whose career I have been following for nearly a decade, chose to relocate here from Bombay with his family. This shift has transformed his practice significantly, adding to it something of the roles of a mentor, pedagogue, catalyst, and institution builder (though he would probably never label himself as such!). Chopra, along with Madhavi Gore and Romain Loustau, transformed a Portuguese-era hotel into the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a residency-cum-exhibition space for young and emerging artists working in performance. This is an important initiative for a number of reasons, not least of which are the region’s sparse landscape for performance-art pedagogy and residencies as well as the unusual event (at least in India) of an established, mid-career contemporary artist’s devoting substantial time, attention, and resources to nurturing a younger generation.

Bangalore, a city that has grown exponentially over the past two decades owing to a booming information technology industry, is also home to an alternative art scene with strong leanings toward experimental film, media, sound, and photography. Our relatively brief visit here introduced us to number of unfolding trajectories, beyond the practices of well-established artists such as Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N., emphasizing the need to return when we have more time on our hands. I found it particularly useful to understand the sustaining influence of Srishti—a private institute of art, design, and technology—which was set up in 1996. A number of artists experimenting across media, including Ayisha Abraham, Shai Heredia, and Abhishek Hazra, currently teach at this relatively young institution. Here, again, it seems that a platform for interaction among different generations of practitioners has been incredibly generative.

The final stop on our trip had us flying east to Bangladesh whose capital city was once again playing host to the biannual Dhaka Art Summit. This platform promised to bring together art and artists from across the subcontinent and farther afield, presenting a very ambitious series of exhibitions (six at my last count), panel discussions, a writing workshop, and a film program on the premises of the Shilpakala Academy (the state academy of fine art). The consolidation of all the summit’s activities across one venue allowed visitors to easily engage with most of the programming offered. One exhibition that stands out in my mind, titled Rewind, was curated jointly by Sabih Ahmad (Asia Art Archive), Amara Antilla (Guggenheim Museum), and Beth Citron (Rubin Museum) with Diana Campbell Betancourt (the Summit’s artistic director). The small show presented a gathering of little-known late-modernist works from across the region, revealing diverse engagements and interests in textiles and tapestries (Rashid Choudhury, Monika Correa), painting (Zahoor ul Akhlaq), printmaking (Krishna Reddy, Safiuddin Ahmed, Anwar Jalal Shemza), photography (Lionel Wendt), and projected image (Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee). A research publication or catalogue would have greatly enhanced the understanding and reception of the exhibition’s historical implications (and, undoubtedly, also bolstered the marketability of the works/artists included). As a broader observation, it seems that almost every exhibition at the Summit contained the kernel of an extended presentation in a museum-like setting accompanied by a publication and programming. In its current format, with a limited three-day run (we are told the next one will go ten days) and the need to move works and people across tense international borders, this is understandably both logistically and financially difficult. That said, the research outcomes, speculations, and possibilities for further exploration laid out by each of the exhibitions are rich and compelling.

Art-Driven Adaptive Reuse in Several Indian Cities

By Jennifer Tobias

During recent C-MAP visits to Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Bangalore, and Kochi, I noticed how artists and gallerists are adapting neglected and abandoned structures for use as studio, exhibition, and performance spaces. This caused me to wonder about preservation policies in India, and artists’ unofficial role in relationship to them.

I learned that various public and private institutions address preservation, but also that there’s no national mandate for buildings less than one hundred years old. At the city level, initiatives vary. As a result, preservation and adaptive reuse are often the results of enlightened self-interest as much as organized planning. And that’s where the art community comes in. Several examples encountered during 2015 and 2016 C-MAP visits to India are discussed below.

Along Mumbai’s Marine Drive I noticed beautiful Art Deco buildings in various states of repair (Mumbai is said to be second only to Miami, Florida, in its number of Art Deco buildings).¹ Regarding their preservation, it seems that in Mumbai, as in many cities, public initiatives and private developments form what is a patchy safety net. At the international level, the district was proposed for UNESCO World Heritage site status in 2013 (Delhi’s Old City was chosen instead),²while on the local level, artist groups are starting to incorporate Deco preservation into their missions.³

New Delhi has its own architectural identity, and adaptive reuse patterns reflect it. Yet like Mumbai, economic growth and a swelling urban population are driving much of the demolition and rebuilding, often destroying significant modern architecture in the process. A case in point is the planned demolition of the Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion by Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj at Pragati Maidan (1972). Recent efforts to save these endangered icons of Indian modernism demonstrate complex social and legal forces at work.⁴ As a representative from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) put it: “More than the fact that there is difficulty in wrapping one’s head around the idea of modern architectural heritage, it is the bureaucratic apathy that is causing trouble.”⁵

The C-MAP group also visited Bangalore, a thriving, tech-driven city. One writer claims that the city has more alternative spaces than traditional galleries, positing that “in the absence of government infrastructure or commercial enterprise, artists and art students have taken on the responsibility of leading Bangalore’s art scene.”⁶The group visited an exuberant example: 1Shanthiroad, a collective founded by artist and historian Suresh Jayaram and designed by architect Meeta Jain.

In Goa, the group visited the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a one-hundred-year-old Portuguese-style villa turned hotel turned artist residency space founded by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore, and Nikhil Chopra. Artists from all over the world come here to share seven studios, several bedrooms—and a cat. Pleasant shared spaces have been adapted to facilitate interaction among residents but also with the community beyond, which is invited to visit during the program’s regular open studio days.

Of all the sites visited, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an ongoing project to integrate architecture of the past into the city’s present and future, is the most expansive example of artist-driven adaptive reuse. Kochi is a historical port town on India’s tropical southwest coast. Long a center for international trade (especially of spices), the built environment strongly reflects the city’s heritage, especially in its Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial architecture. The biennale is sited within historic venues in or near the Fort Kochi heritage area, from the maritime warehouses known as “godowns” to public parks to former military barracks to empty houses. To visit is to feel thoroughly oriented in place and time, and to experience art in ways that strongly resonate with it.

Aspinwall House, built in the 1860s as a waterfront warehouse and now serving as the biennale’s anchor space, makes this immediately apparent. In this context, Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz’s installation Stopover (2012) is especially resonant. The pair collected and installed more than one hundred wet-grinding stones in a central, symmetrical room that opens onto a small pier. Such stones were once used domestically to grind spices and other ingredients for cooking. Usually embedded in the floor, they were standard fixtures in Indian homes built well into the early twentieth century, but are now being abandoned.

As an installation the stones represent once unmovable objects set in motion by irresistible global forces. One is left to guess at the next site for the stones, the fate of the building, and the future of the biennale as a global force. In this way Stopover and Aspinwall House vividly manifest the spirit of art-driven adaptive reuse that is bringing new life to historic but marginalized structures in Indian cities.

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This informal conversation with Dodiya took place last March in Mumbai as part of the C-MAP Asia trip. It is the second published interview of the collaboration between C-MAP and Critical Collective. Watch the first interview with Nalini Malani here.

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1. On the Second Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

By Cara Manes

Kochi was our first stop on what was, for everyone on this leg of the trip, our first visit to India. We arrived in the major port city of Kochi, in the southwestern region of Kerala, in the middle of the night, and then shuffled into our hotel beds for a few precious hours of rest before venturing into the southern Indian sun toward the main site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Whorled Explorations, the biennial’s second edition, was organized by Jitish Kallat, an internationally esteemed contemporary artist based in Mumbai. Appointed by the biennial’s Artistic Advisory Committee, Kallat was tasked with envisioning a show that “responds to the environment that hosts it,” according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Indeed, since its founding in 2012, the biennial’s mission has been to “draw from the rich tradition and public action and public engagement in Kerala . . . and build a new aesthetic that interrogates both the past and the present.”

Past and present certainly converge in the city of Kochi, where sixteenth-century Portuguese churches are intermingled with spice markets and restaurants on streets filled with auto-rickshaws and goats vying for the right of way. The biennial integrated seamlessly into this dialectical space. Kallat built a conceptual framework for the exhibition around an investigation of oppositional forces, as he explained when we met with him in Dubai a few days before our visit. In his curatorial essay for the catalogue, he cites two historic currents from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that informed his thinking—the maritime explorations of the Age of Discovery and the astronomical propositions made by the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. By examining the location’s history, he aimed to “reflect back or forth in time to understand the present” and to “interlace the bygone with the imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial.” Toward that end, he selected a wide range of works by ninety-five artists from thirty countries that speaks broadly to these themes. He organized the works into installations in eight venues across the city, each one a heterogeneous presentation. Free of any chronological, geographical, or medium-specific constraints, Kallat employed a seemingly more intuitive curatorial logic to create a host of unique, generative juxtapositions. Throughout the exhibition, however, a general leitmotif was discernable: Kallat seemed to gravitate toward work involving globes, compasses, maps, telescopes, and star charts—tools for plotting a course through space and time.

Encapsulating Kallat’s point of view and setting a tone for experiencing the biennial through this lens, Powers of Ten, a well-known 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames, is the exhibition’s opening work. In it, a camera zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds, and then back in at the same rate, so that the pictured image first expands incrementally from human to cosmic scale and then contracts in the same manner. The work is installed at the biennial’s main site, Aspinwall House, the sea-facing compound of offices, residences, and warehouses built for a nineteenth-century British trading company. The physical space itself unfolds as a series of successive rooms in loosely adjoining buildings surrounding a central courtyard, each roughly devoted to one artist or project. Other highlights from this venue include Francesco Clemente’s Pepper Tent, a giant tent painted with scenes inspired by the artist’s travels around the world, and the crowd-pleasing Descension by the well-known Indian artist Anish Kapoor, an abyss-like whirlpool cut into the existing floor, which serves as a literal illustration of the thematic “whorl” of the exhibition’s title.

Interspersed among large site-specific installations by internationally renowned artists such as these were many smaller-scale works by younger artists. Installed in an interstitial space at Aspinwall House, American artist Tara Kelton’s video work depicts a laptop screen placed against the open door at the end of a commuter train in Bangalore that is live streaming video feed from a camera placed at the front of the train, suggesting the sensation of simultaneous time travel. One of the greatest discoveries for me was the work of Kerala-born artist Unnikrishnan C. At twenty-three, he was the youngest artist to participate in the biennial. For his project, installed in the show’s Pepper House venue, he spent two months in Kochi (a few hours from his hometown) recording his observations of daily life in the city by painting figures, objects, symbols, and simple scenes onto individual bricks and arranging them into a site-specific “brick wall diary,” as he has described his project. Unnikrishnan seems to be developing a unique visual language that blends the personal and universal; I look forward to seeing more from him!

2. Notes on CAMP at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum

By Jennifer Tobias

Representing the MoMA Library during the March 2015 C-MAP trip to Dubai, Sharjah, Mumbai, and Delhi, I was most taken by the fascinating institution known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (DBDL), its revival by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (Managing Trustee, Honorary Director, and MoMA International Council member), and the current installation by CAMP, a self-described studio organized in 2007 by Shaina Anand (filmmaker), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer), and Ashok Sukumaran (architect). Visiting with Mehta and two CAMPers on site helped me to grasp a particular segment of the installation—The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition—as a compelling historiographic palimpsest.

As a self-aware de- and reconstruction of a colonial museum, the DBDL is a fertile setting for a meta-exhibition. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai, constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the DBDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Mehta organized an innovative public-private partnership to restore and revitalize the institution, which reopened in 2008. In addition to the structure itself, two salient Raj-era aspects of the institution that survive today are the collection of “Indian manufactures” and model-filled displays presenting a history of Mumbai.

Mehta conceived of artist involvement as a key element of the revived mission. Noting that the collection was originally built with little interest in individual makers, her approach today is to “bring artists back to the center” through enlightened management of the legacy collection, building a contemporary collection, and—most relevant here—a stimulating series of interventions. In this framework, artists (especially alumnae of the related Sir J. J. School of Art) conceive installations that engage the space and the collections, often addressing local culture in light of both the colonial legacy and contemporary social issues.

CAMP’s series of installations, titled As If – III Country of the Sea, brings together segments of the group’s multi-year project examining maritime culture proximal to the western Indian Ocean. The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” segment revisits an installation first realized in 2011 at Lalit Kala Academi in Delhi.That project deconstructed an eponymous 2010 exhibition and symposium (and later a book) organized in the Gujarat port town of Mandvi. The exhibit, initiated by a local historical society, was composed largely of digital reproductions of artifacts held by UK archives as well as private collections, with the reproductions licensed for the duration of the show. Scholars from around the world participated in the symposium, and the show traveled to other sites in Gujarat.

The installation at DBDL constitutes primarily photos of photos of photos. For example, a photograph of a photograph of the annotated checklist (left, top) shows a cryptic and apparently damning list of the show’s organizers. In another example (left, middle), a photo of a photo of primary-source documents, which are held by what is presumably a Gujarati hand, is annotated with the oblique, “Not just Word of Mouth but Slide of Hand On a replica Gujerati navigation log dated 1644.” In a clearer example (left, bottom), a photo of a colonial map of Gujarat is updated with present-day claims by British Gas. Although it’s difficult to do a close reading at this remove, CAMP’s argument is clear: they object to the use of colonial spoils licensed back to its subjects, and they charge that limiting local informants to a caste of Hindu seafarers failed to account for the diversity of the colonial period and the present.

As an art-making strategy, Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” is an excellent foil for CAMP’s more critical (if less edited) larger project about contemporary maritime culture in the region. Where the original show featured aura-deprived reproductions of colonial spoils, CAMP’s larger project counters with a barrage of ostensibly collaborative contemporary media (radio, cell phone data, video, shipping records) and extended (if coy) interpretive texts. If the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” show can be criticized as unreflective colonial nostalgia, CAMP’s work errs in the other direction: it is anthropological in its thoroughness and reluctance to draw explicit conclusions.

I conclude that this is precisely the point of the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” : to engender critical thinking about the historiographic endeavor. Experiencing this in person, in the DBDL context, and from the C-MAP perspective, was a wonderful object lesson.

3. Studio Visits in Mumbai and Delhi

By Sarah Lookofsky

In Mumbai we met the artist Shilpa Gupta in her studio. She gave us an overview of her diverse practice, particularly her most recent works. I was especially struck by the site specificity of her practice, since I had previously understood her work, which I had encountered in European museum contexts, as abstract and conceptual. Upon speaking with her about her most recent pieces, it was clear that most of her practice is deeply invested in the Indian context, particular the deep scars of partition that persist in the present. For instance, she spoke of a recent untitled body of work (2013–14) that addresses the Chitmahals, the Bangladeshi minority enclaves in India and vice versa—sites where 51,000 people effectively live within a hostile nation. Gupta’s presentation made me ponder two important phenomena that impact the global circuits of contemporary art: on the one hand, it is often the more metaphorical and conceptual works that circulate internationally and, on the other, works that have a local specificity take on a more metaphorical meaning once they leave local audiences and their frameworks of reference behind.

In Amar Kanwar’s New Delhi studio, among other topics, the documentary filmmaker discussed his forays into what could be described as narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting to the widest possible audience): screening his films directly to the people who are depicted in them and most affected by them in turn. He has put very considerable investments of time and funds into a continued presence in the remote Indian locales on which his films have focused. For Lightning Testimonies (2007), the site of filming and later screening was the state of Assam; and, for The Sovereign Forest (2012–), a place of continued display was established in Odisha. This direct involvement importantly exists alongside Kanwar’s ongoing screening and exhibiting within both cinematic and artistic contexts, making his practice a unique example of one that engages activism and art at the same time. Kanwar was very insistent that he does not see a contradiction or problem in inhabiting these multiple contexts, and thus different spheres of comprehension, at once, arguing that the problems his works engage—whether sexual violence or economic disenfranchisement, to name just two important examples—are of the broadest consequence.

As our conversation was closing, Kanwar mentioned something that has stuck with me: once he has documented something or completed a film, he is always deeply preoccupied with what he experienced in the moment of shooting but, nevertheless, did not manage to record. This insight struck me as profound in the context of a world that is evermore mediated. Despite our increasing capacity to record everything, there is still so much, for better or worse, that will continue to elude capture.

4. TRANSFIGURATIONS: The Sculpture of Mrinalini Mukherjee

On the flight home from Dubai, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrinalini Mukherjee. For me, a jam-packed trip always creates a collection of lingering afterimages—Dayanita Singh’s collection of “museums” installed in her studio; the brightly colored boats in the Sharjah Creek, which we followed to find Michael Joo’s installation; the gently turning forms of the wind garden that Haegue Yang had installed in a small courtyard in Sharjah’s Heritage District—and occasionally an image that’s insistent, refusing to fade, staying at the front of my mind until I can get back to the library and start digging up more.

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a leading sculptor of her generation in India. However, her work wasn’t widely exhibited internationally, and so for me, the monographic exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, organized by Peter Nagy, was revelatory. I had seen three intriguing examples in the Gwangju Biennial last fall, installed there with photographs by Lionel Wendt, but this show covered it all. Her practice comprised an in-depth material experimentation and relied primarily on dyed hemp fibers for nearly five decades, before she turned to embrace ceramics and later bronze. Her works simultaneously suggest figurative and botanical forms, arising from both nature and modernist strategies, capable of both structure and formlessness.

As a student at the University of Baroda, Mukherjee was exposed to the pedagogical philosophy of K. G. Subramanyan, which embraced equally craft and “high art” techniques and strategies. This intersection can often be a thorny one, difficult to navigate, and it is one of the topics that’s touched on in the current exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from The Collection. Mukherjee addressed this issue head-on in a 1994 interview, noting, “In India the arts have always existed alongside each other, at different levels of sophistication. India has an enormous wealth of craft, and I believe in an integrated approach to art and craft, so I enjoy working with the linguistics developed by the practice of craft. It is through my relationship to my material that I would like to reach out and align myself with the values which exist within the ambit of contemporary sculpture.” (“An Interview with Mrinalini Mukherjee.” In Mrinalini Mukherjee: Sculpture, 11. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.)

5. Beom Kim at the Sharjah Biennial 12

By Laura Hoptman

Beom Kim (Korean, born 1963 in Seoul; lives and works in Seoul) is a conceptual artist who has used many mediums including, most notably, drawing and video to display his particular kind of dry humor, which is delivered with words, figurative drawings done in a childlike style, and multimedia installations. A central figure in the contemporary art community of Seoul for the past twenty years, Kim has become increasingly well-known internationally in the last decade. I first saw his work in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, but it has subsequently been included in the 2005 Venice Biennial, in a one-artist exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which traveled to Redcat in Los Angeles, and in a number of surveys of contemporary Korean art. One of his best-known works is a small installation called A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird in which a video of the artist lecturing a stone on avian transformation plays on a screen located within a facsimile of the set in the video.

A selection of Kim’s drawings and a single-channel video work were on display at the Sharjah Biennial 12, as was a group of Kim’s works that was notably different from any work by him that I had seen before. A cycle of thirteen paintings that the artist began creating in 2008, it was collectively entitled Untitled (Intimate Suffering). Extremely simple, even austere, the series consists of shaped canvases in a variety of sizes that are covered in rough, sepia-colored linen. Some have minimal interventions in black that resemble readable symbols like a dash or a cross. These paintings were displayed in several galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. The last canvas in the series, Untitled (Intimate Suffering #13) was created specifically for the biennial and hung at the SAF Art Space. It consists of a sixteen-foot-high canvas that has been systematically covered with black crosses so that the whole creates a kind of maze-like pattern that causes, when looked at, what Bridget Riley has famously called a “visual tickle.” The elegant simplicity of this group of paintings is a surprising turn for an artist known neither for his minimalist aesthetic nor for his work in this medium. In fact, this work is less connected to Kim’s oeuvre of humorous, mildly absurdist multimedia installations than it is to the history of Korean avant-garde art and, specifically, the work of the Dansaekhwa group, who began exhibiting in the late 1960s. The name Dansaekhwa, which means “monochrome,” refers to artists who were experimenting with the idea of the non-metaphoric painting/object in which space is expressed through concrete, non-illusionistic means that might include staining the surface of the canvas or punching holes in it, or replacing canvas with more porous materials like burlap or paper. In his Sharjah canvases, Kim deliberately places himself in a Korean avant-garde context, one that belies the more generic lingua franca of the Biennial-type installation for which he is best known. This statement of allegiance, clearly abetted by the curator’s choice to represent Kim in this startling way, is visually stimulating, but also exemplary of a personal politics and a point of view. The paintings as paintings are beautiful, and the gesture, as a conceptual move in a varied career, is as bold as it is moving.

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This video is the first in a series of dialogues with Indian artists. It was produced in collaboration with Critical Collective, a Delhi-based initiative committed to archiving and building knowledge about the arts in India and South Asia.

Names and titles of works mentioned in the interview are listed below.

Part 1: Anand Patwardhan, Madhusree Dutta, City of Desires (1991), Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Coomaraswamy Hall – Prince of Wales Museum, Medeamaterial (1993), Jason, Film Division of India, Jean Bhownagary, Vision Exchange Workshop, Dream Houses (1969), Akbar Padamsee, Bhulabhai Desai Institute, Tyeb Mehta, Asha Puthli, Prafulla Joshi, Annapurna Devi, Alaknanda Samarth, Object Relations School, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph, Irma Pick, Judith Butler, Plato, Gamepieces (2003/09), In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), Hindutva, Bhagavata Purana Shiva, Vishnu, Mohini, Ayyappa, Ram, Sita, Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, Wendy Doniger, Transgressions (2001), Kumar Shahani, and Mani Kaul.

Part 2: Nasreen Mohamedi, Altaf, Untitled II (1970), Vision Exchange Workshop, Akbar Padamsee, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Madhvi Parekh, Alaknanda Samarth, Medeamaterial (1993), Progressive Artists’ Group, J. Swaminathan, Jehangir Art Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, Galaxy of Musicians (1857), Re-thinking Raja Ravi Varma (1989), Unity in Diversity (2003), Bertolt Brecht, The Job (1996), Shilpa Gupta, N. Pushpamala, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Amrita Sher-Gil, Frida Kahlo, Diego Riviera, Akbar Padamsee, Syed Haider Raza, and Francis Newton Souza.

Part 3: Partition, Gamepieces (2003/09), Shilpa Gupta, Anand Patwardhan, Reena Saini Kallat, Progressive Artists’ Group, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, J.J. School of Art, Atul Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, Place for People, Sudhir Patwardhan, Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, Muddupalani, Susie Tharu, K. Lalitha, Rekhti, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Dream Houses (1969), Transgressions (2001/14), László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, Syed Haider Raza, and Vasudeo S. Gaitonde.

The post “Partition is what we are living even now”: A Conversation with Nalini Malani appeared first on post.

The vivid memories of the scents and tastes of East Asia have stayed with us long after the trip. We enjoyed delicious dishes prepared by artist Siren Chung for the Chuseok holiday in Seoul, quaffed magic water consecrated by the father-in-law of Japanese artist Wada Masahiro, at the Yokohama Triennale, enjoyed the best tofu while talking to Lee Mingwei about exquisite Taiwanese snacks in a restaurant near the Tokyo Tower, and sipped amazing hibiscus tea infused with sun-dried tangerine peel in the company of artists Lee Minghsueh and Tseng Yu-chin at IT Park in Taipei. It is incredible how food connects people and how many times we chatted over food and drink with art professionals. At such moments, life and art are inseparable.

Two weeks are of course barely enough to take the pulse of the dynamic art scenes in three countries. Numerous galleries, studios, museums, restaurants, and cafes slipped out of our intense schedule.

01. Gwangju Biennale: Okin Collective Intervention in the Exhibition Space

By Yu-Chieh Li

It would be difficult to miss Okin Collective’s intervention in the exhibition space at the Gwangju Biennale. While we were touring the show, a cheerful, amplified voice broke in unexpectedly throughout the day and in a pleasant cadence started giving instructions in English and Korean for performing lung exercises.

Hi everybody. We’re Okin Collective.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

No lung, no art.

Your lungs, our power!

Guards in the exhibition space took part in the performance, by performing the gymnastics, to encourage visitors to participate. The sound piece For the Beloved and Song (2014) was broadcast with exercise instructions at irregular intervals over the PA system in and around the exhibition space, its background music adapted from “March for the Beloved,” the official song commemorating the Gwangju uprising of 1980. The lung exercise is presumably beneficial for general health, but it can also potentially protect practitioners during social and political emergencies. Lungs power the song that recalls the past and prepares for the future.

The political implication of the piece was not perceived quite as directly as this description suggests. As is typical of Okin’s work, the call to exercise was mostly taken at face value. In the exhibition space and on the Biennale Plaza, we saw members of the public performing Tai chi-like movements to the broadcast. Spontaneous participation of this kind diluted the work’s heavy intent.

02. Gwangju Biennale: Yamashita Kikuji

By Sarah Suzuki

Sometimes a work is so good or so strange or so unexpected that it will stay with me for days. Such was the case with Yamashita Kikuji’s 1968 painting Season of Change, installed at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. As I’ve familiarized myself with the art of postwar Japan, I’ve been fascinated with the surrealist tendency present in some of the work. You can certainly see it in the etchings of Chimei Hamada. Born in 1919, Hamada studied art, and upon graduation was immediately drafted into the military. His first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war reverberated in his work for decades to come: his dark, forceful etchings of the mid-1950s depict the tragedy and absurdity of war while revealing his artist’s eye for composition and his ability to use abstract forms to convey horror.

Yamashita (1919–1986) was also drafted and fought in China. His paintings from the postwar period, which drew on his battlefield experience, suggest the hallucinatory, nightmarish paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, in which animals, demons, and humanoid figures interact in scenes of horrific depravity. A pointedly political allegory, Season of Change addresses the power dynamic between the United States and Japan after World War II. Having seen just a few examples of Yamashita’s work before, notably in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), this strange and haunting picture left me curious to know more.

03. Lionel Wendt at the Gwangju Biennial

By Eva Respini

Biennials offer plenty of opportunities to make discoveries. My favorite discovery at the 2014 Gwangju Biennial was not a hot new young artist, but rather an artist who was at his prime in the 1930s and ’40s—the Sri Lanken Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). About halfway through the maze of galleries presenting works (many of them in large installations) by artists active today, I stumbled into a beautiful gallery with approximately 25 modestly sized black-and-white photographs. A closer look revealed that many of the pictures were solarized and montaged, techniques that are hallmarks of photographic experimentation that took place in the 1920s and ’30s. Indeed, the label revealed that Wendt was working in Sri Lanka during the waning years of colonial rule. I was fascinated by the variety and beauty of the pictures, ranging from a handsome portrait of two men in turbans, with its silvery patina from solarization, to a doctored seascape, a photomontage of a boat at sea collaged into a frame reserved for decorative art works. A quick Google search revealed that Wendt was also a musician, critic, and cinematographer and that there is an art center in Colombo dedicated to his legacy. Surrounded by contemporary art, Wendt’s works seemed utterly fresh and surprising, and they held their own in an elegant and quiet way. Since leaving Gwangju, those pictures have made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps a trip to Colombo is in order to learn more?

04. The Belated Funeral as Performance: A Dialogue with Minouk Lim

By Yu-Chieh Li

The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the Gwangju uprising. Remains of civilian victims from the Korean War were carried from an ambulance by blindfolded family members to shipping containers on the square as the May Mothers and high school students looked on. A mourning ritual was enacted in front of one of the shipping containers, surrounded by reporters and Biennale visitors. Spectators were silent; sounds of camera shutters and rainfall dominated the scene. The performance was streamed live both in the exhibition space, where it was shown as a two-channel video installation, and on the website of OhmyNews. The shipping containers holding the human remains were left on the square until the Biennale ended. The next day was sunny. We were amazed to see the square empty and the two containers standing under the blue sky. The bright image presented a striking contrast with the gray scene of the day before. We had loads of questions for Minouk, with whom we had a fifty-minute talk rather than a formal interview. It ended up being a great time for sharing thoughts.

Click here to read the transcript of the dialogue.

05. SeMA Biennale Mediacity

By Jenny Schlenzka

Seoul is a bustling metropolis with lots to observe: high-tech screens beeping and flashing everywhere, hyper fashionable teenagers, K-Pop blaring in all directions, and, of course, tempting flavors from street-food vendors, all clamoring for attention. It wasn’t easy to stick to our packed schedule, but luckily the Mediacity biennial, held at the Seoul Museum of Art, turned out to have its own worthwhile sensations. Founded in 2000, the biennial was intended as a reflection on the media and technology frenzy that is at the heart of Korea’s booming economy.

Whereas former iterations reportedly focused mainly on new-media art works, the 2014 edition included some sculptures, installations and two-dimensional works that gave the exhibition some breathing space and made for a stimulating walk-through. According to his catalogue statement, this year’s artistic director, the artist/film director Park Chank-yong, chose to focus on Asia and aspects of its history that continue to inform the present, though often in forgotten or overlooked ways. The theme of invisibility is hinted at in the biennial’s title Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers, three key words through which to look at Asia’s “experiences of intense colonialization, the Cold War, rapid economic growth and social change in such a short period.”

The biennial presented 42 international artists from 17 countries. Haegue Yang’s Sonic Rotating Ovals (2013), which were installed at the beginning of the exhibition as well as on the top floor, are playful sonic sculptures covered in countless small metallic bells that, triggered by visitors’ movements, make an enchanting sound reminiscent of spiritual or religious rituals. The night before we had had dinner with the artist, who had just moved back to her native Seoul after a long and professionally successful stay in Europe. She told us about her feelings of exhilaration regarding Seoul’s cultural and economic boom mixed with a slight frustration at its slow shedding of the old political and social systems, which make life in Korea more complicated and restricted than she had hoped.

The video SeaWomen (2012) by the young Anglo-Greek artist Mikhail Karikis is an impressive portrait of a community of elderly female sea laborers called haenyeo, who live on a South Korean island and make their living by diving for pearls and seafood. The immersive soundscape of the installation is composed of so called sumbisori, the traditional breathing technique. The sound resembles seabird screams and invokes a sense of the danger these women face in their daily work. None of the laborers in the video seems younger than 50, which leads one to wonder about the sustainability of this ancient matriarchal and communal profession in times of globalization.

Another room featured an extensive archive of the Japanese avant-garde group Zero Dimension, led by Kato Yoshihiro and Iwata Shinichi and active from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of the photos and flyers on display carried images of the group’s so-called “rituals” and “art terrorism,” which the members often staged in public spaces, dressed in costumes and equipped with props. Their activities climaxed with the anti-Expo movement in 1970, captured in the documentary White Rabbit of Inaba (1970). Unlike the Japanese avant-garde artists who got involved in the international mega-exhibition, Zero Dimension protested with rituals in and around Osaka against art’s participation capitalist consumer culture.

A whole chapter of the biennial focused on Shamanism, once the official religion in Korea and still practiced widely today, albeit in reduced form. My favorite contribution, Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) Series (1969–70), was by the photographer Naito Masatoshi, whose portraits of elderly Japanese women shamans are taken at night with a flashlight as the women speak to their deceased husbands and sons, conduct nocturnal prayers, mourning ceremonies, and dances. The vitality and intensity in the women’s expressions, heightened by the lighting, makes one believe in their ability to communicate with the afterworld.

06. Seoul: Soo Sung Lee at Audio Visual Pavilion

By Yu-Chieh Li

Audio Visual Pavilion is an art space that feels like a secret garden hidden in the hustle and bustle of the Korean capital. With traditional tile roofing, a simple residential interior, and plain exhibition rooms of various sizes, it is an anomaly among Seoul’s sophisticated galleries. We saw an exhibition by Soo Sung Lee, who merged his works with the architectural setting, filling every space with light colored, minimalist sculpture, including a pool placed in the yard. The entire pavilion was incorporated into the artist’s work.

07. Yokohama Triennale

By Eva Respini

What happens when an artist curates a biennial? Our group had the opportunity to find out on our first day in Japan, when we traveled 30 minutes by train from Tokyo to the busy port city of Yokohama. The 2014 edition of the Yokohama Triennial was directed by the esteemed photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who is known for his performative recreations of iconic images from art history, from Duchamp’s gender-bending alter ego Rrose Sélavy to Cindy Sherman’s centerfolds. The triennial’s title, Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, took as its inspiration Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, later adapted to film by François Truffaut. A newbie curator, Morimura stated on the Triennial’s website: “The future is unknown. But a ship has set sail from Yokohama Port, and to be completely honest, the journey is likely to be risky with me as the captain. Being an artist, I’ve never had the chance to serve as the artistic director of any international exhibitions. I’m taking the wheel for the first time and the ship has already left port without my having had a chance to learn how to steer.” Armed with this information, we set off to view the triennial, which filled all the floors of the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as a large, airy pier on the water, reachable by bus in 10 minutes. Free to explore as he wished, Morimura included a wide range of artists working in all mediums, hailing from all over the world, from the past and the present. Smaller than previous iterations of this triennial, the 2104 show offered a window onto Morimura’s many interests, from the performative photographs of French provocateur Pierre Molinier to the drawings of Japanese artist Chiyuki Sakagami. A discovery for many in the group, Sakagami’s intricate (verging on obsessive) drawings were like little jewel boxes, each seeming to contain a universe, a whole cosmology of new biomorphic forms. Another crowd favorite was Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers’s Interview with a Cat, a recorded interview from 1970 that provided comic relief for the group. We ended the tour with a trip to the pier, where we witnessed the performative unveiling of a mobile stage for Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi’s theater piece Nichirin no tsubasa (Wings of the Sun), based on a text by Kenji Nakagami.

08. Tokyo: Mori Art Museum

By Sarah Suzuki

For me, no trip to Tokyo is complete without a visit to the Mori Art Museum in the towering urban complex known as Roppongi Hills. Sure, the view is a draw but more important are the memorable exhibitions I’ve seen there: big midcareer surveys of Lee Bul and Mokoto Aida; projects with emerging artists like Meiro Koizumi and Tsang Kinwah; in-depth investigations of historical moments, such as Metabolism: City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan, held in 2011; and Roppongi Crossing, the museum’s biennial exhibition of new art that always yields fresh discoveries.

On this visit, we arrived between shows as construction and planning were underway for Lee Mingwei and His Relations. The galleries might have been empty of objects, but they were full of deep thinking, conversation, and planning by the artist and the museum staff. Lee Mingwei’s work is not primarily object-based but instead is often centered on ideas of interactivity and participation. Over the last 20 years, his projects have involved dining, mending garments, conversing, and letter writing. This kind of experiential art can be challenging to show in an institutional context and is further complicated by a retrospective presentation in which multiple works are activated at once.

We’ve faced similar challenges at MoMA while installing Rirkrit Tiravanija’s landmark installation untitled 1992/1995 (free still) and Superflex’s CopyLight Studio. One of the key opportunities of travel is the chance to engage in in-depth dialogue with colleagues around the world about institutional issues like these and the varying strategies we employ to respond to them. In the past, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the challenges and complexities of reinstalling Gutai works from the phenomenal collection of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art with curator Koichi Kawasaki. On this trip, we had the honor of talking with the Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga and hearing his views on reinstalling and recreating sculpture made of ephemeral materials. Lee Mingwei described to us his aim for a multipronged approach at Mori, including experiences that visitors would have to register for in advance, and others that could be encountered by chance in the galleries. Conversations like these are crucial. They suggest new approaches and new answers to questions that we’re all asking. Alas, I left Tokyo without getting to experience Lee Mingwei and His Relations for myself, but I look forward to another conversation about it on my next trip to the Mori.

09. Taipei: Chen Chieh-jen’s “Realm of Reverberation”

By Yu-Chieh Li

On a warm and humid afternoon we strolled from The Cube Project Space in the Gongguan area through the streets teeming with snack bars to Chen’s studio, situated in an apartment building in the Wenzhou Street area. Located opposite National Taiwan University, the neighborhood is a labyrinth of cafes and bookstores but smells more like a rainforest.

Chen Chieh-jen was a leading performance artist in Taiwan in the 1980s. In the 1990s, after an eight-year pause in his career as an artist, he started to address Taiwan’s colonial history using the moving image. We had the privilege of seeing his almost-finished film Realm of Reverberation before its debut at the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014.

The film takes the Losheng protest as its starting point. The Losheng Sanatorium for Lepers was founded by the Japanese Colonial Government to forcibly house and quarantine people suffering from Hansen’s disease. In 2002 the sanatorium was demolished by Taipei’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) over vehement protests by residents, scholars, lawyers, engineers, and documentary filmmakers.

Chen showed us the second section of the film, which depicts the visual narratives of the inmates and takes the viewer on a tour of the ruins of the sanatorium. Like many Taiwanese films, Realm of Reverberation is slow-paced. With much modesty and shyness in his smile, Chen kept telling us, “This passage is almost over. But let me know if you want me to fast-forward.” On the contrary: we were deeply moved by the tranquil beauty of the lepers’ faces—the images still linger in our minds.

10. Taipei: Yao Jui-chung and his archive

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yao Jui-Chung’s 18-year-old cat Moca kept wanting attention from us as we pored over the artist’s portfolio and archives in his studio. Yao is also an art critic and an enthusiastic collector of newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs of art events. Such documents fill his studio and are the basis of his pioneering works Installation Art in Taiwan 1991–2001 and Archives on Performance Art in Taiwan, 1978–2004.

Yao might well be described as a modern literati figure, but his projects are concerned with political and social issues rather than his own emotions. He has never concentrated on a single medium at any one time. His latest work, Ruins Series, a photographic project documenting unused public buildings that were originally intended as exhibition spaces in Taiwan, was shown in this year’s International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Unfinished landscape drawings made with ink on paper were also on view in his studio. From afar they look like traditional ink scrolls, but up close the brushwork is idiosyncratic and tumultuous.

11. Taipei: IT Park

By Yu-Chieh Li

IT Park is perhaps the oldest artists’ space in Taiwan. Founded in 1988 by Chen Hui-chiao, Liu Ching-Tang, and Tsong Pu, it is an exhibition space, a place where artists’ archives are preserved, and, even more importantly, it is a center for artistic exchange and a place to socialize and hatch ideas.

Lee Ming-Hsueh’s brilliantly-installed solo show largely comprised conceptual prints and found objects: dust brooms joined with dust pans, sculptures made of contact lenses, lighters attached to the wall and combined with graffiti. The highlight was the watermelon/knife. I was surprised at how these readymades went so well with the gallery space. Everything had a minimal, casual beauty.

IT Park captures the persistent energy behind Taiwan’s relatively slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, I find that much Taiwanese art does just that.

12. Taipei: Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Practicing live”

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yu Cheng-Ta’s new three-channel video is a send-up of the contemporary art world. The plot is woven from the dialogues of a fictional family of art professionals portrayed by renowned artists, curators, art critics, and gallerists from Taiwan, Japan, and the UK. The actors play alternate versions of themselves: for instance, the gallerist Chi-Wen Huang plays a museum director. Their conversation centers on the rules of the global art world and their plight as art professionals. Well-known maxims from philosophers and cultural theorists pop up in mockery of the overuse of quotations in art criticism.

The story culminates with the arrival of the news that son, David Yu, deemed by his family to be an unsuccessful artist, has won the Turner prize. It is also revealed that he has two other identities – famous artist David X and collector Skyban. With a story woven around an artist with multiple identities, this film throws a question to the global art system—How do you survive today as a contemporary Asian artist?

13. Taipei: Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition

By Yu-Chieh Li

“Before Tsai Ming-liang’s films appear, we actually did not know what ‘slowness’ is.” – Chang Hsao-hung. “Slow Walk in Museum.” (from the brochure for Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition at MoNTUE)

We left time in the afternoon of our last day to slow down with Tsai’s award-winning film Stray Dogs presented in an unusual way, in an unconventional setting. In recent years, Tsai has identified himself more as an artist who works with moving images than as a film director. When entering the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE), we had to walk between heaps of tree branches to reach the screening places. The film was shown in several locations and scales: beneath staircases, on walls, and in a cozy space furnished with floor cushions where it was projected on two facing walls. Visitors were free to orient their cushions any way they wished.

In the brochure to the show, Tsai explains how he’d like to challenge the traditional idea of cinema as a temple-like place.

In my childhood, the cinema was usually a single-building architecture, like a big box surrounded by barbed wires outside, also like a temple with more than one thousand seats…All family would see the movie together, too. At that time, going to the cinema was like a pilgrimage. It happened during the 1960s and 1970s….Now the cinema has become a shopping mall… It is composed of small halls and frequent showing sessions. You can go to see them at any time.

The artist defies conventions of big-box cinemas and multiplex warrens by isolating fragments of the film and projecting them in corners as independent installations. The magic of Tsai is his ability to create drama by showing unremarkable slices of ordinary life—people eating, walking, sleeping in real time and suddenly introducing a disturbance. By decontextualizing these sequences, he opens them up to new and different readings.

The post Burning Down the Biennials: Reports from Gwangju, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei appeared first on post.

Stuart: Were you happy with how it went yesterday? It’s weird to ask if you are “satisfied,” though.

Minouk: I brought the bones that have not been buried yet. It is so difficult for me to think about how to tell [this story] and where to start. I hope this square [Biennale Square] will be the last stop for the shipping containers, which serve as coffins. And I hope this place will be the starting point from which we can speak about these tragedies once again, and together. However, the sound of countless camera flashes has shown the gravity of silence. The journalists who attended seemed only to take photos, since the story was too complex for them to cover.

Stuart: I cannot imagine the political games you had to play to get permission to do this work.

Minouk: I asked for permission after consulting with the association of bereaved families. Getting permission from the families was not difficult because they are eager for people to know about the killings. However, I had to ask government officials for permission to transport the containers holding the remains of the dead. But since it’s absurd that the remains are kept in these containers in the first place, I realized it was nonsense to ask the state authorities for permission to move them Anyway, the main problem was the right of private landowners to refuse the return of the containers to their original locations after they had been moved.

Jenny: So there is no historical record of the massacres?

Minouk: For sure, there are many. The problem is that the historical records are decaying in places that deserve to be called tombs. What is the use of records from the past if they do not become part of the present? In 1999 the issue received attention when the Associated Press reviewed the No Gun Ri Massacre. More than three hundred Korean civilians were killed by the US Army at No Gun Ri in 1950. The US government still denies the charges of intentional murder. It merely says that it “deeply regrets” the incident. During the Korean War, the South Korean government killed more than two hundred thousand suspected Communists and political opponents. South Korea’s fifteenth and sixteenth presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, who were democratically elected, made public apologies for the deaths caused by state violence, and they organized the Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, only 17 of 168 suspected burial sites of civilian massacres across the country have been excavated, and the commissions have been disbanded. I found out last year that there are collective memorial services throughout the year in Korea. The killings took place across the country. Some of the excavated remains are stored temporarily in professors’ laboratories and in an anthropology museum at a university, since there is no other place for them. Some of the other remains have been left in shipping containers. The containers I transported to the Gwangju Biennale Square are from Gyeongsan and Jinju.

Stuart: Allan Sekula also uses shipping containers. He did a film two years ago called The Forgotten Space and it starts with shipping containers. It’s somehow relevant because he was very much interested in following the path of shipping containers to start to locate invisible people—laborers who work in terrible conditions and are never seen. These people make capitalism function, but you never see them because they are on ships or work with shipping containers. I am just thinking about visibility in your work: the visibility of death, the visibility of societal outrage and atrocity that are never discussed in the media.

This morning we were discussing the way we assume that the cameras are staged by you, but you cannot totally control Instagramming. So I was interested in your strategy of making the invisible visible when you stage a media event, and I am also interested in knowing whether that act has been taken on by the audience as well. I am curious about your process, about the extent to which you can control the cameras. It was very interesting to watch that all coming together with the helicopter.

Minouk: In fact, it is not completely true to say the media have never covered the civilian massacres. The No Gun Ri massacre received global attention when the Associated Press uncovered the story in 1999. Only then did the Korean press delve into it. By presenting the issue in an art context, I am hoping that people today will see the event for what it was.

I made the piece because information broadcast on the media constantly flows and dulls our vision. The victims of civilian massacres are like specters who received attention and then were cast into oblivion. People get tired of hearing the same information over and over again, even if they haven’t actually taken it in. However, the context of art is where people see, meet, and think about things for themselves. Thus I believed that many cameras would draw the deaths into people’s everyday lives, not merely channel the event as an isolated occurrence. I wanted to experiment with the logic of the media on the issue of visibility, incorporating all these circumstances into the documentary film. This is why I chose to air the event live, and it was important that everyone face the proceeding and bear witness. The event was streamed live on the Internet by OhmyNews.

The funeral procession was a mobile, LTE [Long-Term Evolution, a standard for high-speed wireless communication commonly marketed as 4G LTE] procession that traversed the globe across boundaries of region and time, as people could watch it on their mobile devices connected to the Web. I wanted all those different scales of means to be used to soothe the wandering spirits of the missing dead and amplify hidden voices. I wonder how the photos of the remains in everyone’s mobile phones will be understood over time. However, what I had hoped was pushed away by the internal struggle of the art scene.

Jenny: Were you involved in the broadcasting?

Minouk: When the helicopter was hovering over the Biennale, I was communicating with the pilot. And I was in the broadcasting bus, controlling the position of the cameras and switching the sources to the main channel.

Jenny: How did you find participants for the performance?

Minouk: I met Dr. Han Sung-hoon while doing research on civilian massacres carried out during the Korean War. He has been studying the massacres for fifteen years. He also worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He informed me that the remains of victims in Gongju were being excavated and told me to visit the site if I was interested. I started to visit massacre sites, meeting the families of the dead. During the process, members of the May Mothers’ House in Gwangju worked together with the Gwangju Trauma Center. Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture also participated in the process through workshops. It is an alternative school for students who refuse to receive formal education. I once worked there as an art director.

Stuart: Who are the blindfolded men coming out of the buses?

Minouk: They are family members of the victims from Gyeongsan, Jinju, and Hampyeong.

Jenny: And there was a kind of funeral yesterday?

Minouk: There was a very simple rite. It was to show respect for the dead, at least. In Korea people visit graves on each anniversary of a loved one’s death and on certain holidays. People also observe rituals in their homes. What is important this time is that people wore mourning clothes and went through funeral rituals for strangers from other regions. Family members of the victims, long divided by regional antagonisms, talked to each other as they participated in workshops and visits. The most rewarding part of the work for me is the fact that they now understand each other’s pain and sorrow and remember each other’s faces.

Stuart: The strangest moment for me was when I walked behind the window of a container where the ritual was happening. Through the window you could see all the reporters taking photographs. The news media are always up front, never in the back.

Minouk: It is an important point. I chose to air it live so that viewers see it for themselves, as opposed to in the form of edited information. I did not know where all those reporters came from, and I could not even focus on the families of the dead through the cameras I was using since they were behind the cameras brought by the reporters. This shows very well how the media block direct encounters with subjects by interfering from the very front. Nevertheless, the families of the massacre victims were amazed to see all those news reporters, and they wanted to believe that the occasion would expedite the realization of their dream to hold a dignified funeral. Yet all those flashing cameras are already pursuing bigger tragedies and more sensational events. Now the container is left as if it is of no significance. What do these deaths tell us? How will these remains withstand LTE “long-term evolution” in reality? How will they fare, and how will they be perceived? These are some of the questions raised by art.

Stuart: What status do the remains have now? Because the rituals happened yesterday, have the bones been fully recognized? Did the ritual formalize their status somehow?

Minouk: In South Korea the victims of civilian massacres are ignored by the government. I have come to realize that there is a difference between the law imposed by the state and the laws of ethics and morality. I did not start this work expecting anything from today’s politics or politicians. The remains of the massacred will be returned to their former locations in Gyeongsan and Jinju. Even though they are not officially recognized at this moment, they can at least be remembered through art. This is why I am trying to honor the victims through proper mourning in the context of art. This cannot be achieved through politics.

Stuart: I was thinking particularly of artists like Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist who frequently uses real blood from violent massacres in Mexico. She did a piece during the Venice Biennale in which there was a man mopping the floors of the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich with water that contained the blood of Mexicans who had been murdered. Or she’ll take dirt soaked with blood from the ground where they were killed. And she coats flags with dirt and hangs them at the palazzo. The use of actual remains is still a powerful thing. I am not sure about the ethics in Korea versus those in the Americas. I mean it’s a very powerful thing, especially if you bring a religious ritual into the secular context of the art world—that means something different, too. Santiago Sierra, the Spanish artist, doesn’t deal with remains, but he deals with living bodies in a way that a lot of people find very troubling. I am sure you’ve been asked this a lot already, but I just wonder where your thinking is going about this a day after the event.

Minouk: I am thinking of death. I am looking for people—not the citizens, but the people. The word people reveals the one-sided reasoning of South Koreans, caused by the division of the North and the South. Thus, I have set out on a journey to find people who are not the slaves of community or ideology. In Korea ideologies have formed around every kind of viewpoint. Death is always interpreted by the living. These victims’ remains make me question the scope of what constitutes a community. Is there such a thing as a clear identity?

Jenny: What did the family members say after yesterday’s performance.

Minouk: The families were amazed by so many unexpected camera flashes of reporters from both Korea and overseas, and they seemed to expect to receive attention once again while appreciating the situation. They have spent sixty-four years wishing to inform the world of the atrocities they experienced. Watching them suffer, I thought of a poem by Gerhard Lohfink, “Death Is Not the Final Word.”

Stuart: So much contemporary art now, especially in the West, is still based on the strategies of Conceptual art in particular, which I think emerged in the 1960s with the rise of certain abstract political systems, like the rise of corporations and consumer society. It was moving further away from the object, real flesh and blood. It’s interesting that Jessica’s show [the 10th Gwangju Biennale was organized by Jessica Morgan] in general is returning to all these body art practices from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and this idea of trying to engage with real material and very factual society. And, I think, in your piece you are dealing with two things: the bones and the mediation—the image of the bones. It’s an interesting contrast, dealing with both the physical reality and also the distributive image universe.

And I have a very museum-related question, because you are dealing with the economy in this art world. What do you think in terms of how this work is archived and documented? The whole mission of museums is to remember, and increasingly it gets very hard with these kinds of practices because, for example, you cannot acquire the bones. I am just wondering if an institution wants to acquire your work, what do they acquire? What is the remaining art work? What are the ethics?

Minouk: The collection of a museum is a collective memory. I want my works in the collection to be open to any kind of combination with what is contemporary, so that they can always be created anew. Museums are places that generate incidents. An incident is a spark that occurs in an unexpected place, and there is a need for keeping records that enable different incidents to be constantly repositioned. I wanted to draw what is outside art into and within art, making art that cast doubt on itself. Emil Cioran asked if a person could love himself without destroying himself.

When we encounter an excellent work of art in a museum, what happens? Instead of informing us about something we don’t know, the art makes us question what we think we already know. What is undefined leads us to imagination rather than judgment. That’s why I’m dealing with two things: I am calling out and looking for the missing people in and through these objects. What should go into the collection from such work are these pivotal transitions.

The interview was conducted in English. Transcript and introduction by Yu-Chieh Li. Revisions made by the artist in Korean were translated into English by Jaeyong Park.

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