Encouraging young curators to think out of the box is nothing new for Khoj, and this time it was gone a step ahead by presenting three exhibitions by emerging curators at the same time. The shows are as diverse from each other as their mentors – Rattanamol Singh Johal, Akansha Rastogi and Dr. Leon Tan.
Starting from November 3 at Khoj Studios in New Delhi, this is the second program in a series of projects that Khoj has undertaken as the nodal centre facilitating curatorial practice in visual arts. This program attempts to develop the training ground for emerging curators who engage with various modes of artistic practice and are actively involved in critical writing.
Titled Elusive Truth, Evolving Medium: Evaluating Contemporary Political Documentary, the exhibition is curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal, a graduate of the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York with double majors in Art History and Political Science. She uses four documentary films – Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like A War (52 min., 1991), Monica Bhasin’s Temporary Loss of Consciousness (35 min., 2005), Anirban Datta’s .in for motion (59 min., 2008) and Simon Chambers’ Cowboys in India (76 min., 2009) – juxtaposed with a text excerpt from Sheba Chhachhi’s installation, Raktpushp (1997), the Blue Book (2008) series of photographs by Dayanita Singh and two short activist videos from Samadrusti TV to underscore the evolution of the documentary medium and its exhibition in art spaces.
Johal explains: “Contemporary political documentary is informed by recent large-scale political, social and economic upheavals and the corporate colonization of mainstream media, responses to which demand new forms of expression and seek new techniques of expressing dissent, evading censorship and expanding circulation. In this milieu, Griersonian notions of documentary as defined by the medium’s conventional didacticism and employment of an “aesthetic of objectivity” have been gradually discarded in favour of non-linear narratives, personal histories, poetry, song, opinion, even propaganda, pointing to the existence of multiple/subjective truths and the complexities of representation.”
The second show titled Parenthetic Exercises: Archiving the Studio has been curated by Delhi-based researcher Akansha Rastogi, and is shown like a text in parenthesis (performative container), and not-the-main-text. The curator inhabited and archived artist Ranbir Kaleka’s studio during the residency-period. Each exhibit is an appendix to the artist’s practice, studio space, artworks and sites of artistic production. Positioning the curator as an artist, researcher, archivist, performer and parasite, the exhibition plays on the idea of archival exhaustion, with the artist as material. The consciously collected, chosen and distilled data / indexes, processed by the curator for dissemination are aimed to highlight the not-so-easily visible aspects of artists’ practices. This experimental exhibition translates the documentation of a non-event that is the artist’s studio space into an event.
Dr Leon Tan, an arts and media writer, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg (Sweden) and Auckland (New Zealand), has curated the third exhibit titled Khoj Online: Experiments in Digital Curation as a project that involves the curation of archival material from Khoj International Artists’ Association using networked platforms including Panoramio, Google Earth, Google Maps and Historypin, with the objective of increasing the international visibility of India’s contemporary art history (1997-2010). It yields a selection of geo-located archival material within these platforms such that they become accessible to online audiences, and also builds on Panoramio’s integration with the Layar augmented reality browser, such that audiences in India browsing the Panoramio Layar with handheld devices in close proximity to Khoj’s historical art activities across the subcontinent will encounter images from the archives linked to contextual information.
Serious stuff? But that’s what Khoj is about!
Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist and has covered the arts for over 15 years. She contributes on visual arts for various newspapers, magazines and online media. More about her on Story Wallahs. Write to her @ poonamgoel2410@gmail.com