Zones of Contact

Propositions on the Museum Curated by Akansha Rastogi Deeksha Nath & Vidya Shivadas

Kiran Nadar, Chairperson, KNMA

Prequel Being in the Zone

In the museum foyer an exposed brick structure sets the tone for the exhibition: An anti-monument that has infiltrated the pristine foyer of a corporate office. Its passages with curved and straight walls, reminiscent of Delhis urban villages, seem misplaced in this setting. They lead, with a few misses, towards an insulated rectangular structure that one can peer into but not enter. The condensed structure, Layout 04 by Sayantan Maitra Boka, Susanta Mandal and M. Pravat, mimics the maze-like-exhibition layout and encapsulates the arguments made. It presents quite literally a site under construction a working metaphor for this exhibition that puts forth propositions on the museum in the Indian context.

curated by

It is a great year for KNMA with important exhibitions at both our spaces, taking our attempts further. Continuing with our effort to experiment with different exhibition modes, KNMA has invited this unique collaboration between three young curators. Zones of Contact offers significant insights into museum practice and different ways of collecting and archiving. It also engages with the technological landscape of its locational context at Noida. It is a great step forward.

Zones of Contact Propositions on the Museum

Akansha Rastogi Deeksha Nath Vidya Shivadas
For if we ask ourselves how the museum as an institution, linked to the formation of the nation state and the idea of constituting a public in 18th century, relates to complex identity formations taking place national, postnational and transcultural contexts today. We are no longer engaging with a monolithic structure which upholds universal/ nationalistic values of public education and acculturation of the masses. What is its mandate in contemporary times? The exhibition finds some of its cues from James Cliffords formulation of the museum as Contact Zones1. Following from the seminal work on the contextualization of non western objects and cultural practices within the western museum, Clifford further develops his position on the museum as a meeting ground. At the start of his essay, he describes a session at the Portland Museum of Art, where the curators invited members

Zones of Contact spans a range of practices and generations of artists, bringing them together in a provocative relationship with each other. Witnessing and participating in the process of making of this exhibition has been a joy ride, full of possibilities that the museum as a site opens up in South Asian context. It is with great pleasure I congratulate the three curators, Akansha, Vidya and Deeksha for their placed/misplaced propositions. Roobina Karode, Director, KNMA

from the Tlingit tribe to participate in a brainstorming on the Rasmussen collection. He observes how the process was not reducible to collecting information or advice on objects and how the community used the occasion to deliver a message. The objects became memory aids to emphasise stories and songs that linked histories, myths and present day struggles. The community thus implicated the museum in their ongoing political battles. The museum becomes a social space activated by the complex interplay of cultures and communities coming into contact and engaging with each other. It is recast into zones of contact and equally conflict where the State, cultures and communities assert different agendas, they clash and grapple with each other to construct memories, histories and social action itself. Here art intersects with political issues and the ongoing process of exchange, uneven reciprocity and negotiation between the parties is as much the subject matter of what the museum contains as the art works themselves.

Directly opposite a small curatorial insertion documentation of D P Roy Choudharys sculpture Triumph of Labour found at the entrance of National Gallery of Modern Art. This bronze sculpture was one of the first commissioned works at NGMA, having won the First National Exhibition of Modern Art in 1953 and finally being installed in 1959. Triumph of Labour was among a spate of public commissions by Choudhary in the 1950s that constructed national symbols. Here he eulogises the toiling, muscular bodies of the workers who are literally engaged in national reconstruction. We begin to make connections between the two representations and their placement, between two versions of the museum and between two markedly different moments in the nation. What kinds of politics of representation and address, exclusion and inclusion do they present? As we make these journeys from constructing symbolic representations to marking invisibility, what discussions do they generate in the public sphere on belonging, citizenry, memory and aesthetics? Holding on to this central figure of the worker, other art objects enter the discussion to examine the art historical legacy on the labouring figure. They engage the notion of the collection (an essential museum ingredient, which speaks of accumulation, sedimentation and layering) where the body accrues different forms of signification over time and remains the visible site of interplay. Here we have Chittaprosads prints and drawings of the toiling farmer from the post famine years, Sunil Janahs early industrial photographs of 1950s when the factories in Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Durgapur etc were being set up, Sudhir Patwardhans

early working class representation from the mid 1970s; N.N. Rimzons 1993 elegy to the worker, a Tirthankara Jain figure, paying obeisance to the tools around him. But this calm stance and traditional allegiance to his craft seems out of place and endangered. And in Ravi Agarwals documentary images of changing working conditions and migration patterns in South Gujarat in mid 1990s and Amar Kanwars poetic A Love Story, 2010, that speaks of continuous separations, the descend of the worker into the displaced migrant comes full circle. Rakhi Peswanis 2012 sculptural panels set a different tone of enquiry, here the engagement is with more personal artistic process laying bear the tedium of crafting ideas, not as an abstract, romantic notion but one which embeds and makes visible the artist workers hand and tools within the fragile art object. Finally there is Sumedh Rajendrans work that examines critically the human relationships in urban habitats. The exhibition thus configures the museum into a construction site that the labour is building, but that is also addressing them in how it reconstitutes a fragile public space to allow for dialogue on tenuous issues of identity, visibility and belonging and inflects on the roles and the systems of art production in making these conversations possible.

portrait on a movement in the making, and the way it engages with individual agency and collective resistance. Nearby Bhopal survivors assert their moral right to represent and memoralise the 1984 tragedy. The proposed museum will not only keep alive the memory of the worlds worst industrial disaster but also become a tool in their struggle for justice. Alongside the collected objects, posters and photographs, the installation brings together a series of voices that speak of the need to remember, on who has the right to that memory and what forms it can take. As we walk past the first layer of the exhibition centred on the figure of the worker, we arrive at another section which engages with the idea of the alternate museum. The projects presented here, which function like quasimuseums, not only contain suppressed histories but also meditations on how to engage with these histories, with objects and materials, with archival strategies. While looking at who the museum is addressing, they also look at forms of construction as built spaces and built ideas and narratives, representing new curatorial, artistic and archival methodologies. They privilege artistic process over art product and construct tools by which one may locate the experience of the individual at the heart of the modern discourse on the nation. In the process they destablise the conception of the museum itself. Like in Amar Kanwars Sovereign Forest, presented here through text and some images, the installation is equally a library, a memorial, a public trial, and a call for collection. Naeem Mohammeins project on the failed ultra Left movements the 1970s, shows archival footage of the JAL hijacking of

On Entrances and Encounters

On the glass faade of the museum is the photo frieze Cosmopolitan Strangers by Arun Kumar H G. It shows groups of people, daily wage construction workers, waiting to be picked up by passing contractors at busy intersections in Delhi, Gurgaon and Mumbai. Positioned at the threshold of the museum, looking in, the work captures the reality of Indias labour figures where 94 per cent of the population is now work in the unorganized sector.

Alternate Histories: Archives Revisited

In Record/Resist Sheba Chhachhi revisits her archives of the womens movement, taken over two decades, blurring the boundaries between personal memoir and historical event. The documentary images of women activists protesting becomes a touching

1977 by the Japanese Red Army and the subsequent negotiations for the release of the hostages. It examines formation of global networks from another time which eventually collapsed, as the artist describes, into a decade of failed utopias. It points to the lapses in conversation and diplomacy between the state, civil and radical action communities, which have other resonances when seen today in India. It highlights the conscription of social codes of conduct, regulated by the ideologies in power, which decides the limits of acceptable and unacceptable civil action and the extent to which one belongs or doesnt belong within a citizenry. Masooma Syed and Samit Das, on the other hand, engage with the identity formation and historical antecedents in more personal ways. They construct three dimensional structures from paper and cardboard, working with found images and texts. Syeds tableaus become strange meeting grounds of disparate images of people from different cultural contexts, all gathered expectantly to participate in the unfolding of human drama, while Dass artist books are in conversation with texts by scholars like Abanindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen as they engage with the issue of identity, both personal and collective. The project Grazing experiments with modes of presentation to examine the networks that inform and support artistic practices. With collaborations from artists Prayas Abhinav, Abhishek Hazra and Kiran Subbaiah , the forum looks at the art scene of Bangalore, an account that could equally be about another space, another time, as much fiction, or based on rumours, as fact. It engages with the idea of Practice not of a single artist rather an art scene with many artists, collaborators, critics, curators, activists, facilitators and various other practitioners,

inside an exhibition-space. It proposes ways of accessing, looking, relocating and playing with a location, present readings of its networks, processes, activities, flow of ideation, knowledge production, dissemination and exchanges, or perhaps may not.

On Seeing: Museum Metaphors

Both Susanta Mandal and Ranbir Kaleka engage with the act of viewing. Mandal reworks the Magic Lantern, where a fragile tentative image is produced with the help of a candle light. It is only through the constant re-adjustment of the height of the candle by the viewer that the images clarity can be retained. Ranbir Kalekas Reading Man speaks of the impossibility of pinning down the creative experience and grasp concretely what it produces. How does the museum contain human imagination, how does it encode memory, how does it prescribe an aesthetic experience to the viewer? How does it create conditions of seeing that also speak of the instability and subjectivity of that experience? In the context of the museum now imagined as an active, contested public sphere, how does it engage with the discrepant voices, experiences and subjectivities and record these on multiple registers? These are some of the questions we ask as we imagine the contours of the museum in our contemporary context.

Artists
Amar Kanwar Chittaprosad H. G. Arunkumar Masooma Syed Naeem Mohaiemen N. N. Rimzon Rakhi Peswani Ranbir Kaleka Ravi Agarwal Samit Das Sheba Chhachhi Sudhir Patwardhan Sumedh Rajendran Susanta Mandal

(Endnotes) 1 James Clifford Museums as Contact Zones in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 1997.

Amar Kanwar
A miniature film narrative in four acts where time becomes so fluid that the image gets distilled to its inner self. In the bareness of this transience A Love Story appears and disappears at the fringe of the expanding city. As if a piece of evidence, it searches for a court of law that can understand its origin. As if a clue to the future it searches for a home that can understand its exile. In a world of continuous migration and therefore of continuous separations, A Love Story eventually became a part of The Sovereign Forest in 2012. A text along with a collection of images that present a glimpse of The Sovereign Forest. The Sovereign Forest has overlapping identities. It continuously reincarnates as an art installation, an exhibition, a library, a memorial, a public trial, a call for the collection of more evidence, an archive and also a proposition for a space that engages with political issues as well as with art. The Sovereign Forest is also permanently open for public viewing at the Samadrusti campus in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The Sovereign Forest attempts to reopen discussion and initiate a creative response to our understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology. The validity of poetry as evidence in a trial, the discourse on seeing, on understanding, on compassion, on issues of justice, sovereignty and the determination of the self. all these come together here in a constellation of moving and still images, texts, books, pamphlets, albums, music, objects, seeds, events and processes.
AMAR KANWAR (b. 1964, New Delhi, India) is an independent film-maker, who works with documentary, poetic travelogues and video essays. Kanwar is the recipient of the 1st Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art from Norway; an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Maine College of Art; the MacArthur Fellowship; the Golden Gate Award (San Francisco International Film Festival); Golden Conch (Mumbai International Film Festival); Jurys Award (Film South Asia, Nepal); Grand Prix at EnviroFilm, Slovak Republic; and the Golden Tree at the 1st National Environment and Wildlife Film Festival, Delhi. His films have been screened in several local and international film festivals, galleries and museums. Kanwars recent solo exhibitions include those held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. He has participated consecutively in Documenta 11, 12 and 13 in Kassel, Germany. He lives and works in New Delhi.

A Love Story, 2010 HD video, colour, sound, 5 min 7 sec Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Arun Kumar H G
The photo-frieze Cosmopolitan Strangers shows daily wage workers waiting to be hired, at allotted sites in Delhi, Gurgaon and Mumbai. It is a unique sort of marketplace where skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled men and women, most of them migrant settlers from rural communities, can be hired for unspecified amounts of times and negotiable salaries. This is a large labour force in limbo, waiting, holding tools to advertise their skills to passing contractors. A multitude of anxious bodies, witnessing the changing configurations of the nation state and trying to find appropriate modes of survival. These workers build Indias urban dream, including multi-scale industrial, corporate and residential complexes, and yet there is no place for them within these sites or the ambitions they create and support. The photo-frieze creates an ironical crowding that highlights the exclusivity of the human and material traffic and invisibility of large tracts of people in India today.
Arun Kumar H G (b. 1968, India) completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University of Baroda in 1995. His solo shows include Feed at Nature Morte, New Delhi and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2006; Inflatable works at Nature Morte, New Delhi, 2001; and Studio Gallery, and Garhi Artist Studio, New Delhi, 1997. Arunkumar is also an active member of Khoj Artist Collective, a contemporary art organisation that facilitates international art dialogue and artist exchange, and has completed residences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2005, and the University of South Australia, Adelaide, in 2007. The artist lives and works in Gurgaon, Haryana.

Cosmopolitan Strangers, 2012 Digital print of 14 panels, 572.5 x 63

Chittaprosad
Chittaprosad disassociated himself from the Communist Party of India in the late 1940s but continued with his humanitarian and socially committed art practice. Chittaprosad also addressed urban themes depicting migrants in the city such as the toiling factory worker and construction labourer at site or the villager travelling to the city in search of work. Linocuts from this series resemble the narrative of Bimal Roys film Do Bigha Zamin, 1952. Chittaprosad was commissioned by Bimal Roy to make posters and several drawings for the film.
CHITTAPROSAD (b. 1915 d. 1978, India) was a self-taught artist, studied at Chittagong Government College, Chittagong, Bangladesh. He remained an active member of the Communist Party of India in the 1940s, working as an artist for their publications and propaganda material and participating in activities organized by the I. P. T. A. His powerful black and white drawings and eyewitness accounts of his travels to famine stricken areas in 1943-44 were published in Communist Party journals and a pamphlet titled Hungry Bengal, brought his socially and politically engaged art practice to prominence. He illustrated several books for children, including The Kingdom of Rasagolla and Other Tales and Angels Without Fairy-tales and Ramayana. He scripted, designed and performed plays like Shakuntala and Prince and the Princess in his puppettheatre, Khelaghar, for children living in slums.

Untitled, Early 1950s 9.5 x 9.0 in. Linocut on Paper Untitled, Early 1950s 6.7 x 9.0 in. Linocut on Paper Untitled, 1946 21.7 x 15.0 in. Brush, pen and ink on paper Untitled, 1946 20.2 x 14 in. Brush, pen and ink on paper Collection: Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi

Masooma Syed
Zahid sharab peene de masjid main baith kar ya wo jaga bata de jahan par khuda na ho Masooma Syed quotes the above couplet by Mirza Ghalib to talk about her architectural maquettes that function as sets where intense historical and cultural dramas unfold. The artist creates the work by cutting shapes out of the cardboard packaging of alcoholic beverages and sourcing images from magazine and print media and her own archive of images and personal photographs. The installation of five structures from different time periods and cultures plays with the word spirit - from the intoxicating drink to the notion of the divine. Her structures are free-wheeling zones of contact, tableaus where the East and West meet, different histories of colonialism, globalisation and racism collide, cities and people from the past and the present arrive on the same stage and wait in expectant suspense for the drama to unfold. They come together to form personal and strangely evocative versions of fiction and reality.
Masooma Syed (b. 1971, Pakistan) studied painting and later studied M.A. in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore. She has exhibited in Pakistan and abroad, participating in several artistin-residencies and workshops. Masooma has also taught art in various art institutes, namely The National College of Arts, Lahore; Beaconhouse National University, Lahore; Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi; and Manchester Metropolitan University, England. Her works have been exhibited in group shows including Fukuoka Asian Art Trienniale, Japan; Harris museum & Art Gallery, England, at Apex Art in New York and in Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Series of five sculptures, 2012 Cardboard, photographs and mixed media I am not from the North 34 x13 x 10.5 My complexion is not much too white 20 X 17x 6.5 Spirits 26.5 x 9 x 15.5 Become a Diurach 31 x 8 x 9 Blues 13.5 x 15.5 x 8.5

Naeem Mohaiemen
Since 2006, Naeem Mohaiemen has worked on The Young Man Was (shobak.org), a history of the 1970s ultra-left. The current chapter, United Red Army, is a film about the Japanese Red Armys 1977 hijacking of JAL 472 to Dhaka. The hostages include an American politician and his actress wife, on their honeymoon. The narrative is constructed from the audio recordings of negotiations between the Dhaka control tower and the lead hijacker. The written echo of the crackly radio conversation creates a continual doubling. By the end, there is an exhausted camaraderie, almost a reverse Stockholm Syndrome. Shumon Basar observes, Perhaps because English is second language to both men, the tone with which they start their discussion is peculiarly polite, until the accord between ransom and reason gives way to breaking point. [Tank] United Red Army, Timeline Part 1 [1968-1977, #vcapture] is part of a series of timelines built around the film. It takes 1977 as a rupture point, spanning this successful hijack (six million dollar ransom) and a hardline shift in European governments willingness to negotiate (the raid on Lufthansa 181). Photographing archival video at close range generates images reduced to a blur, signposts for a decade of failed utopias.
Naeem Mohaiemen (b. 1969, Bangladesh) explores histories of the international left, and the contradictions of borders, wars, and belonging in South Asia, through essays, photography, and film (shobak.org). Since 2006, he has worked on The Young Man Was, a history of the 1970s ultra-left. Project themes have been described as not yet disillusioned fully with the capacity of human society (Vijay Prashad, Take on Art). His work has been shown at Experimenter, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Gallery Chitrak, Frieze Art Fair, and Sharjah Biennial, and appeared in Granta, Rethinking Marxism, Arab Studies Journal, and Secret Identities: Asian Superhero Comics. Mohaiemen is a critic of the potentially racist aspects of a hegemonic Bengali nationalism, and was editor of Between ashes and hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the blind spot of Bangladesh nationalism (DP/MJF). He is currently a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Columbia University.

United Red Army, 2011-2012 Video loop, 71 minutes United Red Army, Timeline Part 1 [1968-1977, vcapture], 2012 8 x 6 in. each of 40 frames

N N Rimzon
The early 1990s witnessed major upheavals within the country on the one hand the communal tensions following from the breaking of Babri Masjid and on the other hand the opening up of the Indian economy and the beginnings of liberalization. Rimzons sculptural installations from the 1990s engaged with these changing configurations. The Jain Tirthankara figure remains a recurring central motif in many of these works, an oasis of spiritual calm amidst the turbulence. In Tools from 1993, the figure venerates the instruments of his craft lying around him a circle. He could be participating in a ritual festival or equally delivering a quiet elegy to his traditional skills that are no longer valued under changing work conditions. Like his other significant installations from the same period, Speaking Stones (1998) and The Inner Voice (1992), the figure remains a sole witness, bearing the onslaught of history, political turbulence and communal violence with rectitude and endurance.
N. N. Rimzon (b. 1957, Kerala, India) completed his B.A. in sculpture from the College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, 1982 and M.A. in sculpture at M. S. U., Baroda in 1984 and further studied at the Royal College of Art, London on an Inlaks scholarship. He was deeply influenced by the leftist and radical background in Kerala and the socio- political strife at the time of the Emergency. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Rimzon was nominated for the Sothebys Award for Contemporary Indian Art in 1998. He lives and works in Kerala.

The Tools, 1993 78.7 x 157.5 inches (diameter) Resin, marble dust, fiberglass and iron Collection: Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai

Rakhi Peswani
Before the idea of work takes shape and affects the imaginary/ imagery, it is the preliminary germination of a flimsy thought that begins work. The state before work begins is the stage that is replete with theatricalities, embedded in delicate forms and obscure materiality. The mind enters into various debates and conversations with tools at hand, with materials, skills, possibilities and impossibilities. Cultivating the Craft is a series of five sculptural panels that immerse the viewer within this theatrical stage of delicate conversations. The work is brought to shape (cultivated) in the mind as a series of disparate images, which represent the tedium of any skilled craft. Often, the tasks are broken down into a series of infinite steps hinging on absurdity and non-meaning (abstraction). Through disparate processes and their repetition, acquiring skill is a slow, weary process. The tools at hand become prosthetic devices that embody desires within the body. Their form, as representation, is embedded within the fragility of sculptural surface. Opticality hinges on associations between psychic and somatic accumulations. Light becomes a metaphor that reveals the drama behind work, which here, is an inbetween membrane that produces meanings from dark, obscure zones towards clarity and meaning. Intimacy and immediacy are conveyed through the fragile textural surface of kantha (quilting) to represent the hide (skin/ cover). Its repetitive yet simple technique easily draws the non-skilled, semi-skilled or untrained into fine craftsmanship.
Rakhi Peswani (b. 1977, India) received her M.F.A (Sculpture), and B.F.A (Painting) from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. U. Baroda. She is the recipient of Emerging Artist Award 2007, presented by Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), New Delhi. Peswani received the Inlaks Scholarship for the UNIDEE in residence at Cittadellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto in 2006. Her recent solo exhibitions include Matters Under the Skin, Art HK Asia One represented by The Guild, Mumbai, Hongkong;Intertwinings, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Sonnet for Silent Machines, at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery & The Guild, Mumbai. Peswani currently teaches at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.

Cultivating the Craft (Within Sleep), 2013 Five textile panels, hand embroidered on Calico, linen 100 x 52 inches each (detail of the installation)

Ranbir Kaleka
Reading Man 2, Ranbir Kalekas single channel video projection on a painted background, is an evocative rendering of the lapses and transitions between the acts of reading, thinking and seeing. The work encapsulates the viewers expectations of an art work. It raises questions regarding modes of engagement and experience. The outcome of the creative process remains that obscure object of desire that can never quite be fixed, that always eludes the viewer. How does one speak of translating images in the imagination of the artist and the viewer, where do they cohere and become apparent? What does this in turn speak of the museum space and its aspiration to contain and make explicit the meaning of art? It is a work that is both a still life (through its painted background) and a moving picture (with its video component). Kaleka has said of this process, Painting has a physical quality, a thing-ness which one can touch and feel. Video, on the other hand, is made simply from light, and has another kind of aura. I wondered what would happen if I combined the two. When you do that you arrive at a third, layered image with a different quality, which makes it possible to enter different spaces of meaning and touch human experience at another level.
Ranbir Kaleka (b. 1953, Punjab, India) studied painting at the College of Art, Chandigarh, and later taught fine arts at the Punjab University from 1970 to 1975 and then at the College of Art, New Delhi between 1980 and 85. He later obtained his Masters degree in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. His works have been widely exhibited in India and abroad. His recent participations include Deconstructing India at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 4th Guangzhou Triennial, Media Art Lab in Moscow, Prague Biennale 5, and Lalit Kala Akademis Tolstoy Farm- Archive of Utopia to name a few. He was given the National Award in 1979. Ranbir Kaleka lives and works in New Delhi.

Reading Man 2, 2012 Performance: Amjad Majid Video Projection on painting 2 min 31 sec

Ravi Agarwal
The three-year long journey into South Gujarat, led into the dark recesses of the Indian economy. Unearthing the invisible workers of India, who constitute over 90 percent of its informal work force, paradoxically also led to a witnessing of quiet assertions of human dignity. The workers included diamond cutters, construction workers, sand dredgers, sugarcane workers, textile labour, stone miners etc. Migrating from the village to the city in search of work, they were attempting to escape not only their extreme poverty but also a social order which excluded them from any opportunity of upward mobility. Work defined their lives. For the lucky few who found it, it could mean working as a family in a brick making unit all night, or being cooped up in dark mafia-run ghetto-like diamond cutting sweatshops. Paltry piece rate wages, with a denial of any other rights, were the norm, as a complicit State machinery looked the other way. The increasing informalisation of work, which began paradoxically as Indias economy began to globalize, is today more commonplace and growing. The migrant worker remains trapped in a deeply exploitative political condition of our times.
Ravi Agarwal (b. 1958, New Delhi, India) is an artist, curator, writer and environmental activist. He has participated in several international curated shows. Amongst them are Documenta XI, Kassel 2002; Horn Please, Berne 2007; Indian Highway, London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Lyon, Rome, Beijing, 20092012; 48deg C public art and ecology, New Delhi, 2009; Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India, Tel Aviv, 2012; and Newtopia The State of Human Rights, Mechelen, 2012. He cocurated the Yamuna-Elbe Public. Art.Outreach project in 2011 (www.yamuna-elbe.de), held in the cities of Hamburg and Delhi. Agarwal has written extensively on ecology and development issues. He is the founder of the Indian environmental NGO, Toxics Link (www.toxicslink.org). Agarwal lives and works in New Delhi. Work morning Sugarcane worker couple Stone quarrying worker Brick kiln workers From Down and Out, Labouring under Globalization*, 1997-2000 (Photographic series by Ravi Agarwal and book by Jan Bremen, Arvind Das and Ravi Agarwal - OUP, India, 2000) Courtesy : The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai

Samit Das
Working as an artist in the present cultural scenario which is bewildering at best, I look at other historical periods to resolve some of my dilemmas. For example, what was sustaining artists in the 19th century? How were they engaging with the cultural vacuum at a time of political turmoil and lack of patronage? The nationalist, revivalist movement laid the ground for consolidation of ideas on Indian art and identity in the early 20th century and threw up questions that continue to remain relevant for practitioners today. I work through these issues within my installation using three texts as seminal points of departure: Okakuras seminal text The Ideals of the East that engages with issues of Asian identity, a more personal memoir Pathe Bipathe by Abanindranath Tagore, where the artist describes local and global identity, not seeing them as stable spaces, rather as strange mind spaces. The third layer is provided by Amartya Sens more recent publication, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, where he speaks of the ways one can understand the self and reconnect with ones roots. Working between these writers and their positions, I construct an architectural space encrusted with overlapping histories and shifting positions. Using the format of books, the work builds on principles of architecture to create spatial fields within flat surfaces. The work is interactive, for it to have meaning requires the viewer to turn pages, glimpse through openings, cuts and gashes and undertake a physical and visual journey of the books. Samit Das
Samit Das (b. 1970, Jamshedpur, India) specialises in Painting, Photography, Interactive art works and artists book creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. He studied fine arts from Santiniketan, Kala Bhavan and post Experience program from Camberwell College of Arts, London, through British Council Scholarship [ CWIT]. Das has held several solo shows in London, Singapore , New Delhi , Kolkata and Mumbai. He has documented the Tagore house Museum In Kolkata [19992000]. His recent publications include Architecture of Santiniketan : Tagores Concepts of Space. Samit is currently part of a programme to prepare a Dossier on Santiniketan as World Heritage Centre on behalf of ASI. He has exhibited his works widely. Das lives and works in New Delhi.

The Vista 2012-13 Installation with unique edition artists books

Sheba Chhachhi
Record/Resist presents an intimate reflection on my engagement with the womens movement in India, as both photographer and activist. Blurring boundaries between personal memoir and historical events the video and the photographs revisit my archive of documentary images taken over 20 years, from 1980 to the late 90s-early 2000s, including posters, pamphlets and other archival material. The work investigates the meanings, slippages and contradictions within collective resistance and explores the construction of subjectivities through social and political processes. Refiguring the relationship between subject and photographer, the personal and the political, within a philosophic framework of inter-subjectivity, the installation posits an embodied temporality - a time of plural pasts, cellular memories and open futurity.
Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958,Harar,Ethiopia)works with lens based images, both still and moving, investigating questions of gender, ecology, violence and visual culture. Her work often recuperates ancient iconography, myth and visual traditions to calibrate an inquiry into the contemporary moment. Chhachhi began in the 1980s, both as an activist and photographer, documenting the womens movement in India. By the 1990s, Chhachhi moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large photo based multimedia installations. Her photographic work retrieves marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, and forgotten forms of labour. Chhachhi creates immersive environments, bringing the contemplative into the political in both site-specific public art and independent works. She has exhibited widely in India and internationally. Chhachhi lives and works in New Delhi.

Record/Resist, 2012 Installation with photographs and single channel projection, Duration: 17 minutes

Sudhir Patwardhan
These works from 1975 and 1985 represent significant moments in the Sudhir Patwardhans practice. The artist remembers Green Torso as a breakthrough work in his series of working class figures from the seventies. He describes the work in the Art Heritage catalogue, 19781979: The first significant and fruitful convergence of my intellectual and pictorial preoccupations occurred in 1975. I had been working with a kind of autobiographical and expressionist drawing when I became preoccupied with an image of the sitting man the worker - encountered daily in the suburban train. The art critic Ranjit Hoskote speaks of Patwardhans deployment of the body, in this first phase, as a presence and a symbol, where the muscular physique responding to strains of everyday life act as embodiment of spirits fortitude. By the time of Nullah in 1985, we see Patwardhans preoccupation with the figure of the worker shifting to engage with landscape and habitat. The move was triggered in part by the collapse of the mill workers strike in 1982-83 and by Patwardhans own increasing ethical dilemmas of speaking on behalf of the worker other. Nullah allows the artist to take a distant view, a panoramic landscape undergoing development is put on display. The artist records the particularities and the changes within suburban neighbourhood, and the kind of human relationships and activities it engenders. By bearing witness to the everyday changes in the environment, Patwardhan makes this rooted record of a specific place and time.
Sudhir Patwardhan (b, 1949, Pune, India) graduated in Medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune in 1972. Patwardhan is a practicing radiologist and runs a clinic in Thane, in Mumbai. He held his first solo exhibition of paintings in Delhi at Ebrahim Alkazis Art Heritage Gallery in 1979. Since then he has held several solos and participated in important group exhibitions. Patwardhan has grown to be one of the most significant contemporary artists of India. Sudhir Patwardhan lives and works in Mumbai.

Nullah, 1985 72 x 44 in. Oil on canvas Collection: Buno and Gurcharan Das, New Delhi Sudhir Patwardhan Green Torso, 1975 40 x 30 in. Oil on canvas Collection: Sudhir Patwardhan, Mumbai

Sumedh Rajendran
Sumedh Rajendrans drawings and sculptures yoke disparate elements together to explore the historical contexts of materials the association of iron and steel with industrialization, of leather with caste histories. Collage remains a key principle in his work, and he crafts his effects from the fusion of, and the friction among, dissimilar materials and the symbolic associations they carry. The interstitial geography of New Delhi, built as it is on layers of history, is a source of inspiration for Rajendran and he uses elements of architecture as a condensed form of the social psyche. This work is part of a recent series of small sculptures, which explores the relationship between people and building complexes. What idea of collective living do these structures promote, what kind of communities do they engender? Rajendran likens the architecture to a condensed form of human belief system. The colourless, indistinct building blocks and the desires they unleash among people seem to lead them towards exploitative and self-serving relationships. Here one truncated male figure hoists himself on another to make his presence felt, to make his claim stronger.
Sumedh Rajendran (b. 1972, Kerala, India) completed his B.F.A. from College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum in 1994 and M.F.A. from Delhi College of Art in 1999. His solo exhibitions include Chemical Smuggle at Grosvenor Vadehra, London, 2008; Final Call at Anant Art Centre, New Delhi, 2008; Street fuel Blackout at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2006; and PseudoHomelands at Rohtas Art Gallery, Lahore, 2005. Rajendran has widely exhibited his works, including participations in various international exhibitions. He lives and works in New Delhi.

Bouncing High Walls, 2012 Aluminum and cement concrete

Susanta Mandal
How long does it take to complete a circle? From basements to the top-most floors ofmulti-storey buildings, walls and roofs camouflage endless small spaces, hidden pockets. Concealed within walls, roofs, floors are inter-connected pipelines and electric cables and power connections whiz silently. I use glass and steel to create structures that attempt to provide a visual depiction of the invisible energies running through these pipelines. The thought that provokes is trying to figure out how long they will run. I expose these internal structures, lay them bare. The glass pipes allow for this transparency and minute observation, they provide the possibility of making the unseen seen. In this particular body of work I work with a contraption called Magic Lantern which was used during the Victorian period for entertainment. I deconstruct the apparatus and using its only source of light, a candlelight, illuminate a series of slides. The candlelight flame throws a soft light, one that continuously elides the opticalcenterof the lenses. To get clarity, viewers have to adjust/lift the candle with the help of a device. The images which focus on small architectural details and their surroundings acquire a hallucinatory quality, seeming familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Susanta Mandal (b. 1965, Kolkata, India) studied painting at the Government College of Arts and Craft in Kolkata and the Benares Hindu University. Mandal has worked as artist in residence at Khoj International Artists Association in Delhi and Britto in Bangladesh. His work has been shown in several exhibitions both in India and abroad and acquired by prestigious art institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He lives and works in New Delhi.

From How long does it take to complete a circle series, 2011 Variable lenses, slides and candle Installation, size variable

projects
Bhopal: Memory, Movement and Museum (The Remember Bhopal Trust and Rama Lakshmi) Grazing (in collaboration with Abhishek Hazra, Kiran Subbaiah and Prayas Abhinav) Layout IV (M Pravat + Sayantan Maitra Boka + Susanta Mandal) Sunil Janah: Ram Rahman Project

Bhopal: Memory, Movement and Museum

Collection: The Remember Bhopal Trust, Bhopal Curator Rama Lakshmi

Bhopal is the site of the worlds worst industrial disaster. Methyl iso cyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbides pesticide factory in a crowded working class neighbourhood in Bhopal during the midnight of 2-3 December, 1984. More than 25,000 people have died as a result of gas-related ailments. More than 150,000 remain chronically ill. Meanwhile, new generations continue to be exposed to Carbides poisons from a severely contaminated factory site and polluted groundwater. How should a museum portray the story of the tragedy and the travails of Bhopalis? More importantly, who should imagine such a museum? The government wants to build a memorial at the site of the factory, but some survivor groups say only they have the moral right to memorialize the event. They would like the memorial and museum to be a tool in their continuing struggle for justice, and not be an institution that freezes their story in history. To this end, we have begun to collect artifacts, oral histories, photographs, protest songs, posters and slogans that have constructed the collective memory of the survivors and activists in Bhopal. Families have given to the museum project objects that are their last tangible link with those who died. Many others have recounted their harrowing tales of survival and fierce struggle. The museums narrative will be shaped by their stories and objects. This will be the first museum in independent India that is co-curated by the community and tells the story of a peoples movement. It will also be the message of the movement -- it will not use any toxic material or products manufactured in hazardous factories; and it will not accept money from either the government or large corporate houses.

The Remember Bhopal Trust was formed in 2011 with the goal of keeping the history of the struggle alive in public memory and launching a series of commemorative projects.The story of Bhopal is not a localized incident; it needs to be taken to other parts of the country, especially to places that are sites of similar struggles, collect those stories, and ultimately weave them all to form a permanent museum to be located in Bhopal.But the Trusts activities will also address the ongoing arguments about matters of economic growth, foreign

investment, and environmental and human rights violations in contemporary India. Rama Lakshmiis a museum studies graduate; she has worked with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Missouri History Museum. In New Delhi, she has consulted with the National Museum and the National Rail Museum, and has conducted oral histories in the United States and India. Currently, she is working with the Bhopal survivor groups to build a communitycurated museum.

GRAZING
Akansha Rastogi

Or There is a Rumour that this is about Bangalore

Artist-Collaborators: Abhishek Hazra, Kiran Subbaiah and Prayas Abhinav

Grazing is duration. It treats the reader as a grazer and exhibition space as a prairie. Treating this exhibition as an archipelago, Grazing responds to its conditions. It images a network that keeps coming upon itself even after walking further and further or follows practices of relay to retrieve a new distance each time; a reminder of the instability of an event. The space of seeing sees itself, not as a reflection but as a parasitical twin. It is calm but eerie. Parasite is not outside anymore but inside, and also a twin conjoined twin inseparable; both die if detached. I am thinking of a self-referential structure that is an opaque metaphor pretending to talk about something else, but describes only itself demonstrates a perversity and an obscene relationship with images. This is the space that has the potential to create a chain of surrogates (substitutes) or where the separation of the body from the bodily happens and defiles the bond of origin or originality, rather suggests eventuality. It comprises of six structures of Grazing, simulating the presenter, the presentation and the presentee: Methods, Lurking, Fielding, Exhaustion, Desks and Shakiness of the Ground. To view the state of viewing is a loss of content; more importantly, a loss of speculative subject. Grazing is built on this lacunae and scraping along the surface. These six structures can be anything that one sees, listens, reads, and plays with, browses through, steps onto, walks through, rests on or something which is made visible only after certain conditions are achieved. This exhibition implies being one with the ground where one ruminates.

The three collaborating artists have been mediated by the curator as they mediate the content in the project. Their engagement varies from active contribution to staying throughout the process, becoming witnesses and the material and to lurk in the periphery. All the images in the exhibition are documentation of various art events in Bangalore, shared by the art community there. These events have been brought into a calculated relationship with the museum space.

Acknowledgements: Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy, Pushapamala N, Christoph Storz, Suresh Jayaram, Namita Sharma, Aiysha Abraham, Smitha Cariappa, Suman Gopinath, Annapurna Garimella, Archana Prasad, S G Vasudeva, Lina Vincient Sunish, Ravi Kashi, Balan Nambiar, Ekta Mittal, Kush Badhwar and Paribartan Mohanty. Ravi Sundaram and CSDS, Sarai for allowing me to audit the course Researching the Contemporary. Nishant Shah and Centre for Internet Studies, Bangalore where one version of Grazing was presented. Raqs and Devi Art Foundation for starring Grazing in Episode 2: Sarai Reader 09 Exhibition.

Abhishek Hazra (b. 1977, Kolkata, India) is a visual artist based in Bangalore. He has previously exhibited widely, including Science Gallery, Dublin; HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Casino Luxembourg Forum dart Contemporain; Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art. Kiran Subbaiah (b. 1971, Karnataka, India) was trained as a sculptor from the Royal College of Art, London and MSU, Baroda. He works in many genres including photography, video, sculpture and installation. He has exhibited his works at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai; Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London, Paris, Delhi, Mumbai; Pompidou Centre, Paris. He has participated in international residencies including Flaggfabrikken, Bergen, Norway; Khoj, New Delhi; Stiftung Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen, Germany; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. He was alsorecently shortlisted for the Skoda Prize, India. He lives and works in Bangalore.

Prayas Abhinav (b. 1982, Haryana, India) is a writer and occasional teacher, presently an artist-in-residence at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Amsterdam, NL). He is the Director of the Museum of Vestigial Desire (http:/ museumofvestigialdesire.net). Prayas has developed his research and practice with the support of fellowships by Sarai, Openspace, the Centre for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA), TED and Lucid and participated in residencies at Khoj, India; Coded Cultures, Austria and Dis-locate, Japan, and shared his work at festivals including Transmediale, 48 degree c, Futuresonic, ISEA and Wintercamp. He lives with his family in Bangalore.

Layout 04

A location based collaborative construction Sayantan Maitra Boka, Susanta Mandal and M. Pravat Site-specific, 2012

Layout 04 is a location-based aesthetic construction that interrogates the standard engineered urban interior space, be it an artists studio, a site specific intervention or here in this case context of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in a technology hub. This partnership between artists seeks to transform and mutate the typical architectural process using distinct approaches. The resulting convergence of these individual eccentricities function as one self-contained artwork and the product of the interaction is a source of discovery for both the artists and the audience. Within the dynamic morphology of cityscapes, any attempt at forming representational models to reflect that dynamism poses a number of challenges, more so

M. Pravat studied in Baroda and has participated in several shows in India and abroad. Currently, he has been meditating on the notion of flexibility of the designed space, and his prior works dealt it by creating fake architectural blueprints. Sayantan Maitra Boka is an architect and scenographer by qualification, with a career in art by choice. He heads an interactive design firm, Illusion in

because any city is largely constituted by innumerable layers of images and imaginations. Whereas many images find a picture-plane, there are imaginations, desires, and resentments that gradually seep into fissures and cracks to form a different substratum. This initiative aims to delve into that substratum, albeit not with a mind to excavate but to project onto through the diverse approaches of these creative practitioners. Such a process of discovery aims to unravel the various layers defining the semantics of space. The artists are concerned with a specific cultural landscape, the character of which is influenced by the geological structure, history and culture into which they integrate their work. They are also interested in the disturbing associations that people have of spaces and drawing attention to the architectural settings through their interventions. The group draws inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that is solely expressed through hypothetical projects.

Motion, and is an active member of the NGO, Shelter Promotion Council (India), through which he has started producing and curating Public Art Festivals in different parts of North-East India to identify issues and question them through the medium of contemporary and new media art. Susanta Mandals recent art practice is involved with the issue of energy; whether it is pipeline politics or other forms of mechanism involved with energy. His mixed media installations, which often utilize spotlights and kinetic mechanisms, seem playful, but are actually uncanny and ultimately disconcerting constructions.

Sunil Janah

Project by Ram Rahman

Slide show of industrial photographs taken in the early 1950s, in Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Durgapur and the Damodar River Valley

Sunil Janah had been recruited into the Communist Party of India by P.C. Joshi, the General Secretary of the CPI, in the early 1940s in Calcutta. Recognising his talents as a photographer, Joshi sent him to document the Bengal Famine in Midnapur in 1943. Those pictures, published inPeoples War, made Janah nationally famous. Living and working as an inspired youngster in his twenties - in the party commune in Bombay between 1944 and 1947, Janah developed a life-long empathy for agricultural and industrial workers and their struggles for dignity as labourers. After P.C. Joshi was ousted as the General Secretary of the CPI, writers, actors and artists like Janah whom he had recruited also left the party. Moving back to Calcutta, Janah set himself up in a studio in the late 1940s. When the great Industrial projects began to be set up during independent Indias first five year plan, many were in the coal and steel belts near Calcutta. Sunil Janah was perfectly placed to photograph these Temples of Modern India. His body of industrial photographs, made through the early 1950s, is the rare instance where people are not his central focus. Greatly influenced by the industrial photographs made earlier in the 1930s in the US and the Soviet Union by his friend and colleague Margaret Bourke-White, Janahs large format photographs are strikingly graphic and evoke the idealism of the new nation striving to build an industrial base for self-reliance. They were very much a part of the creation of the Nehruvian India when the slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan was a matter of pride. These pictures, made in Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Durgapur and the Damodar River Valley, reflect a time when the labourer was valued as a co-traveller in building the new nation before industry began to be seen as exploitative and polluting. Great industrial structures dwarf the landscape and the humans within them. That many were made in the same areas now witnessing Maoist revolts and pitched conflicts between tribals, corporates and the state over land rights and mineral resources, is an irony of history. These photographs are an important cultural document of our modernist history, one which has not been incorporated significantly into our understanding of that history and its roots. The photograph of the boatmen on the Hooghly shot from behind and below shows the

Sunil Janah (b. 1918 d. 2012, India) is one of Indias foremost photographers. Sunil Janah was educated at St. Xaviers and Presidency Colleges in Calcutta. His photographs of the Bengal Famine of 1943 brought him to prominence, and he went on to capture Indias peasant and workers movements and independence struggle in the late 40s. Ram Rahman (b. 1955, India) is a photographer, artist, curator, designer and activist. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a degree in Graphic Design from Yale Universitys School of Art in 1979. Rahman has shown his photographs in individual and group shows in India and around the world. Amongst the shows Rahman has curated are Delhi Modern: The Architectural Photographs of Madan Mahatta at Photoink, Delhi, in 2012, Heat Moving Pictures Visions, Phantasms and Nightmares at Bose Pacia, New York, in 2003; and Sunil Janah Photographs, A Retrospective at Gallery 678, New York, in 1998. Rahman is one of the founding members of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in New Delhi. He is co-curator of

Boatmen on the Hooghly, Calcutta, Late 1940s Vintage toned gelatin silver print 11 x 9.5 in. Collection: Ram Rahman, New Delhi Casting, Steel Plant, BengalOrissa, Mid-1950s Vintage toned gelatin silver print 16 x 19.7 in. Collection: Ram Rahman, New Delhi

the Sahmat retrospective exhibition opening at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago in February 2013. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

full mastery of Janahs eye and aesthetic. He idealises the hard muscular labour with a pictorialists eye, but imbues it with his left-leaning empathy. He finally makes a beautiful toned gelatin silver print, fully conscious that he is making full use of his craft to make a stunning work of art. Janah passed away in 2012 in Berkeley and his work has not been in the public domain for decades, partly through his own reclusiveness. He had photographed both my grandmother and mother in their dance careers and I grew up seeing his work. As I became serious about my own photography, I realized that we lacked any access to our own photography history and archives in India, and it became a part of my practice to bring some of these histories to public attention through exhibitions, articles and lectures. Sunil Janah and his work has been the first of these projects. Ram Rahman

Zones of Contact Propositions on the Museum

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) Produced and published in India in January 2013 by

Plot 3-A, Sector 126, Noida, India Tel: 011-49160000 www.KNMA.in All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Texts Akansha Rastogi, Deeksha Nath and Vidya Shivadas Artists Artworks Artists Photography of Artworks Artists Graphic & Publication Design Akshay Raj Singh Rathore Printed at Archana Advertising Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi