Neelam Raaj | April 30, 2011

Indian presence in Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is often called the Olympics of the art world. The city's palazzos and pavilions see artists - and nations - vying to impress a notoriously hard-to-impress audience. In 2007, Subodh Gupta's pots-and-pans stainless steel skull Very Hungry God was positioned by the Grand Canal and catapulted him to the global stage. This year's event, the 54th Venice Biennale, which will open to the public on June 4, is India's breakout year.

VENETIAN AFFAIR: 

Praneet Soi, who divides his

 time between Amsterdam and his 

native Kolkata, will create an onsite mural 

for Venice while New York-based 

Zarina Hashmi's work tackles

the concept of 'Noor' or divine light

For the first time in decades, India will have a national pavilion (Indian artists such as Subodh Gupta, Riyas Komu and Nalini Malani have shown here but not under a national umbrella). In an exclusive interview, TOI-Crest caught up with Ranjit Hoskote, the man who has been constantly on the move ever since he was appointed curator of the India pavilion last August. Shuttling between Mumbai and Utrecht, the two cities where he has been living over 2010-2011, and Venice and Delhi, Hoskote has been hard at work coordinating with the Lalit Kala Akademi, artists, and with the production team. "Sudden questions pop up, like when electrical facilities pop up in the middle of a mural and we have to make a calibrated deviation from the plan, " says the 42-year-old who wears quite a few hats. A poet, cultural theorist, translator (he's put the launch of his latest book, a translation of the work of 14th-century Kashmiri saint-poet Lal Ded, on hold), he admits that this curatorship is quite a high-pressure job. "Since this is, in effect, our first initiative in Venice on such a scale, we have had to invent protocols and mechanisms for everything. Many people in the art world labour under the delusion that curators lead glamorous lives. What they don't see is the behind-thescenes work, the hard work of negotiation, design sessions, extended meetings, diplomatic discussions, the nuts and bolts of it!" 

Despite a very vibrant art scene, this is the first time India has a pavilion at the116-year-old Venice Biennale. Did you want the debut to make a statement? 

India has had an exhibition presence at previous editions of the Venice Biennale, especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, routed through the Embassy of India in Rome. But after a showing mounted by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations during the 70s, India has been notably absent. Also, after the Biennale reorganised itself substantially at the end of the 90s, we may now see it as a constellation that speaks of a new world order, with greatly transformed regional equations. Within this new constellation, it was important for India to have, for the first time, a professionally curated exhibition commissioned, very appropriately, by the country's National Academy of Art, the Lalit Kala Akademi. So yes, it is vital for me, as curator, that India's debut should mark a strong symbolic statement - in the choice of artists, the complex histories and entanglements they embody, and their place in a newly unfolding narrative of artistic practices that develop across multiple locations. 

Venice is quite the European cultural bastion. What does this mean for Indian art? 

Venice is also still very much the symbolic centre of global contemporary art. It means that we have to attend more responsibly to our status as a cultural power that is taken seriously. The time to celebrate the market uncritically is over. The time to overrate price and reduce artists to lifestyle brands is over. We now have to view our art as something that has powerful critical insights to offer on the layered experience of the present, and to address it through the appropriate optic of knowledge. That is the lesson we have to learn. But I'm afraid we are not going to learn that lesson just yet. There is so much we have to unlearn before we get there. 

The pavilion is somewhat menacingly titled Everyone Agrees: It's About to Explode. 

My eye fell on this sentence, from a text by an anonymous group of theorists called The Invisible Committee, which was shared with me by Mriganka Madhukaillya of the Desire Machine Collective. It was one of those fortuitous, magical moments. The sentence holds a reservoir of multiple meanings. It could speak of a society whose confident energies, simmering discontents, plural and productive articulations are all set to explode. It could speak of an art scene that is on the point of explosion in all directions. It could speak, also, of a cluster of ideas about location, identity, subjectivity and post-postcolonial, transcultural shape-shifting, whose time has come. 

You've chosen four artists - printmaker Zarina Hashmi, painter and video artist Gigi Scaria, mixed media artist Praneet Soi, and The Desire Machine Collective, made up of the husband-and-wife team of Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain. Why didn't you choose some of the more established names? 

As I said, it was important for me to make a strong symbolic statement about contemporary Indian art. My argument is that contemporary Indian art is defined by multiple horizons of meaning and value, and not only by the yardstick of the market. 

So, instead of having a vast number of artists to illustrate the booming art scene in India, or merely replicating the conventional wisdom of the art market, I chose four powerful positions, each of them conceptually rich and robust in expressive power. While some of these positions have been incorporated into the ranking system of the gallery world, they have not been neutralised by it - and they enjoy the critical acclaim that correctly attends truly dynamic practices that keep transforming themselves instead of settling into anxious formulae. It was also important for me to point to the variety of locations from which contemporary Indian culture is produced, and that it is reducible neither to place nor medium nor generation.

Zarina Hashmi incarnates, for me, a subjectivity profoundly shaped by the trauma of the 1947 Partition, by the experience of diaspora, and concerned with an exploration of epiphany and illumination. Praneet Soi's transcultural practice allows us to look at the transformation of the studio into a series of fluid situations, shaped through interactions with diverse collaborators, research modes, and a transition among disparate economies of image-production. Gigi Scaria, a Kerala-born artist who has lived and worked in New Delhi for over a decade, reflects on the processes and demands of internal migration, travelling among diverse psychic landscapes, social textures and interpersonal asymmetries. The Desire Machine Collective, based in Guwahati, signal the emergence of a vibrant contemporary art scene in the north-east, a part of India that is often regarded as quite separate from the mainstream - they combine their own work in film and public art projects with the conferences and workshops they organise through PeriFerry, a platform based physically on a barge moored on the banks of the river Brahmaputra.

In this sense, the India pavilion is, for me, a laboratory to test out various conceptions of cultural citizenship, of a cosmopolitanism that is not exclusively based on the metropolitan condition. I use the Indian Pavilion as a laboratory to investigate the idea of India. Through the four artistic positions presented there - as well as through the three associated conference platforms that will follow, in India - I bring into play the many claims and counter-claims, the extensions of conceptual boundaries and the multiple locations within the subcontinent from which artists now work, as ways of opening up the idea of the nation-state. Cultural citizenship, rather than national identity, is one of the key themes that I am exploring through this experiment. 

What are the works that will be on display? 

There are seven works in all. I have chosen three existing works by Zarina Hashmi - Home is a Foreign Place, Noor, and Blinding Light. We have produced a 35 mm film version of an earlier work by Desire Machine Collective, Residue, and a new recension of Praneet Soi's slide-projection-based work, Kumartuli Printer. The new works that I have commissioned are a mural that Praneet Soi will paint onsite, and a threescreen video installation by Gigi Scaria, called Elevator from the Subcontinent. 

There has often been the discussion that Venice, with the national pavilions, is an obsolete model. Two years ago, you wrote a column in The Times of India arguing against a national pavilion which you said was an outdated idea. Now that you are curator, have you changed your mind? 

My argument, in that text, was polemical and intended to draw attention to the possible dangers of the national pavilion format, and of interpreting the logic of national pavilions literally rather than creatively.

Among these was the danger of trying to 'represent' the nation through some form of heavy-handed regional or constituencybased quota system, and the pressure that this would place on the curator. The other peril that I pointed out was that artistic practice is increasingly moving away from the nation-state as unit of cultural measurement, and assuming fluid, entangled, transcultural, hybrid forms.

I am happy to say that the commissioning body for the India pavilion, the Lalit Kala Akademi, made it absolutely clear from the very beginning of this project that I would not be subjected to any kind of pressure in my curatorial work, as to choice of concept and artist. And the Akademi has supported me completely in this.

As to the critical engagement with the nation-state, the national pavilion becomes the ideal setting for such a revisiting of the idea. As I have said, the pavilion can be opened out and turned into a laboratory in which to test out notions of how we belong, and to what we belong - what does it mean to subscribe to a notion of cultural citizenship, to be related to a dynamic set of ideas concerning India rather than the textbook image of a territory. 

The site of India's pavilion is the Arsenale, a sprawling complex of docks and warehouses. It sounds architecturally arresting. 

PERIFERRY TO CENTRESTAGE: 

The Desire Machine Collective, based 

in Guwahati, signal the emergence of a vibrant 

contemporary art scene in the north-east.

'Residue', a video shot at an abandoned thermal 

power plant, was shown last year at the 

Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. (Top) Gigi Scaria's 

installation is called 'Elevator from the Subcontinent'

The Arsenale is the former ship-building yard and weaponry production centre of the Venetian Republic, as it used to be for centuries, a great trading and maritime power controlling the Mediterranean, until it collapsed under Napoleon's attacks and was eventually annexed into the newly formed nation-state of Italy in 1866. The Arsenale is a fantastic place, redolent of history, grotty, with exposed concrete and unfaced brick walls, huge columns, vast empty bays. I never cease to marvel at how this ruin-like space is transformed, with each edition of the Biennale, into the magical stage where some of the most inspiring contributions of contemporary global art are presented. 

How seriously does China take cultural platforms like Venice?

China takes its soft-power initiatives very seriously. The Chinese presence in Venice, as in most other centres and off-centres of the global art scene, is substantial. Their pavilion has been curated by the Beijing aesthetician Peng Feng and is titled Pervasion of Chinese Flavours. Its project is to weave traditional Chinese aesthetic conceptions with contemporary idioms of practice, a tendency that is prominent in contemporary Chinese art. That said, China cannot wish away the fact that, when art oversteps the boundaries laid down for it by the state, the official reaction is tumultuous. China has recently embarked on a campaign of persecution against the artist Ai Wei Wei, who has expressed himself firmly on behalf of cultural and political openness. This has generated enormous dismay and protest across the global art scene.