Highlights 2014: Shanay Jhaveri

By Shanay Jhaveri

‘Last Night a line appeared,
Unbidden, unsigned:
It has eight memorable
Syllables. I’ll keep you,

I said, falling asleep.
It’s gone now,
And I write this to requite it,
And to mark its passage.’

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Just as I was embarking on the slightly onerous task of recounting my highlights of 2014, I came across the above poem, Inscription, which is included in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s new book Collected Poems: 1969 – 2014 (Penguin Books, 2014). It leapt of the page, concisely articulating my feelings about the evanescence that inevitably follows an encounter – any kind of encounter – that leaves behind the simple acknowledgment of its happening. Each time that encounter is summoned, it will appear altered, and further changed as it recedes. So, with Mehrotra’s words as a guide, I offer up some recollections of 2014.

Bedsides’ Mehrotra’s poems, the new volume also gathers together his work as a translator. A true gift, his translations guide the reader through centuries of Indian poetry. I was particularly floored by his translation of The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala (originally published in 1991), perhaps the earliest anthology of secular Indian verse, dating back to the 1st and 2nd century CE. These poems – in which the speakers are mostly women – are about love, but they’re also about the act of love-making: what precedes it, what happens during it, and what is to be expected after it. Read today, amidst the moral policing and draconian measures of ‘modern’ India, one can’t help lament and not be disheartened. They are frank verses full of yearning, desire, longing, disappointment, frustration, fear, joy, sadness and humour – all emotions I experienced three times in 2014 at Howard Hodgkin’s exhibitions. The first was in Gagosian in Paris, of his most recent paintings – the artist’s first solo show in the city; the second, of his new prints at London’s Alan Cristea Gallery; and a final bijou presentation of gouaches on Khadhi paper at Gagosian’s Davies Street Gallery in London, titled ‘Indian Waves’, which Hodgkin made in 1990–91, and which were, until recently, believed to be lost.

Howard Hodgkin, Disturbed Night, 2013-14, oil on wood. Courtesy: the artist

Remarkable and inspiring, at 81, Hodgkin is turning out some of his best and freest creations. Working on different scales, his recent paintings were made over the last two years in England, France and India. A picture that has stayed with me is the intimately scaled Disturbed Night (2013–14), which is powerful and fragile in equal measure. Similarly stirring were two shows by Zarina, ‘Folding Houses’ at Gallery Espace, New Delhi, and ‘Descending Darkness’ at Luhring Augustine, New York. The piece de résistance of both shows was ‘Folding Houses’ (2013), a set of 50 collages each a reworking of the image of a single-story house made from leftover pieces from other projects. Drenched in emotion and memory, ‘Folding Houses’ is a chronicle of a life and, as Zarina poignantly elucidates: ‘Homes live in the imagination and dreams of people who leave the place they were born in. Our past never leaves us. We hide behind our memories – until we come to accept that the past is already gone.’ It’s such a privilege to witness such creative output in numerous instances in a single year of artists like Hodgkin and Zarina, who have not slowed down with age, but are full of vitality and energy.

Memories also stalk Sylvia Schedelbauer’s pulsating, exhausting, and triumphant new film Sea of Vapors (2014). Rarely has the use of flicker transcended its formal application to produce such intense emotion. 15 minutes long, Sea of Vapors is created from a mix of film shot by Schedelbauer and found footage. Labour intensive, and intricately assembled, images dissolve into one another, and in the plainest of acts, such as someone holding a bowl, Schedelbauer evokes the world’s phenomena. I was stunned and moved by this film. While Sea of Vapors unfurls at a rapid pace, Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s formidable and haunting From What is Before (2014) draws itself out over a period of five-and-a-half hours. Not as long as some of Diaz’s other works, which clock in at eight and 11 hours, From What is Before is set in a rural part of the Philippines in 1972, focusing on a small community of villagers just as Ferdinand Marco’s dictatorship is to announce itself. Diaz spends the first hour or so establishing the rhymes and rituals of the tiny barrio where his characters live before things start to unravel and the military arrive. The camera rarely moves: there are exquisite shots of nature, waves crashing against rocks, the densest of forests and his protagonists firmly embedded within it. Amongst the most unforgettable sequences in the film is an extended scene in which an elderly woman performs a mourning song for her deceased child. Without being didactic, as the hours pass by, Diaz exposes how fear is used to control and condition people. Based on his personal memories, From What is Before returns us to a past, reclaiming a history of the Philippines, and in the process revealing the necessity and urgency of committing to such acts of historical reclamation.

Sylvia Schedelbauer, Sea of Vapors, 2014, HD video still. Courtesy: the artist

Another act of excavation that left a significant impression on me was the re-release of Fei-Mu’s exquisite 1948 family drama Spring in a Small Town. Its deep vulnerability reduced me to tears. Also, the unearthing of Nalini Malani’s cameraless photography and film installation Utopia (1969–76), at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Museum of Art, New Delhi, in the first part of her year-long retrospective, was a revelation, not only further fleshing out a history of Indian artists engagement with film, but also reiterating an assured and active female agency from the mid-20th century. I was also happy to have been made of aware of Hungarian-born American artist Sari Dienes, courtesy of her first-ever museum show at the Drawing Center, New York, curated by Alexis Lowry Murray and Delia Solomons. It focussed on the street rubbings Diene made in the 1950s in New York City, while another showing at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York covered other aspects of her practice. Dienes’s tactile paper works and experimental working methods had a tremendous impact on a younger generation of male artists, especially Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The central role she played within the art community of the time is testified by the visitor’s book to her studio, which includes signatories like John Cage and James Joyce. It’s completely shocking to me that an artist such as Dienes has been so entirely forgotten.

Sari Dienes, NYC. C, 1953-55, ink on werbil. © Sari Dienes; from the collection of Pamela Jarvis

Similarly, ‘From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945 – 1952’ at the Jewish Museum in New York highlighted the work of two artists who, by virtue of being a Jewish woman and an African-American man, remain less known than their white male counterparts. Both Krasner and Lewis reached their mature styles in the 1940 and ’50s, and curator Norman L. Kleeblatt did a notable and nuanced job in putting them in conversation with one another. Seeing Krasner’s glyph-inspired work next to Lewis’s jazz-like paintings was a complete joy, highlighting a wide range of subtle cultural referents. Surprising and stimulating, Dries Van Noten’s exhibition at the Musée Des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, ‘Inspirations’ operated in a similar manner. Not a conventional retrospective, through a series of elaborately staged set pieces, Van Noten presented not only his own garments, but those of other designers, as well as art works, photographs and film clips, emphasizing less the genius of a single designer, but the process of creation. The garments themselves became receptacles of all that surrounds them, full of intention and affect. An overwhelmingly generous exhibition (more than 400 pieces were on display), Van Noten revealed himself to be a great connoisseur: the range of his inspirations was exhilarating to behold. I was personally delighted to see an Yves Klein blue bust, placed next to a Christian Dior Bar jacket and skirt from the 1950s, and the famous Cecil Beaton Garden Party coat from 1937 next to documentary footage of one of Pina Bausch’s dances. Other remarkable pieces included Saree-inspired pieces by Balenciaga and Christian Dior, and a magnificent 16th century sculpture by Bronzino on loan for the first time from the Louvre. I left ‘Inspirations’ totally elated.

Another expanded fashion exhibition that impressed me was the small but gorgeous ‘Sahib, Bibi, Nawab: Baluchar Silks of Bengal 1750 – 1900’ from the TAPI collection at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Prince of Wales Museum of Western India) in Mumbai. Baluchar sarees come from Bengal and are sensual, regal and intricate; for me, the highlights are those in which the weavers introduced Europeans figures and modern modes of transport such as the train, to echo their appearance amidst the landscape of colonial India. The show was accompanied by two other special exhibitions at the museum. ‘Alice: A Visionary Artist and Scholar Across Two Continents’ mapped out the Swiss painter, sculptor, art historian and Indologist, Alice Boners’s time in India in the 1930s, and her association with Uday Shankar and a young Ravi Shankar. ‘Kekoo, Kali and Jehangir: Framing a Collection’ at the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery celebrated the friendship between the two men, but also provided a vibrant account of how the Indian art world operated in the 1960s and ’70s. Together, this trio of shows focussed attention to the impressive efforts of Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the Museum’s director, to revitalize the institution. It is a particularly remarkable endeavour in India, where most government-funded public museums are barely functioning.

‘Dries Van Noten: Inspiration’, exhibition view at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

Another exhibition that deserves mention is ‘V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life’ at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Curated by Sandhini Poddar, it not only introduced Gaitonde’s sublime non-objective paintings to an international audience, but highlighted important works hidden away in public collections. Having secured loans from major public collections in India, including the TIFR, for which special governmental clearance was required, Poddar revealed a wealth of material that is held by public institutions on the subcontinent, and the need for curators and art historians to wrangle with them and the attendant bureaucracy to ensure that they are properly documented and seen.

An album that I had on repeat in 2014 was Matthew Halsall & the Gondwana Orchestra’s When the World Was One (Gondwana Records, 2014). Halsall, a dedicated follower of the spiritual jazz of John and Alice Coltrane, deftly melds together a diverse group of influences, while maintaining their individual integrity. The impact of Japanese music on Halsall is profound, most noticeably with the inclusion of the koto and bansuri flute mixed with a harp, soprano sax and double bass. The rhythmic beauty of When the World Was One is only matched by Unseen Worlds release of Ethiopian classical pianist and composer Girma Yifrashewa’s Love and Peace (2014). At a first listen, it might seem that Yifrashewa is wholly indebted to a Western Romantic classical tradition, but gradually Ethiopian folk traditions are heard and felt. This original music is a reflection of how a distinctly personal sound can be evolved from a classical repertoire of expression.

Mamman Sani, ‘Ya Bismillah’, 1978, re-released 2014

In 2014 Hindustan Motors Ltd. announced that it was suspending production of the Ambassador which, in 1957, was the first car to be built in independent India and was modelled on the Britain’s Morris Oxford (I write about this in the January 2015 issue of frieze). The country’s protectionist economy in the 1960s and ’70s ensured the omnipresence of the car: civil servants, government officials and the affluent drove it. It was only in the mid 1980s when Maruti Suzuki Ltd. entered the Indian market with the cheaper Alto 800 that the Ambassador’s sales started to decline. On hearing of its demise, I returned to Raghubir Singh’s photo book A Way Into India (2002). A vital historical document, the earliest image in the book dates from 1978; what is remarkable to behold is how Singh’s images visualize the transformation of an entire nation seen and felt through, and with, this car. These photographs portray a life cycle of not only a car and an artist, but also of another India, its aspirations and dreams, now long gone.

And what now? Can we hope for a better future? A leap into the unknown? What will carry us forward? I remain unsure; my anxiety as I enter 2015 is tempered by the re-release of Nigerian composer and keyboardist Mamman Sani’s 1978 collection of previously unheard recordings Taaritt (Sahel Sounds, 2014). Composed on analogue synthesizers in French and Nigerian recording studios, these songs combine traditional Saharian folk ballads with 80s synth and are totally elevating. They quietly suggest that perhaps the future could be slightly more familiar and less foreboding. Hopefully, it just might be a little more than bearable.