Roobina Karode, curator of the India pavilion at the Venice Biennale speaks to Gayatri Sinha
Gayatri Sinha: The curator Ralph Rugoff has spoken of truth and post truth as essential context for his exhibition and thematic of Venice Biennale. How are you relating this to contemporary art works and the reference to Gandhi in the India pavilion?
Roobina Karode: Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for the Venice Biennale May We Live in Interesting Times engages with the complexity of the world we live in today. The India pavilion also in many ways, addresses the social, political, environmental, technological and moral conundrums we are enveloped in. This second edition of India pavilion ‘Our Time for a Future Caring’ creates an opportunity for a renewed search and investigation into received notions of agency, action, and freedom. The selected artists and artworks weave an exciting argument in this regard, from Jitish’s Covering Letter to Ashim Purkayastha’s work on postage stamps. One has tried to read the larger thematic that the Government of India has been celebrating ‘150 Years of Gandhi’ as time encapsulated. It is also 150 years of modern Indian history. This is why I have included artists such as Nandalal Bose through the Haripura posters, MF Husain's Zameen and Rummana Hussain's Fragments which reveal different aspects of artistic response to the nation state. The subtlest evocation of Gandhi, in terms of his pronounced values and his persistent provocations to re-think our complex world, makes for a compelling pavilion in this day and age.
GS: Kiran Nadar has embodied the museum KNMA, with her enthusiasm, but what are the challenges involved in mounting the show of this nature and scale of collaboration?
RK: Kiran Nadar as an institution-builder looks holistically at the ecology of arts in India and the support systems that are needed for contemporary art. She believes that India’s participation in this large cultural gathering in Venice is of utmost importance to create future networks for sustained visibility of Indian artists, and the positive gesture of the Ministry of Culture in supporting this modern and contemporary art event is indeed welcoming.
Having said that, whatever one might say, exhibitions do tend to happen under different kinds of pressure and productive friction. This is the first time that three institutions/ organizations have come together to see that the India pavilion at Venice Biennale sees the light of the day. KNMA did initiate several processes pertaining to curation and bringing the artworks to the readiness required for their travel and installation. This was done in consultation with the Ministry of Culture, and though things take time, the good part is that the Commissioner of the India pavilion has been cooperative and considerate to the curatorial vision. Of course, time is critical, the curator does not have divine powers to create magic! We have to move fast in order to deliver the pavilion.
GS: Can you speak a little of the Indian pavilion, it is a new site in the Arsenale. You mentioned that this site is being used for the first time in the history of the biennale.
RK: Yes, the venue of India pavilion in Arsenale is being used for the first time in Biennale’s recent history. It offers its own unique spatial possibilities and some constraints as well. With India pavilion happened only once before, we have deliberated a substantial representation of eight Indian artists in a 530 sq. mt. area. We have opted for the space to be fluid, evoking resonances through the works displayed, keeping the temperament of the pavilion meditative to pause and reflect. I chose not to have a symmetrical design of the space, wishing for more odd edges/spaces and unusual encounters. In the end, I think it will have those spaces. It is a quiet pavilion. We are working with Jasmin Oezcebi, a Paris based architect/scenographer and Luz Gyalui who will head the production team.
GS: You are setting up the India pavilion from scratch, so to speak. What are the challenges, say beyond scenography, how about the Government of India?
RK: Someone interviewed me today and inquired about the pre decided theme, whether one could evade this theme, was it non-negotiable etc. However, I must say, I didn't resist it as much as I thought. It is an open-ended theme that lends itself to various ways of entering, articulating and interpreting it. I saw in it an opportunity to explore the potential and transformative force the theme may offer, and also in the context of Venice Biennale as a biennale with national pavilions, to revisit Gandhi amidst the current debates on de-colonisation, and reflect on so much artistic production that has happened in India around the figure of Gandhi. Atul Dodiya did his first exhibition on Gandhi in 1998, calling him ‘the artist of non-violence’. However, I need to add here, that the pavilion expands into many more trajectories, and this process has been both stimulating and rewarding. Before this, I had never thought of Jitish Kallat’s Covering Letter and Atul Dodiya’s Broken Branches together, or Broken Branches and Shakuntala Kulkarni’s cane armours but these juxtapositions came about while mulling over the theme.
GS: Even Husain’s Zameen and Nandalal Bose’s Haripura panels, even though they belong to the same period….Zameen is also very important because conceptually it represents Gandhi's village republics. Zameen was painted in 1955, which was also a moment of hope in the new nation. By 1957 in cinema we know that, in the work of Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Ritwik Ghatak that there was a loss of faith, but in 1955 the aura is still intact.
RK: The works of that period are so much about the peasant, the laborer, the rural, the artisan, the indigenous…
GS: The secular....
RK: The secular, yes indeed. When I curated Stretched Terrains, on modernist Indian artistic practices at the KNMA, I felt MF Husain was deeply thinking about all of this, the kind of vocabulary, the kind of symbology that he was bringing together, the idea of nation and its uniqueness with multiple languages, religious and social practices, alluding to Gandhi’s plea for ‘unity in diversity’. The subject of Zameen seems a continuation from Nandalal, it is just that the artistic language moved into a modern idiom.
GS: From Nandalal to Husain it is like the spine of mid century India, because this was the period of moving from the village to the metropolis, there is a huge migratory impulse.
RK: Husain also made several paintings then including the one titled Yatra (1955), in which the focus is on migration, on the movement of nomadic groups, sometimes unclear as to whether they are coming or going? But the idea that the city is made by migrant labourers, to mymindisverymuchthere;the dignity and presence of labour is very important in this phase.
GS: I think its important that by the time the great British Exhibition at Wembley came about in 1924, Gandhi had protested strongly against Indian artisans being put on display at British art fairs, a practice that went back to 1886. He had said that the dignity of India lies in her artisans and this is what by 1937 becomes Nandalal’s Haripura panels, under Gandhi's initiative, where he shows the artisanal but created indigenously.
RK: The dialogue/exchange of ideas between Nandalal and Gandhiji is a significant meeting point. We had thought we could make Nandalal the nodal point from which the entire exhibition radiates, but when the idea of Zameen came up, it brought about another level of excitement and engagement. I am also excited by the inclusion of Ashim Purkayastha’s drawings and painting, which are new works and will be exhibited for the first time. When Akansha and I went to his studio, we saw the drawings he makes of people, acquaintances, common people/citizens he comes across in the park near his house, and felt immensely drawn to their lightness and humour. This project of his has been going on for a long time, sketches of ordinary public, using pencil/ball point on graph paper. While on the one hand you see the official stamps, you turn and see small lines of instant direct portraits of people, each one carrying a different expression.
GS: What is the attitude of the citizens? How did you read it?
RK: The attitude of citizens is never monolithic. People do think differently. Some are elated, others grimacing or some laughing. They are impressionistic and linear, they make you question and think.
GS: Would you speak of your selection of Ashim’s stamps? He has made several series on the subject of Gandhi.
RK: I like the idea of an artist who is an interventionist in his own way. Ashim’s painstaking labour in adding and subtracting meanings from an existing popular image is a compelling artistic strategy. What I respond most to is that the working is neither loud or monumental in form or image, but the content processed in its minimality can address issues of acute relevance, be it farmer’s suicide or social disparity. Its intimacy prompts the viewer for a closer investigation.
GS: Ralph Rugoff’s title May we live in interesting times seems to come from benedictions. ‘May you live long’, ‘may you live happily’ these have been benedictions of a certain formal language. How do you address the thematic at a time we are living in? It seems to be deeply ironic and an almost wounded suggestion.
RK: I read Ralph Rugoff’s statement that he wanted to have no theme at all for his exhibition, and the title in a way serves the purpose of keeping it open and interesting, multivalent and not pushed into a single narrative.
GS: I find it interesting that in the movement of subjects from the thematic Universes in Universe, which speaks of globality but also of cosmic play, the curator has shifted to aspects of time. Beyond the notion of spatiality and borders and geography, to the notion of time which is very strong in your exhibition I think, because you are mapping a 150 years, that’s modern Indian history.
RK: The shift from the spatial to address the temporal is visibly paramount, but to encapsulate 150 years for us is rather an impossible task. It is also impossible to present the vast art landscape of India and its artistic talent across generations in the format given. India's modern and contemporary art history is not linear, it draws from vernacular streams, symbols of heterodox faiths, a populated iconographic field and abstraction, the many layers between a classical past and the great equalizer of public expression on the level of the street. Gandhi is a contemporary figure, a man of his own time as much as ours. So many of the aspects of resistance of our times: passive resistance, peaceful protests, ecological concerns, even vegetarianism were espoused powerfully by Gandhi. You do go back to Gandhi, but there is also the onus of our own times. The title of our exhibition also stresses on ‘care’, perhaps more than healing that presupposes a wound/ a tear. ‘Our time for a future caring’, is in that sense a call for attentiveness and an invocation for shared futures.
GS: How do you depict something as fragile, as tenuous and as abstract as truth that is something Gandhi was specific about? Can we map this movement in the figure of a man to exemplify truth and how do we project it into the present time?
RK: The structure of Venice Biennale is unique in that the curatorial premise set by the curator of the main international exhibition is not the pervasive theme guiding the national pavilions. Each pavilion is independent yet aligned, bound spatially, in proximity to each other reflecting on contemporary art and thinking about the world. In setting the curatorial narrative of this edition of India Pavilion we have been mindful of this expanded viewing and reception of the biennale. I didn't conceive the exhibition as a literal representation of Gandhi in a documentary-like format, or by resurrecting him from the archives. Gandhi’s image/presence is not fixed in time and space. He keeps returning to public conscience in periods of crisis or despair. He is not a subject that rests only in sentiment or nostalgia. Rather he is the subject of contemporary reflection. I was more inclined to look at aspects of his practice of satyagraha, non-violence, peace, equality and unity. And also the idea of craft, dignity of labour and emphasis on self-reliance.
The artists and their works were chosen with these at the back of one’s mind but in doing so I found it rather interesting to see how the linkages can be built through Gandhi’s works. For instance, how we look at one moment as a very pragmatic value and at the same time, a very spiritual value. There was something practical about the actions he had proposed. At the same time that action could carry something deeper, like a spiritual intention. That is what appealed to me when I chose Shakuntala Kulkarni and her cane armours, headgears and wearable costumes. I had visited her studio, then and was fascinated by the production and process of making the work. There was a humane equation, wherein the urban artist and the two artisans, a cane repair labourer and a weaver from a village in Assam, got together in her Mumbai studio, none of them having made such cane sculptures, life size women’s body wear before. She learnt about the difference between bamboo and cane, to work in an untried medium, depending upon the artisan’s insights.
GS: Do you think it affects the nature of the work?
RK: I think that theartisanherein away, had an upper hand, because the artist had conceptualized what she wanted but her process was enriched through conversations and learning about cane as material, about it being resilient, whether it could burn or bend, or take the form that she has visualized. The learning process was organic, gradual, and had to be about human connection before it could be vocational. Economic and social disparities had to disappear to work from a common ground. The process of working together dissolved artistic hierarchies to a great extent and the learning here, I am assuming, was perhaps happening the other way round, the artisan teaching the urban artist. Shakuntala says her biggest challenge in the absence of a common spoken language was to build channels of communication and camaraderie which resulted into a resolved work.
GS: We have an excellent interview on Critical Collective where Shakuntala says cane came at a time when she wanted to break out of the trappings of patriarchy in her own home.
RK: The project addresses the safety of women in different spaces. The cane armor simultaneously alerts us to the idea of protection (of being safe in the city) but also of suffocation, investigating ideas of freedom and non-violence. While the armor has only be seen historically, related by and large to the masculinity of the male king and soldiers, the armor for women was an idea that made her male co-workers question its making.
GS: Roobina I want to ask you something, which may or may not be directly related to this. We seem to be in the art world in a productive mode where we can go from biennale to biennale but the actual truth of our practice as you are seeing with Shakuntala or the engagement or the investment maybe with very few subject areas in our entire careers. An artist may be interested in an idea or an iconography and will devote a very large part of her time to it, even as she participates in 25 other projects. So then the truth of the experience becomes the very material. And in that sense, an exhibition on Gandhi compels us to confront something like this. I’m certainly thinking about this.
RK: Yes you are right. The truth is in the experience and in materializing the action. It speaks in the absence of strict narration. Gandhi’s abstract principles are referenced evocatively and transacted into materiality. Rummana’s works for instance are fragments, with broken shards of a pot. And the work exudes immense power. Atul’s works are dismembered pieces and memory objects in cabinets, modelled on Gandhi’s memorial museum in Porbandar, Gujarat. Jitish’s multimedia work, the way it touches the viewer’s body that passes through it, that literally is, the most moving part of the experience. The work otherwise is abstract, is mist, is words melting away. The poverty of materials used - roadside stones, clay, cane, the frugal padukas carry the philosophical import. I think process and material, body and the spirit are definitely on my mind.
GS: Jitish’s installations all give text such materiality and then he dematerializes text in the Covering Letter. I think it’s important what a curator chooses to materialize and dematerialize.
RK: You are so correct about that!
I was talking to Iranna today who in recent years has been working with ash, ash cubes and with the padukas/ cheap wooden footwear, engaging ideas pertaining to the ephemeral, the wear and tear of material, dematerialization and traces. While the pavilion has nowhere evoked the typical and most popular symbols of Gandhi- his specs, spinning wheel or his walking stick, it was quite refreshing to reiterate his idea of non-violence through Iranna’s project using the wooden padukas, that assimilate various symbolic and spiritual connotations from within the Indian culture. This on-site installation will evoke multiple references through the object-symbol, alluding to the idea of walking as performing action, satyagraha, meditation, keeping fit and grounded.
It is believed, in the forty years of his lifetime, in an average, Gandhiji walked 20 miles every day. And these are published facts.
GS: And walking through troubled geographies. Calcutta, Noakhali, Champaran, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Delhi….
RK: I was taking this cue to see at varying levels one can talk about the paduka, Gandhi’s wooden footwear, as referenced in the work of GR Iranna. One is this pragmatic flow of action of Gandhi and the other side is the spirituality.
GS: Roobina if we have to confer sainthood on Gandhi, in comparison to a Buddha or a Nanak, they went through extreme travail and they came out of it and then expounded their teachings. Gandhi’s modernity lies in his telling you at every step of the way what he was doing - it’s almost psychoanalytical.
RK: It is also an open book that can be read and interpreted in multiple ways. The exhibition presents this possibility and predicament through the artists’ voices and their chosen works.