By Michael Birchall

Photo by: Lucie Couillard

In November 2012, I was fortunate to attend a four-week residency at The Banff Centre. Titled ‘The Decapitated Museum’, it was led by Vincent Normand, a Paris-based curator. After attending the Banff Centre in 2008 as a curatorial work-study, I was eager to return: situated in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the small town of Banff, two hours from Calgary, the centre is surrounded by snow-topped mountains. It provides a quiet context for research, practice and discussions.

Photo by: Vincent Normand

Normand led the residency with a series of lectures in which he traced the genealogical roots of the exhibition back to zoological gardens in Europe and the use of dioramas in natural history ingemuseums in the early 20th century. Along with guest faculty member Etienne Chambaud, he presented their collaborative film, Counter-History of Separation (2011), which suggests a connection between the emergence of the guillotine as a means of destroying the aristocracy and the opening of The Louvre in 1793. The film concludes with the end of capital punishment in France and the opening of The Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977). This Franco-centric analysis of the creation of museums and the French Revolution is of course not without its limitations, as it omits other key events, such as the opening of MoMA in 1934, to give one example. But it helped provide a starting point from which other areas could be discussed throughout the residency.

Photo by: Kate Williams

The residency included 11 artists and six curators, and each week included a series of lectures and seminars for participants to engage in. Nomand devised a series of seminars that included the presentation of a ‘stake object’ – that is, a key concern in someone’s practice. This caused some contention, as both artists and curators reduced their practices to a series of drawings, lines and text. In order to facilitate more discussion time, several groups or ‘clusters’ were formed; which attempted to find conclusions to the problems that were presented. The ‘cluster’ I participated in was concerned with ‘publics’ – a primary concern for artists and curators. Fortunately we could agree on Hal Foster’s essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ (1996) as a key text for us to address. Written before texts such as Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998), Foster focuses on site-specific art – which can provide a temporary community – and examines a range of problems that arise when art attempts to follow the ethnographical principles of the participant-observer. This feels quite timely now given Okwui Enwezor’s Paris Triennale 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo – which explored the areas where art and ethnography converged – and ‘Animism’ (2010–12) curated by Anselm Franke.

Banff River. Photo by: Michael Birchall

The ‘underground’ history of exhibitions, as proposed in the initial description of the residency proved problematic to address with such a large group of participants, although more of an effort could have been made to ensure fluidity amongst peers. Delivering a residency to a group of artists and curators from various background and levels of education is of course tricky to manage. The successes of the residency were more the personal interactions and the exchange of ideas that took place organically. As well as the intensive time spent in the studio, the Banff Centre has some of the most incredible facilities for artists – printmaking, photography and sculpture just to name a few – as well as the newly refurbished onsite library for researchers and curators. Specialist facilitators are on hand, aided by work-studies to assist artists who require technical support.

Toronto-based artist Maria Flawia Litwin produced a video work Syzyfa (2012), in the winter landscape of Banff; unravelling a large bundle of yarn used in an earlier performance work. Litwin was assisted by a team of residents who happily ventured out into the cold to assist her. New York-based artist, David Court produced a video work using the recorded voice of a fellow resident, Rosa Aiello. Toronto-based artist Xenia Benivolski invited a group of artists to critique art reviews written by established art critics, as part of an ongoing work that works in the ethos of institutional critique. Collectively a group, including myself, formed a noise band – initiated by British curator, Victoria Brooks – that culminated in a one-night-only performance, using handmade contact microphones and synthesizers.

In these informal collaborations, a real sense of community was created – one that was fostered by the context of the residency. We all cooked, ate, drank, made fires and watched movies together – this was just as crucial as the time spent in the studio or in the seminars. I am certain the connections made during this residency will continue to be just as fulfilling in the future, and would encourage anyone who is interested in a thematic residency to apply.

By Sean O’Toole

Fucked up. That about summarises the degradation. Let me do a partial reckoning. In the same week that South African athlete Oscar Pistorius allegedly shot and killed his 29-year-old model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, an unemployed man, reportedly desperate to remedy his lot, beheaded his wife and mother of three, Phumeza Modikane, at their family home east of Johannesburg. Elsewhere, in a rural village in the Eastern Cape, a partially blind and deaf 69-year-old grandmother was raped, her attacker later falling asleep in her bed, leaving the old woman to hobble away in terror. It was, by certain markers, an unexceptional week. A week or so before the Pistorius case made news, a 17-year-old working girl, Anene Booysen, was gang-raped and disembowelled at a construction site in a town east of Cape Town. Her attackers further slit her throat and broke all her fingers and both legs.

Like Goya’s Colossus, something huge and naked and murderous roams South Africa. It is a man with a perpetually balled fist. He will rape many women, 65,000 if we go by one official tally, the intervals of his pleasure corresponding with the arrival of subway trains during peak hour in New York. Bearing witness to this in words, there is the temptation to dress the unlovely facts of life in contemporary South Africa with the finery of adjectival outrage, to describe these things as abject and vulgar and inexplicable. But adjectives will not revive the dead, nor will they undo the violations of mothers and sisters, of strangers and friends.

If the gilded resources and chromed equipment of language fail here, what consolation does art, of any sort, offer to a brutish and brutalised society? Lucy Valerie Graham asked herself this question. A literary scholar, Graham has just published a study looking at the entangled history of race and rape in South African literature. When she began the project, she writes in State of Peril (2012), ‘I had no idea how historically wide-ranging it would become, nor how a focus on stories of sexual violence would illuminate many aspects of South Africa’s national and literary history.’ This is perhaps the first lesson: violence against women is not new in South Africa; it is as old as the colonial encounter. Unavoidably, it has coloured perspectives of the country.

In 1950, tells Graham in an earlier 2003 essay, author Doris Lessing’s New York publisher, Alfred Knopf, told Lessing they would consider publishing The Grass is Singing (1950) if she changed it to accommodate an explicit rape of the white female protagonist by Moses, a black man, ‘in accordance with the mores of the country,’ as the publishers put it. Lessing refused. The publication of JM Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), which includes two rapes, one explicit, the other buried (‘rape, not quite that,’ protests David Lurie, the book’s central protagonist), appeared at a time when the South African media were reporting on high levels of sexual violence. The government of then president Thabo Mbeki protested, both the ‘racist journalism’ and Coetzee’s brutal portrayal of ‘white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man’.

But race is a cheap subterfuge: women of all ages, ethnicities and sexual orientations are being cruelly brutalised. Black artists have not shied from this fact. Zanele Muholi, the garrulous portrait photographer and gay rights activist whose archive of black lesbian women was shown on dOCUMENTA 13 last year, has determinedly – and often at great risk – documented the frail intimacies and real world assaults experienced by black lesbians. ‘I feel that it is my responsibility as a citizen of the “democratic” South Africa to historicise our harsh realities, so that our faces and skin are part of our country’s national collective memory, and as a form of existence and resistance,’ writes Muholi in an essay appearing in a recent book on art and social trauma that I co-edited, über(W)unden: Art in Troubled Times (2012).

Muholi, like the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, is Zulu. Her life choices sit awkwardly with this fiercely proud and patriarchal culture, a culture that is in some senses also cowed by tradition and custom. Painter Trevor Makhoba deeply understood the complexities and nuances of Zulu culture, in particular the way it was and is being refigured by a precarious urbanity. His paintings repeatedly describe rape, incest and wife-beatings. Skeletons copulate on graves. There is sexual shame. Men in business suits and plump old women in traditional skirts partake alike in cannibalism.

But Makhoba, who painted in an acute graphic style, was not some kind of South African Hieronymus Bosch. There is also levity in his paintings: the joy of birth, music and community, also the consolation of traditional Zulu custom. His work, much of it painted between 1987 and 2003, when he died aged 47, records a mixed-up place, where sexual avarice and servitude comingle. It is a place of ‘excess’, as art historian Juliette Leeb-du Toit has noted, where displays of male pride, authority and dignity confront the circumstances of a ‘disintegrating patriarchy’.

The successive histories of colonialism and apartheid contributed to this disintegration. You get this sense negotiating the flimsy biographical writings recalling the career of sculptor Nelson Mukhuba. Born in 1925 in the Tshakhuma area, in the country’s far north, like Makhoba, Mukhuba was an able musician. While living in Johannesburg he formed various dance bands, establishing himself in the 1960s with collectives known as The Zoutpansberg Merry Makers, Nelson and the Phiri Boys, and The Music Men. But the reality of being a guest labourer in the city required earning wages doing menial jobs.

By the 1980s Mukhuba was living in his rural birthplace. Like many of the gifted wood carvers from this region, Mukhuba worked in a grammar that melded abstraction with figuration, animist myths with biblical themes, tourist kitsch with genuine expression. Mukhuba was by all accounts aware of the contradictions. In 1987, in a now familiar act of patriarchal dominion, he killed first his wife and two of his daughters, then himself. Ascension, an undated and fire-scarred wood figure retrieved from his torched studio is currently on show at the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg.

But Mukhuba’s work can seem far removed from the current malaise, which, thinking backwards, was prefaced by a gory pageant of masculinity. In July last year, a month or so after the outrage prompted by the display of Brett Murray’s The Spear, a figurative painting that portrayed Jacob Zuma in a famous Leninist pose with his penis exposed, Kendell Geers held a solo exhibition at the same gallery. Titled ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, the show included a sculpted bronze phallus flanked by a two-page text, a kind of jaunty history lesson on the role of Christian dogma in shaming the penis. While congruent with Geers’ recent practice, the snarky essay, which indulged in phallic euphemisms and wordplay, was fundamentally misdirected. ‘Rather than remembering the pain of past generations in order to further subjugate our nature, it’s time to now re-member [sic] our bodies, restoring our selves in nature, with respect?’ What utter rubbish. The question has nothing to do with ennobling some lost phallic culture. Read Coetzee, listen to David Lurie: ‘The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?’

By Diana Campbell

Hemali Bhuta Speed Breakers, 2012 11 Beech roots cast in bronze

A Conversation about Sculpture: the Invisible, the Impermanent and the Ephemeral
Location: CONA in Borivali, India; Skype, telephones and Google Docs between 8 January and 13 February, 2013

Hemali Bhuta (b. 1978, lives and works in Mumbai)
Neha Choksi (b. 1973, lives and works in Mumbai)
Baptist Coelho (b. 1977, lives and works in Mumbai)
Vijai Patchineelam (b. 1983, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro)
Prajakta Potnis (b. 1980, lives and works in Mumbai)
Asim Waqif (b. 1978, lives and works in New Delhi)

Moderator: Diana Campbell (b. 1984, lives and works in Mumbai and Hyderabad)

Six artists and I (five in person, and one remotely) got together to discuss ephemeral practices and forms of sculpture that often defy form. We hoped to find a way to document an informal and ephemeral conversation between artists.

I opened the conversation with a simple question:

Diana Campell: Why is sculpture important to your practice? Or not important?

Baptist Coelho: Within my practice, research is the foundation and more of an integral part than sculpture. It is a journey where various medium such as: installation, sculpture, video, photograph, performance, etc. become a manifestation of the process and the decision to develop a work using particular media occurs during or towards the far end of the process.

Baptist Coelho
‘I thought I had forgotten about it…’ (2011-12) 

Installation View
Image Courtesy of the 
Pump House Gallery & Wandsworth Heritage Service

Hemali Bhuta: I am a trained interior designer and a painter so there is always an urge to respond to space and explore 2D even in a 3D object. The form only exists in relation to the space that contains it, which in turn is contained by a larger/universal space. Each acts as a framework for the other and at the same time, each becomes the other or is inhabited by the other. Though a lot of my work seems sculptural, I don’t consider myself a sculptor. I prefer to observe/consider everything as a painting.

Asim Waqif: I don’t look at myself as a sculptor, rather I try to manipulate space and situations in my work, and sometimes even people. I am not so concerned about the object that I create but more about what impact it may have on it’s setting.

Vijai Patchineelam: I work with space and what inhabits it, manipulating these elements in order to document them, and later re-stage them inside the exhibition space as photography, videos and/or photobooks. So I don’t work with objects and form, but rather with space and image. I ended up working like this as a strategy to avoid the bureaucratization of my work as an artist. I don’t want to build-up a structure (the studio and whatever comes with that, rent, assistants, etc.) and have to maintain that, I don’t want my practice to become a job. From what I’ve learned so far this forces you to take away some of the hierarchy between mediums and lately this has become an important aspect of my work.

Prajakta Potnis: Hierarchy between media is an interesting point raised by Vijai. Especially for a multi- disciplinarian artist, in my case I aspire that they all coexist and sporadically draw references from each other. The starting point for most of my work is within a small notebook, where I obsessively draw and make notations; these small drawings sometimes manifest into a painting. Often a finished painting instead of feeling completed and done with, urges me to attend to it in another form, it could transcend into a physical form like a skirting of a wall in an architectural space or a form constructed and framed through a camera lens. I look at mediums as porous structures that allow me to flow through them, to represent social and individual anxieties.

Neha Choksi: No matter what I do, and I work in multifarious ways with a variety of media, I seem to think through most projects in terms of sculptural issues of presence, mass, weight, gravity and sheer thing-ness and elemental materialness. I am a sculptor, even though I make photographs and performances and videos.

Diana Campbell: Why do you say that, Neha?

Neha Choksi: I think a lot about the vagaries of material survival and the odds of anything surviving for too long. Take for instance my work with poetic texts from Ancient Greece, for instance Theognis or Sappho or Anne Carson’s one-time muse Simonides. Texts from ancient times have survived in the oddest of ways, as a result of a scribe’s fancy or a child’s homework being used to wrap a mummy. And even then whole words and phrases are missing. That missing bit activates my imagination, just as it has hundreds of scholars through the ages. When one stops to consider the range of semantic meanings possible in corrupt texts, or the range of stop-gap explanations for missing chunks, one is humbled, both by the range of imagination, and by the contingencies of local and temporal contexts. This is all to say, I like taking the long view of things, and accounting for inevitable loss. This brings us back to matter, whether words, papyrii, drawing paper or the substance of my sculptures and the intelligence behind performances. It is through a consideration of material, elemental and complex, that I am able to give credence to my materialist foundations, which strain against my anti-materialist Jain inheritance. In short, as I say often enough, my art presents a materially bound search for absenting and effacing. Sometimes I even succeed in approaching something akin to it, too.
Well, although I have many publicly known examples, let me give an example that illustrates the long-view of things and offers a notion of sculpture that is ephemeral but on a different time frame. Tree Shape Gathering Dust I (2009) is a large tree branch covered with nylon cloth and lightly trussed with rope. I imagined this object not as a Christo homage nor as a package but more like furniture covered for future use, when one leaves a home behind not knowing when one will return. I expected the dust to cover the sheet not only outside, but also inside. This was a piece with a long time-frame, a sculpture that performs over centuries as the wood inside slowly turns to dust. Ironically, this piece was destroyed. No room! The life of a sculptor with limited space! Anyway, this relates to Vijai, who earlier mentioned an interest in the dimension of time rather than space. My interest is in accounting for both time and space. The funny thing is that without stuff, from the dustup after the Big Bang to our objects undergoing daily wear and tear, time may not be said to exist, could it? Unlike Asim, I don’t particularly consider the final audience in the making of my work at all. I make work to actualize the material in my hands and the substance of my thought. I don’t mind being self-contained in that way. I make work that no one else could, that does not depend on the viewer for its existence, although it may depend on others for its activation; and it certainly depends on others for its meaning to be complete.

Neha Choksi
‘Tree Shape Gathering Dust I’ (2009)
Tree branch, nylon, rope, 75 × 24 × 12 inches, 2009, destroyed. Dimensions variable for successive versions
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Diana Campbell: What is the importance of ‘failed experiments’ in your work?

Baptist Coelho : If I could apply the term ‘irrelevant research’ to ‘failed experiments’, I would also note that research material can be identified as catalysts to experiments as well. I am aware that something that has been deemed unwanted or extraneous today, could become something meaningful or of value in the future. It is difficult to consider something ‘failed’ because randomness, chance, and the consequential are also elements that are important to my work. The organic nature of my projects probe beyond the surface of things and I naturally encounter trials or errors which at times evolve into something new and often create reflections of the past. I believe there is story behind everything which is waiting to be discovered. Everything has a place in time. The process could take a month, a year, or even more than a decade as I believe.

Hemali Bhuta: Our craving to accumulate more material, and still more knowledge could definitely come in handy for the future. I also find this idea very interesting where there is a possibility, a confirmed probability that every project of mine could be a failed one. I would prefer to call these ‘experiments’ as against being burdened by ‘Sculpture/ Painting/ Installation’. The visceral nature of my practice doesn’t allow me to go in depth into a single material/situation rather I like to float at the periphery or threshold of things. There is always the danger of failing but I derive pleasure in these failures, in accepting them, in respecting them and thus making them successful experiments. I cease to exist without them.There is a lot of back and forth in my practice too. As many a times, one could observe that one work seems like a response to the other, which was made much earlier. But again, I must confess, these are just subconscious ponderings, never deliberate, over similar concerns or subjects and spaces.

Neha Choksi: I am happy to note that from now on I will not have any failures or successes. This is because my New Year’s Resolution is to have no expectations and no exhilarations. Last year I managed to have few rather than none, and I experienced what is called a learning moment. Bah to those. This is a trick question anyway, because every teacher has been trained to tell their students that every failure is a learning moment and every fiasco a teaching opportunity. So, I learn daily and I want to unlearn any which way and destroy myself daily. Nothing new. Even the sun has not learnt anything in all its risings and settings. It is just about how it offers us life with panache and sangfroid. Anyway, I appreciate Baptist’s answer, because I too have things tucked away for years before the patina of the damn thing attracts me to it again. Things, ideas, notions, bits of research, bobs of drawings. But are those failures? I think of them as living fully and not being impatient with the business of living.

Baptist Coelho: ‘Living fully and not being impatient with the business of living.’ Interesting, Neha.

Asim Waqif: Well I am not comfortable with the term ‘failed experiment’ with materials. Of course, there is a lot of experiment – but the term ‘failed’ has a rather negative connotation. It supposes an ideal to be arrived at that wasn’t reached, but that some other place has been reached. Perhaps this is because quite often I don’t have too much idea of the form I am trying to achieve, In fact, I consciously try to avoid determining the final object. Not too many projects where I have a definite goal in mind, rather I try to let things develop on their own (well not really on their own, but giving them space and opportunity to transform in new ways). So I am looking at potential of materials, and what you call ‘failure’ is an essential part of understanding any material.

Asim Waqif
‘Bordel Monstre’ (2012)
Installation view
with the support of SAM Art Projects, Palais de Tokyo (Paris)
Photo: Aurélien Mole

Diana Campbell: Letting things develop means allowing time to function, doesn’t it?

Neha Choksi: From what I remember, Vijai was talking about time being significant, not space. Hence the temporal shifts that he documents. As for me, time shows up in my work often, and I have even listed it as a material. It all depends. The sculptures in which I reuse increasingly distorted and shrunken molds to make new castings or in which I cast molds based on an increasingly dematerializing or deflated pattern all require patience with materials over stretches of weeks; and the work manifests or reifies visibly the time spent on the work.

Vijai Patchineelam: Once I attended a talk with Cildo Meireles; he’s an artist who I think is very successful working with space. For him there is no such thing as space but only time, everything is time and can only be. Then he stated that he did not know how to articulate further this idea at that moment. The statement stuck with me. I started thinking about the life of an art work, object or not, with a small difference to Neha that to preserve things was never a thought for me, but that a artwork will have its own lifetime, chain of events and encounters. Then switching from the perspective of the artists to the non-human actor – the artwork. So maybe these gaps that Neha talked about are not as much what we interpret or place upon them but what they communicate, in their own relationship with other things and the different forms of experience this brings about. And I don’t say this in a sort of fairytale way, but an acknowledgment of the presence of the other. Which I think Hemali articulates well in her works.

Neha Choksi: Vijai, I, too, in part understand what you mean by the switch from the artist to the generally non-human artwork. Yet, the work’s relationship with the presence of the other is often also about spatial relations. However a dialogue that a work sets up, whether it is preserved or destroyed, challenges my abilities to renew experience infinitely, not in terms of time, but in terms of infinite possibilities of relations; and I prefer that open-endedness. I want to let materials breathe.

Baptist Coelho: Letting things develop in time is a process since time itself began. The process of letting things develop within my practice is an important outcome to my work. At times the process faces the risk of procrastination or boredom but often it becomes advantageous. To quote John Cage: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then 16. Then 32. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’

Hemali Bhuta: Hierarchy between materials is something that I am constantly trying to break. My attempt most of the time is to reconfigure the position of the material itself. For example in Speed Breakers, a bronze cast of Beech tree roots was also a response to the image of bronze as a material. I wanted to bring the glorified material down to your feet, to be the ordinary. The selection of materials is very impulsive but it often tends to suggest the temporality of its own existence and in turn that of all.

Baptist Coelho: Hemali, can you elaborate about what your image of bronze as a material and as a ‘glorified material down to your feet, to be the ordinary’ – if I have understood you right, are you indicating feet or anything on the floor is ordinary and why?

Hemali Bhuta: As most of you know there are a lot of Bronze age burials sites in England, especially there have been records of the presence of the Bronze age men around the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Also, the strong presence of Bronze sculptures of Henry Moore and others currently on display at the park made me think of the significance of the material itself, and how most people want to buy things that seem permanent as opposed to most of the materials that I have used until now. By ordinary I meant, I wanted it to be partially buried, submerged underneath the ground, at times almost hidden due to snow, dried leaves, that one would not notice the shine/texture of the material. I wanted it to merge with nature, as though one could walk over it and not look up to it–to look beneath – what lies under the ground that you are standing on is of great importance to me. I would like to quote the great Architect Tadao Ando ‘If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.’

Baptist Coelho: I hear what you say about ordinary but I am still not sure, maybe it’s the comparison of the ordinary vis a vis feet. Building from that, is to observe gestures such as bowing down to someone’s feet for blessings or apologizing if feet touched a book, both I refused to do even though I was mocked for the latter). Both gestures reflect a contradiction towards feet as I believe that every part of the body is of equal importance and that’s why my argument over your quote of ‘down to your feet, to be the ordinary’. For my participatory performance titled, What have I done to you? (2011), I washed people’s feet. I came across a book titled, Feet and Footwear in Indian Culture by Jutta Jain-Neubauer; here one can see to a degree the basis of the complex religious belief that the foot is significant as that part of the anatomy that connects the human body to the earth, comparable to the root of a plant. Since the earth is believed to be creative energy, not only the foot, but also footprints are considered worthy of veneration. I also site walking as seen in Richard Long’s practice, to the idea of ‘walking upon’ to ‘bare-feet walking’.

Vijai Patchineelam: Hemali, is the latex work Flooring that was included in your recent show ‘Point-Shift and Quoted Objects’ [at Project 88 in Mumbai], a mould taken from a floor?

Hemali Bhuta: It looks like a cheap vinyl imitation of the parquet flooring but I would like to say that it is a product of my failures. It is a cast of latex, mould being made of ply.

Vijai Patchineelam: I thought it was the thing itself. That work compared to the others was the most radical in the way that it is almost nothing. How the object was placed on the floor with nothing in particular highlighted, made to be looked at, understood or engaged with. It was pretty much floored, so to speak. And because that it in turn repositioned the other works that retain a more sophisticated craftsmanship like the silver line. The way I saw it, it allowed the other works to indulge in the things which Flooring had given up and not have that mastery aftertaste of sophisticated craftsmanship.

Hemali Bhuta: Thanks Vijai for putting this point across as my efforts are always to create this kind of a dialogue between works, some subverted deliberately to elevate the others, and thus come back to enjoying the nothingness in the previous, each creating a framework for the other, like the relationship between silence and sound or the gaps between thoughts and thoughts.

Diana Campbell: Can we discuss the idea of breaking away from the idea of having a job as an artist; a backlash against conventional expectations seems to bring a sense of freedom for you all.

Neha Choksi: If not space, then time, if not time, then love, if not love, then money, if not money, then space. Don’t think like that. Be destructive of value.

Prajakta Potnis: There is definitely a sense of freedom especially in terms of the afterlife of the work, as the problem of storage is solved. Also since the materials that I use are often cheap and more readily available, they allow me a certain kind of easiness with experimentation, one isn’t carrying the burden of preciousness. I believe in being involved in the letting the work pass through my own hands as I feel that the engagement of the maker somehow transpires into to the work, allowing a more personal and intimate reading of the work.

Asim Waqif: The work at the Palais de Tokyo was made from trash generated by the Palais. When I first visited the Palais in September 2012, they were changing exhibitions and I happened upon the waste generated from the exhibition that was being dismantled. This got me thinking about the waste created in the act of displaying art so I proposed to the museum to give me their waste so that I could upcycle it back into an art exhibit. Almost like a bad joke on museums. There is no set idea or form that I tried to achieve, instead I chose certain processes and mechanisms and played with them as and how the work progressed. This allowed me to make something beyond my own imagination as each step of the fabrication process led to its own unique unpredictable results. This does not mean that I have no control over the process, rather that the control mechanisms are not predetermined.

Baptist Coelho: Asim, for argument’s sake, if you had access to waste generated from a shipyard would you include it in your work at Palais de Tokyo and why?

Asim Waqif: I think it’s very important where the waste comes from. For me looking at waste is almost like archaeology in the sense that one can gather a lot of information about the waste-generator (popularly known as the consumer) from observing the waste. In this context I wanted to reveal two sources of waste, first from the art-institution that supported and hosted the project, and secondly the waste generated by the creator/artist (myself) in the act of working on the project. So for this particular project I wouldn’t use shipyard-junk, that would be another project altogether.

Hemali Bhuta: So, Asim, but would that mean that in other scenarios, situations, the source of the material wouldn’t be as important or relevant for you, as it was in this particular situation?

Asim Waqif: No, I think the source of the material is usually very important. But at times the representation of the history of the material (or even the myth of the history) might be more useful as an artistic device than the actual history.

Neha Choksi: Asim, I laughed out loud at the bit about ‘the waste-generator (popularly known as the consumer)’. I understand the notion of the power of the consumer but I share very little interest in his or her choices. I am hardly one to investigate group interests or collective cultural memories; even if I inadvertently end up doing so. It is never my focus point. The specific material I use is either fitted to the idea behind the work or is emotionally or conceptually important. I share with Baptist an interest in specificity, although often it is not revealed. Aura, whether sneaked in or right there, matters to me even after the supposed death of the author or god or creative agent. While authenticity matters little for many, the appearance of authenticity probably matters a great deal.

Vijai Patchineelam: The construction of an image of essence.

Vijai Patchineelam
General Hype, 2011
Photograph
50 × 100 cm
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Neha Choksi: Yep.

Hemali Bhuta: I avoid using the object in its found form. Rather my efforts are always to transform the material into something beyond itself. Hence the material never remains or retains its form but is reconstructed or recalibrated through my understanding of the Real. The selection is always derived from my very personal experiences, observations and my relationship with the material. The material could have a long history of either being a part of the incense trade, chemical industry, etc, but it is more of a collective memory/history than in the specificity of that object. Also, the composition or the origin of the material could be of more interest to me but all of this acts as a backdrop in my practice and at times it could never surface as it could also be very misleading if I allowed it to.

Prajakta Potnis: For me every object is authentic as it bears evidence to the various hands it has been passed from. Through the passage of time these bearings form layers on to the object almost creating a halo around it. I believe in its ephemerality, I am interested in the essence of an object and its memory than the actual form just like a medicine bottle and its lingering smell. The experience of an object is what i try to revisit within my work, how a mundane object can breath a utopian experience. In case of Baptist it is important for him to know the exact lineage.

Prajakta Potnis
Still Life, 2010
Color print on archival paper, edition of 5 + 2 APs
24 × 54 inches
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Baptist Coelho: Within the realm of uncovering details, I can encounter the exact, the assumed, the myth, the fabricated and so on. My work also questions the very notion of what is exact or authentic. To site an example of a recent work, _I thought I had forgotten about it _(2012), I came across ‘Incident Reports’ at the Heritage Service of the Wandsworth Archive Department in London. These archives are a series of printed forms that were filled by a Warden to describe disasters like bombs falling, roadblocks, casualties, etc., which took place around the London Borough of Wandsworth during World War II. There was this absurdity of creating a template for disasters via forms which the Warden would record precisely what happened. I wondered if emotional losses could be documented?

Neha Choksi: I can understand Hemali’s fear of letting the history of the material overpower one’s own intervention and industrious rethinking or creative confusion. And also, like Prajakta and Baptist Coelho, I trust material and objects, but more importantly, I trust my relationships with the same material and objects. Call me a crazy empiricist who counts my feelings as a sensory organ, too. I don’t seek particular milieu or events, as Baptist Coelho might, thus I get little opportunity to work with specific objects.

Asim Waqif: In my own process, research plays a very important role. But I am not concerned about sharing it with the viewer. For me the research is more an internal process in trying to understand/assimilate a situation. I see no value in trying to share it with the viewer or exposing the viewer to the process/depth of my research. Research is a tool that helps me manipulate the situation and or viewers in a more nuanced manner. It may add layers and depth to an otherwise straightforward experience, preferably so subtly that the viewer is unaware of it. Authenticity is a matter of perception, it is not a quality of the object. Anything can be seen as authentic or bogus for that matter. So in that sense it may gain or lose value as it is passed on. It depends what the manipulator/user does with the object, and how the viewer sees it.

Diana Campbell: Following the idea of breaking away from the routine of art-making, you all have extensive bodies of work that are ephemeral in nature. Why is this important to you?

Baptist Coelho: I would like to draw attention to the passage of time where a second or minute gone by no longer exists but leaves its trace/mark via memory, stories, objects, archives, etc. Such residues become access points to the ephemeral past. Within sections of my practice, I also observe and question the possible/impossible ephemeral connections and disconnections that may or may not exist with the past, present and possible future.

Hemali Bhuta: For me, ephemeral involves the process of self-destruction, self- dissolution and the acceptance of the same. It is an instrument/tool to accept the notion of the form being temporal and subjected to change whereas contradicts the immortality of the being. Hence it is a state of flux, unease.

Asim Waqif: For some time now I have begun to loathe durability, which I feel can often lead to stagnation. I believe that dynamic evolution and adaptability is only possible where there is a possibility of change and decay/destruction. A permanent object only blends into the background with time. A temporary gesture lives on in memory (even transforms into fantasy), and by its very absence calls out for the staging of a new gesture.

Neha Choksi: While I agree with Asim that a lacuna causes creative responses, I have accepted that ephemerality and materiality go together like conjoined twins. To speak again of the scraps of papyri, their persistence through time has also fruitfully led to renewed guesses about interpretation and to new poetry through the ages. To attack durability is to attack a cherished myth, like Santa, without knowing that Santa does not really exist. We artists might attack propped up permanence, because we are human beings aware of our own brevity and transience and want to do something about it other than retreat to the Himalayas. Else why engage? This might be an Oedipal battle after all.

By Diana Campbell

Hemali Bhuta Speed Breakers, 2012 11 Beech roots cast in bronze

A Conversation about Sculpture: the Invisible, the Impermanent and the Ephemeral
Location: CONA in Borivali, India; Skype, telephones and Google Docs between 8 January and 13 February, 2013

Hemali Bhuta (b. 1978, lives and works in Mumbai)
Neha Choksi (b. 1973, lives and works in Mumbai)
Baptist Coelho (b. 1977, lives and works in Mumbai)
Vijai Patchineelam (b. 1983, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro)
Prajakta Potnis (b. 1980, lives and works in Mumbai)
Asim Waqif (b. 1978, lives and works in New Delhi)

Moderator: Diana Campbell (b. 1984, lives and works in Mumbai and Hyderabad)

Six artists and I (five in person, and one remotely) got together to discuss ephemeral practices and forms of sculpture that often defy form. We hoped to find a way to document an informal and ephemeral conversation between artists.

I opened the conversation with a simple question:

Diana Campell: Why is sculpture important to your practice? Or not important?

Baptist Coelho: Within my practice, research is the foundation and more of an integral part than sculpture. It is a journey where various medium such as: installation, sculpture, video, photograph, performance, etc. become a manifestation of the process and the decision to develop a work using particular media occurs during or towards the far end of the process.

Baptist Coelho
‘I thought I had forgotten about it…’ (2011-12) 

Installation View
Image Courtesy of the 
Pump House Gallery & Wandsworth Heritage Service

Hemali Bhuta: I am a trained interior designer and a painter so there is always an urge to respond to space and explore 2D even in a 3D object. The form only exists in relation to the space that contains it, which in turn is contained by a larger/universal space. Each acts as a framework for the other and at the same time, each becomes the other or is inhabited by the other. Though a lot of my work seems sculptural, I don’t consider myself a sculptor. I prefer to observe/consider everything as a painting.

Asim Waqif: I don’t look at myself as a sculptor, rather I try to manipulate space and situations in my work, and sometimes even people. I am not so concerned about the object that I create but more about what impact it may have on it’s setting.

Vijai Patchineelam: I work with space and what inhabits it, manipulating these elements in order to document them, and later re-stage them inside the exhibition space as photography, videos and/or photobooks. So I don’t work with objects and form, but rather with space and image. I ended up working like this as a strategy to avoid the bureaucratization of my work as an artist. I don’t want to build-up a structure (the studio and whatever comes with that, rent, assistants, etc.) and have to maintain that, I don’t want my practice to become a job. From what I’ve learned so far this forces you to take away some of the hierarchy between mediums and lately this has become an important aspect of my work.

Vijai Patchineelam
General Hype, 2011
Photograph
50 × 100 cm
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Prajakta Potnis: Hierarchy between media is an interesting point raised by Vijai. Especially for a multi- disciplinarian artist, in my case I aspire that they all coexist and sporadically draw references from each other. The starting point for most of my work is within a small notebook, where I obsessively draw and make notations; these small drawings sometimes manifest into a painting. Often a finished painting instead of feeling completed and done with, urges me to attend to it in another form, it could transcend into a physical form like a skirting of a wall in an architectural space or a form constructed and framed through a camera lens. I look at mediums as porous structures that allow me to flow through them, to represent social and individual anxieties.

Neha Choksi: No matter what I do, and I work in multifarious ways with a variety of media, I seem to think through most projects in terms of sculptural issues of presence, mass, weight, gravity and sheer thing-ness and elemental materialness. I am a sculptor, even though I make photographs and performances and videos.

Diana Campbell: Why do you say that, Neha?

Neha Choksi: I think a lot about the vagaries of material survival and the odds of anything surviving for too long. Take for instance my work with poetic texts from Ancient Greece, for instance Theognis or Sappho or Anne Carson’s one-time muse Simonides. Texts from ancient times have survived in the oddest of ways, as a result of a scribe’s fancy or a child’s homework being used to wrap a mummy. And even then whole words and phrases are missing. That missing bit activates my imagination, just as it has hundreds of scholars through the ages. When one stops to consider the range of semantic meanings possible in corrupt texts, or the range of stop-gap explanations for missing chunks, one is humbled, both by the range of imagination, and by the contingencies of local and temporal contexts. This is all to say, I like taking the long view of things, and accounting for inevitable loss. This brings us back to matter, whether words, papyrii, drawing paper or the substance of my sculptures and the intelligence behind performances. It is through a consideration of material, elemental and complex, that I am able to give credence to my materialist foundations, which strain against my anti-materialist Jain inheritance. In short, as I say often enough, my art presents a materially bound search for absenting and effacing. Sometimes I even succeed in approaching something akin to it, too.
Well, although I have many publicly known examples, let me give an example that illustrates the long-view of things and offers a notion of sculpture that is ephemeral but on a different time frame. Tree Shape Gathering Dust I (2009) is a large tree branch covered with nylon cloth and lightly trussed with rope. I imagined this object not as a Christo homage nor as a package but more like furniture covered for future use, when one leaves a home behind not knowing when one will return. I expected the dust to cover the sheet not only outside, but also inside. This was a piece with a long time-frame, a sculpture that performs over centuries as the wood inside slowly turns to dust. Ironically, this piece was destroyed. No room! The life of a sculptor with limited space! Anyway, this relates to Vijai, who earlier mentioned an interest in the dimension of time rather than space. My interest is in accounting for both time and space. The funny thing is that without stuff, from the dustup after the Big Bang to our objects undergoing daily wear and tear, time may not be said to exist, could it? Unlike Asim, I don’t particularly consider the final audience in the making of my work at all. I make work to actualize the material in my hands and the substance of my thought. I don’t mind being self-contained in that way. I make work that no one else could, that does not depend on the viewer for its existence, although it may depend on others for its activation; and it certainly depends on others for its meaning to be complete.

Neha Choksi
‘Tree Shape Gathering Dust I’ (2009)
Tree branch, nylon, rope, 75 × 24 × 12 inches, 2009, destroyed. Dimensions variable for successive versions
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Diana Campbell: What is the importance of ‘failed experiments’ in your work?

Baptist Coelho : If I could apply the term ‘irrelevant research’ to ‘failed experiments’, I would also note that research material can be identified as catalysts to experiments as well. I am aware that something that has been deemed unwanted or extraneous today, could become something meaningful or of value in the future. It is difficult to consider something ‘failed’ because randomness, chance, and the consequential are also elements that are important to my work. The organic nature of my projects probe beyond the surface of things and I naturally encounter trials or errors which at times evolve into something new and often create reflections of the past. I believe there is story behind everything which is waiting to be discovered. Everything has a place in time. The process could take a month, a year, or even more than a decade as I believe.

Hemali Bhuta: Our craving to accumulate more material, and still more knowledge could definitely come in handy for the future. I also find this idea very interesting where there is a possibility, a confirmed probability that every project of mine could be a failed one. I would prefer to call these ‘experiments’ as against being burdened by ‘Sculpture/ Painting/ Installation’. The visceral nature of my practice doesn’t allow me to go in depth into a single material/situation rather I like to float at the periphery or threshold of things. There is always the danger of failing but I derive pleasure in these failures, in accepting them, in respecting them and thus making them successful experiments. I cease to exist without them.There is a lot of back and forth in my practice too. As many a times, one could observe that one work seems like a response to the other, which was made much earlier. But again, I must confess, these are just subconscious ponderings, never deliberate, over similar concerns or subjects and spaces.

Neha Choksi: I am happy to note that from now on I will not have any failures or successes. This is because my New Year’s Resolution is to have no expectations and no exhilarations. Last year I managed to have few rather than none, and I experienced what is called a learning moment. Bah to those. This is a trick question anyway, because every teacher has been trained to tell their students that every failure is a learning moment and every fiasco a teaching opportunity. So, I learn daily and I want to unlearn any which way and destroy myself daily. Nothing new. Even the sun has not learnt anything in all its risings and settings. It is just about how it offers us life with panache and sangfroid. Anyway, I appreciate Baptist’s answer, because I too have things tucked away for years before the patina of the damn thing attracts me to it again. Things, ideas, notions, bits of research, bobs of drawings. But are those failures? I think of them as living fully and not being impatient with the business of living.

Baptist Coelho: ‘Living fully and not being impatient with the business of living.’ Interesting, Neha.

Asim Waqif: Well I am not comfortable with the term ‘failed experiment’ with materials. Of course, there is a lot of experiment – but the term ‘failed’ has a rather negative connotation. It supposes an ideal to be arrived at that wasn’t reached, but that some other place has been reached. Perhaps this is because quite often I don’t have too much idea of the form I am trying to achieve, In fact, I consciously try to avoid determining the final object. Not too many projects where I have a definite goal in mind, rather I try to let things develop on their own (well not really on their own, but giving them space and opportunity to transform in new ways). So I am looking at potential of materials, and what you call ‘failure’ is an essential part of understanding any material.

Asim Waqif
‘Bordel Monstre’ (2012)
Installation view
with the support of SAM Art Projects, Palais de Tokyo (Paris)
Photo: Aurélien Mole

Diana Campbell: Letting things develop means allowing time to function, doesn’t it?

Neha Choksi: From what I remember, Vijai was talking about time being significant, not space. Hence the temporal shifts that he documents. As for me, time shows up in my work often, and I have even listed it as a material. It all depends. The sculptures in which I reuse increasingly distorted and shrunken molds to make new castings or in which I cast molds based on an increasingly dematerializing or deflated pattern all require patience with materials over stretches of weeks; and the work manifests or reifies visibly the time spent on the work.

Vijai Patchineelam: Once I attended a talk with Cildo Meireles; he’s an artist who I think is very successful working with space. For him there is no such thing as space but only time, everything is time and can only be. Then he stated that he did not know how to articulate further this idea at that moment. The statement stuck with me. I started thinking about the life of an art work, object or not, with a small difference to Neha that to preserve things was never a thought for me, but that a artwork will have its own lifetime, chain of events and encounters. Then switching from the perspective of the artists to the non-human actor – the artwork. So maybe these gaps that Neha talked about are not as much what we interpret or place upon them but what they communicate, in their own relationship with other things and the different forms of experience this brings about. And I don’t say this in a sort of fairytale way, but an acknowledgment of the presence of the other. Which I think Hemali articulates well in her works.

Neha Choksi: Vijai, I, too, in part understand what you mean by the switch from the artist to the generally non-human artwork. Yet, the work’s relationship with the presence of the other is often also about spatial relations. However a dialogue that a work sets up, whether it is preserved or destroyed, challenges my abilities to renew experience infinitely, not in terms of time, but in terms of infinite possibilities of relations; and I prefer that open-endedness. I want to let materials breathe.

Baptist Coelho: Letting things develop in time is a process since time itself began. The process of letting things develop within my practice is an important outcome to my work. At times the process faces the risk of procrastination or boredom but often it becomes advantageous. To quote John Cage: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then 16. Then 32. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’

Hemali Bhuta: Hierarchy between materials is something that I am constantly trying to break. My attempt most of the time is to reconfigure the position of the material itself. For example in Speed Breakers, a bronze cast of Beech tree roots was also a response to the image of bronze as a material. I wanted to bring the glorified material down to your feet, to be the ordinary. The selection of materials is very impulsive but it often tends to suggest the temporality of its own existence and in turn that of all.

Baptist Coelho: Hemali, can you elaborate about what your image of bronze as a material and as a ‘glorified material down to your feet, to be the ordinary’ – if I have understood you right, are you indicating feet or anything on the floor is ordinary and why?

Hemali Bhuta: As most of you know there are a lot of Bronze age burials sites in England, especially there have been records of the presence of the Bronze age men around the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Also, the strong presence of Bronze sculptures of Henry Moore and others currently on display at the park made me think of the significance of the material itself, and how most people want to buy things that seem permanent as opposed to most of the materials that I have used until now. By ordinary I meant, I wanted it to be partially buried, submerged underneath the ground, at times almost hidden due to snow, dried leaves, that one would not notice the shine/texture of the material. I wanted it to merge with nature, as though one could walk over it and not look up to it–to look beneath – what lies under the ground that you are standing on is of great importance to me. I would like to quote the great Architect Tadao Ando ‘If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.’

Baptist Coelho: I hear what you say about ordinary but I am still not sure, maybe it’s the comparison of the ordinary vis a vis feet. Building from that, is to observe gestures such as bowing down to someone’s feet for blessings or apologizing if feet touched a book, both I refused to do even though I was mocked for the latter). Both gestures reflect a contradiction towards feet as I believe that every part of the body is of equal importance and that’s why my argument over your quote of ‘down to your feet, to be the ordinary’. For my participatory performance titled, What have I done to you? (2011), I washed people’s feet. I came across a book titled, Feet and Footwear in Indian Culture by Jutta Jain-Neubauer; here one can see to a degree the basis of the complex religious belief that the foot is significant as that part of the anatomy that connects the human body to the earth, comparable to the root of a plant. Since the earth is believed to be creative energy, not only the foot, but also footprints are considered worthy of veneration. I also site walking as seen in Richard Long’s practice, to the idea of ‘walking upon’ to ‘bare-feet walking’.

Vijai Patchineelam: Hemali, is the latex work Flooring that was included in your recent show ‘Point-Shift and Quoted Objects’ [at Project 88 in Mumbai], a mould taken from a floor?

Hemali Bhuta: It looks like a cheap vinyl imitation of the parquet flooring but I would like to say that it is a product of my failures. It is a cast of latex, mould being made of ply.

Vijai Patchineelam: I thought it was the thing itself. That work compared to the others was the most radical in the way that it is almost nothing. How the object was placed on the floor with nothing in particular highlighted, made to be looked at, understood or engaged with. It was pretty much floored, so to speak. And because that it in turn repositioned the other works that retain a more sophisticated craftsmanship like the silver line. The way I saw it, it allowed the other works to indulge in the things which Flooring had given up and not have that mastery aftertaste of sophisticated craftsmanship.

Hemali Bhuta: Thanks Vijai for putting this point across as my efforts are always to create this kind of a dialogue between works, some subverted deliberately to elevate the others, and thus come back to enjoying the nothingness in the previous, each creating a framework for the other, like the relationship between silence and sound or the gaps between thoughts and thoughts.

Diana Campbell: Can we discuss the idea of breaking away from the idea of having a job as an artist; a backlash against conventional expectations seems to bring a sense of freedom for you all.

Neha Choksi: If not space, then time, if not time, then love, if not love, then money, if not money, then space. Don’t think like that. Be destructive of value.

Prajakta Potnis: There is definitely a sense of freedom especially in terms of the afterlife of the work, as the problem of storage is solved. Also since the materials that I use are often cheap and more readily available, they allow me a certain kind of easiness with experimentation, one isn’t carrying the burden of preciousness. I believe in being involved in the letting the work pass through my own hands as I feel that the engagement of the maker somehow transpires into to the work, allowing a more personal and intimate reading of the work.

Asim Waqif: The work at the Palais de Tokyo was made from trash generated by the Palais. When I first visited the Palais in September 2012, they were changing exhibitions and I happened upon the waste generated from the exhibition that was being dismantled. This got me thinking about the waste created in the act of displaying art so I proposed to the museum to give me their waste so that I could upcycle it back into an art exhibit. Almost like a bad joke on museums. There is no set idea or form that I tried to achieve, instead I chose certain processes and mechanisms and played with them as and how the work progressed. This allowed me to make something beyond my own imagination as each step of the fabrication process led to its own unique unpredictable results. This does not mean that I have no control over the process, rather that the control mechanisms are not predetermined.

Baptist Coelho: Asim, for argument’s sake, if you had access to waste generated from a shipyard would you include it in your work at Palais de Tokyo and why?

Asim Waqif: I think it’s very important where the waste comes from. For me looking at waste is almost like archaeology in the sense that one can gather a lot of information about the waste-generator (popularly known as the consumer) from observing the waste. In this context I wanted to reveal two sources of waste, first from the art-institution that supported and hosted the project, and secondly the waste generated by the creator/artist (myself) in the act of working on the project. So for this particular project I wouldn’t use shipyard-junk, that would be another project altogether.

Hemali Bhuta: So, Asim, but would that mean that in other scenarios, situations, the source of the material wouldn’t be as important or relevant for you, as it was in this particular situation?

Asim Waqif: No, I think the source of the material is usually very important. But at times the representation of the history of the material (or even the myth of the history) might be more useful as an artistic device than the actual history.

Neha Choksi: Asim, I laughed out loud at the bit about ‘the waste-generator (popularly known as the consumer)’. I understand the notion of the power of the consumer but I share very little interest in his or her choices. I am hardly one to investigate group interests or collective cultural memories; even if I inadvertently end up doing so. It is never my focus point. The specific material I use is either fitted to the idea behind the work or is emotionally or conceptually important. I share with Baptist an interest in specificity, although often it is not revealed. Aura, whether sneaked in or right there, matters to me even after the supposed death of the author or god or creative agent. While authenticity matters little for many, the appearance of authenticity probably matters a great deal.

Vijai Patchineelam: The construction of an image of essence.

Neha Choksi: Yep.

Hemali Bhuta: I avoid using the object in its found form. Rather my efforts are always to transform the material into something beyond itself. Hence the material never remains or retains its form but is reconstructed or recalibrated through my understanding of the Real. The selection is always derived from my very personal experiences, observations and my relationship with the material. The material could have a long history of either being a part of the incense trade, chemical industry, etc, but it is more of a collective memory/history than in the specificity of that object. Also, the composition or the origin of the material could be of more interest to me but all of this acts as a backdrop in my practice and at times it could never surface as it could also be very misleading if I allowed it to.

Prajakta Potnis: For me every object is authentic as it bears evidence to the various hands it has been passed from. Through the passage of time these bearings form layers on to the object almost creating a halo around it. I believe in its ephemerality, I am interested in the essence of an object and its memory than the actual form just like a medicine bottle and its lingering smell. The experience of an object is what i try to revisit within my work, how a mundane object can breath a utopian experience. In case of Baptist it is important for him to know the exact lineage.

Prajakta Potnis
Still Life, 2010
Color print on archival paper, edition of 5 + 2 APs
24 × 54 inches
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Baptist Coelho: Within the realm of uncovering details, I can encounter the exact, the assumed, the myth, the fabricated and so on. My work also questions the very notion of what is exact or authentic. To site an example of a recent work, _I thought I had forgotten about it _(2012), I came across ‘Incident Reports’ at the Heritage Service of the Wandsworth Archive Department in London. These archives are a series of printed forms that were filled by a Warden to describe disasters like bombs falling, roadblocks, casualties, etc., which took place around the London Borough of Wandsworth during World War II. There was this absurdity of creating a template for disasters via forms which the Warden would record precisely what happened. I wondered if emotional losses could be documented?

Neha Choksi: I can understand Hemali’s fear of letting the history of the material overpower one’s own intervention and industrious rethinking or creative confusion. And also, like Prajakta and Baptist Coelho, I trust material and objects, but more importantly, I trust my relationships with the same material and objects. Call me a crazy empiricist who counts my feelings as a sensory organ, too. I don’t seek particular milieu or events, as Baptist Coelho might, thus I get little opportunity to work with specific objects.

Asim Waqif: In my own process, research plays a very important role. But I am not concerned about sharing it with the viewer. For me the research is more an internal process in trying to understand/assimilate a situation. I see no value in trying to share it with the viewer or exposing the viewer to the process/depth of my research. Research is a tool that helps me manipulate the situation and or viewers in a more nuanced manner. It may add layers and depth to an otherwise straightforward experience, preferably so subtly that the viewer is unaware of it. Authenticity is a matter of perception, it is not a quality of the object. Anything can be seen as authentic or bogus for that matter. So in that sense it may gain or lose value as it is passed on. It depends what the manipulator/user does with the object, and how the viewer sees it.

Diana Campbell: Following the idea of breaking away from the routine of art-making, you all have extensive bodies of work that are ephemeral in nature. Why is this important to you?

Baptist Coelho: I would like to draw attention to the passage of time where a second or minute gone by no longer exists but leaves its trace/mark via memory, stories, objects, archives, etc. Such residues become access points to the ephemeral past. Within sections of my practice, I also observe and question the possible/impossible ephemeral connections and disconnections that may or may not exist with the past, present and possible future.

Hemali Bhuta: For me, ephemeral involves the process of self-destruction, self- dissolution and the acceptance of the same. It is an instrument/tool to accept the notion of the form being temporal and subjected to change whereas contradicts the immortality of the being. Hence it is a state of flux, unease.

Asim Waqif: For some time now I have begun to loathe durability, which I feel can often lead to stagnation. I believe that dynamic evolution and adaptability is only possible where there is a possibility of change and decay/destruction. A permanent object only blends into the background with time. A temporary gesture lives on in memory (even transforms into fantasy), and by its very absence calls out for the staging of a new gesture.

Neha Choksi: While I agree with Asim that a lacuna causes creative responses, I have accepted that ephemerality and materiality go together like conjoined twins. To speak again of the scraps of papyri, their persistence through time has also fruitfully led to renewed guesses about interpretation and to new poetry through the ages. To attack durability is to attack a cherished myth, like Santa, without knowing that Santa does not really exist. We artists might attack propped up permanence, because we are human beings aware of our own brevity and transience and want to do something about it other than retreat to the Himalayas. Else why engage? This might be an Oedipal battle after all.

By Charlie Fox

Emptyset: James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas

When a nuclear strike seemed inevitable during the darkest hours of the Cold War, the BBC outlined a procedure to be followed in such an event and assembled a collection of radio programming judged suitably entertaining for the surviving public in the aftermath of the blast. Listeners suffering through the horrors of radiation sickness or covering the bodies of dead relatives with sheets in accordance with the instructions given on the government’s Protect and Survive public information films could escape momentarily with an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour or the music of Julie Andrews. The coming of the bomb would be announced across all television and radio stations, accompanied by ‘Dalek music’ (probably a merciless radiophonic drone) and repeated flashes of light.

In preparation for Emptyset’s Trawsfynydd installation at Tate Britain, I’ve gathered all kinds of information about nuclear sites – ‘Trawsfynydd nuclear power station was shut down in 1991 and is currently being decommissioned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’ – re-read the irradiated sections of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and found some stuff about how ‘the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia’, then abandoned it, and researched various catastrophes involving power stations and/or radiation. All of which is immediately thrown out of my head when I enter the room and experience the immense ferocity of the piece itself, with its concussive bass, stretches of toxic noise and writhing static. Onscreen, footage of the site, abstracted beyond recognition by digital trickery and layered with atmospheric murk, loops on and on – for how long I’m not sure (it’s the purpose of such assaultive stuff to obliterate your sense of time). It was audible before I reached the building. Emptyset was on the air.

This is not what might be expected from art about the afterlife of nuclear power. Following catastrophe or in decline, almost all of it features soundscapes of uncanny vacancy, sinister humming and haunted silence. Take Heavy Water: A Film For Chernobyl (2006), with its meditative footage of ruined interiors, climate of electronic lulls and susurrations and strangely disconnected narration, the blank cadences echoing, perhaps not accidentally, the patrician iciness of Patrick Allen’s voice-over on those Protect and Survive films. In the BBC’s Threads (1984) and Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), nuclear winter unfolds in nightmarish muteness, intermittently punctured by the sobbing of survivors and the howl of wind transmitting fall-out.

According to a North American report from 1961, in the wake of a bomb or catastrophe, ‘most of the familiar sounds would be missing. Birds and insects would be dead, so you wouldn’t hear them. Traffic would be dead too – or very nearly so. And the factories, of course, would be out of operation. It would be a silent world to which you emerged.’ Noise vanishes and an eerie hush reigns.

Jane and Louise Wilson, from ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (2010)

And here we are also moving stealthily towards the territory of the ruin. Trawsfynydd is on the brink of becoming a ruin of the future, and post-nuclear art is littered with ruins and wreckage, abandoned spaces and sinister zones. Jane and Louise Wilson have dedicated themselves to exploring similar forgotten sites in works such as Gamma (1999), shot at a deserted, decommissioned nuclear storage facility, and ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (2010), a photographic series documenting the abandoned city of Pripyat close to Chernobyl. Gamma, like Trawsfynydd is full of disconcerting drones and sudden bursts of malevolent noise, as if any intruding presence rouses some dormant menace within the building. In each film, you drift through these fascinating spaces, inhabiting somewhere formerly forbidden but now as Trawsfynydd‘s press material puts it, ‘at the end of its functional arc’ and edging into the slow process of decay. ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ is, just like Trawsfynydd, another symptom of contemporary ruin lust, with its interiors overrun by nature, degrading and at the same time taking on a strange kind of grandeur. Ruins are bleak but always sumptuously so. Isn’t the experience of examining those covetable monographs like The Ruins of Detroit or Left London an uncanny negative image of leafing through certain home interior magazines? And Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is inescapable here, too (still bewitching but, like David Thomson, I identify most with the dog): that sense of entrancement by industrial space, and of trespassing on an area which possesses, as Geoff Dyer writes in Zona (2012), his book-length essay on the film, ‘a slumbering sentience’. The disused hydroelectric plant in Tallinn, which doubles as the magical Zone is full of strange resonances. The wind wearily sighs through it and Eduard Artemiev’s synth score seems to alternately rumble from the polluted earth or drift mistily overhead. Malevolence hidden and energy banished, all these buildings are gradually transforming into enormous tombs onscreen, haunted by their history and slipping into further decline.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979). The dog ‘so black he is never more than a dog-eared silhouette’ in the mysterious Zone.

But in Trawsfynydd, no space slumbers or stretches out for contemplation. This space is fiercely alive, even whilst coated in thick, eerie phosphorescence. Everything takes place at manic speed and ferocious volume; the effect is hypnotic and incapacitating. Against other sound pieces drawn from similar co-ordinates, this is purposefully aggressive, damaging and loud. Plot it against Jacob Kirkegaard’s Four Rooms (Touch, 2006), which contains the resonances of four sites in Chernobyl’s Zone of Alienation obtained by recording their near-silent ambience, playing back them back and recording the results repeatedly until sound emerges in drones and atmospheric murmurings. Absence is made audible in long, dark spells. Nothing so gentle here. Trawsyfyndd is concerned with hitting a more visceral frequency, as if recalling the site’s past as a monumental power source. I think of the sign of enforced workplace cheer displayed on the canteen wall inside a nuclear facility in Mark Aerial Waller’s film Glow Boys (1998): ‘where science never sleeps!’

This is what might be expected from Emptyset. Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg like things to be relentless, abrasive and overpowering. Sleep is not a possibility. Their work is minimalist and precise, drawing force from an austere index of jagged textures, jackhammering rhythms, electrical jolts and all-over claustrophobia. Track titles like ‘Void’, ‘Interstice’ and ‘Core’ suggest some especially bleak territory mapped with geometric exactitude and worked by forbidding digital programmes.
Their discography – three full-length albums, a clutch of EPs and 12’‘s, each of which should be handled like a weapon – takes the total force of contemporary techno, welds it to noise, and can turn, as per ‘Armature’ on their most recent EP Collapsed (2012), gloriously propulsive: it flattens everything. That Collapsed was released under the auspices of German record label Raster-Noton, home of sound artists known for a certain severity like Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai, gives some indication of their seriousness and sense of purpose.

Against much of contemporary bass music’s lithe resistance of anything as distracting as ‘content’ (what does the music mean? It doesn’t matter, it just works and takes the body in the right way, into the possession of rhythm and clout), Emptyset are assiduous in their attention to processes, experiments, particular Events and methods of making noise. Consider the occult undercurrent to last year’s LP Medium, recorded at Woodchester Mansions in Gloucestershire – yet another abandoned space, a site of rumoured magickal activities and rituals, an accidental bat sanctuary in which, according to Purgas, ‘stairs lead nowhere and there are fireplaces suspended in mid-air’. Medium was the attempt to translate this space into sound, capturing its uncanny atmospherics and buried resonances, sculpting pieces from feedback, echo and ghostly room tones- much of the same rubric concerning translation underpins Trawsfyndd. The outcome on Medium is a powerful, immobilizing object, carved out of metal, full of punishing high-frequency howls and blizzards of noise. Technology and architecture become involved in some dark, mutual metamorphosis, producing material which is imposing and brutally mechanical but also nastily, thrillingly organic, festering, overrun with decay, lichen, detritus.

So into the room I went. Trawsfynydd is a slight work – more slight than minimal, not so much economical as attenuated – but still powerful and disorientating, all reassuringly huge. The images are where it fails. Everything is fed through the eldritch X-ray effect and much else is hidden in darkness so it resembles a surveillance tape hit by a little radioactive damage: monster’s lair or final level on videogame dystopia?

Sound and image operate in delirious correspondence: shadow for slabs of bass, caustic textures twinned to harsh, pulsating shapes. This fits in with the aesthetic of their other videos but through in its rigorous chilliness and abstraction, you get a phantom space, a stagger through an unreal site. Trawsfynydd might be there in sound but it feels so much like just watching the video for some music and nothing more with all its familiar digital contortions and graphic flux. The rewards of the process are hollow. The immense, anxious meaning of the site, that aura of secrecy, catastrophe and desolation, gets lost in the feedback loop.

The soundtrack, though, is astonishing. Set at that bludgeoning volume and playing through high-grade equipment you feel the full richness of its texture, all the bristling edges, riots of pure noise, squealing high-end and always that thudding rhythm underneath which begins to feel warm, almost cocooning, after a little while. Their work has its own particular gravity, all pressure and devastating heaviness, it drags everything down into the void.

Maybe the shadowy presence of the nuclear power station serves to obliquely underline a particular continuity within their work. This is the latest mutation of industrial music, the discipline which stretches back to David Lynch and Alan Splet’s sound design for Eraserhead (1976). ‘Collapse’ is, after all, a translation, in fact, of the German ‘kollaps’, the name of the great Einstürzende Neubauten record made in 1981 which has the same sort of metallic nastiness running through it and echoes their obsession with architecture and decay (the group’s name translates as Collapsing New Buildings). The same electronic extremity can be found in the work of Finnish duo Pan Sonic through records like Kulma (1997, another architectural title, meaning ‘angle’ or ‘corner’) and Katodivaihe (2007) where black holes of noise meet with brittle rhythmic ingenuity – Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 ‘Planet Rock’ after an ecological disaster, everything overcome by toxic sludge.

By Agnieszka Gratza

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, "The Last Judgement" (2013), installation view at Forum Expanded

Now in its eighth year, Forum Expanded is to Forum – the self-consciously avant-garde and experimental strand of Berlin’s annual film festival, the Berlinale – what expanded cinema is to cinema tout court. The programme of Forum Expanded goes resolutely beyond the traditional viewing formats and single screen projections of a standard length and size; shows video, installation and performance-based works alongside film; eschews classical approaches to narrative in favour of fragmented forms; and, though by no means confined to artists’ films, tends to privilege an artistic way of handling a given topic and organizing material. As far as location goes, Forum Expanded ventures beyond the confines of the purpose-built cinema complex of the Berlinale in Potsdamer Platz to explore alternative, and rather more inspiring, screening venues dotted around the city.

A former crematorium is an unlikely exhibition venue at the best of times but even more so in the dead of winter. (‘A crematorium, how tropical,’ an acquaintance of mine jokingly remarked.) So it was not without some misgivings that I made my way towards the dreary-sounding ‘silent green Kulturquartier’ in Berlin’s graffiti-ridden Wedding district for the opening of the Forum Expanded group exhibition ‘Waves vs. Particles’. My scepticism proved largely unfounded. Colourful lights projected onto the façade of the imposing, squat building looming large at the end of a wooded alley turned the crematorium with its central octagonal structure into a magic lantern of sorts.

James T. Hong, ‘Apologies’ (2012), film still

Unlike in previous years, this year’s edition of Forum Expanded dispensed with an overall theme, opting instead for a thematic group exhibition. Drawn from quantum mechanics, which is predicated on wave-particle duality, the title was an interesting choice – one that applied to most, if not all, of the works on view. The one obvious misfit in this respect was James T. Hong’s single-channel video installation called Apologies (all works 2012), a variation on the theme of official state contrition for past misdeeds. The work was inserted between two thematically interconnected, three-channel video installations, Spirits Closing Their Eyes by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, and Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Life of Particles. Both focus on Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant that ensued; in the former, three video screens of equal size were placed horizontally, whereas in the latter – formally the more remarkable of the two pieces – the arrangement was vertical and the middle screen, much narrower than the other two, was mostly used for subtitles.

Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The Life of Particles’ (2012), installation view

Experiencing these video works with their talk of nuclear annihilation, atomic radiation and animist spirituality on the premises of what used to be a crematorium was not without consequence. The Life of Particles, projected at the end of a room neatly lined with alcoves that once housed funerary urns, made for particularly unsettling viewing given its context. In Spirits Still, a haunting multi-channel video installation that was the most imaginative response to the space by far, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel used select frames from Leviathan, their award-winning, immersive documentary about deep-sea fishing made in collaboration with the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. If you spent long enough with the images projected onto straight or curved walls and nestled in some of the alcoves, you began making out skull-like shapes, gaping eyes and mouths, beastly snouts, distended as if through anamorphosis, more or less focused, captured on film yet invisible to the eye at the ordinary speed of projection.

More harrowing still, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s The Last Judgement, excerpted from Leviathan’s final sequence, took over the mourning chapel of the crematorium, filling it with moving images of seagulls and many ghostly creatures of the air and sea, according to Castaing-Taylor at least (they eluded me in this instance). Screened on the ceiling, the second video installation in a four-part project experimenting with different formats and speeds of projection of the same documentary, which could be seen as a feature film in a standard cinema set-up elsewhere at the Berlinale, was meant to be viewed lying down on cushions strewn over the floor, better to observe and immerse oneself in the birds’ spiralling upward (or downward?) motion. A low, thrumming sound of wind, rumbling water and digital distortion accompanied the video footage, played at the lowest frequencies.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ‘La Javanaise’ (2012), film still

White noise of varying intensity is built into the very fabric of Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta’s Strange Lines and Distances, which visually and aurally connects the two sites of Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless transmission at the start of the 20th century. The twinned images of St John’s, Newfoundland and Poldhn, Cornwall, facing each other across the central octagonal space and echoing each other’s composition, were fitted to the same soundtrack. The same was true of another two-channel video installation included in ‘Waves vs. Particles’ (though at best tenuously linked to the exhibition’s theme): Dutch filmmaker Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s documentary La Javanaise, in which two different videos that cannot be viewed simultaneously, in contrast to Bonnetta’s films, share the same soundtrack, including dialogue.

Helio Oiticica, ‘Block-Experiments in Cosmococa’ (1973), installation view at Forum Expanded

Among the other highlights in the Forum Expanded strand, two of the rarely shown Block-Experiments in Cosmococa, devised by Hélio Oiticica in the early 1970s in collaboration with other artists and filmmakers, held pride of place. Distressingly, I missed the projection at the Liquidrom, which was on for one night only, from 10pm to 2am. Prolonging the liquid theme of the group show, it called on the audience to don swimsuits and experience the slide-show environment from inside the pool. The other experiment in quasi-cinema – a term coined by Oiticica and the Brazilian artist-filmmaker Neville d’Almeida for their ‘suprasensory’ multimedia installations – seemed fairly tame in comparison. An homage to the 1973 Rolling Stones album ‘Goat’s Head Soup’, CC6 Coke Head’s Soup (1973) involved photographs of Mick Jagger’s face on a newspaper cover, liberally dusted with cocaine, projected on all sides of a mattressed room at the Hamburger Bahnhof to a soundtrack from said album.

Oiticica is also the subject of an engaging biopic by his nephew Cesar Oiticica Filho, which premiered at this edition of the Forum and won the Caligari Film Prize. The documentary’s colour-steeped aesthetic and camp sensibility are indebted to Jack Smith, whom Hélio Oiticica acknowledged as an influence on the cocaine slide-show projections that conjure up New York’s underground scene of the early 1970s. Smith’s influence also makes itself felt in Richard Foreman’s collage of overexposed portraits and tableaux-like scenes from what feels like theatre rehearsals in Once Every Day. The first feature film made by the illustrious founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in over 30 years is more akin to experimental theatre and photography than to cinema.

The New York-based director wasn’t able to make it to the premiere, due to snowstorms, but Babette Mangolte, who photographed two of Foreman’s plays and shot his last films, Out of the Body Travel (1976) and Strong Medicine (1978), was present at the discussion that followed. (Her own short documentary, Edward Krasinki’s Studio, suffused with wintry light and beautifully shot with a handheld camera, premiered the previous day, also as part of Forum Expanded.) Foreman was in attendance virtually, via Skype, and he appeared dumbfounded that so many people had walked out during the screening. But that’s the Berlinale for you: the audience tends to be refreshingly vocal in its likes and dislikes.

Agnieszka Gratza is a writer based in London.

By Dan Fox

Derek Jacobi in the 1995 production of Peter Luke's 'Hadrian VII' (based on the novel by Frederick Rolfe)

This week saw the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the first to abdicate as leader of the Roman Catholic Church since Gregory VII in 1415. Soon, the Papal Conclave – a meeting of the College of Cardinals – will gather behind locked doors to decide who will be the next Pontiff. (It used to meet in a bricked-up room, to prevent lobbyists trying to influence the decision process, and to ensure that the cardinals would concentrate on the matter in hand.) When their decision has been made, the ballot papers used by the Cardinals will be burned, the smoke – visible from St Peter’s Square – signalling that a new Pope has been elected.

What, you are probably wondering, does this medieval pantomime have to do with a contemporary art magazine? Well, Benedict XVI’s resignation falls on the 100 year anniversary of the death of Frederick Rolfe, an obscure British artist and writer who, in 1904, published a peculiar revenge fantasy about the election of an English pope, titled Hadrian the Seventh.

Rolfe was a marginal figure in 19th century British bohemia. A writer, painter and photographer, he was also, by many accounts, a troubled and often deeply unpleasant man who alienated many close to him. Rolfe went by many names, the best known of which was Baron Corvo; he claimed that the Duchess Sforza Cesarini – a minor aristocrat and patron of Rolfe – had bestowed the title on him. Rolfe’s other pseudonyms included Frederick Austin, Frank English, A. Crab Maid and Fr. Rolfe, the clerical ambiguity of the latter no doubt a way of assuaging his resentment at being expelled in 1889 from the Scots College in Rome whilst training to be a Catholic priest.

Frederick Rolfe (c.1889)

He wrote short stories for The Yellow Book– the London-based literary journal famous for its Aubrey Beardsley illustrations and associations with fin de siècle decadence – and dabbled with painting and homoerotic photography. Hardly an exceptional artistic talent – his painting was formally naïve and deeply religious in subject matter – Rolfe nonetheless was notable for making very early experiments in both colour and underwater photography. Unusually for his time, Rolfe was open about his homosexuality. He was strongly attracted to adolescent boys, and his desires were often expressed in mawkish and borderline pornographic terms in correspondences with friends. Given Rolfe’s obsession with Catholicism, his life echoes in peculiar ways around the abuse scandals, indefensible cover-ups and antediluvian homophobia that rocks the Vatican today. Rolfe’s life was later documented by the co-founder of the International Wine and Food Society, A.J.A. Symons, in his ‘experiment in biography’, The Quest for Corvo (1934), a book that not only tells Rolfe’s life but gives a meta-commentary about Symons’ own experiences writing it.

A.J.A. Symons, ‘The Quest for Corvo’ (1934)

Hadrian the Seventh (which in 1968 formed the basis of a stage play by Peter Luke, Hadrian VII) tells the story of George Arthur Rose, an unashamedly transparent avatar for Rolfe. The chain-smoking Rose is a failed writer, living in poverty in a London garret with no one other than his imperious cat Flavio for company, and nursing bitterness at having been rejected from the Catholic priesthood. One night he is visited by two envoys from the Vatican, including a Cardinal Archbishop. They inform him that the Papal Conclave has been in session to elect a new Pope, but the discussions have reached stalemate. By a strange twist in events, the Conclave has decided to offer the Papacy to Rose, which he accepts, taking on the name Hadrian VII in homage to Nicholas Brakespear, the last and only English Pope, Hadrian IV, in the 12th century.

Poster for 1969 stage production of ‘Hadrian VII’ at the New Tivoli Theatre, Sydney, Australia

Rose travels to Rome and, once ordained, sets about exacting revenge against every person and institution that has ever crossed him or disagrees with him, and dragging the Roman Catholic church through a set of reforms. Pope Hadrian wants to redesign the crucifix, re-decorate the Vatican and redraw the boundaries of various European nations. Oddly, his decrees do not include lifting the church’s ban on homosexuality, and Hadrian rails against socialism despite deciding to re-distribute the Vatican’s wealth to the poor. The story ends with Rose assassinated by an anti-Catholic Scotsman.

Frederick Rolfe, ‘Hadrian the Seventh’ (Cover of 1963 Penguin edition)

Hadrian the Seventh is, in many ways, a dreadful book. Rolfe uses it as a platform for venomous screeds about all the injustices (perceived and imagined) that vex him, passages that drag on for pages and pages. With its almost absurdly vituperative tone and fantastical, Dan Brown-esque plot it nonetheless remains a curio in a long strain of English writers who have over-aestheticized and romanticized the theatre of Roman Catholicism, including Anthony Burgess, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Evelyn Waugh. It also contains a strong message: do not elect an artist as Pope.

By Ellen Feiss

All photos courtesy: Christa Holka

The ‘special’ mode of address offered by this symposium was acutely aware of its setting. Curated by Tate Film and Electra Productions and convened by the artist Carlos Motta, ‘Gender Talents’ was held in Tate Modern’s Tanks, that subterranean domain of the museum reserved for its most subversive offerings. The event itself was a one day conference as part of the series ‘Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness’ and was held in an installation by Motta, with speaker’s platforms and a foundation designed for seated panel discussion reminiscent of the environment he created for his 2011 exhibition ‘We Who Feel Differently’, at the New Museum. The audience was seated tightly around a central stage, with the darkened walls at the periphery of the room providing space for projections during each presentation. Somewhere between a TV studio (the dramatic lighting of The Weakest Link came to mind) and a TED Talk, emphasized by the participants’ headsets, the tightly curated scene of the symposium plainly addressed the construction of all public forums of knowledge exchange. This highlighted what would be one of the main considerations of the occasion: the tension between critical speech and its institutional framework.

The objectives of the congress were clearly stated. Despite unprecedented recognition for the rights and liberties of mainstream gay and lesbian lives, and the attainment of many of the goals of historic gay liberation movements, social inequity has intensified along different (albeit no less violent or exclusionary) lines – between ‘rich and poor, between North and South, between global elites and global multitudes’, as the theorist and cultural critic J. Jack Halberstam put it in his introduction. What can a queer politic do when it rejects the normative recognition of marriage and any belief in ‘progress’ or ‘tolerance’ as goals, and is reimagined as in partnership with a plethora of struggles against systemic injustice?

Each speaker had been invited to give a manifesto, ‘to convey a sense of urgency and encourage a (speech) act of performance’, which did well to establish the basis for the congress as a union, or the inseparability, of politics and aesthetics. At a moment when a particularly destructive form of gay marriage politic is being propagated through culture, effacing the insurrectionary capabilities of queer authorship; from the forthcoming adaptation of Larry Kramer’s seminal play about ACT UP, The Normal Heart for HBO to David Cameron’s support of marriage for all. The urgency of this congress was both specific to queer and trans communities as well as related to recent calls to arms across the Left, at least since the popularization of Occupy.

Unlike other institutional ‘summits’ for engineering resistance, many of the 12 presentations within ‘Gender Talents’ actively contradicted one another without apology or rationalization by the organizers. This was a real strength of the programme, as it allowed a heterogeneity of approaches to its stated goals to flourish, avoiding the easy consensus and development of catchphrases common at other gatherings of the ‘radical’ masses. The first panel felt like a hark back to a slightly earlier moment of queer thought and cultural activity, one which blossomed in the 1980s and ’90s as gay and lesbian studies gained traction in universities across Europe and the US. Del LaGrace Volcano, the genderqueer artist and photographer, gave a largely autobiographical manifesto that was as rousing as it was at times problematic, veering between misinterpretation of Judith Butler’s classic notion of performativity, to affecting personal stories of violence and reclamation. Volcano’s arsenal of photographs of gender nonconforming bodies, including his own, was a reminder of how important the acts of queer self-representation, documentation and its archiving still are to the health of LGBTQI communities. Truly alien to the demeanour of the Tate, Volcano demonstrated the still uneasy relationship between what could be called queer folk art to contemporary art. Halberstram argued for a queering of mass revolt against the state, as well as the development of new forms of allegiance and ways of being together in struggle. In keeping with his oeuvre, he used cultural material as commonplace as the animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and chart hiphop, yet this form of analysis left unexamined the impact of the realities of these texts, specifically the political economies that had produced them, on their ability to be deployed for radical purposes.

In almost stereotypical fashion, feminist infighting occurred at several junctures. Terre Thaemlitz, the activist and DJ (who records as DJ Sprinkles), issued a statement, sitting down and turned away from most of the audience, criticizing the premise of the event as one vested in queer self-determination, as if one is ever ungoverned by subordinating forces, and emphasized the untrustworthiness of notions of solidarity and community especially in the context of an art institution. In seditious style, Thaemlitz referenced the speaker’s fee all participants were receiving to deliver their ‘manifestos’, relishing the contradiction inherent in earnest expressions of political mobilization within the framework of both Tate and its waged labour. In a related spirit, the philosopher Beatriz Preciado reminded the audience of how, even in their most subversive forms, they are biologically governed by increasingly complex modes of capital as the ‘somatic and sexualized workforce of global post-Fordism’. Incorporating the aligned politics of sex work and disability, Preciado did however map a feasible picture of what a queer coalition and its tactics could be today.

Despite clear criticism of traditional modes of gay and lesbian identification, ‘Gender Talents’ maintained moments of recognition for historic forms of queerness that remain politically necessary. The curator Xabier Arakistain, whose practice has involved developing feminist criterion for the exhibition of contemporary art as the director of the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, delivered a reminder of the short history of feminism and its easily expugnable gains. The filmmaker Campbell X spoke on the role of UTube and social media more generally, as space for expression by queers of colour, in opposition to mainstream media forms dominated by white LGBTI narratives. It is this specificity of and attendance to subjectivity that allowed the congress to both examine questions being hotly debated around global inequality and forms of resistant action, and also acknowledge the central contradiction of any insurgent speech act within the institution, with its imperial set of frameworks which shape and insulate meaning. Above all, ‘Gender Talents’ pointed to the ludicrous segregation of forums for the consideration of politics on the one hand and gender on the other, utilizing the cultural legitimation offered by the institution to do so.

By Ali Kayley & Dan Glaister

'for stupid people love tales that are old' 16mm film still, 2013

It started with a word on a map. One of those places you hear of but never visit: Purgatory. We’d read about it, seen it in pictures, in art galleries, in the movies, though it had never been real. But there it was, just up the hill from our studio, marked on the OS map in that fine roman script. We don’t know why it is there, and we don’t want to know. We prefer to make up our own story, to imagine the stories that lie behind it. It’s a creepy place, although that might just be because of its name. It’s always windy up on the top of the hill, inside the copse that is Purgatory. And you can hear the cattle moaning, and sometimes the farm dogs howling, and the trees creaking. And it seems to have had some sort of devastation wrought upon it: it really is a place of gnarled trunks and fallen boughs, of tangles and thickets and marshy ground. And like all the best depictions of Purgatory, it is circular.

So there was Purgatory. And then some time later we noticed the other place: Paradise. It’s not far, a few miles, easy to walk to, but there it is. Why this coincidence? Which one came first? Do they always go around in pairs like this? So then we thought maybe there are lots of them, all over the country, Purgatories, maybe there should be an inventory of Purgatories. But there aren’t. We found one, in Cumbria, and a Purgatory Pool near Wolverhampton, which sounded fairly grisly, but that was it. So this was unique? A unique occurrence? Probably not, but it felt good, the sort of stuff artists thrive on.

Our previous project, Conquistador (2011) was about immigration and death in California and Mexico. It had taken us to fruit farms in California’s Central Valley and to depopulated villages in southern Mexico where death is a way of life. Not the narco death we hear so much about but the waiting for the dead, the ushering past of the newly departed, the easing of their journey. And now here we were, on the other side of this world, with Purgatory. The dead play such a vivid part in life in Mexico and Mexican culture, it was easy to exoticize it. But what happened here? Why would there be a place called Purgatory here?

‘Indulgence I’, Charcoal and ink on paper, 2013

Indulgences. Google indulgence and it will tell you about chocolate and celebrity perfume. But there was a more sane, more rational time: it was called the Middle Ages, a time of fervent belief, of doubt, of uncertainty, and, it seems, of a desperate attempt to cater for all eventualities in the great unknown. Fire and brimstone? Probably, literally, true. Hell and damnation? Ditto. Purgatory and the cleansing of sin by fire? A certainty. Escape? Almost impossible, although….

There was an answer. For while a literal belief in Purgatory was the norm in medieval Britain. That widespread belief spawned a relief: the Indulgence, or pardon, sold or exchanged for goods or money, promises or piety. The money went to the church’s coffers, to good works, to finance the building of hospitals, harbours, all sorts. Think of the National Lottery with a particularly nasty consequence should you not buy a ticket. These pardons were, in the early Middle Ages, hand-written, sometimes sold by travelling pardoners – Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale (written in the late 14th century) is the best-known literary example – and sometimes available at churches. They promised remission, relief from time in Purgatory in very specific ways: perform a particular penance or religious duty – from killing Turks on a crusade to going to church and saying prayers – and you could earn tens, hundreds or thousands of years off your time in Purgatory. This was managed by the church, but gradually it was farmed out to sellers, pardoners, who might be religiously endorsed, or might have obtained a seal from the Pope, or might be sporting a religious artefact, possibly an old leg of lamb, or possibly the leg of the lamb of God. You could never be too sure.

Pardons were initially hand-written by scriveners, but when moveable type and the first printing presses arrived in England they began to be made using the new technology. Caxton and other early printers produced pardons on a scale previously unimaginable, helping to both fuel the business of indulgence production, and to propel the nascent business of printing. Arguably, Caxton was able to print Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the first books printed in English, thanks to the trade in pardons.

Purgatory (diptych, work in progress), 2013

For this project we have made a series of indulgences, borrowing in spirit from the indulgences of the Middle Ages, as well as working with letterpress printing, in the spirit of Caxton. We have printed our indulgences over charcoal drawings of Purgatory: in these indulgences the reality of Purgatory is plain to see; the metaphysical is given physical form.

Untitled (16mm film still), 2013

For our film work, we propose to film the flight from Purgatory: a figure treading a path that is well-worn and ancient yet elusive, a path that is both mythical and material, leaving a trace in the landscape, a trace that is there but momentarily, persisting even after the film has moved on, a retinal memory. We like working with the transient medium of film, its unpredictability and its instability absorb and reflect the ethereal nature of the subjects that we are drawn to. The title of one section, ‘for stupid people love tales that are old’, is spoken by Chaucer’s Pardoner in Sheila Fisher’s translation of The Canterbury Tales.

A third element of the work is to walk from Purgatory to Paradise. In the same way that the film and the drawing reference and give flesh to myth and superstition, so the walk takes this handed-down notion and does it for real. We may even find out if it has any meaning.

From Purgatory to Paradise: an indulgence in 16mm film, drawing and print will be developed at Meantime, Cheltenham (www.meantime.org.uk), with work to date shown on 21-23 March. The final film will be shown at the end of May at the Site festival in Stroud. The walk from Purgatory to Paradise will take place on June 1.

By Rob White

Restricted view of Alina’s ordeal: still from 'Beyond the Hills', 2012 Mobra Films / Why Not Productions / Les Films du Fleuve / France 3 Cinéman / Mandragora Movies. Courtesy of Artificial Eye.

It’s six years since Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Palme d’Or for his painful and pared-down drama about an illegal abortion, ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ drawing international attention to what was inevitably called the New Wave of Romanian cinema. Accepting the award, the director explained that these films ‘come from reality, not from other films’.

As with any realism, there’s nothing haphazard involved; it takes discipline to successfully convey the impression of unfiltered reality. In his follow-up feature, Beyond the Hills (2012) – which is released in the UK on 15 March – he continues to abide by rules. Aesthetically the most notable of these is that there’s only one shot per scene. No editing modifies the sense of cinematic space or guides the viewer’s perception of emotional dynamics. This restriction often gives scenes in Beyond the Hills an enclosed painterly quality of separation. At other times, especially when Mungiu keeps an incident off-screen, the effect is more inclusive because both audience and characters have restricted perception. It’s hard to say whether what’s involved is realism conducive to empathy, if what’s meant by that word is a heartening sense of togetherness. Given that Mungiu persistently conveys the disheartening experience of shared powerlessness, it’s more of an abject realism.

Beyond the Hills is set mainly in a conservative monastery in Moldova, in the desolate east of Romania, occupied by a group of nuns obedient to a charismatic priest (Valeriu Andriuţă). One of them, Voichița, (Cosmina Stratan), is little more than a teenager. When Alina (Cristina Fluturher), her best friend and protector, visits she’s shocked to discover Voichița’s newfound passive devotion. Alina has been working in Germany, but she’s lonely there and wants Voichița to join her. Nothing she says, though, shakes her friend’s piety. Alina asks: ‘Will you stay in this cave your whole life? … Are you afraid of living?’ Voichița answers with a parable of the priest’s: ‘A man traveled the world for years to find life’s meaning, and another man looked out of his front door and found peace and God.’ Exasperated, and then desperate to reclaim her friend’s love, Alina challenges the priest’s authority with calamitous consequences for everybody.

The Priest surrounded by nuns

Despite his own rule-bound practice, Mungiu’s depiction of a religious community living in primitive conditions is only intermittently sympathetic. Narrow-mindedness in the monastery develops almost accidentally into violence. In a remote environment that gives its inhabitants precious little comfort, the nuns huddle together for safety and cherish the priest’s certainties. Orphan Alina, by contrast, has struck out on her own in the mistaken belief that Voichița will join her. Alina’s furiously tenacious and sometimes ugly refusal to accept escape without love is the poignant problem at the heart of Mungiu’s grave and powerful film.

Voichița with the priest and mother superior

Rob White: Can you explain the place of the Orthodox Church in Romania?

Cristian Mungiu: Romania was one of the few countries where, during the Communist times, religion was tolerated. It was never like the Soviet Union: churches continued to exist, priests were paid by the state. You could go to church during the Communist times, unless you were a member of the Party – then it wasn’t recommended. Yet [President] Ceaușescu himself buried his parents in an Orthodox ceremony, because they were simple people finally.

Beyond the Hills is set in more recent times (the events it’s based on occurred in 2005). The Church has consolidated its position in society since the end of Communism. I think we have 20,000 churches for a country of 20,000,000 people, with 4,000 built in the post-Communist period. Eighty-five per cent of Romanians declare themselves to be religious in polls. However, if you were to ask people to define their religion, I think there would be a lot of superstition mixed together with Christian morality.

RW: Is the monastic community in Beyond the Hills almost a kind of cult?

CM: It’s not a cult. They’re a part of the Orthodox Church, but very traditionalist. There’s a sign on the gate of the monastery that’s not translated in the English subtitles, which warns against believers in other cults. It’s an extremist position – believing without doubting in any way. Actually the Orthodox Church has increasingly embraced ecumenism, while this priest sticks with the most traditionalist position.

The priest’s traditionalism is expressed when, confronted with Alina’s defiance, he attempts (not without hesitation and caution) an exorcism. He can’t understand her behavior in any way other than as possession by the devil. The priest this character is based on was seen by some as a fanatic, but in the film I think he’s wiser than that label suggests. In particular he insists on the subtle distinction between the manifestation of evil and its cause of evil. There were also some who defended the actual priest because although his exorcism ritual ended with the death of the woman concerned, it did succeed in scaring away the evil from her. She was fine when she died. I thought that was an interesting opinion.

RW: What connections do you see between 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills?

CM: I don’t see much direct connection apart from the fact that I again thought a lot about my means as a filmmaker. I thought how I was going to make the film and I couldn’t come up with anything smarter or fresher or different in terms of style compared to last time. I didn’t want to make the same kind of film and so the fundamental decision was to do a story that takes place today and not in the Communist society.

If there’s a thematic connection, perhaps it’s in the area of moral dilemmas and situations that aren’t clear, that show you how complicated it is to judge some things. Last time it wasn’t only abortion but also the freedom of decision. Beyond the Hills speaks about how relative good and evil can be. If you watch this situation everything advances in a very logical way, and everybody seems to be trying to help, but finally it doesn’t go well.

Beyond the Hills speaks also to me about the necessity, which comes out towards the end, of making decisions for yourself. What Voichița has to understand at the end is that the sense of guilt is personal and the responsibility that you feel is personal and therefore the decision has to be yours. You can’t share it with anybody else.

RW: Can you speak about the self-imposed restrictions of your filmmaking?

CM: There are several restrictions: just one shot per scene, no music, no editing, the camera always watching from a participant’s perspective. The great difference in terms of structure between this film and the previous one is the amount of time the story covers. It’s a huge difference for me as a filmmaker to represent twenty-four hours in one shot per scene in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days compared to several days in one shot per scene in Beyond the Hills. I wanted to discover if I could use this long-take technique, which I believe to be honest, and still use it for stories that are longer and more complex. I’m still not totally sure if it works, honestly. Indeed maybe cinema should only be for stories that occur in a short while, with every ellipsis explicitly marked by a subtitle: “one year later” or whatever. The moments have to have their coherence if you work with one shot per scene because the whole essence of this technique is that time flows like in real time. You don’t eliminate the moments that aren’t important or relevant – everything is relevant, as in real life.

RW: What was your approach to shot composition and lighting?

CM: I wanted to build something on white, as if I were painting on a white canvas. But it happened that the snow came quite late in the film, so I was hindered in this objective. Any film is made of what you plan plus what then happens. For the interiors we had a different kind of problem. This is a place with no electricity. I had to ask my cinematographer to make it look as realistic as possible, but especially for the night scenes. To shoot people dressed in black at night with no electricity raises some problems because we never want to actually see where the light comes from. We wanted to have it seem as natural as possible, so the cinematographer had to use a lot of candles. Normally the walls of such monastic cells are white but you can’t really shoot black with white in dark light because it doesn’t look good. So we ended up having everything in tones of grey and at the end we reinforced the look by desaturating the colours quite a lot. We did the same thing in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: there’s a reduction of between thirty and forty per cent of the colours, and what you get as a result are very strong blacks, which really speak a lot. What I like is to have a composition with big portions of colour, with pretty much shades of the same colours, but not very colourful, with lots of geometrical elements too.

Painting on white

The scenes are like moving photos. Since I don’t cut, the first thing I do when I’m on set is to identify the camera position from where I’m going to cover pretty much all of the situation. The final shot has to do the work of several shots in another film. I like at the beginning to see the whole space but then I move with the character. The camera never moves unless a character is moving.

RW: What about your use of sound?

CM: You find out immediately when you decide to do only one shot per scene that there are going to be a lot of things which you just can’t shoot. It’s difficult to work like this: you have to learn how to use the off-camera a lot. For example, we learned that it’s not going to be good have all the dialogue spoken in the shot. This isn’t powerful. We also learned how to use off-camera sound, to rely a lot on things you don’t see but you hear.

There’s a scene that relies only on sound. After Voichița unties Alina at the end, she gets back to her cell and sits on her bed and just listens. She hears a couple of footsteps on the snow approaching and then the dog starts barking. The footsteps stop for a while and then resume. Finally you hear a gate opening. The sounds correspond to Voichița’s hope that Alina will leave. Actually it must be someone else walking outside, but what’s powerful is the character’s projection. Using off-camera sound like this means that the spectator can witness what’s in the mind of the character but not in the shot itself.

Alina and Voichița

RW: What’s the nature of the friendship between Alina and Voichița?

CM: Each of them is trying to convince the other that she’s on the wrong track and each of them is doing this out of the love that she feels for the other. In the end, the one who succeeds is Alina. The film doesn’t tell you about her reasons, but I suspect Alina doesn’t leave after she’s untied because she has a point to make. It’s not about leaving, it’s about making the other open her eyes. This is her whole struggle. It’s the same thing with Voichița, only she comes to understand that she’s wrong this time. For me, she’s the main character. The crucial thing is that we witness the moment when somebody changes something about herself.

Voichița isn’t somebody who’s religious who loses faith. No: she’s not losing faith – she starts having doubts which for a religious person is a worse punishment than not being religious, losing faith completely. Whenever you’re sure about something it’s fine. But the greatest sin is to doubt and this is what happens to her. She’s differentiated visually by her big beige sweater at the end because she’s different now. The greatest punishment that she’ll have to endure is that she’ll live with this burden of feeling guilty for the rest of her life. She loses the comfort of the life that she’s had had in the monastery, this illusion of affection that she had among these people – and she’s not getting anything else in return. Because, you know, people don’t always want to be free. Freedom is a great burden, but Voichița understands that she has to take this responsibility to leave. She will leave: this is why she begins to dress differently. She’s getting back to the world. Where to exactly? She doesn’t know, I don’t know. But this is something that she has to do.

RW: Why does Alina go to such lengths to persuade Voichița?

CM: There’s a time in our lives – when we’re 16, 20, even 80 – when somebody that we really love a lot tells us that everything is finished. ‘Just go, we’ll be good friends’, which is even more awful. The love between these girls is a very, very strong bond because of what they went through together at the orphanage. It’s not only friendship. It’s the desire not to be alone in the world, to have somebody to love and trust, your only family. When Alina returns, she understands that she’s lost this person – and lost her in favour of someone you can’t even really punch, because Voichița is in love with God! And this is intolerable. This is something you can’t fight against. So, if you like, her madness comes from her love.

It’s not carnal love: it’s a need for affection that I wanted to explore. When you lose the affection that’s so important, you’ll get the strength to fight with all your means to get back the other. It isn’t rational. And any man or woman who’s ever been dumped knows that you’d do anything, however humiliating. This is what Alina does. The priest is a concrete manifestation she can actually fight. On top of this, I honestly believe this character is nonconformist. It’s not clear in the film – and I wanted it to be like this – if she’s mentally sick, if she’s possessed or if she’s just somebody with a strong personality who can’t tolerate rules. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a combination of all these.

The interview was conducted during the London Film Festival, 13 October 2012. Thanks to Jake Garriock at Artificial Eye for making the arrangements. Beyond the Hills premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where Mungiu won the award for Best Screenplay, and Flutur and Stratan shared the award for Best Actress. It was selected as the Romanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. Beyond the Hills has a limited released in the UK on 15 March.

By Ayesha Hasan

Visitors take pictures by the message board at the inaugural Lahore Literary Festival

It began as the most sought after event in the history of the city – a city full of art and culture, the home to the Mughal emperors and their architectural aestheticism, the city that fascinated British rulers for over 100 years. Book lovers were excited and so were the writers. None of them wanted to miss out the event that had been announced just a few weeks before its launch.

Book lovers poured in on the two days of the first ever Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) held at the Alhamra Arts Centre in the heart of the city. Unhampered by continuous rain, people went through the schedule lists in their hands to make their way into the halls where their favourite authors were speaking. For me, it was a hard choice to make. Though I attended consecutive sessions, my heart and mind travelled to the overlapping sessions as self-created images from other halls popped in my mind. What must Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice Candy Man, 1991) be saying while I listened to Owen Bennett-Jones (Target Britain, 2013) speak about national narrative? What excerpt must Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 2007) be reading from his new book, as I listened to Linda Bird Francke and Victoria Schofield talk about ghost writing Daughter of the East (2008), an autobiography of the slain first woman prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto. Twitter saved my life. Updates from each session every second made me feel as I was present at more than one place at the same time, like a dream where you see yourself at multiple locations. My toes were damp and numb. I kept stepping into puddles on the building premises. I was not alone as I noticed many wet pairs of boots standing in a queue to get into the hall where Pakistani-British award-winning author Nadeem Aslam was about to launch the Indian Subcontinent edition of his new book The Blind Man’s Garden. I grabbed a copy available at a 15% discount and waited for the session to end before I could get it signed. He was personally my favourite author at the event.

Nadeem Aslam in conversation with Declan Walsh

Aslam’s writing has always clicked with me; he creates images where violence and beauty intertwine in a magical way that combines fiction and reality. He grew up in a Pakistani rural city and learnt English only when he moved to the UK at the age of 14. He now references Czeslaw Milosz, Vladimir Nabokov and Herman Melville. To learn English, he copied several books out by hand, including Moby Dick (1851) and Lolita (1958). To write about a blind man, he taped his eyes for weeks to feel what a blind man would do. During a discussion with him a day before the LLF, he told me that he regularly went for a walk to note down things that he found interesting. He would return with his pockets full of notes that would later go into his record books, numbered according to the years, where he had been noting things down since the age of 17. These notes, he told me, helped him create stories. No wonder, I have always found a touch of realism in his work, especially his master piece, The Waster Vigil (2008).

Being a writer in Pakistan can be a tough job. With almost half of its population illiterate, the public is judgmental and sensitive about books and authors, art and artists, love and relationships. They tend to evaluate everything on a scale that is determined by their religions and culture. At an event such as the LLF, choosing excerpts to read can be a tough job, too. In a country, where the majority of people try to connect everything with religion, you never know if the word that leaves your mouth will be your last word.

But the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid and Indian writer Jeet Thayil prefer taking risks. Thayil read from his book Narcopolis (2012) which is about opium and its effect and is set in the 1970s Old Bombay. Minutes after he read the excerpt containing explicit words from the Urdu-Hindi slang that he used for various castes in the Indian Subcontinent, all the copies of the book available at the event were sold out. What could have offended a lot of people there, actually made them laugh their lungs out. The hall echoed with more laughter as Thayil continued to read, literally swearing at each caste. Later, I overheard some people commenting at Thayil’s ‘clever marketing of his book’ by ‘deliberately choosing’ the particular excerpt. Literary festivals are a good way to market work and for readers, signed copies are a life-long treasure.

While there were sessions where authors discussed the globalisation of Pakistani literature and the challenges of use of language in storytelling, several others deliberated on the declining interest of Pakistani readers in Urdu literature. Indian writers had a somewhat similar observation on Hindi literature. But all concluded unanimously that writing in English gave them a larger market to write for. At the same session, Pakistani-Canadian Musharraf Ali Farooqi ( Between Clay and Dust 2012) said he would have preferred writing in Urdu, but could not trust local editors with his work.

The second day of the event brought some sunshine. The umbrellas were gone and so were the boots. Dressed in bright colours, it was now an opportunity for the audience to show off their Hermes bags, their Gucci sunglasses and LV and Chanel sandals. More than half of the visitors belonged to the local fashion and entertainment industries. There were also international bloggers, local and international publishers and journalists from around the world.

People queuing to get into talks

Halls were full and so was the parking lot. It took me 40 minutes to find a safe place to park – 500 metres from the centre’s building. Author Tehmina Durrani made her first public appearance in 12 years after her book My Feudal Lord (1991) was published in which she had explained her personal experience of an abusive marriage to a famous politician, whom she later took a divorce from. Durrani is now married to another politician, who is part of the ruling government. This is her third marriage. Doors of the hall where she talked had to be locked during the session for it could not accommodate even one more person. Dozens of people had to be denied entry. Durrani talked about how her family had disowned her for 13 years for abandoning her first husband for the love of a man, stronger and more powerful than the former. This is something any conservative family in Pakistan would do to such a daughter. Durrani’s courage to speak about it publicly is, nonetheless, a valiant step on the face of our backward society.

In Pakistani society, it is very common for an artist’s years of hard work to be criticised because it might contain overt images of people or has symbolism that is above a layman’s understanding. Most people here are offended by pictures that represent people, calling them anti-Islamic. Religion is the new obsession in Pakistan. Well, not that new, but the implications have never been so extreme.

Selma Dabbagh

Then there were sessions that I unwillingly missed, because I wanted to attend all of them, had they not been scheduled on overlapping timings. I especially regret missing those on the courtesan in literature, Urdu poetry, Kathak dance and women’s voices from colonial times to modern Pakistan. Women were prominent speakers at the LLF. Palestinian-British fiction writer Selma Dabbagh whose debut novel Out of It (2011) a story of a Palestinian family who flees the violence in Palestine and settles in the UK and the Gulf – was particularly impressive. Unsurprisingly, Dabbagh has strong views on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and writes about conflict zones and political issues. Although she lives in Britain, Dabbagh still feels her strong connection to Palestine and her ‘responsibility’ to highlight the problems of the people there, through fiction writing. Her calm speech, reasonable stance, upright posture and specifically her understanding of subject area were impressive.

LLF was a venue for the audience to catch a glimpse of their favourite writers, catch-up with friends and acquaintances or make public appearances. For me it meant more than that. As an aspiring author, I learned two things. First – always know the beginning and end of your story and let what’s in-between come to you and second – always arrive at least 30 minutes before the sessions begins if you don’t want to sit in the stairs.

http://www.lahorelitfest.com

By Alia Swastika

The Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Twenty-five years ago, one of the most important moments in the history of contemporary art in Indonesia occurred in a small living room in a simple house in the middle of a kampong (village) in Yogyakarta. Nindityo Adipurnomo, an artist who had just graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta and went to school at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and Mella Jaarsma, who had just moved to Yogyakarta from Holland, established an independent art space called Cemeti Modern Art Gallery. Cemeti literally means whip, a symbol they chose to represent a new spirit to encourage a new generation of artists in Indonesia.

But starting an independent art initiative was not easy during the authoritarian political regime of the late 1980s. Many political issues needed to be dealt with: censorship, security permits and controlled regulation. At the same time, in terms of the economic situation, there was no government support for arts organizations. Not to mention that the market for contemporary art at the time was dominated by big patrons, who rarely supported younger artists.

Exhibition spaces in the city during 1980s were very limited; though there was an Art Center in every city that was initiated and managed by the government, they were mostly rented out for commercial exhibitions. But there were no professional commercial galleries that operated under the model that Cemeti established. At the same time, more and more varied artistic practices were emerging in the wake of a previous generation of artists like The New Art Movement and Art of What kind of Identity in the late 1970s. Adipurnomo and Jaarsma had seen the importance of providing a new platform for a younger generation of artists where they could show their work, and more importantly, reflect a criticism of the surrounding political situation.

In the last decade of Suharto’s regime, Cemeti hosted numerous exhibitions, which showed the important role artists played in spreading critical thought and opinions against the government. While censorship was common, artists found their own ways to create new metaphors to be shared with a wider audience. At the same time, it also encouraged artists to fight for more freedom of artistic expression. Many experimental projects and different forms of art were exhibited at Cemeti: paintings, installations, photography, performance, video arts or even craft.

During that time, we could sense the dynamic spirit of an aesthetic breakthrough being realized at the Cemeti Art House, as it displayed the wittiest and most cutting edge work of that particular period. Just as importantly, this art space was instrumental in fostering the earlier stages of Indonesian artists’ careers and their participation in international art events. All the famous biennale curators’ had stepped into this hub to research, find artists, give talks, and build new connections with this new generation of artists. All the Indonesian ‘superstars’ who actively joined the global art circuit at the time had started their artistic careers here, from Agus Suwage and Heri Dono to Eko Nugroho and Jompet Kuswidananto.

An exhibition at the Cemeti Art House

Over the past 25 years, the Cemeti Art House has regularly played host to meetings of different art forms: from traditional to contemporary, from political to conceptual, from Eastern to Western, from lowbrow to fine art, from heavy historical subjects to subtle daily experiences, all mixed together to create different discourses and make a strong impact on the artistic community in its surroundings. But it does not only exhibit art works, they also do workshops, talks, residency programmes, publications, exchanges, touring exhibitions and community programmes, and in doing so they have been a fundamental element of the development of contemporary art in Indonesia.

Opening nights at Cemeti Art House are typically not formal: they have a very special intimacy, with small finger foods and coffee and tea. It’s amazing to think that this simple ceremony has taken place more than 300 times. It is interesting to reflect on how the space has survived for over 20 years without permanent funding and without big collectors. I worked there for nearly four years, and I still recall how well everything was organized on a tight budget but without compromising a high standard. For example, rather than printing hundreds of promotional posters for events, they customized the posters using a silk-screen technique and printed them in editions of 50 or so, to be delivered in public spaces, and then they sold the remaining 20 posters. Being there I learned a lot about the practical side of curatorial work, as did my other colleagues who worked as managers or designers. Cemeti has provided a valuable alternative education for art managers and curators in Indonesia.

Year after year, the public had witnessed how Cemeti has transformed itself to respond to the continuously changing social and political context of the local, regional and international art scene: from Cemeti Modern Art gallery to Cemeti Art Gallery then to Cemeti Art House. In 1999, they moved to a new building, designed by renowned Indonesian architect Eko Agus Prawoto, who effectively combined his traditional signature of using old Javanese house with the needs of a contemporary exhibition space.

In the midst of the current art market boom, and as a high accumulation of changing post-Suharto era, Cemeti Art House has once again transformed its identity. Observing the new political and economic context these days, rather than underlining the act of promoting they are now focusing more on encouraging artists to value the art-making process as something more research-based and collaborative, and to offer a critical standpoint to the audience.

The party for their 25th anniversary, which took place on 2 February this year, reflected the casualness they have always had. ‘One Night Stand’ invited artists and other collaborators to celebrate these years of survival in a unique way: to perform site-specific works, interactive projects, disc jockey, all in just one night. It is interesting that few collectors attended or joined this party; instead it was mainly crowded with artists, curators, journalists, writers, art workers, artisans, and such. And yes, observing this, I can recall the same spirit after all these years: despite the glamorous attention from the international market toward Indonesian art, in their home town, contemporary art is still celebrated by its core community, within this intimate and fluid platform. Happy anniversary!

Alia Swastika is a curator and writer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

By Dan Fox

Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Ever played 27 Gnosis? It’s my new favourite game. Here are five reasons why:
1) It’s the most fun you can have with wordplay outside a strip Scrabble tournament.
Two) the only time I ever played 27 Gnosis, my team won.
Thirdly) the game is an alibi for a serious and inventive work of art about the limits of language, communication and representation.
Number Four) it’s funny. When I say that, I don’t mean that it flashes a few insider gags about the art world or tired shock tactic vulgarities. I mean that it’s the sort of inventive work of surrealist comedy that critics like to say is ‘laugh-out-loud’ funny. If The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, Andy Kaufman, Chris Morris, Reeves and Mortimer, and Eddie Izzard are your thing, then 27 Gnosis is an out-and-out rib-tickler.
V) Did I mention that my team won?

27 Gnosis was created by artist Michael Portnoy. First presented at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel last year, its latest iteration was staged in early March 2013 at The Kitchen, New York. Some might categorize Portnoy’s absurdist game show as a form of theatre, but as this report is published in the context of an art magazine, I should probably describe it as an inter-disciplinary fusion of sculpture, architecture, performance, music, perfumery, audience participation and dance. Yes, exactly. Theatre.

The evening I arrived at The Kitchen for 27 Gnosis, around 20 people were gathered in the building lobby. Instructed to leave coats, bags and phones behind, we were led by a bossy usher to the venue’s upstairs gallery. In the middle of the darkened space was a large wooden structure (designed by Portnoy in collaboration with Christian Wassmann) that looked like a purple-coloured UFO. Faintly ominous ambient music percolated through the room. The usher lined us up in silent single file. In turn, she lifted each audience member’s left arm and arranged the hand at the end of that arm into a quasi-Masonic, tangled-finger salute. There was then a pause – a long and theatrical pause – and we were finally invited inside the lilac UFO where the instruction was given to ‘assume your lean’.

The interior resembled the set from Rollerball (1975) crossed with a giant lemon squeezer. The circular wall sloped outwards and the audience was told to spread around the perimeter and lean with our backs against it. The angle of our ‘leans’ was surprisingly comfortable and I wondered why more buildings didn’t incorporate gently raked walls for people to rest against. Fixed to the wall was a shelf, on which stood 27 small, black abstract sculptures and a glass of Armagnac. In the middle of the little arena was a circular mound, on top of which were two triangular podiums, or ‘skews’.

Once settled into our leans, the two hosts of 27 Gnosis strode in, closing the arena’s double doors behind them. Played by Portnoy and Ieva Misevičiūtė (who was also involved in the development of the game and choreography) the hosts introduced themselves as, respectively, The Rigid Designator and Modifa the Modifier. Their clothing was designed by threeASFOUR; workaday business suits with absurdly large panels cut from the legs and jackets, like haute couture styled by someone who’d had the idea of fashion explained to them but had never seen actual examples of it. The Rigid Designator wore purple eye-shadow and carried a microphone on a long, thin stem of the sort you might remember from a 1970s edition of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The Rigid Designator (Michael Portnoy) and Modifa (Ieva Misevičiūtė) perform an explanatory ritual dance in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

With comical over-confidence the pair welcomed us to the game. They spoke in an unfathomable language somewhere between spoof theory-speak and the kind of pseudo-technical jargon that actors struggle to make sound convincing in sci-fi films. Their delivery was fluid and masterfully deadpan. At one point, as if to clarify the explanation of the contest, Modifa began speaking to us in Russian.

Modifa and The Rigid Designator did a short dance; a gigglesome parody of modern interpretative dance. This ritual out of the way, the game began. Two teams of three were picked from the audience to play the first round and asked to stand at the skews. The Rigid Designator gave the proposition for round one: ‘”A marcescent thing loosens the categorical creance of a guddle.“’ Everyone looked baffled. He continued. ‘I will define some terms. Marcescence is when something withers yet refuses to drop off, like a poor, shriveled bud hanging on at the end of a branch. Creance is when we rope something to our wrist, like a falcon, to train it, and so categorical creance is when we swing categories about in order to dizzy them. And the guddle, well that’s when we thrust our arm into the bitter droll of the river and grope about beneath stones for exubera, or the fruits of exuberance. So, a marcescent thing loosens the categorical creance of a guddle. This proposition is the evidence from which we must derive the three governing constraints of an ontic sphere, or slippery world. What are the three rules which could define a world in which this evidence exists? Each skew will have two minutes to discuss. Your generates will be judged by their: One) intricacy! Two) robustness of confound! And three) sheer diaphragmatic heat!’

Three gnoses from Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

The teams looked uneasy. ‘To make it a bit easier, I will give you each the assistance of a gnose’ announced the Rigid Designator. He reached over to the shelf of small black sculptures and selected one for each team. ‘To you, at Skew One I give: Punctognosis! Or, the knowledge through lancing. And to Skew Two, I give: Hupognosis! Hupognosis, Or the knowledge through heaping, through heaping. Begin!’

The groups went into huddles, each player gazing helplessly at their teammates, hoping that one of their trio had managed to intuit the rules of the game. Modifa moved between each team, keeping an eye on their progress and giving counsel on how to approach the propositions. Useful advice such as ‘make sure you keep to your own bed, don’t narrativize! Notions only!’

Time was soon up and a spokesperson for each team was asked for their ‘generates’. Skew One approached the proposition literally, presenting their three rules for a slippery world in physical terms: no swinging, no hanging and no scrabbling. As their spokesperson gave his answer, The Rigid Designator kept exhorting him to use his diaphragm, to project his answer with force. Skew Two seemed like they were beginning to get the knack of 27 Gnosis. Their confidently delivered answer advised using ‘a laundry list with vigilantized apnea.’ I had no clue what this meant, but it appeared to please Modifa and The Rigid Designator no end and they were declared the winners of their round.

What Skew Two had grasped, and began to dawn on me, was that as far as 27 Gnosis functioned as a game, it was basically one of word play in which the object was to beat the hosts at stretching language to its breaking point, spinning into play as many cod-philosophical neologisms and multiple compound words as you could, and delivering them with as much conviction as possible.

Portnoy and Misevičiūtė’s world of linguistic delirium felt, in its microcosmic way, roundly realized. As actors, the pair seemed to fully inhabit their characters, to believe in the ceremony and language of 27 Gnosis. Their sense of comic timing was well-tuned, and there were pleasingly few chinks in the dramaturgy through which we might see signs of self-reflexivity, signs that they wanted us to be aware of the work’s structural underpinnings. 27 Gnosis was a world unto itself and to engage with its premises, the performance didn’t require prior knowledge of its pedigree. That’s to say, its tangible authority as a work of theatre did not rely on priming the audience with gloss about it being based on, say, a Samuel Beckett or Bertolt Brecht play, or Spalding Gray monologue, in order to boost its intellectual prestige – an insecurity trap that too many art and performance hybrids fall into today. Yes it was absurd, but it was a convincing absurdity; a fiction that, for the 40 minutes you were leaning against the wall of the purple room, made you feel you truly were in the company of two lunatic philosopher game-show hosts.

Modifa (Ieva Misevičiūtė) explains the collision of the four gnoses in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

I was picked to play in round two against the winning skew from the previous bout. I am usually shy of audience participation, but 27 Gnosis looked like too much fun for my normally retiring competitive side to ignore. The Rigid Designator explained that for our round, ‘the proposition was derived from the collision of the four gnoses.’ The formula these gnoses supposedly created was outlined by Modifa in the form of a dance for which The Rigid Designator provided explanation and commentary. It ended with the instruction to ‘construct a notional scaffolding that will allow us to give Political its hill back.’

Just as bewildered as everyone else, my team groped for some verbal hook on which to hang our answer. The matt black gnose in front of us looked to me like a half-formed Henry Moore sculpture, and was about as much help as one too. Modifa asked us if we were going to ‘moisturize the notion closed’ and whether we were clear that it was a ‘notional scaffolding’ we were supposed to be devising. ‘What kind of people do you take us for? Of course we are!’ I replied, sensing that the more you put into the game, the more you’d get out. Modifa was taken aback: ‘I was merely checking – great to know that you’re on the right course!’

As our trio conferred, The Rigid Designator slipped out of the purple UFO. Before we were asked to present our responses, he returned to treat us with a short musical performance, re-entering the ring with a small synthesizer strapped to his arm and playing a sequence of chords that sounded like the theme tune to American Idol might if it were composed by Brian Eno. Following a lengthy anecdote about the previous person who had held the position of Rigid Designator, we were asked for our answers.

The Rigid Designator (Michael Portnoy) tells an anecdote in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Skew One’s spokesperson was summoned to the middle of the arena to deliver their idea for a notional scaffolding that would give Political its hill back. ‘Our notion… is a spanner that would give the tortoise room on the street.’ I smelled blood. My instinct was that this trad-surrealist response would have little traction with Modifa and The Rigid Designator, given their taste for pseudo-critical theory. I was picked as spokesperson for Skew Two and made a counter move: ‘Our strategy is to aim for the clear, to make sure the foundation for the notion is clean and firm to avoid any foamy effervescence leaking into the politic.’ There was a long silence. The Rigid Designator held his head back, peering down his nose at me. Modifa looked anxiously at the RD. With the understated dignity people usually reserve for moments of great cultural significance, the Rigid Designator quietly announced us as ‘the clear winners’.

At this point, Modifa became agitated. She berated us for not generating enough ideas, fearing a collapse of the ontic sphere. She pushed us to think more about ‘logical truth union constants’ and ‘subject clumps’ – at the very least to put our minds to ‘a simple granule of default disjoint.’ I felt as if I was suffering a form of aphasia; I could recognize her words as being spoken in English, but could not attach meaning to any of her sentences. It was like being in a car that’s moving forward even though the engine has cut out – all momentum and no control. Modifa asked us to remain at our skew and face the winners of round one in the final.

Our task was ‘to generate a simple granule of default disjoint through the paranasal hoops of the final gnoses’. The Rigid Designator added two more gnoses to the skews; a philosopher’s stone for ‘notognosis’, or knowledge through the back, and one for ‘angiognosis’, or knowledge through containment. Once again, the teams repeated the ritual of cluelessness, only this time we knew that invention was the solution. Shoulders were once again shrugged and ‘don’t-ask-me-I’ve-no-idea-what’s-going-on’ expressions exchanged, but now, so too were possible phrases and lines of attack. After the two minutes of conferring, Skew One stepped-up to the wooden mound facing Modifa and The Rigid Designator. The gauntlet their spokesperson threw down was ‘a rabbit cloaked in brine and musk.’ It was a bold play. Sidestepping fancy neologistic moves, the metaphor was agile enough to push the trad-surrealist approach of the losing answer from the previous round up to another level altogether. Modifa and The Rigid Designator looked impressed. It was my team’s turn at the plate. A strong parry in the opposite direction was needed. Fixing the RD in the eyes I declared that our default disjoint ‘would be structural: we start at the edge, but in order to oxygenate the network’s through-lines we must keep texturality swampy’. I could tell we’d scored a bullseye the moment I hit the word ‘swampy’. The move had been decisive, and we were declared overall winners.

Our reward as champions of the gnose was to name one of the little black forms. The hosts asked the audience to turn and face the wall and urged us to pick a designation with ‘good mouthfeel’. My teammate chose the word ‘tongue’. Modifa and the Rigid Designator felt this was an unorthodox choice, but honoured our victory and christened the gnose ‘tongue’.

The audience awaits the naming of a new gnose in Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13). Performance still. (Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of The Kitchen)

Beyond the entirely childish sense of glee I’d felt at being on the winning team, the experience of this performance camouflaged as a game seemed to me like an ingenious microcosm of how art criticism might work. The interpretation of art involves competition, risk, rivalries, strategic agreements and on-the-spot judgement calls. It’s a game of language; of taking the artwork in question as first principle, then conscripting context, history, ideas and imagination in the construction of a persuasive or illuminating argument for that artwork. It’s a game you can play on your own or in a team. There are critics who like to run solo, bringing a particularly individual sensibility to bear on what they see. They play fast and loose with translation and invention, shining light from all kinds of acute and obtuse angles on images and objects that might seem stubbornly opaque or retreat coyly from having meaning pinned. On the other side there are critics who prefer to work as part of a team. The swotty ones tend to check over their shoulders for approbation via the right art historical precedents and interpretative orthodoxies. The best ones understand that in order to score a goal, you don’t always need possession of the ball; you need to pass, play tactical defence, understand when your teammate has strategic advantage.

For 27 Gnosis we were invited to respond in kind to propositions that were oblique, surreal, and rich in imagery or metaphor. We were drawn in with physical and auditory atmospherics and clues. In that sense, it seemed like a good metaphor for the experience of looking at art, one which is so often an experience that begins with mystery – or plain bafflement – and moves towards some sort of clarity about its mechanics. Despite what some may think, there is no right or wrong way of doing this. The only way to get something out of the game was to put something back in, to participate both as a team (a group who might choose to agree on how to interpret a proposition, like the types of critics who prefer to move in the currents of established readings) and also as individuals grasping and groping for some sort of clarity (acting like the type of critic who relies more on a subjective response to an art work, rather than building upon the interpretations of others). 27 Gnosis only functioned if you agreed to the physics and philosophy that governed the bonkers world it inhabited. As Marcel Duchamp taught us, this is how most art encounters work, only less explicitly so and usually dressed with finer words.

27 Gnosis was for me about the pleasure of interpretation and the limitlessly ridiculous permutations of the English language as a tool for grasping the world. Whether you are a critic writing about art, or chatting to a friend about an artwork you’ve just seen, when you feel the pleasure that the game of interpretation can give, that’s when you know you’re winning.

By Nicola Bozzi

The Kleiburg housing block and the abandoned Kraaiennest shopping centre in the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam Zuid-Oost

The Vinger office, where I met producer Sara Mattens and artist Daniela Bershan, is wedged in a low edifice that hosts several other ateliers, just opposite the Kraaiennest metro station in the peripheral Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam Zuid-Oost. The spot tells it all: dwarfed by a freshly-built housing block just a few feet away and buried under the sturdy metro infrastructure that zips right by, the modest structure stands out as a small yet visible intruder among the architectural giants surrounding it. One of the biggest mosques in Amsterdam is about a minute away, its minarets tower over the elevated railway and the intersection below, which is otherwise blighted by the deserted Kraaiennest Shopping Centre. A couple years ago, when I came here to interview a few shopkeepers about the Bijlmer Euro – an RFID-powered local currency and community mapping experiment by artist Christian Nold – the mall was still thriving. Now that the building has been cleared out, the retailers that could afford it have moved to more expensive facilities in a new complex nearby.

In the meantime, Mattens, Bershan, and their team have turned the location’s vacancy into an opportunity. Encouraged by Thomas Hirschhorn’s Spinoza Festival, which took place in this area in 2009, they put together an heterogeneous programme of visual arts, music and performances under the banner ‘FATFORM’, bringing people from otherwise separate walks of life – from Taekwondo students to noise DJs – on the roof of the ramshackle behemoth of the shopping mall. An incense-burning candonblé ritual performed by a Brazilian artist on a bike helped guide visitors via olfaction.

The FATFORM location, in a former garage

In 2012, in view of the former mall’s demolition (which is still on hiatus, apparently) the action had to quickly migrate to a smaller venue on the opposite side of the street, the vacant Klieverink garage, where a small headquarters-cum-roof-garden was established for a few months. The group rolled up their sleeves and put up ‘Present Forever’, their biggest project to date: an exhibition populating the awkwardly vacant parking space with art works by no less than 55 artists. More than 1,200 people attended the opening, a third of which were from the Bijlmer itself.

A performance at ‘Present Forever’, 2012

But change doesn’t only come from the bottom up: ‘When we started, people told us we were mad,’ says Bershan, a German-born artist fascinated with physical, material forms of aggregation. ‘Eight years ago taxis wouldn’t drive into the neighbourhood; now it’s more like a suburbia. It has even become hip, somehow.’

Built as a modernist residential paradise for the white middle class in the 1960s, and originally marked by its characteristic semi-hexagonal housing blocks, the Bijlmer failed to attract its intended audience and, once Suriname became independent in 1975, many immigrants from the former Dutch colony moved in. The relatively high crime rate made the neighbourhood long infamous as a ghetto, but – as often happens in cities bigger and more dangerous than Amsterdam – in the last decade the low rent and spacious facilities made the Bijlmer popular with artists. For reasons probably pertaining more to the typically-tight Dutch planning than to the above-mentioned creative colonization, no permanent hipster hangouts like cool cafés have yet appeared in the area. But the Bijlmer is now undergoing major redevelopments and gentrification. With such a rich and layered history and population, it’s easy to expect locally-produced and locally-shown art to embody some kind of social commitment, at the risk of coming across as superficial or patronising. For FATFORM, though, the area’s controversial reputation is a contingent backdrop rather than the main focus.

The Vinger studio

Mattens, who grew up in the neighbourhood and returned years ago to join Jeffrey Croese’s Vinger production studio, explains how the welfare industry has contributed to a bureaucracy-heavy culture that doesn’t really promote creative enterprise. ‘There is a lot of money going into that. You always have to pay attention not to be sucked into these more problematic branches.’ For Bershan, the issue is very simple: it’s about the quality of the art. ‘We are artists, we’re not social workers.’ The confusion can sometimes lead to less-than-spontaneous collaborations, imposed by local politicians as a condition for funding. For the most part though, it seems the Bijlmer art scene that has emerged in the last decade has been shaped by natural affinities and practical necessities.

While FATFORM is a more episodic, volatile initiative, other organizations have established themselves and built different relationships with the territory, also in terms of their collaboration with artists. ImagineIC, which in 2011 invited Christian Nold to create a local currency in order to map the Bijlmer’s multicultural identity – an art project accepted by the Dutch Bank exactly because of its artistic and temporary nature – has since shifted back to its core focus on heritage. The foundation works with artists as collectors of individual stories about urban youth, with projects like Kostana Banovic’s Mijn God (My God, 2012) – a video-installation exploring the relationship between youth and religion – or exhibitions and workshops about subcultures and history.

Installation view of Kostana Banovic’s exhibition ‘My God’, at Imagine IC

The main institution in the neighbourhood that focuses solely on contemporary art is CBK Zuidoost. There, on a rare sunny afternoon, I met curator Renske de Jong and Maria Guggenbichler, the latest guest of the BijlmAIR residency programme. Just outside a street market was in full swing, showcasing the Bijlmer at its liveliest. ‘We had our 25th anniversary in 2012,’ De Jong tells me. ‘We started as an art library. People paid a small amount per month to keep the art works at home.’ The centre then evolved and started organizing educational projects for schools, hosting exhibitions and assigning small commissions to artists. When more space opened up in one of their facilities, the centre took the opportunity to use the extra room to invite artists for residencies – and the BijlmAIR programme was born. CBK started collaborating with SMBA (the Stedelijk Museum’s project space) and, since moving to the nearby apartment block at Florijn 42 a few years ago, it also partnered with Stichting Flat (the collective emerged from the housing block that now hosts the residency and from which FATFORM also originated).

As the board got richer, the activities intensified. Now residencies are shorter and more international, and the quality has also improved. When I asked De Jong about her favourite projects, she mentioned recent interventions by Moroccan artist Yassine Balbzioui, who worked in a variety of formats collecting objects in the area, and Leo Asemota, who also sourced unconventional materials to reflect on post-colonialism. The theme was also explored by artist duo Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, in their Empire documentary project in 2012. But reflecting on such complex social issues is not mandatory. ‘I like the diversity of it,’ De Jong told me. ‘Lots of artists want to do something with the residents of the Bijlmer, but it’s nice to see something different, too.’

Which brings us to Guggenbichler. With a background in theatre, the Munich-born artist has big plans for the flat she’s been provided. The former FATFORM volunteer intends to turn the space into a temporary venue for music, screenings, lectures, parties and a meeting point for Situationist group walks into the night (you can check out her programme here). As often happens with BijlmAIR, the neighbourhood’s architecture has been inspiring to her. ‘I’m interested in utopias coming to life. Even when they fail over a long time.’

Failure or not, the Bijlmer’s architecture is changing fast, and so is the housing market. The iconic Kleiburg building – the only standing memento of the hexagonal, CIAM-inspired beehive vision of architect Siegfried Nassuth – was deemed too expensive to demolish. De Flat, a consortium of independent real-estate developers, has transformed it into a matrix of rugged yet appealing apartments. As for Stichting Flat, it seems the future is unclear. ‘It’s very hard at the moment,’ curator and fellow frieze writer Irene de Craen told me via Skype. She’s on the board of Stichting Flat and, at the time of our interview, she is on a residency in Berlin herself. ‘There are people leaving and it’s hard to replace them. The situation has changed, rent has become more expensive.’ But, overall, she’s optimistic. ‘We’ll have to negotiate what to do. Everything can be negotiated.’

Nicola Bozzi is an Amsterdam-based writer focusing on schizophrenic urban identities. You can follow him at schizocities.com and at twitter.com/schizocities.

By Sarah-Neel Smith

OFFICE, Oases (2012–13), installation view at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial

On day one of the Global Art Forum – a yearly talks programme organized in conjunction with the Art Dubai fair, now in its seventh year – economist Tarik Yousef gave a frant. For the uninitiated, that’s short for ‘friendly rant’, just one of many neologisms, puns and acronyms that were proposed during the GAF, which was organized around the capacious idea of ‘definitionism’ under the title ‘It Means This’. This year, the programme was split between Mathaf, the Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha, and Dubai, where it coincided with the art fair at the hotel-conference-centre-souk complex Madinat Jumeirah. Some 40 artists, writers, curators and academics participated in the six-day event, which also included five artist commissions (two ‘advert adverts’ and a soundtrack), a couple of small books and a fellows programme, all spearheaded by commissioner Shumon Basar and director H.G. Masters.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Douglas Coupland, Michael Stipe and Shumon Basar at the Global Art Forum, Dubai

The frants brought speakers to the stage ahead of their main appearance, each functioning as a sort of screen test, a short teaser that stimulated audience investment in the character-based dramas to unfold on stage minutes later. Some were seat-of-the-pants operations with a low-tech vibe; others were orchestrated performances, timed like clockwork for the 15-minute window. The controlled anarchy of the format accommodated both playful impulses and some serious political flag-planting, establishing a regular swing between the ludic and the long-faced that characterized the GAF as a whole. (The fact that Yousef’s presentation on economic free zones took place between two kitschy potted palms, a nod to American comedian Zach Galifianakis’ online talk-show Between Two Ferns, gives a sense of the dynamic.)

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Uzma Z. Rizvi and Payam Sharifi (Slavs & Tatars) at the Global Art Forum, Dubai

Sometimes, that very playfulness did the important work of easing tensions and smoothing interactions. This was the case for the term ‘MENA’, which, as part of GAF’s ongoing exercise in ‘definitionism’, Masters and Basar proposed as a means to describe a psychological state (Middle Eastern Nervous Anxiety) rather than the more familiar geographic notation (Middle East/North Africa). MENA quickly became shorthand amongst conference participants, providing a new angle on familiar topics and an accommodation for nervousness or irresolution that may not have otherwise been given room – as well as occasion for laughter and release when a talk became tense. At other times, though, the term seemed to function like a get-out-of-jail-free card: one could simply cite MENA and flee from the heavier topics at hand. When does playfulness become facetious or even unethical; when is self-seriousness a handicap? And what are the stakes of these approaches at a conference in the Gulf, as the question of how to produce knowledge within the region is driven ahead by the museums, universities and educational centres busily being established nearby? Itself another nascent knowledge-producing organization, the GAF didn’t hand down a judgment one way or the other, but it did provide a spacious forum in which to begin thinking about these issues.

SANAA, Bubble (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

All of this is part and parcel of a rapidly changing local cultural landscape, where, as of March 2013, the Sharjah Biennial is over a decade old, the Qatar Museums Authority’s Mathaf is still fighting to come into its own as a Museum of Modern Arab Art, the Art Dubai fair continues to expand yearly, and the state of construction of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island remains unresolved. In the meantime, Saadiyat Island hosts a museum devoted to its future museums – if that doesn’t sum up the region’s vertigo-inducing relation to historical time, I don’t know what does.

Shimabuku, Shimabuku’s Boat Trip (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

Distributed across multiple sites, including the Sharjah Art Foundation’s gorgeous new art spaces, a former bank building, a calligraphy museum and the Sharjah Art Museum, the 11th Sharjah Biennial ‘Re:Emerge—Towards a New Cultural Cartography’ features more than 100 artists. Coming after Jack Persekian’s controversial iteration of last year, curator Yuko Hasegawa, perhaps inevitably, seemed to have been tasked with playing it safe. The result was a strange disjuncture between her stated curatorial coordinates and the unacknowledged curatorial statements that asserted themselves in the form of the exhibition itself. (In a throwback to biennial ambitions of the 1990s, the curatorial framework included Islamic courtyards, Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century travel notes, hopes that dialogue between Sharjah’s migrant populations might take place within commissioned architectural ‘oases’, as well as evocations of the Global South.) Ironically, Hasegawa was most silent on the issue of sound. Not only was this an explicit concern in nearly half of the exhibited art works and performances, this unspoken theme arguably served as one of the more effective entry-points into the curator’s stated ideas, retaining a political edge or level of regional engagement that she directed us to elsewhere.

SUPERFLEX with Schul Landscape Architects, The Bank (2013), 2013 Sharjah Biennial

Just an hour’s flight away, in nearby Doha, Mathaf – an institution in search of both a director and a curator – is engaged in its own coming-of-age. Since opening in late 2010, the museum has featured several exhibitions by the freelance curatorial duo Art Reoriented (Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath), including the ongoing ‘Tea with Nefertiti’. The exhibition centres around the iconic 14th-century BC bust of Nefertiti, discovered in Egypt in 1912 (not included in the show but on permanent display in Berlin). Tracing the 100-year biography of the masterpiece, it addresses the broader phenomenon of ‘appropriation, de-contextualisation, and re-semanticisation’ of ancient Egyptian culture in both Egypt and the West from the early 20th century onwards.

J&K, Horus and Anubis in Islamic Cairo (2006), pigment print
on paper, included in ‘Tea with Nefertiti’, Mathaf, Doha

Mathaf’s current conundrum – reliant on mercenary curators, at the cost of a more settled structure of accountability, sustainability and growth that comes with the presence of a permanent staff – might serve as a cautionary example for those involved in the region’s cultural sector. Nevertheless, Mathaf continues to provide a forum for art works and research materials that are difficult to access elsewhere. I, for one, was grateful for the substantial archival research, and intrigued by some of the artistic pairings, like Lee Miller’s Egyptian photos of the 1930s alongside those of Mamduh Muahmad Fathallah and Van Leo from the ’40s. Scheduled to travel to Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe in this month (under the more cerebral Francophone title ‘Le Théorème de Nefertiti’), the exhibition is billed by organizers as the first contemporary art exhibition to originate in the Gulf and travel to the West. Whether this is even possible to confirm, and they’re winning in the game of firsts or not, Bardaouil and Fellrath’s assertion raises the important point that an institution like Mathaf may have a stronger impulse and more significant resources to invest in research on such topics, than many Western institutions do.

By Charlie Fox

Here’s Harmony Korine on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997, aged 23, looking like a teenage Walter Benjamin with the voice of a spooked cartoon puppy. We sneak in as he’s mid-sentence, ears cocked, audience gawping: ‘You know James Joyce, Ulysses?’ Scarcely the stuff of Letterman appearances, but then a glorious swerve, a punchline played as non-sequitur: ‘I was just inspired because I used to know Snoop Dogg a long time ago and he was starring in a production of that story.’ And there, in a few lines, is Korine’s description of where his debut film Gummo (1997) came from. He’ll soon tell a bemused Letterman: ‘I’m a commercial filmmaker, I’m a patriot, I hide in trees,’ then a riot of applause will break out and we’ll cut to a commercial break.

This is a strange scene, and in miniature it maps out Korine’s domain: trash-surrealist juxtaposition, deadpan incongruity, mischief. He’s long concocted art films – experimental, raucous, deformed, mostly starless – from junk: juveniles, Satanic teens, satyr-like rappers and now Disney Channel girls in the lurid fantasia of Spring Breakers (2013). But the precise method of this alchemy matters little, what fascinates is that strangeness. Across his various works, this is what Korine has supplied in a manic profusion: weird tableaux, surreal mixtures, hallucinations of North American trash. Photographs and fragments, taken from his films and elsewhere, provide an oblique portrait of the filmmaker – and his films are always portraits of some damaged contingent: mesmeric waifs, drug-addled teens, celebrity impersonators, a depraved group of aged vandals or, in solitude, a starving magician. By contemplating stills and stray fragments, an image adrift can become strangely more meaningful than a whole film.

What follows is a perverse sort of homage, not so much non-linear as erratic. In Korine’s films, everything drifts. Plot matters little, and instead there comes a sprawling sequence of artfully arranged moments, interludes, digressions and echoes. Perhaps his reputation lies in purveying stretches of grotesquerie meant to make you shudder and stare. But they are fascinating, delirious works made from weird passions, entrancing and sinister, woozy and purposefully aimless, their mood pitched between a strange kind of calm and utter lunacy.

***

When I was 16, I asked Korine a question. Pale, jittery and in the throes of a particularly extreme obsession with his strange work, I yelped through a malfunctioning microphone towards the distant director: ‘Why did you want to work with Macaulay Culkin on that Sonic Youth video?’ He told me the boy reminded him of James Dean, especially in his last film, Giant (1956). Strange, I thought, to use a star as an impersonation of another, as an echo, rather than for their own resonance. That was at the National Film Theatre in London. Korine was there with his comeback film Mister Lonely (2007), about a commune of celebrity impersonators. He has always been fascinated by fame, especially the sort surrounded by rumour and weird myth. In Gummo, a perverted cab driver does little more than recite many scurrilous rumours: ‘Tupac Shakur stuttered, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Warren Oates swallowed his chewing tobacco spittle…’ Child stars, especially those who vanish or flee their fame, accrue myths like so much shadow. None more so than Culkin who has been, according to rumour, variously dead, near-death or addicted to drugs ever since he retreated from stardom. In the video, an eerily serene film, he becomes an incarnation of all these anxieties: a leering, burnt-out monster. The adolescent recluse, who had famously retired at 14, staggers out into the spotlight (inhabitants in a Korine film often seem half-awake, almost mid-dream) and smoulders with sinister eroticism, his blood-red lips blossoming in slow motion.

Orson Welles recalled that, before every take her daughter performed, Shirley Temple’s mother would tell her, ‘Remember, Shirley, sparkle!’ and Korine’s film is a study of Culkin’s corroded ‘sparkle’, which has turned sinister but keeps him hypnotic. His nearest relation is herself a witchlike double of Temple, the little girl in the first shot of William Egglestone’s glorious ‘home movie’ Stranded in Canton (1973) who stares darkly into the distance, utterly still, as if under some sinister enchantment. Time seems to have almost paused to lead us into the drowned world of the scene. And a similar druggy, dreamlike languor reigns over Korine’s video: Culkin in junkie swoon, tempo opiated, echoing the lines of the song as it ‘seems to move so slow’. There is an echo, too, of Korine’s explanation for his addictions: ‘The drugs were a way for me to slow things down.’

***

A boy is woken from his sleep by a song. Robert Mitchum, playing the psychotic Reverend Harry Powell, appears by moonlight in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1953), his baritone booming through the dark. ‘Leanin’, leanin’ on the everlasting love!’ he sings. Chloë Sevigny murmurs the same song in Korine’s Julien Donkey-boy (1999); she conducts the cornfield and it nods sleepily, her hair a mass of Harpo-like curls. Pearl is her name, a purposeful double of the little girl’s name in Laughton’s film. Their kinship, though, runs deeper: there is also the matter of light. Laughton’s film is all silver and magical shadow, a supernatural luminosity suffuses everything. A residue of it remains in Julien Donkey-boy where the air glitters, all honeyed light and wintry gloom, ash and atmospheric pollution. The marvel of the film (beneath everything which is traumatic, addled, bizarre) is the splendour of its surfaces.

The other bond between them is Laughton’s image of a fantastical Deep South which is heavily imprinted on Korine’s work. This is an Expressionist wilderness. Night is otherworldly: owls haunt the trees, the sky remains eerily aglow. Like The Night of The Hunter, Gummo is lurid and yet deeply contemplative, sometimes spellbound by its own movements and inhabitants. It transcribes the elusive climate of dreams, their feel of aimlessness and dislocation, non-sequiturs, weird jolts and flashes of vaguely significant things. A parade of strange images: two albino sisters walking home in the twilight with a certain sprawl like enormous bored cats, a boy with pink rabbit ears wandering through junkyards, a little girl with a defaced portrait of Burt Reynolds stuck to her face like a makeshift mask shouting, ‘I want a moustache, dammit!’ Throughout the film it feels like you’ve wandered into a haunted space, the site of some unique deforming weather that makes everything slow and odd. Perhaps all these films (and Gummo especially) come from this darkness in the landscape.

The foreboding silhouette in the frame, singing in the white night, isn’t Mitchum astride a horse but a midget upon a donkey. Somehow this peculiar detail doesn’t spook the mystery of the image away but deepens it. I think of the black dwarf in Gummo who cheerily defeats a yokel at arm wrestling, the boy who rode a pig named Trotsky in his unfinished script What Makes Pistachio Nuts? and Korine excitedly telling Letterman (another sublimely strange utterance) that he wanted to make a movie about Eddie Gaedel, the midget baseball player.

***

‘My dad used to be a tap-dancer, he hung out with the Nicholas Brothers…’ Here’s Korine on Letterman in 1995, putting himself in the traditions of vaudeville. Though his father was a filmmaker who made films about the folk traditions of the Deep South – moonshiners, carnivals and ‘mouth music’ – this little bit of myth-making has a purpose. Korine’s work is an index of various obsessions: gangsta rap, gleeful depravity, Herzog’s films, insanity… – tap-dancing appears repeatedly. The art requires a bedazzling mixture of manic energy and elegance that seems somehow unearthly, it’s the mode of dance that longs to become levitation.

In Jonas Mekas’s archives, there’s a video of Korine performing a tap-dance. He mumbles about Flashdance and Busby Berkeley’s films, his hair in electro-shock spikes, his voice smoked-out and his sentences broken. This is one of the few recordings from his five or six years of disintegration brought on by numerous addictions, house fires and profound disenchantment with his art. For all his stagger and vacancy, the dance is a joy: demented, all clatter and anarchy, like a scarecrow in the middle of a seizure, or the chicken’s jittery little steps at the end of Herzog’s Stroszek (1977).

As deeply as Korine is fascinated by trashiness, there’s also a deep, lingering affection for the old, weird American school of entertainment. Tap-dancing is part of a repertoire of magical, bygone acts that appear in his films alongside Groucho’s wisecracks (Gummo was, incidentally, the fifth Marx Brother who left to fight in World War I, then sold raincoats), slapstick and cigarette eating, and scattered echoes of its fondness for the repulsive spectacle of blackface and minstrelsy. With their acts transferred often intact onto the cinema screen, these manic routines became among the first entertainments in the cinema, those comical one-reelers. Recalling the films of these ‘show people’ he’d watched as a child, Korine said: ‘There’s almost a poetry or a strange insanity to what they did. When I was a kid, I would watch their films and I almost couldn’t figure out how they existed […] It was like they hovered above reality.’ Perhaps all his films are about these people who do not seem quite real; strange, surreal creatures.

Tap-dancing of a more classical kind appears in this little interlude from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The dancer provides a masterful switch between birdlike flutter, clockwork jerkiness and eerie glide. He’s momentarily in duet with Linda Manz who leaps from the frame after a few hesitant steps. After a long absence from the cinema, she appears in Gummo, delivering a monologue about old tap shoes in memory of Marlene Dietrich. The African-American dancer looks incongruously refined in the parched landscape: his bowler hat and waistcoat making him a peculiar double of Chaplin’s tramp.

***

Paul McCarthy, Rocky (1976)

This is a still from Paul McCarthy’s film Rocky (1976), which is intended to stand in for Korine’s unreleased film Fight Harm (1998, unreleased, Korine claims, owing to the poor quality of its camera-work). In this 21-minute film, a naked McCarthy fights thin air and punches himself repeatedly in the head, sometimes slathers his genitals with ketchup, masturbates and growls throughout like a dying King Kong, all whilst wearing a grotesque rubber mask complete with bloated nose and drooping mouth. The Italian Stallion is transformed into a lumbering oaf, a deformed masochist oddly premonitory of De Niro towards the end of Raging Bull (1980). There’s no trace of the triumphant underdog, only a sustained study in abjection. But it’s also strangely comic; a kind of failed comedy suggested by the cartoonish mask and the smeared ketchup which spurts out in place of blood, a reminder of fake Hollywood violence. There’s also the comedy of repetition and time. Like Stallone, it’s comic that he just keeps fighting. In Korine’s film, he roamed the streets of New York, intoxicated, and started fights which he’d usually lose.

‘It’s high comedy’, he said, ‘like Buster Keaton’. Lacking Keaton’s animal grace, he’d settle for his injuries. The comedy would come, he said, from the repetition, as if Korine was Wile E. Coyote out of his head or one of the burglars maimed by Culkin in Home Alone (1990), doomed to a never-ending defeat. The routines of slapstick would turn real and so, become somehow funnier. Never completed owing to Korine’s injuries, you can guess its effects would come close to McCarthy’s Rocky: a mixture of repulsion, weariness and anxiety. Korine’s films are about extreme states- the dispossession that comes from impersonating someone else, mental illness and violence- and sometimes gruelling, but they are also obscurely damaged, strangely stitched together.

Diane Arbus, Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, New York (1963)

Every still has its echoes. Every time I look at this image I think of the speedfreaks in Larry Clark’s book Tulsa (1971), the delinquent friends he started photographing the same year Arbus took this shot. And I turn to the three nude bodies gathered together on a bed towards the end of that book, when everyone’s haggard and damaged, staring intently at the needle slipping into the middle figure’s arm.

High above their heads, at the very edge of the frame, is a little Hollywood incongruity: Lon Chaney Jr. playing the monster in a horror movie I can’t name, looking haunted, drooling blood. Then I remember the strange way a scene is punctuated in Kids (1995), which Korine wrote for Clark: an amputee appears on the train, chanting ‘I have no legs!’, as if he’s come through the door between Korine’s work and Clark’s studies of teenage lust. Sometimes in Arbus, there’s also an echo of Fellini who had a similar predilection for the more ‘freakish’ sorts of circus folk: hermaphrodites, transsexuals, dwarves and giants. Arbus took them as subjects, too. (Intermittently, her photographs look like Fellini tableaux with all the mischief and jollity beaten out of them.) Her famous and deeply disquieting line echoes, too: ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot.’ There is always a similar anxiety about Korine’s use of people with Down’s Syndrome, dwarves, amputees, albinos, the blind, as if they became merely aesthetic objects whose misfortune carried with it a sort of macabre fascination. (Like Arbus, though, there is a deep tenderness there, too).

I put this last snapshot down in place of the many adolescents in Korine’s work: stoned boys on the couch towards the end of a party in Kids, a girl looking at the sky, bored, glue-sniffers sprawled under the lukewarm sun, Little Red Riding Hood on a blue afternoon, Sevigny wandering through New York like a wounded foal. Spring Breakers (none of the images from the film possess any allure for me) is about teenagers, too, straight from the beaches on MTV– ‘subversive’, I guess, that they’d end up there, like Dorothy thrown out of Kansas and into Hell but… strangely empty, a kind of trick John Waters perfected decades before.

Arbus was also a supreme recorder of adolescence in a way which is scarcely caught elsewhere; a time of mania, innermost contortion, stupor and despair. Think of her store of strange images that contemplate adolescent bodies: the Republican boy whose face is ablaze with acne, the boy on the cusp of his teens in Central Park with his crooked, claw-like hand, the portrait of Marcella Matthaei. Another line from Arbus also echoes: ‘Freaks are aristocrats.’

The critic Serge Daney defined cinephilia as a matter of ‘not just the films you watch but the films that watch over you,’ as if certain works never ended and commenced instead some permanent angelic intimacy with you, the solitary viewer. During my adolescence, I felt that Korine’s films were my angels: demented and misshapen maybe, but we don’t all feel Scorsese or Bergman at our side. I always imagine Korine’s angels look like this.

By Ela Bittencourt

Stories We Tell (Directed by Sarah Polley, 2012)

New Directors New Films (NDNF), a festival run jointly by Film Society at Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has garnered positive attention this year as a counter-weight to the bigger and hipper Sundance and South By Southwest (SXSW). While some critics complain that the latter two embrace the mainstream, the NDNF remains eclectic, favoring artistic filmmaking.

Jiseul (2012), directed by O Muel, is one example of a film with a distinct authorial voice: An historical epic, shot in black and white and framed at times as a macabre folk tale, it captures the true story of an uprising of armed Korean civilians against their government in 1948. From the absurdist scenes that, through carefully juxtaposed images, draw parallels between an ignoble, stupid army commandant and a slaughtered pig sensuously dipped in an outdoor cauldron, to the long, ethnographic conversations amongst farmers hiding in a dark cave, featuring actors in an ensemble, and finally to the painterly vast winter landscapes, Jiseul gives ample evidence of O Muel’s background in theater and in fine arts. Even though the film’s final scenes borrow pathos from socialist kitsch, its visual power is undeniable, with some shots like a war photograph springing to life.

Jisuel (Directed by O Muel, 2012)

In Küf (The Mold, 2012), Turkish director Ali Aydin draws inspiration from Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Like Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), Aydin slows down time to coax drama from infinitely small moments. Two Ceylan actors star in Aydin’s film: Ercan Kesal as Basri, a middle-aged epileptic rail track inspector, whose son disappeared in Istanbul 20 years earlier; and Muhammet Uzuner as Murat, a blasé provincial police chief, who comes across as a spokesman for the oppressors but takes pity on Basri and helps him resolve the case of his son’s disappearance. The two play the game of helpless but dogged citizen versus omnipotent functionary with the deflated sadness of Chekhov. There are rumblings of the empire – Turkey’s vastness, if no longer glory – in the passing trains. The character of Cemil, played by Tansu Biçer, is most Dostoevskian: a drunken apparatchik-nihilist, would-be rapist and blackmailer, who is nevertheless so lame he inspires pity when he tries to coerce Basri into concealing his carousing.

Küf (The Mold, directed by Ali Aydin, 2012)

Some may find Küf overly metaphysical: there is the ticking clock on Basri’s wall, the unending tracks and sepulchral tunnels. But the imagery is pared down by bleak humour: When Basri arrives at the morgue he is handed a wooden box that resembles a crate. Ugly and prosaic, the box serves as an anti-climactic incarnation of Basri’s crushed hopes.

Blue Caprice (2012), a debut by French-born director Alexander Moore, boasts a dense, gray palette, particularly in the long driving scenes, where the car shines in the heavy rain like a gleaming fetish. Similarly to light-boxes, the image conveys both darkness and luminosity: Perfect for a story about two drive-by shooters, whose vigilante sprees are fueled by a delusion so powerful it borders on spiritual. Based on facts, Blue Caprice features two stellar performances: Isaiah Washington as John, a man who adopts Lee, a young boy abandoned in the Caribbean, played by Tequan Richmond. Divorced and stripped of custodial rights to his own children, John brings Lee to America, a faded land of opportunity. Lee’s life on the fringes – no school or legal status – renders the story’s close-third-person point of view claustrophobic, as the mutual adoration between mentor and pupil slips into psychological abuse. While the film may raise questions of racial stereotyping, the inscrutable logic with which Lee is ensnarled by John’s psychosis extends the circle of victims to the young shooter. As thoughtless and cruel as Lee’s random shootings are, Moore also shows the injustice done to the boy: a poignant message as America debates its promiscuousness with guns but also its disproportionate numbers of incarcerated youth.

In Stories We Tell (2012), a film about filmmaking, Canadian director Sarah Polley dismantles her mis-en-scène to then put it back together. Polley plays herself as an anxious seeker-director constructing a docudrama: She stages her half-siblings and gives script directions to her adoptive father, who acts as her story’s narrator. Her ‘actors’ step in and out of character to comment on the discomforts and oddities of playing a role, particularly acting as if the divergent, at times ambiguous threads they weave about their private lives can neatly coalesce into a ‘plot.’

Polley’s narrative exercise has a serious purpose: She is on a quest to find her biological father, a purpose we discover halfway through the film, after she leads us down a few dead-end trails. Allowing mysteries to emerge and to multiply becomes part of the viewing pleasure. At other times, Polley’s stance tilts towards manipulative: After the early intoxication at finding each other, biological daughter and father, who turns out to be a playwright, butt heads over whose story gets to be told – their ‘authorial’ rights. Polley gets her way, but to some extent underplays the enduring folly, and lasting albeit doomed mutual attraction, of her mother’s extramarital affair. Nevertheless, one couldn’t ask for a more engaging, self-mocking tyrant than Polley, whose intelligence and wit are contagious.

Not all films featured at NDNF were as highly self-aware in their stylistic or narrative approaches. L’Intervalo (The Interval, 2012), directed by Leonardo Di Constanzo, is descended from a long line of films mining the criminal underworld, in this case the Italian mafia, for fictive material, viewed through a minutely observed social lens. More than Gomorrah (2008), the famous film by Matteo Garrone that L’Intervalo harks back to, it distils mafia group dynamics to a microcosm: The film’s action takes place in one day, during which a young boy Salvatore holds hostage a local girl, to prevent her from going out with a man from a feuding clan. Prisoner and guard, Salvatore and Veronica test and antagonize each other, only to finally appreciate how similarly trapped they are in an environment where, belied by the bustle of modest working-class domiciles, much in their young lives is beyond their control.

Die Welt (The World, directed by Alex Pitstra, 2012)

Die Welt (The World, 2012) is one of the films that voice discontent of the trans-national Generation Y that sees its dreams crushed in the wake of global instability. In the film, Dutch director Alex Pitstra mines his Tunisian roots, finding the country’s economy bankrupt, and its young people dispossessed, jobless and restless, after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011. From the witty opening scene, in which young man Abdallah breaks into a rant about Hollywood’s cultural brainwashing, to the grotesque finale that finds his escape attempt to the West thwarted, his raft inadvertently washed ashore back in Tunisia, there is much in this tart debut to celebrate. Part cinéma-verité chronicle of the vagaries and richness of life in an Arab country caught between an uncertain future and dying traditions, and part hurried, MTV-inflected montage, _Die Welt_’s unevenness may be one of the most refreshing aspects of this year’s NDNF. The fluidity and range of storytelling and editing within the picture demonstrates young filmmakers free of the strictures of style. Implicit in their choices seems to be the hope that audiences may embrace experimentation.

By Amy Sherlock

Vadim Zakharov (artist) and Udo Kittelmann (curator) at their exhibition 'The Last Stroll through Elysian Fields', Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1995

Moscow seems to have been in the news for all of the wrong reasons recently. The trial of opposition activist, Alexey Navalny, accused of embezzling state funds but guilty of speaking out against President Putin began in Kirov last week; there continues to be intrigue in the case of Alexander Perepilichnyy, the businessman who sought refuge in the UK after denouncing corrupt state officials to Swiss prosecutors and dropped dead whilst jogging near his Surrey home late last year; and, last month, another self-exiled anti-Putin billionaire, Boris Berezovsky, committed suicide in London after having lost to Roman Abramovich in what was supposedly the most expensive legal case involving individuals in history.

We know that there are a lot of Russian billionaires in London; they have become an accepted, if in some quarters begrudged, stratum of the capital’s society. And we have an idea of what people are doing in Moscow, or at least what people are buying in Moscow, now that it has opened itself up so brazenly to the desires of consumer capitalism. (The most surreal moment of my recent trip there was window-shopping at Dior whilst looking across Red Square to Lenin’s tomb.) But the Russian Federation also preserves a certain sense of mystery: Moscow remains a city that feels slightly furtive and unknown.

Udo Kittelmann, Stella Kesaeva and Vadim Zakharov at the Russian Pavilion press conference held at the Stella Foundation

I was in town last month for the press conference announcing that Vadim Zakharov will be representing Russia in the national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The pavilion is to be curated by Udo Kittelmann, Director of the State Museums in Berlin: the first time in the pavilion’s 99-year history that a non-Russian is to hold the role. The conference and dinner was held at the Stella Foundation, whose director, the eponymous Stella Kesaeva (wife of billionaire tobacco magnate Igor Kesaev) is the pavilion’s commissioner. Kesaeva’s appointment raised hackles in certain quarters when it was first announced three years ago, but the 2011 pavilion, curated by Boris Groys and dedicated to Andrei Monastyrski and the Collective Actions group was very well received, seeming a timely reminder of the participatory and performative practices of late-Soviet Conceptualism. Perhaps often overshadowed on the international (and, indeed, domestic) stage by the better known Fluxus or Art & Language movements, this staking a claim for the group’s significance came at a moment of renewed interest in participatory practices and the turn towards performance and the ephemeral that we have seen in recent years (not to mention a corollary suspicion of the art-object-as-commodity, following 2008’s economic crash).

Collective Actions, Pictures, Moscow Region, February 11, 1979

The work of Collective Actions is fascinating because of the very specific economic, social and political context that it grew out of. The greatest collective, the ‘workers of the world unite’, promised by Socialism was a long-since failed Utopia by the late 1970s and early ’80s, and Collective Actions were working out what collaboration might mean in a symbolic economy in which values were shifting and confusing, as the ideological tenets that underpinned them collapsed. Collectivism cast a long shadow over Soviet art-making, right from the early avant-gardes, who aspired to free art from the bourgeois context in which it had come to be mired and to create an aesthetic language that would not only be accessible to all, but that would also shape the new society. Zakharov is of a younger generation of the Moscow school than Monastyrski and has been living mostly in Germany since around 1990, but he is not being glib when he tells me that there is too much of the ‘I’ in most artistic production today when there needs to be a return to the ‘we’. For Zakharov, the artwork is a process of collaboration and dialogue – he dislikes the term ‘curator’, and shuns the implication that Kittelmann will be merely arranging his works according to a preconceived schema. Rather, the pavilion, which will host a new commission, has evolved in ‘partnership’. Kittelmann and Zakharov are long-time collaborators, having met in Germany in 1988 and been involved in projects together since then (notably 2003’s Monument to Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt, the philosopher’s city of birth).

Vadim Zakharov, Monument to Theodor W.Adorno, 2003, installed in Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz, Frankfurt

Much has changed in Moscow since Zakharov first left the city. The Stella Foundation itself is, in no small way, the product of the rampant individualism unbridled by perestroika. Across town, the same is true of Garage, the arts foundation of Dasha Zhukova (partner of the aforementioned Mr. Abramovich), with which comparisons are inevitable. Currently located in Gorky Park, in a specially commissioned temporary pavilion designed by Shigeru Ban, Garage will move to the newly renovated and expanded site of the park’s former Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) later this year.

Where Stella Kesaeva is resolute in her championing of Moscow Conceptualism, the programme at Garage is more consciously international-user-friendly: when I visited they were showing Philipe Parreno’s 2012 film Marilyn, first presented at the Fondation Beyler, Basel, last year; later this month the space will be taken over by the fifth edition of the Museum of Everything. Marilyn: no need for a surname; no need for translation; a figure that transcends borders and eras (not to mention curtains, even iron ones). The film is a beautiful and melancholic attempt to trace the contours of her ghost as it pans through the empty set of a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the actress lived in the 1950s. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of her words, modulated by a computer and an enormous robotic arm that copies out snippets of the handwriting in an endless loop. The suggestion that all individual acts can be replicated according to set of algorithms or computational formulae prevents Parreno’s elegy from becoming saccharine: but the whole affair is as straightforwardly easy on the eye as the eponymous absent heroine.

Philipe Parreno, Marilyn, 2012, film still

As to what is going on the ground with regard to artists currently working in the city, it would seem that neither Garage nor Stella Art Foundation are the places to find out. And whilst I don’t doubt that each organization’s professed intent to develop the city’s cultural scene is both genuine and necessary, given the absence of any significant state investment, there seems to be a divorce between their aspirations to raise Moscow’s cultural profile internationally and the lack of any young contemporary Russian artists in their programmes. Monastyrski and Zhakarov are artists from a provocative, highly intelligent and perhaps slightly overlooked school and Kaeseva’s Venice pavilions are a worthy corrective in this regard, but a back-to-back double whammy of late-Soviet conceptualists will inevitably beg questions about their heir apparent (or lack thereof?). Kaeseva, who will also commission the pavilion in 2015, refused to be drawn on the question of whether there are any artists currently working in Moscow that might take up the baton. A slightly disheartening statistic in this regard is that of over 150 artists exhibited in Massimiliano Gioni’s main exhibition, there will be only four Russian-born artists, all male, two of whom are already dead. This is up on 54th Biennale, where the single (young, female) Russian representative in Bice Curiger’s main exhibition was Anya Titova, though her contribution was unmemorable, and she seems to have since dropped off the radar. Ilya Kabakov, also one of the leading figures in the Moscow conceptualist group (though, a long-term US resident, he has by now been making work outside of Russia for far longer than he did in it) is by some margin the most expensive living Russian artist (after the sale, in January this year, of a collection of 40 of his paintings to none other than Roman Abramovich).

Rendering of the new Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Gorky Park, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA on the site of the former Vremena Goda restaurant (location shown on photograph from 1970)

Both in the Russian Pavilion and at Garage, there seems to be a piecemeal reclamation of the Soviet past at work, which cannot but feel slightly perverse coming from those who profited most from the USSR’s dismantling. Garage started out inhabiting the shell of a 1920s bus terminal designed by the constructivist architects Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov. Its new Gorky Park site will preserve many of the original restaurant’s 1960s prefab features. The renovation is being carried our by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, and it may be Koolhaas himself whose statement about the project on the gallery’s website best summarises Kaeseva’s project too, in all its ambivalence: ‘We were able […] to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them.’

By Amy Sherlock

Vadim Zakharov (artist) and Udo Kittelmann (curator) at their exhibition 'The Last Stroll through Elysian Fields', Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1995

Moscow seems to have been in the news for all of the wrong reasons recently. The trial of opposition activist, Alexey Navalny, accused of embezzling state funds but guilty of speaking out against President Putin began in Kirov last week; there continues to be intrigue in the case of Alexander Perepilichnyy, the businessman who sought refuge in the UK after denouncing corrupt state officials to Swiss prosecutors and dropped dead whilst jogging near his Surrey home late last year; and, last month, another self-exiled anti-Putin billionaire, Boris Berezovsky, committed suicide in London after having lost to Roman Abramovich in what was supposedly the most expensive legal case involving individuals in history.

We know that there are a lot of Russian billionaires in London; they have become an accepted, if in some quarters begrudged, stratum of the capital’s society. And we have an idea of what people are doing in Moscow, or at least what people are buying in Moscow, now that it has opened itself up so brazenly to the desires of consumer capitalism. (The most surreal moment of my recent trip there was window-shopping at Dior whilst looking across Red Square to Lenin’s tomb.) But the Russian Federation also preserves a certain sense of mystery: Moscow remains a city that feels slightly furtive and unknown.

Udo Kittelmann, Stella Kesaeva and Vadim Zakharov at the Russian Pavilion press conference held at the Stella Foundation

I was in town last month for the press conference announcing that Vadim Zakharov will be representing Russia in the national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The pavilion is to be curated by Udo Kittelmann, Director of the State Museums in Berlin: the first time in the pavilion’s 99-year history that a non-Russian is to hold the role. The conference and dinner was held at the Stella Foundation, whose director, the eponymous Stella Kesaeva (wife of billionaire tobacco magnate Igor Kesaev) is the pavilion’s commissioner. Kesaeva’s appointment raised hackles in certain quarters when it was first announced three years ago, but the 2011 pavilion, curated by Boris Groys and dedicated to Andrei Monastyrski and the Collective Actions group was very well received, seeming a timely reminder of the participatory and performative practices of late-Soviet Conceptualism. Perhaps often overshadowed on the international (and, indeed, domestic) stage by the better known Fluxus or Art & Language movements, this staking a claim for the group’s significance came at a moment of renewed interest in participatory practices and the turn towards performance and the ephemeral that we have seen in recent years (not to mention a corollary suspicion of the art-object-as-commodity, following 2008’s economic crash).

Collective Actions, Pictures, Moscow Region, February 11, 1979

The work of Collective Actions is fascinating because of the very specific economic, social and political context that it grew out of. The greatest collective, the ‘workers of the world unite’, promised by Socialism was a long-since failed Utopia by the late 1970s and early ’80s, and Collective Actions were working out what collaboration might mean in a symbolic economy in which values were shifting and confusing, as the ideological tenets that underpinned them collapsed. Collectivism cast a long shadow over Soviet art-making, right from the early avant-gardes, who aspired to free art from the bourgeois context in which it had come to be mired and to create an aesthetic language that would not only be accessible to all, but that would also shape the new society. Zakharov is of a younger generation of the Moscow school than Monastyrski and has been living mostly in Germany since around 1990, but he is not being glib when he tells me that there is too much of the ‘I’ in most artistic production today when there needs to be a return to the ‘we’. For Zakharov, the artwork is a process of collaboration and dialogue – he dislikes the term ‘curator’, and shuns the implication that Kittelmann will be merely arranging his works according to a preconceived schema. Rather, the pavilion, which will host a new commission, has evolved in ‘partnership’. Kittelmann and Zakharov are long-time collaborators, having met in Germany in 1988 and been involved in projects together since then (notably 2003’s Monument to Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt, the philosopher’s city of birth).

Vadim Zakharov, Monument to Theodor W.Adorno, 2003, installed in Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz, Frankfurt

Much has changed in Moscow since Zakharov first left the city. The Stella Foundation itself is, in no small way, the product of the rampant individualism unbridled by perestroika. Across town, the same is true of Garage, the arts foundation of Dasha Zhukova (partner of the aforementioned Mr. Abramovich), with which comparisons are inevitable. Currently located in Gorky Park, in a specially commissioned temporary pavilion designed by Shigeru Ban, Garage will move to the newly renovated and expanded site of the park’s former Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) later this year.

Where Stella Kesaeva is resolute in her championing of Moscow Conceptualism, the programme at Garage is more consciously international-user-friendly: when I visited they were showing Philipe Parreno’s 2012 film Marilyn, first presented at the Fondation Beyler, Basel, last year; later this month the space will be taken over by the fifth edition of the Museum of Everything. Marilyn: no need for a surname; no need for translation; a figure that transcends borders and eras (not to mention curtains, even iron ones). The film is a beautiful and melancholic attempt to trace the contours of her ghost as it pans through the empty set of a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where the actress lived in the 1950s. It is accompanied by a soundtrack of her words, modulated by a computer and an enormous robotic arm that copies out snippets of the handwriting in an endless loop. The suggestion that all individual acts can be replicated according to set of algorithms or computational formulae prevents Parreno’s elegy from becoming saccharine: but the whole affair is as straightforwardly easy on the eye as the eponymous absent heroine.

Philipe Parreno, Marilyn, 2012, film still

As to what is going on the ground with regard to artists currently working in the city, it would seem that neither Garage nor Stella Art Foundation are the places to find out. And whilst I don’t doubt that each organization’s professed intent to develop the city’s cultural scene is both genuine and necessary, given the absence of any significant state investment, there seems to be a divorce between their aspirations to raise Moscow’s cultural profile internationally and the lack of any young contemporary Russian artists in their programmes. Monastyrski and Zhakarov are artists from a provocative, highly intelligent and perhaps slightly overlooked school and Kaeseva’s Venice pavilions are a worthy corrective in this regard, but a back-to-back double whammy of late-Soviet conceptualists will inevitably beg questions about their heir apparent (or lack thereof?). Kaeseva, who will also commission the pavilion in 2015, refused to be drawn on the question of whether there are any artists currently working in Moscow that might take up the baton. A slightly disheartening statistic in this regard – of the handful of (all male) Russian artists that will be exhibited in Massimiliano Gioni’s main exhibition, none were born later than 1973. The number is up on 54th Biennale, where the single (young, female) Russian representative in Bice Curiger’s main exhibition was Anya Titova, though her contribution was unmemorable, and she seems to have since dropped off the radar. Ilya Kabakov, also one of the leading figures in the Moscow conceptualist group (though, a long-term US resident, he has by now been making work outside of Russia for far longer than he did in it) is by some margin the most expensive living Russian artist (after the sale, in January this year, of a collection of 40 of his paintings to none other than Roman Abramovich). So where is the post-Soviet generation?

Rendering of the new Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Gorky Park, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA on the site of the former Vremena Goda restaurant (location shown on photograph from 1970)

Both in the Russian Pavilion and at Garage, there seems to be a piecemeal reclamation of the Soviet past at work, which cannot but feel slightly perverse coming from those who profited most from the USSR’s dismantling. Garage started out inhabiting the shell of a 1920s bus terminal designed by the constructivist architects Konstantin Melnikov and Vladimir Shukhov. Its new Gorky Park site will preserve many of the original restaurant’s 1960s prefab features. The renovation is being carried our by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, and it may be Koolhaas himself whose statement about the project on the gallery’s website best summarises Kaeseva’s project too, in all its ambivalence: ‘We were able […] to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them.’

Correction: this article has been updated from the original text, which incorrectly stated that the work of two dead Russian-born artists would be included in the main exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale. The artists in question, Hans Josephsohn and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, were born in East Prussia. frieze apologises for any confusion.

By Agnieszka Gratza

It’s 4am and I’m struggling to stay awake while two people made up as clowns throw questions and answers each other’s way. ‘How do spark plugs and three-prong plugs work?’ I try to process this but it’s more than my battered brain can handle at this hour. The show began practically on the stroke of midnight and I’ve got 20 more hours to get through. Welcome to Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola! in its extended 24-hour run. This is the first time that the show, which normally lasts six hours and 12 at most, will go on for this long. Four hours into it, I’ve come to think in Q&A mode. (‘Am I a glutton for punishment?’ ‘Clearly.’)

Of course, no one is actually forcing me to stay for the full span of the performance. Spectators are free to come and go as they please. I could go home, get some rest and come back, suitably refreshed and in the mood for some more entertainment. Sticking it out seems important, though, not just as a personal endurance test (my only prior experience of durational performance on this scale has been Ragnar Kjartansson’s 12-hour Bliss (2011), staged as part of Performa 11 at the Abrons Art Center in New York, and I didn’t make it to the end) but because staying up all night and collectively marking time is part of what this whole exercise appears to be about.

And then I find it genuinely hard to pull myself away. At its best, Quizoola! really is quite entertaining, by turns moving, poetic, thought-provoking, crackling with wit, a seemingly endless supply of it; even when inspiration is flagging and performers fall back on set phrases and tired tropes, resort to scatological jokes and sexual innuendo to grab our attention, the spectacle of seeing people struggle to come up with an answer on the spot, occasionally slip up only to bounce back again, show their weaknesses and thus lay themselves open to our scrutiny makes for compelling viewing.

The clown make-up partly obscures facial expressions, rendering them both inscrutable and overblown. There is something vaguely disquieting, even sinister, to this theatrical front that affords a measure of anonymity and puts performers at some remove from the audience. A simple but effective way of physically demarcating the space in which the game of question and answer unfolds consists in a garland of white light bulbs, loosely strung together with wire to form a luminous circle around the two chairs on which alternating pairs of performers – drawn from a pool of six, three men and three women, allowing for several permutations – sit for much of the time. Above them a red neon sign reads ‘Quizoola’.

In one of the passing self-referential comments that draw attention to what we are seeing, a performer remarks that they seem to be in somebody else’s set. And so indeed they are. The white room, virtually unadorned except for the aforementioned props and a few opulent touches, such as mirrors, chandeliers and French windows, could be the setting for, say, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis-Clos (No Exit, 1944). The minimalist décor was in fact created for The Salon Project, re-enacted at the Barbican by the Scotland-based company Untitled Projects as part of the biennial SPILL Festival of Performance in April.

Three days before the start of Quizoola!, I found myself pacing that very room expectantly in full Victorian regalia, my hair all puffed out and piled up, trying not to stumble on my train, while members of the Untitled Projects company were milling about with other guests sporting formal period attire. We had been asked to give our measurements ahead of time, so that a matching outfit could be selected for us from among the company’s treasure trove of costumes covering a period of 30 years, from 1885 to 1915, during which the Parisian salon waxed and waned. The period costumes, not unlike the clown make-up, were intended as a ‘device to destabilize the audience and provide a remove from their everyday selves’ as well as granting the ‘freedom to converse and think in different ways’, to quote one company member.

Although the audience, thus hurriedly transformed by skilled hair stylists and make-up artists, was centre-stage in this piece of immersive theatre, in practice not enough time had been factored in to allow the guests to get on with the business of conversation. Left to our own devices, in the rare moments when we were not being force-entertained with mini-lectures by invited speakers, piano recitals and a graphic video purportedly alluding to World War I, which brought about the demise of the salon culture, we were doing just fine. As the three-hour event drew to a close and everyone began to unwind, I was introduced to a couple of aspiring salonnières, who promptly extended an invitation to ‘informal gatherings’ of their own.