The Space of Retelling:
Commemorative Exhibitions,
Timelines and Fugitivity
vis-à-vis India Pavilion in Venice
AKANSHA RASTOGI
Image:
Ashim Purkayastha’s work at the India
Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2019 (detail)
A pavilion is an externality, a territory at some geographical or physical
distance from and in relation to the main part, which is sought, negotiated,
rented and intended for self-articulation, representative purposes and
signaling of narratives. An ancillary outside staging an internally rehearsed
narrative: a practice so internalized that it takes the form of a retelling and
separates the event of the pavilion from its previous occurrences and
dispositions.
A national pavilion at the Venice Biennale is a pressure point that can
yield. I use the occasion of the second India Pavilion in Venice to reflect
on the commemorative urge of exhibitions and the inchoate ideas that
emerged from the experience of visiting the Biennale and partaking in the
curatorial process (of India Pavilion), which was overwhelming as well as
underwhelming. And while doing so, I look for related glitches, recursive
acts, instances and foretelling accidents and their spillages in the exhibition
histories of modern and contemporary Indian art. This essay stands as
an interval between the ongoing exhibition Our Time for a Future Caring
and the future India Pavilions which are yet to come, including the ones
that have no urge to manifest; by writing it this way, I, attempt to delineate
several definitions and expressions of a pavilion.
Gyrating and Making a Case
I propose to approach national pavilions as a space of retelling and rehearsed
utterances. Particularly, the debuting pavilions or ones that lack succession
and appear more as an anomaly, like the India Pavilion at the 58th Venice
Biennale, which also doubled up as a commemorative space for marking
the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. I read India
Pavilion through a category of exhibitions that are conceptualised around
a certain historical date, event, figure, icon, symbol or anniversary. These
can be clustered as ‘commemorative exhibitions’ or exhibitions invested in
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a recall or that summon and assemble multiple memories and timelines all at
once. Commemorations are acts of unlocking time, concerned with forgetting
and longing as much as reinstating and redirecting; each act mediating between
the dead, the buried, the missing, the revived and the living.

Navigating newer ambitions, curatorial, intra-institutional and governmental

objectives, the India Pavilion exhibition Our Time for a Future Caring showcased
artworks and projects of eight artists in a 530 square metre space inside the
Arsenale, which was utilised for a pavilion for the first time in the recent history
of the Biennale. To my mind, it seems to present an ideal opportunity to delve
into fictions and histories of exhibitions with references and subjects exclusively
dedicated to national leaders and iconic figures, historical events and dates, that
have served as commemorative gestures to righteously preserve the memory
and probe the relevance and effects of the figure and the event. Each time
an anniversary, centenary, jubilee-year of a political idea, ideal or figure pops
up, it produces the cultural and governmental order to make exhibits, events,
present research and launch new investigations. However, mapping exhibitions
through the linearity of timelines and cyclical nature of commemorative events
Images (L to R):
makes one question and intrude into its circularity. Now, depending on the
Exhibition documentation of Khadi: The
agility of these timelines, their usages, reordering and stretching, there exists Fabric of Freedom, 2002. Image courtesy:
a possibility of releasing the fugitive, metaphorically as well as in its multiple Martand Singh Archive with AMR Vastra-
manifestations as the migrant, the missing, the exiled or the one that escaped Kosh Trust. A group of 50 children spinning
attention. This reconstitutes the timeline as a performative site and a creative in the open lawns of the IGNCA in morning-
afternoon-evening shifts and teaching
work/order. In the context of ‘commemoration’, I want to think around the work
anyone who was willing to learn; Martand
of an exhibition, its transmissibility and afterlife, not just in residual forms but in Singh among the fabric exhibits at IGNCA;
the regenerative mechanisms that it co-habits and co-produces. With attention Handspun on Desi Charkha Sari with extra
to the layering of event upon event, the amplitude that a narrative gains in the warp patterning in Muga Silk from Andhra
course of the retelling and the enactment of a kind of belief1 in the event of the Pradesh; Martand Singh with Rahul Jain and
Rta Kapur Chisti at the Kolkata opening;
Biennale. The incidental structuring of the India Pavilion around the thematic
Aparna Sen at the inauguration of Kolkata
of ‘150 Years of Gandhi’, as mandated by the Ministry of Culture, Government Exhibition at the Fine Art Society.
of India, very interestingly stages an intense interlocking of an internalised and 1. In the course of participating in the
curatorial process of the exhibition Our
rehearsed script with commemorative exhibitions. Exhibition view of Meanings, Metaphors:
Time for a Future Caring, I have come
Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st
to name this belief in the event of the
Century at the Laxmi Mills Compound,
Directories and their Restaging Venice biennale as the ‘dangerous
Coimbatore, 2019. Image courtesy: The
“There were 108 pieces of khadi hanging from the ceiling to the floor, one faith in art’.
Registry of Sarees, Bangalore.
could just walk through them. That experience of touching the fabric, rubbing it 2. Artist Dayanita Singh in an interview
with Akansha Rastogi, 15 January
between your fingers, feeling and seeing different textures of khadi, the subtlety
2019, New Delhi. Unpublished.
and pure aesthetics of white on white in the exhibition space was unique; the 3. This date is the death anniversary of
curator revived those 108 looms to create those textile pieces, and the limited Mahatma Gandhi in 1947.
edition catalogue accompanying the exhibition was unbelievable, had a sample 4. Few fabric varieties were specially
of each khadi piece with the contact details of the weaver.”2 commissioned from Andhra Pradesh,
West Bengal, Karnataka, Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar, and also sourced from
Earlier in the year, speaking about the most memorable experiences of various centres of khadi and Village
exhibitions of her life, artist Dayanita Singh in an interview, mentioned a Industries Commission (KVIC), along
beautiful Khadi exhibition curated by Martand Singh, which was inaugurated with 63 creations by famous fashion
on 30 January 20023 at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in New designers such as Asha Sarabhai,
Abraham and Thakore, Abu Jani and
Delhi. The exhibition travelled to Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata. Khadi: The
Sandeep Khosla, Manish Arora, Ritu
Fabric of Freedom, as it was titled showcased 108 varieties of plain Khadi Kumar and Raghavendra Thakore and
fabric, from coarsest to purest.4 Focusing on the aesthetics and materiality of Rajesh Pratap Singh, who interpreted
khadi as a hand-spun cloth, the intention of the exhibition was clearly revivalist khadi in their ensembles.

204 | Akansha Rastogi The Space of Retelling | 205

in nature, to rethink it with and for the weavers’ community, simultaneously
giving provocations and inviting contemporary fashion designers to work with
Images (page 206 -207):
the hand-spun material’s structure, strength, texture and weave. Moreover, by Exhibition view of Meanings,
involving textile experts Rahul Jain, Rta Kapur Chisti and Rakesh Thakore, the Metaphors: Handspun and
exhibition-project created an occasion for the “study of the many cultures and Handwoven in the 21st Century at the
technologies of cotton cultivation in India”5, and marked the death anniversary Laxmi Mills Compound, Coimbatore,
2019. Image courtesy: The Registry of
of Mahatma Gandhi and the birth anniversary of Volkart Foundation6, the
Sarees, Bangalore.
sponsor of the entire exercise.
5. Mayank Mansingh Kaul, Meanings,
To set up autonomies that can proliferate on their own agencies through the Metaphors: Handspun and Handwoven
framework of an exhibition is a noteworthy aspiration. Through the exhibition- in the 21st Century, 2019. Exhibition
form, Khadi: Fabric of Freedom plays out an interlocking of pleasure of touch, catalogue
6. Volkart Foundation is a Swiss
interactivity of textile as a material, and effective functionality of an inventory
company founded in 1851 in Bombay
made freshly available. In another interview, Martand Singh suggested how and Winterthur. Andreas Reinhart in his
exhibitions and the textile pieces he commissioned were a way of storing Foreword to the exhibition catalogue
knowledge (of patterns, styles of weaving, forgotten transitions), and worked of Khadi: The Fabric of Freedom
as compact directories that could be used beyond the spatial and exhibitionary writes, “India was the main source and
market for its traded goods… In its
context. “I was interested in creating directories. When I say I, I mean ‘we’, it
Indian operations, the company dealt
was a huge collaborative exercise. Also, it is not as much it is beautiful, as it with a number of products, from the
is relevant.”7 The suggestion of a contemporary textile-piece’s performance as export of cashew nuts and coffee to
an inventory of the past and living traditions or what is not dead, still alive in the import of machinery and matches.
memory, perhaps unrecorded and under-practiced, and making a khadi sample But none was more important than
cotton. Starting from the southern tip
book modeled on a representative swatch-book, which carries over the tactility
of India, along the Western coastline
of the exhibition, is an interventionist methodology within exhibition making. up to Karachi, and deep into the heart
Now, the new sample book desires and seeks an occasion to practice. More so, of the subcontinent, Volkart Brothers
it indicates a movement towards artworks intended to be revived and expanded collected the cotton boll, ginned it,
in future, a deposition to be mined later for a performative regaining of time, pressed it, and packaged it into bales,
then shipped it to the major ports of
while presenting a reverse of the process of working with collection-based or
the world.”
pre-existing inventories. 7. Martand Singh in an interview with
Akansha Rastogi, 27 November 2016,
Rahul Jain, designer and part of the research team of the Khadi exhibition New Delhi. Unpublished.

206 | | 207
says, “what was unique about Martand Singh’s contribution was to combine
academic field research and documentation with a public exhibition that was
entirely conceived and mounted as a sensory space… The mere ‘viewing’
of an ‘exhibition’ became a theatrical and performative event.”8 Emerging
from the five-decade long practice of a textile historian, scholar and curator
of textiles, is an exhibition foregrounding khadi as a material, focused on its
physical characteristics, luminosity, texture, its abstraction, cultivation and
artisanal labour/artisanship. Even though khadi’s synonymy with Gandhi, the
swadeshi movement and India’s political struggle for independence remains in
the backdrop and as a starting point. Could directories be a method to address
the abstraction of commemorative occasions in exhibition-making?

In an almost negligent and non-existent history of restaging of exhibitions in

India, Martand Singh’s original collection of 108 sarees and fabrics resurfaced
in an exciting and almost timely9 manner through a series of exhibitions curated
and organised by Mayank Mansingh Kaul and The Registry of Sarees in 2019.
Titled as Meanings, Metaphor: Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st Century,
Kaul reads this reiteration and the collection against the backdrop of dissonances
and contradictions it presents today. From khadi as a medium and material
used by the elite now, a class and caste-biased garment to being a nationalised
brand run by the Government of India which includes non-textile products and
textiles produced with semi-mechanised and mechanised processes and is far-
removed from the origins of khadi as an alternative to the industrially produced
cloth. Positioning the collection beyond its immediate association with Gandhi
and a metaphor of self-reliance and resistance, he organised the exhibition
in the weavers’ space in Chirala, Andhra Pradesh as part of a conference on
technological cultures of the handmade and then in an old textile loom shed
inside industrial mill compounds of Lakshmi Mills in Coimbatore and other
public venues in different cities, to encourage direct interaction with weavers
and mill workers making clothes on machines. “Handlooms are a living
tradition. It is therefore befitting that we have the event in a living space – and
what better than a mill shed. We want conversations, dialogues and debates. Image:
Visitors are free to agree, disagree or be indifferent to the collection or what it Martand Singh speaking to a group of
stands for,”10 says Kaul of his impetus. This re-visitation of khadi as a material blind children who were the quickest
and an aesthetic, goes back with the collection to the weaving community. In to learn spinning from the other
children and respond most articulately
a reverse process of pinning the collection as a produced body of knowledge
to the exhibits they could touch,
with inventory of types, counts, weaves, textures and processes, a rarity, the 2002. Image courtesy: Martand Singh
exhibition seeks an interaction with ‘human hand’ or the ‘lost hands’ in hand- Archive with AMR Vastra-Kosh Trust
spun fabric and its workspace, ways of knowing and an embodiment of the
artisan. Is it a disruption? Commemorative exhibition can distort and allow a 8. Rahul Jain in an interview with Mayank
detour from the historical, almost mythical and embedded context. Does it raise Mansingh Kaul, Meanings, Metaphors:
Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st
questions around craftsmanship and mastery: “At its higher reaches, technique
Century, 2019. Exhibition catalogue
is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply what 9. The 150th birth anniversary year of
they are doing once they do it well?”11 Could exhibitions rethink a tool? In the Mahatma Gandhi as a marker cannot
context of swadeshi, the functionality of khadi as a tool to boycott and resist be missed. As many exhibitions
celebrating the occasion continue to
the foreign, and a template of the living is far gone. Could the metonymy of
open.
commemoration transcend the space of restoration and be actively present?
10. Pankaja Srinivasan, The Freedom
Fabric, The Hindu, January 18, 2019
Restaging and finding new functionalities of the modernist directories is the first 11. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman,
proposition in disappearance. Both the above exhibitions exist in the instance of Penguin UK, 2008, p.20
Image:
Ashim Purkayastha’s large canvas in
his studio in New Delhi, 2019. Photo
by Akansha Rastogi
12. Michel Serres, Statues: The Second
Book of Foundations, tr. Randolph
Burks, Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 174
this essay’s retelling of a fugitive thread that hesitantly and tactfully missed the
frame associated with commemorative exhibitions and timelines.
Stones and Timelines /
In Lieu of the Figure (India Pavilion) and the Event (Gandhi)
Ashim Purkayastha, one of the participating artists of the India Pavilion exhibition
at the 58th Venice Biennale, has been collecting stones from the streets of Delhi
for several years now. These are mostly stones used by the homeless to make
temporary walls, half-walls and structures marking and enclosing a space. This
enclosure is part of the public space of Delhi which has been changing rapidly,
more visibly and concertedly since the Nirbhaya protests in 2012. These are
also the stones collected from and near protest sites. He is a regular visitor/
participant to the Jantar Mantar road and various sites and spaces of protest.
In several large-sized paintings Ashim has attempted to paint this public space,
with people snuggling and sleeping in groups, pairs, alone by the side, all clad
in white, becoming a blob of cloth, encroaching, occupying the space and trying
to pass the night. These half-dead, dreaming, sleeping bodies too could be
stones, a slow returning, turning into stones. “Stones form the skeletons of the
dead and the seeds of the future.”12
At the extreme end of the India Pavilion, an illuminated white screen with
meticulously painted/placed stones awaits being listened to or being spoken
to, stalled in time and place, like a portal or talisman ready for activation. From
distance these stones look like as if hurled in vengeance from human material
history. With missing actors or force mobilising their movement, they are trapped
in this vista of the pavilion: rough broken edges, painted monotones and twirls,
suggested gyres, each stone is a cipher that only an injured visitor or a stone-
pelter can unlock. These fugitive stones are all around us. “And if for once we
looked at the rock, invariably present beneath our eyes, the stubborn object,

208 | Akansha Rastogi The Space of Retelling | 209

thrown, fallen, lying before?”13 Refocusing from the human subject to stones
or rocks as long forgotten “humiliated objects” which are “always invariant and
14. To name a few of the exhibitions
returning”, philosopher and scientist Michel Serres informs, “But the things of held in 1997: Major Trends in Indian
the world take silent vengeance for acts that nullify them.” In his reinterpretation Art at Lalit Kala Galleries curated by
of the Myth of Sisyphus, he argues that Sisyphus who is pushing the big rock artist Rm. Palaniappan, Tryst with
uphill, in his dedicated blindness is not seeing the rock at all, and the humiliated Destiny - Art from Modern India 1947
– 1997 organized by CIMA (Centre for
stone keeps returning to its place. Through this painting, Ashim Purkayastha
International Modern Art) in Calcutta
gifts the metaphor of stone to the India Pavilion, and along with it the figure at the Singapore Art Museum, India
of the homeless, the unlisted, the stone-pelter and a cluster of portraits of his – A Celebration of Independence
neighbours who are making/distorting their faces, probably teasing the onlooker (1947-1997) as a travelling exhibition
and a set of painted-over revenue stamps meant for the passing of ‘property’ from the National Gallery of Modern
Art in New Delhi and Bombay to
from one generation to another.
the Royal Festival Hall in London,
Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts
The migrant-artist encroaches with stones. In their gyration/escape these stones in Philadelphia and other museums
are accessible like never before. Hurled with a certain force and an angle at in USA, Epic Reality: Contemporary
someone or at something in order to shift its location. Where is this charged Narrative Painting from India at
the Contemporary Arts Museum in
field or protest happening? Whose ground and debris is being hurled? Where
Houston showcasing works from
would it land? At present Ashim’s stones can be catapulted in any direction. Chester and Herwitz Collection.
Each with calibrated velocity and projectile, can be employed to displace and These set of international travelling
change the course of a certain movement and action. exhibitions precede the mega survey
exhibitions of contemporary Indian art
organized in the first decade of the
Stones inside the pavilion, stones and the gravity of the pavilion: as to what
new millennium in Europe, America
is being displaced/hit remains unclear, one can look at other rehearsals and Asia.
populating the timelines of histories of exhibition-making. Such timelines unfold 15. Madhu Jain, Mega NGMA show pays
the restlessness, superficiality, the re-workings and improvised scales of the tribute to four stalwarts, India Today,
event-based narrative of contemporary art. I am inclined to seek exhibitionary August 11, 1997
16. R. Siva Kumar in conversation with
entanglements, timelines, stones and artworks that manage to escape or
Akansha Rastogi, 15 February 2015,
disappear, even for brief duration through the tracks, sites and itineraries Kolkata. Unpublished.
marked for them. Or morph into something that is not-so-easily identifiable. A 17. Ranjit Hoskote in his catalogue essay
rigorous pursuit of such disappearance and reappearance can trace and give ‘Pavilion as Laboratory - A Tool Box
some sense of the complex circulatory patterns and conditions of memorializing for Everyone Agrees: It’s About to
Explode’ says, “As a laboratory, it
which often activate new or distant/unrelated sources and actors. To that effect,
[India Pavilion] test-runs the idea of
even a simple listing of sources and agencies in relation to a particular episode/ a non-territorial cultural citizenship
context is a retelling. I define ‘Retelling’ as a non-continuum-flow, a separation (such as Homi K. Bhabha has been
from the event and a space of distinction for the audience. It is a moment of considering), under which a cultural
pooling in of entanglements and coalitions, wherein a heightened awareness practitioner may live away from India
and yet belong to its extended national
makes performative stances viable.
space in crucial ways, by affirmation
and critical affiliation.” (p.19)
With the intention to dilate and explore the circuit of ideas travelling from 18. In 1995 Sahmat had organized an
one exhibition to another, and perform a flattening of the ground from the exhibition project ‘Postcards for
perspective of exhibition histories, as part of my larger research I had created Gandhi’ to celebrate 125th birth
anniversary of Gandhi. It invited
a timeline documenting group exhibitions of modern and contemporary Indian
hundreds of artists to make postcards,
art since 1947, the year of national independence. Such a timeline though Images: another example of mail art exhibitions
forever incomplete, is useful in constructing patterns and politics of exhibition- With Ashim Purkayastha, collected and prompted an entire generation
making, and the assertion of specific subject matters, artists or institutional stones and the painting of stones in of contemporary artists to rethink
his studio in New Delhi, 2019. Photo Gandhi and the allegories, ideals and
prerogatives. One moment illuminated by this exhibition histories timeline is the
by Akansha Rastogi symbology built around him. A genuine
year 1997, the golden jubilee year celebrating India’s independence. It sparked
appraisal and discussion on Sahmat’s
off numerous independent exhibitions in India and abroad, each one on a 13. Michel Serres, Statues: The Second role in propelling as well as crippling
different scale, setting criteria, emphasis and timespan to investigate particular Book of Foundations, tr. Randolph Indian contemporary art scene is yet
“developmental” tendencies of modern and contemporary Indian art. Burks, Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 173 to be undertaken.
210 | Akansha Rastogi
The commemorative euphoria of fifty years of India’s independence through
these large-scale exhibitions is predicated upon a reflective gaze, a desire to
express the spectrum and the expansion of a post-colonial nation’s intellectual
and aesthetic achievements and to think anew. A majority of exhibitions
were surveys with familiar and typical frames for appraising and celebrating
‘the national’ as their titles and subjects14 suggest with few exceptions that
showcased a determined effort to utilize the occasion to establish arrangements
which anticipate future explorations. I want to highlight such select exhibitions
for their directions, distinct narratives and positionality:
“Finally, Santiniketan is going to have its day. The NGMA [National Gallery
of Modern Art] kicks off its celebrations of 50 years of Independence this
month with a huge show of about 400 works titled Santiniketan: The Making
of a Contextual Modernism.”15 Curated by Prof. R. Siva Kumar with works
of Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Benodebehari
Mukherjee from the 1920s to the 1940s, the exhibition brought a previously
unseen large collection into the public domain and became an exemplary event
for its research and curation and shifting the historical narrative and discourse
on early modernism in India. Siva Kumar’s approach to the exhibition was an
extension of his art-historical research and pedagogic engagement intertwined
with the exercise of proposition-making and documenting modernism. He says,
“It was meant to demonstrate Santiniketan as separate from the Bengal School,
which are often clubbed together. I used ‘contextual modernism’ to argue for
developing a modernist position in a particular historical context. Each country
or group of people construct modernism in the context of their own histories
and experiential worlds. I was exploring how this happened in the case of
Santiniketan, also in relation to the positions taken by these four artists.”16
Another exhibition Out of India – Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora
curated by Jane Farver at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, 1997 looked
at the history of the subcontinent from the perspective of diaspora artists. It
was the first survey exhibition of its kind in the United States that brought a
representative spectrum of geographies, experiences and timespans together.
It is noteworthy that when cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote curated India Pavilion
at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he endeavoured to present different regionalities
and localities into the fold of ‘the national’ along with strains and tensions in the
territorial claims and constructs of a nation. By including two diaspora artists,
Zarina Hashmi and Praneet Soi, one collective – Desire Machine Collective –
from Guwahati, Assam and Gigi Scaria who migrated from Kerala to New Delhi,
he positioned India Pavilion as a laboratory17 of geographical visitations where
an articulation of artists as political agents/units can occur, and produced a
zone of multiple inhabitations within the pavilion.
An opportune seizing of a commemorative occasion happened through Gift
for India exhibition (11-20 September 1997) that sent out calls for participation
to the world and received responses extending artistic solidarities beyond
the national. Organized by Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat)18 at Lalit
Kala Akademi Galleries, Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, it was proposed by
artist Vivan Sundaram and manifested in a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic. The
exhibition belongs to the category of mail art and networking exhibitions that
The Space of Retelling | 211
depend on an alternative circuitry of channels through small packages and the
personal intimacies developed between artists.19 It invited gifts in the format of
five-inch boxes from artists all over the world. Performing an almost ritualistic
exchange/correspondence with the world on behalf of a nation celebrating fifty
years of its post-colonial-ity, receiving and presenting two hundred artists' gift
boxes in an exhibition-form, it is more than a gesture, a reaching out and call
for expansion and plurality, an indulgence in a positionality of numbers and
participation. Informal solidarities amongst artists continue to be a fundamental
structure and primary resource for contemporary art and activism. However,
the idea of a common ground, social justice and the artistic labour involved in
forging new collectivities has shifted immensely.
A seminal narrative of negotiating the timeline of the year 1997 emerges from
the show 50 Years of Art in Bombay, one of the first few exhibitions of the newly
inaugurated National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Mumbai which marked
a remarkable chapter in the cultural life of the city. Within the celebrated idea
of a nation, the city of Bombay self-descripts itself, and asserts its independent
identity from the central branch in Delhi. The exhibition was conceptualised
and initiated by art historian Saryu Doshi, then Honorary Director of NGMA-
Bombay (and also former editor of the seminal Marg Magazine), to reclaim
the relationship between the institution and the city, historically as well as
forging an articulation of local-cultural-spheres. For her the impetus came from
Bombay-based artists on representing the spirit of the city and how NGMA-
Bombay cannot be a simple extension or replica of its Delhi branch. As a result,
she created a pocket using the national independence timeline and funds of
‘50 years’ to investigate the growth of modern art in Bombay, exhibiting works
and artists working between 1947 and 1997. Following the success of the first
iteration in 1997 Saryu Doshi continued the trend of exhibiting the art of Bombay
every year in monsoon months, bringing many city-centered narratives into the
fold of NGMA. “I did six of these exhibitions. My monsoon show of Bombay art –
we called it ‘Ideas and Images’ – was envisioned as a Magazine Show because
the notion was eminently suited to the space. The NGMA – in its former avatar
– was an auditorium. Its hollow interior was transformed very creatively into an
art gallery by means of a central spiral stairway connecting exhibition areas
positioned at alternating levels. I could imagine the entire space as a magazine
- with each gallery level as a section of the magazine with the central staircase
as its spine. Each gallery would be planned like a section in a magazine. The
lowermost gallery featured ‘Choice’ in which noted individuals belonging to a
particular group (e.g. art-critics) were invited to exhibit a selected number of art
works of their choice. Level 2 was assigned to paintings on themes and issues
such as marginalized communities or gender. Level 3 was a tribute in the form
of a retrospectives of renowned artists as KH Ara. And, Level 4 displayed
‘Related Arts’ such as photography or pottery. For the uppermost level art
gallerists were invited to showcase the works of young promising artists. I feel
it was an exciting concept and a way to engage with viewers, art lovers and art
galleries, who began to feel involved and giving voice to the younger artists.”20
These four exhibitions from 1997 – Santiniketan and contextual modernism,
politics of diaspora artists, city-centered timelines of modernism and artistic
solidarities – create distinct palimpsests from a commemorative exhibitionary
212 | Akansha Rastogi
Images:
Artists at the Anhad Garje sufi music
festival organised by Sahmat in New
Delhi, 1993; Rummana Hussain and
MF Husain at the Artists Against
Communalism public art exhibition,
1992, Bombay; Cover Page of ‘Gift
for India’ exhibition catalogue, 1997.
Image courtesy: Sahmat Archives
19. Vivan Sundaram, ‘A Gift among
Friends’, Gift for India, Sahmat, New
Delhi, 1997. Exhibition Catalogue.
20. Saryu Doshi in conversation with
Akansha Rastogi, October 2018,
Mumbai. Unpublished.
Image:
Exhibition view of Gift for India
exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi
Galleries, New Delhi, 1997.
Image courtesy: Sahmat Archives
occasion. More so, locate unstable pockets that influence and affect many
exhibition-events across time and place, and reveal the porosity and textures
of timelines.
From Missing to Fugitivity: Production of a (National) Pavilion
If the pavilion is a temporal encrustation in a scape, propelled by invitation,
intentionality, form and function, what would an inquiry into its rehearsals or
irresolute appearances and orchestrations sited before the current retelling
lead to? I find it useful to step away from the discussion on the relevance of
the category of ‘national pavilion’ and defining national art in relation to the
colonial origins of national pavilions in contemporary art biennale structure. I
would rather indulge in a reading of intensities, vocabularies and infrastructural
specificities of national/local art scenes that are visibly at work through
the spatial, geo-political and economic interactions occurring between the
independent, individual-ised national pavilions and the global contemporary art
within the hyper-visible fabricatory of the Venice Biennale.
Since the initial stages of imagining and realizing the India Pavilion at the
recent edition of the Biennale, I have been struck with the potential instability
of national pavilions from the former colonies, within a very stable and pre-
determined structure of the biennale. National culture ministry and departments,
intermediating bureaucracies, private partners, institutions and individuals find
a common ground to come together; each entity in varied capacities acting on
behalf of a nation. The more fascinating aspect are the ways in which national/
local art scenes are embedded inside national pavilions, with foreseeable
effects of instability and participation on national art scenes and its politics of
articulation. I think this instability is a resource.
The long potent absences of certain national pavilions allow opening of new
dimensions, conjuring of visions, dreams and apparitions. In case of India
Pavilion, one such hallucination manifested in an exhibition titled The Missing
Pavilion at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
The Space of Retelling | 213

in New Delhi (6 December 2014-10 February 2015). It was organised by the
students of visual arts as part of a curatorial studies course to reflect on the
imaginary of India Pavilion which went missing from Venice since its last
appearance in 2011 curated by Ranjit Hoskote. Students took cues from the
press reportages and responded to the agitation of the Indian art community
about the inability of the government in facilitating a continuous presence of
the pavilion in Venice that signals the lack of integration of contemporary Indian
art into the international art community. As a pedagogical exercise, the JNU
project treated the idea of ‘missing’ and loss as a template to engage with the
sentiments and aspirations of a national/local art scene. It extended from a
missing pavilion to ‘missing’ cultural objects from the archaeological sites in
India.21
Amidst this persistent imaginary of India pavilion in the local art-scene of India,
its simultaneous construction and negation, it is interesting to note that The
Missing Pavilion exhibition was a performative replicant. One trying to be
doubly present in two locations, in Delhi and hypothetically or dreamingly in
Venice. Though it hardly offered any methodology of navigating the politics
of representation and teasing out the nuances of participation in a global
contemporary event with novelty and inquisitiveness, to my mind it certainly
foregrounded the possibility of an ‘elsewhere’, amidst a suffocating or almost
benumbing dependence on international validity and visibility of a scene and an
urgency for independent frameworks.22
However, a premonitory glitch did occur in The Missing Pavilion, in the form
of an installation by artist Riyas Komu titled ‘Doors to New Pavilion’ (2014).
The installation was staged inside a wooden crate/container in the exhibition
showing a group of painted portraits of Gandhi inscribed with antagonistic
phrases ‘Ahimsa/Violence’, ‘Satya/Perception’, ‘Antyodaya/Victim’, ‘Swaraj/
Control’. Constructed to serve the hyperbole of India pavilion and the Venice
Biennale. Riyas Komu in his notes on the installation writes, “This work is very
explicit. The words are known, the man is part of our blood. Pavilions will be
214 | Akansha Rastogi
Images:
Rummana Hussain’s ‘Gift for India’
box, 1997, Photograph and yarn on
cardboard box. Collection: Peter Nagy.
Image courtesy: Sahmat Archives
21. Gayatri Sinha, who mentored the
exhibition The Missing Pavilion
writes in her catalogue note, “Is
the pavilion then an aggregation of
desires or a disaggregation of cultural
expectations?”
22. The Srinagar Biennale, a slow
rhizomatic biennale occurring in many
sites and inside other biennales, is
yet to happen in Srinagar, Kashmir.
An event still awaited, lays out and
negotiates the idea of elsewhere and
representation in an inspiring manner.
23. The Missing Pavilion, 2015. Exhibition
catalogue.
24. Michael Safi, ‘Statue of 'racist'
Gandhi removed from University of
Ghana’, The Guardian, December 14,
2018 - https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2018/dec/14/racist-gandhi-
statue-removed-from-university-of-
ghana
25. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public
Secrecy and the Labour of the
Negative, Stanford University Press,
1999, p.90
26. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public
Secrecy and the Labour of the
Negative, Stanford University Press,
1999, p.93
built on the chest. Salute to a martyr.”23 Indeed, almost four years later ‘the
chest’ revealed itself. Now, it appears almost as an apocryphal story to the
2019 edition of India Pavilion which is premised on the thematic of 150 Years
of Gandhi. The installation literally and ironically turned into a portal, activated
only years later. It is no mere coincidence that a reinstating of India Pavilion was
facilitated through the cultural funding allocated to the celebration of Gandhi.
How to account for this foretelling accident of a yet-to-come pavilion inhabiting
a missing pavilion? Likewise, the stones of Ashim Purkayastha, await trigger
and offer another portal.
Our Time for a Future Caring exhibition for India Pavilion, curated by Roobina
Karode, invoked the pandal/pavilion envisioned by artist Nandalal Bose and
Gandhi for the Haripura Congress in Vithalnagar in 1938, and exhibited posters
that adorned the gates, enclosures, cottages of the temporary complex. First of
its kind public art project in India, meant for mobilising political consciousness
among the visiting rural folk in pre-independent India, Bose and Gandhi’s
pavilion should be read as constituting an imaginary of a new place of gathering,
both politically and culturally. This pavilion within a pavilion relays a desire for a
spatial and political outside, an externality.
There were four debuting national pavilions at the Venice Biennale this year,
including Ghana Pavilion with an exhibition titled Ghana Freedom with six
artists and an architectural design conceived by David Adjaye, who specially
brought soil/earth from Ghana to texture the walls of the pavilion. In no simple
interpellation of events and linkages, the recent removal of the commemorative
statue of Gandhi from the University of Ghana after protests from students and
faculty on charge of racism (December 2018)24, connects Ghana and India
pavilion in a knot. A knot, if looked carefully, capable of turning the device
and contested space of Venice Biennale into a more conflicting cultural,
historical, temporal and pedagogical intersection that can move beyond
nations, representation and experience. It makes Gandhi not only a complex
but contested image that gleans into the future with a hyper-present: the way
his ideals have been systematically contested by various Dalit thinkers and
activists, and also the way his assassination is appropriated and re-performed,
again and again, moves him into an extra-commemorative zone.
In one way, Gandhi’s statue is “set free at last into that other realm, the realm
of defacement, disappearing into itself”25. It can now move and exist on its own
with perhaps changes occurring in its being because of this exposure. Michael
Taussig in his book Defacement speaks of public knowledge and secrecy; now
to think of its role in commemorative monuments gets even more complicated
with the idea of conservation of secret in public knowledge. “Ultimately this
notion of art is the notion of the secret and its defacement. It rests on the notion
that the world of appearance is a surface, a tensed surface, concealing a
hidden and deeper world providing a treasure trove, so to speak, for a certain
kind of storyteller who skillfully exploits the play of facades and the repression
holding facades in place… The secret is unmasked so as to conserve it.”26
The contradictions of our times, the symbolic space of national pavilions,
shared colonial pasts and within that the subset of commemorative exhibitions
and its circulatory forms do conserve the space of retelling and demand new
The Space of Retelling | 215
competencies to be developed. What kind of pavilions or externality new
institutions may produce or desire? I see more potential in the accidently
discovered immediate intimacies that are perceptive of emergent grounds and
interlinkages, and move beyond a thematic order.

Thus, I postulate that a national pavilion, no matter how arbitrary or permanent,

is a retelling and a rehearsed utterance, whose performance has happened
several times over in different contexts. Yet it remains always independent of the
select individuals, organisations, governments facilitating and conceptualising
it. Arrested in its sporadic presence, India Pavilion within the “multi-cellular Images (page 200 -221):
structure”27 of the Venice biennale presents a delirious image, holding time. One Nandalal Bose's Haripura Panels
(1938) and Ashim Purkayastha's
of the ways to brood further on its resourceful instability, gaps, restlessness,
installation as displayed at the India
illusions and incoherence is to relook at the timeline, i.e. all the exhibitions that Pavilion in Venice Biennale, 2019
have happened in India as a parallel and supplemental chain of events. In order
to prepare for and conduct a drill for an evacuation, hatching an escape plan 27. The term is taken from Lawrence
seems mandatory. Or refill the gaps with all the exhibitions that have transpired Alloway, who described the “‘multi-
in all post-colonial nations! Only an incomplete and propositional timeline of cell’ structure of the Venice Biennale”,
Alloway, L. (1968). The Venice Biennale
exhibition histories can gyrate a coup, can be called upon for rescue and handy
1895-1968. From salon to goldfish
usage. The porosity, fragility, chaos and labyrinthine grids of exhibitionary bowl. Greenwich: New York Graphic
timelines, contexts and art-scenes in the lifetime of a post-colonial nation- Society.
state can channelize a possible counter-narrative to the singular monumental 28. Angela Vettese in her Preface to the
event that the Venice Biennale is.28 Such proximity and necessary collision book Starting from Venice: Studies
on the Biennale writes, “Starting
of the two timelines: the biennale with its long history, universality, recurring
from Venice. Because it was there
and revisionary presence versus the spread, divergences and intensity of a that the idea for the exhibitions of Acknowledgements
geographically-led art scene, could address the unquestionable dangerous contemporary art took shape and the This essay is part of my larger research on exhibition histories of modern and contemporary South Asian art. I would like to thank Roobina Karode,
faith in art as exhibited by the viewers of the Venice Biennale. many different formats evolved”. Annapurna Garimella, Paribartana Mohanty, Avijna Bhattacharya and Sandip K. Luis for their responses to the early drafts of the essay.

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216 | Akansha Rastogi