Tasked by the Critical Collective to reflect on Passages, the film programme I curated for the 3rd Edition of the Dhaka Art Summit (till February 8) it became clear that this text would provide me an opportunity to address some of the specific choices I made that defined the selection of the programme. It also offers a platform to deliberate more broadly on the context in which the programme was screened, by thinking through the possibilities that can be engendered by a curatorial initiative operating in South Asia at this present moment.
With Passages I consciously chose not to screen only works made by South Asian artists at the Summit, a decision that immediately set this film programme apart from the one that had preceded it for the 2nd Edition of the Summit, which primarily included work from the region. Passages comprised of 37 films, 36 of which were organized into clusters and screened according to a set schedule in the Shilpkala Academy’s auditorium, while another film Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization made by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in 1972 was shown every hour on the hour on the 3rd floor of the Summit’s venue. Filmmakers in Passages hailed from Argentina, Cameroon, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Lebanon, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, Angola as well as from the United States, United Kingdom, parts of Europe and those artists who shuttle across two or more geographic contexts to realize their work. More than half the filmmakers were women, and the earliest film in the programme dated from 1952-53. Passages also played host to the world premiere of Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) made by Ashim Ahluwalia with Akbar Padamsee, and the regional premiere of over 25 works.
I adopted what I called in my curatorial statement a ‘resolutely transnational perspective’ when formulating this selection of material. The transnational as a conceit has recently found much favor with certain curators, wherein the proposition is that any understanding of the contemporary is to be formed by looking across cultures. With its international selection and my own declaration of a ‘resolutely transnational perspective’ Passages could well be considered a standard bearer of such an approach. However, I would contend that is not the case with Passages. In fact, the film programme sought to emphasize that while the transnational is a possible way towards considering the contemporary, as there are issues that resonate globally. However, significantly, each of these emerge from undeniably particular social situations and circumstances that are tied to given nations, which cannot be ignored.
Passages was formulated keeping in mind the Summit’s own aims which as articulated by the Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt was to “look instead at shared and cosmopolitan histories across the region, as culture knows no physical boundaries.” I decided to take this objective one step further by thinking about the region in concurrence not only with itself, but internationally. Rather than showing films and moving image works that were made in the region, I wanted to take this as an opportunity to bring work to Bangladesh that which had not only never been screened in the country, but would resonate with local audiences. My proposal was supported by my including material from other parts of the world, mostly from the Southern axis - Latin America, South East Asia, Africa - navigating similar issues such as migration, displacement, urbanism, globalization as those confronted by the populations of South Asia. Also, by presenting material from these regions of the world that are part of the global south, I was hoping to initiate their conversation with South Asia directly, which was not routed through the West, and the West remained ancillary to these connections. By doing so it also gestured to those moments in the mid 20th century when these engagements between the global south were robust and pioneering.
By limiting the amount of material from the region, my hope was that audiences themselves would be able to acknowledge a resonance with these other works and regions of the world, but which would not be something predicated on direct, immediate identification, as most of the films did not picture or even make reference to Bangladesh or the region itself, but rather through a kind of felt affiliation. I use the word affiliation in reference to how it has been defined by Edward Said, where it is distinguished from ‘filiation’, which refers to identification through naturalized bonds. Said has further directly connected the notion of ‘affiliation’ with the concept of ‘worldliness’ explaining that “affiliation’ is a rather more subtle term {than worldliness} that has to do with mapping and drawing connections in the world between practices, individuals, classes, formations … above all affiliation is a dynamic concept; it is not meant to circumscribe but rather to make explicit all kinds of connections that we tend to forget and that have to be made explicit and even dramatic in order for political change to take place” [1]
Passages strove to enact a conceptual proposition of bringing together films that even if formally quite different from one another, a correspondence can be traced between them, without diminishing or suppressing the contextual specificities they respond to and that played a role in their creation. It wanted to propose a different vantage point from which the ‘world’ could be viewed and imagined, or rather how the transnational and ‘worldliness’ can be reconsidered in terms of the national and local. The leitmotif of the voyage, the actual journey, the trip, travel in a generalized sense became a way into illustrating this matter. Location was a crucial consideration when shortlisting films for the programme, in that each work included in Passages transacted with and addressed its own site of production but also the concern of context, in self-reflexive and knowing ways, being aware of being part of an irrevocably globalized world.
This question of a situational praxis was most clearly to my mind pictured in the Merchant-Ivory documentary Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization, which I made the centerpiece of Passages. The film was played on a different floor from the auditorium where the rest of the programme was screened, and constantly throughout the summit. The reason to separate the film from the rest of the programme was two fold. Firstly, by having it be shown alongside the other exhibition spaces of the Summit, the film programme was allowed a more physical and continuous presence within the Summit’s proceedings, ensuring that it be recognized as not a secondary component to what are the main events of the Summit. Secondly, byhavingthe film screen on its own, it was being set up as a talisman for the rest of Passages, in that it announced to the audience some of what is further explored in the individual screenings.
Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization is a documentary made by Merchant Ivory and commissioned by the BBC in 1972. It is a portrait of the writer and scholar Nirad C. Chaudhuri who was born in 1897 in the small town of Kishoreganj in the district of Mymensing, now a part of Bangladesh. Chaudhuri was a tiny and frail man, standing at five feet and weighing about 43 kilograms, and who took himself and his experience of life as his primary subject. He published his first book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in 1951 at almost precisely the halfway point of his life. Very productive, he penned several polemical books, and moved to Oxford in 1970 and never returned to India. He was 57 years old when he made that journey, one that he had prepared for his entire life. The 1972 documentary vividly and unapologetically captures Chaudhuri in England, living out his western affectations and is a captivating portrayal of a postcolonial intellectual in the heart of the Empire.
Chaudhuri was a complicated figure, he dedicated The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to the British Empire, which occasioned much controversy on publication, but he was no apologist for the British, frustrated as he was by their resistance to Westernised Indians. On the other hand, he shared with the British little enthusiasm for nationalist leaders and Indian nationalism. His views on India were often unpleasant, and at times unjustified. Clearly, Chaudhuri was not writing for the fallen Empire, nor was he addressing the new nation: neither he nor his prose fell into a particular political or national regime. As the writer Amit Chaudhuri declares, “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian presents, on the other hand, a startling variation, even inversion, of the theme of disowning and recovery, exile and homecoming” [2]. It is in responding to this variation inversion that Merchant Ivory capture in Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization, that I conceived and built off the other thematic screenings of Passages. Chaudhuri represents the complexities of inhabiting two parallel tenses of being, where neither is fully acceptable or resolved. It is an existence distributed across two cultures, yet his position is one that is oriented from his being South Asian, one that he could not and did not disavow.
From Passages the most direct association to Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization can be made to those films in the programme that preoccupy themselves with the lives of individuals who have lived between various geographical contexts. These include Ayisha Abraham’s I Saw A God Dance (2011) about the self exoticizing, transracial gay dancer Ram Gopal who popularized Indian classical dance in the West during the early half of the twentieth century; an extract from Leslie Thornton’s The Great Invisible (ongoing) which focuses on Isaballe Eberhardt, a Victorian woman who dressed up as a man to travel freely in North Africa during the late nineteenth century, or Aykan Safoglu’s Off White Tulips (2013) a semi personalized account of the queer American writer James Baldwin’s time in Istanbul in the 1960s. The trips made by the filmmaker themselves are also integrated, as in Anita Fernandez’s Un Balcon En Afrique (1980) where Fernandez is seen living in a tree house somewhere in Bissau, observing the city from above, but not physically interacting with it and conversely Narcisa Hirsch’s dreamlike Patagonia (1976) that centers itself on a corporeal engagement with the plains and mountains of Patagonia.
Alongside these films is Mati Diop’s A Thousand Suns (2013) set in contemporary Dakar, which follows the cattle herder Magaye Niang who was the star of one of the most iconic films of African cinema Touki- Bouki (1973) made by Djibril Diop Mambety, who happens to be Mati Diop’s uncle. In Touki-Bouki Niang along with his then companion Mory conspired to find ways to migrate to France, but A Thousand Suns finds them 40 years later still in Dakar, no closer to Paris. The film is a heartbreaking reflection on the notion of self-exile and failed aspirations. Djibril Diop Mamberty himself makes an appearance in Passages in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s short filmic portrait Grandma’s Grammar (1996) in which the legendary filmmaker ruminates on filmmaking and the potential that the cinematic holds in telling stories of an emotional and affective nature. The subjective and intimate condition of being in exile, and the complexity in expressing these circumstances is further explored in Bouchra Khalili’s Chapter 1: Mother Tongues (2012) from her Speeches Series in which Khalili collaborated with five exiled people based in Paris and its outskirts, inviting them to translate, memorize, and relay fragments of texts from political thought and contemporary culture written by Malcom X, Abdelkrim El Khattabi, Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Mahmoud Darwish.
The film programme sought to move beyond a literal understanding and consideration of travel - one that might focus exclusively on, say, works made by traveling artists - and consequently devotes a section to those films that relate the journeys made by objects across differing contexts and scenarios. It pairs Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s Statues Also Die (1953) that reflects on African tribal objects that have been gathered by ethnographic museums in the West, with Bahman Kiarostami’s The Treasure Cave (2009) where the story of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran and its comprehensive collection of modern western art is told. Yto Barrada’s False Start (2015) is an observation on Moroccan fossils and the counterfeiting industry that has sprung up around them, while Lois Patiño’s hallucinatory Night Without Distance (2015) is a portrait of border smuggling between Portugal and Galicia. Objects like LP covers of jazz, blues and salsa in Kader Attia’s Silence Injuries (2013), the pieces of fabric that Jodie Mack delightfully animates in her films, kitschy dinnerwear sets in Ana Vaz’s Occidente (2014), a roll of film itself in Jennifer Reeves Landfill 16 (2011) or the collections of objects gathered by artists in their homes or studios as witnessed in Ben Rivers Things (2014) and Kohei Ando’s My Collections (1988) are regarded as having expressive potential, and able to convey particular cultural and personal histories.
A broader inquiry into other kinds of voyages, is part of the programmes itinerary, and while some of the aforementioned films recount literal acts of travel acrossterritoriesby people and objects, it also makes room for work like Lisl Ponger’s Phantom Foreign Vienna (2004) in which Ponger does not leave Vienna, but films over seventy different cultures and nations, simply by visiting different neighborhoods in the city. In Ponger’s film Vienna becomes ‘global’, so to speak. She is constructing her own world map, reinforcing that map making itself is an ideological act, something which is further underscored by Anna Bella Geiger in her Elementary Maps No. 3 (1976), where Geiger dwells on the shifting cartographic lines that depict Latin America, and the numerous stereotypes and myths that are projected onto it. Place as an abstraction, the way it resides in memory, but also the more phenomenological and emotional experience of geography is a distinct strand of the programme, most forcibly felt in Claudio Caldini’s pulsating Vadi Samvadi (1981), Sylvia Schedelbauer’s overwhelming Sea of Vapors (2014), Ashim Ahluwalia’s subtle Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) (2016) and Alexandre Larose’s mesmerizing Brouillard - Passage # 14 (2013) in which a single unedited roll of 35mm is exposed 39 times as the filmmaker walks along the same forest path to a water body.
Landscapes themselves hold emotions, those particularly that are scarred by violence, and this is suggested in a cluster of films that comprises Mani Kaul’s rarely seen but stunning film on Kashmir Before My Eyes (1989), Soon Mi Yoo’s Dangerous Supplement (2005) assembled from found footage shot by American soldiers during the Korean war, Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series # 1 (2013) in which anonymous people are pointing to landscapes across Vietnam, Lamia Joreige’s Untitled: 1997-2003 (1997 - 2003) filmed in Beirut after the Lebanese war officially ended and Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep (2014) that alludes to the situation in Gaza, but by filming ancient ruins in Athens and Malta. The trauma, terror, fear, discomfort and threat that lurks in urban cities like Bangkok and Luanda is compellingly communicated in Taiki Sakpisit’s A Ripe Volcano (2011) and Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Concrete Affection - Zopo Lady (2014) respectively. There is also the unknown, the landscapes of outer space in Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts (2014), and of future Vietnam submerged underwater in Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Minh Quy Tru’o’ng’s Mars in the Well (2014).
As is evident, Passages was committed to exploring certain colonial and postcolonial conditions that are part of the region’s history and present day reality, but through a resonant host of international films that either were literally about a definite place, site, object or were conversely negotiating with dislocation, states of exile, belonging or expressions of the emotional and phenomenological conditions provoked by making such a journey. My endeavor with Passages was not to fixate simply on either the national or the global, but to investigate the question of a situational praxis. By screening works that each introduced a specificity of its own into an appraisal of what constitutes the contemporary, Passages strove to an unraveling, where the co-existent tenses of the transnational and local can be explored, hopefully with a felt sense of affiliation.
Notes:
[1] Edward Said in conversation with Bruce Robbins, ‘American Intellectuals and Middle Eastern Politics: Edward. W. Said’ in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 145.
[2] Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Poles of Recovery: From Dutt to Chaudhuri’, The Hindu, Sunday, 29 July 2001, available at http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/2001/07/29/stories/1329046c.htm