Moving Lives 2009

 

 

 

Moving Lives 2009.

 

Unstitched:in conversation

Part of the events surrounding the exhibition by artist NS Harsha at Iniva, London.

A Review/Re-log/Re-cap.

Industrial, production, nations, tangled.

Caged, colour, woven, store.

territory, language, revolution, subaltern, nation.

system, economy, symbol.

Cloth as communication, text, information, open-ended, personal, political.

Gender, class, race, labour – migrant labour, women’s labour.

Sustainable, global, ethics.

Branding.

Pedagogy, Imminence, Multitude, Complicity, Criticality, Choice.

Rethinking co-operation.

Further Reading:

Naomi Klein: No Logo

P Verno: A Grammar of the Multitude

Of Common Cloth: Women in the global textile industry

No Sweat.

 

BBC NEWS | Health | MS woman wins right-to-die fight

Investigation Three at The Elephant Rooms

Residency at Elephant Rooms

As part of Investigation Three an artist collective, I have been resident at the Elephant Rooms at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre from today. It has been quite a crazy week. As all four of us were quite occupied with our own busy work schedules we hadn’t been able to meet to co-ordinate about installation till like a day before. We landed up trying to make a very very old mac work and when that didn’t happen, a laptop trying to be hidden in a plinth! But it all came together in the end just a few minutes after the private view opened.
Robbie Lockwood recorded a conversation with Chris Jones from the 56a Infoshop. It was great to hear Chris talk about the shopping centre and his personal association with the space. The narrative was about shops that had shut down. The temporary gallery space in fact was housed in what used to be a bookstore….Tion Books. It did hold a special place for those who visited. Chris spoke about the guy who ran it, Marek, and how one day it had just vanished. His voice was interspersed with sounds of the shopping centre that we had recorded earlier. This was our sound piece for the gallery space. We had some really interesting photographs and bits and pieces of conversations from various forums on the walls. We even had a repossession notice by St.Modwens and the notice put up by the shop when it closed.
Chris has written extensively on the gentrification of the area and his shop is a highly recommended visit. It is welcoming, comfortable and there’s so much to know, to read there. Chris is also an extremely generous person and has really worked with the group offering us support in ways to involve ourselves with the community. He has reservations about how galleries can engage with communities which we did see live at the opening. A gallery press release will say so much and yet being there we saw the definite divide between the outside and the inside. The gallery kept its doors shut till it was time for the private view, no info whatsoever for people who might be passing by as to what was happening, completely and definitely excluding the community they said they were reaching out to. Its difficult working in such a space and we don’t want to be inside. That’s not what we want to do with our sound. Maybe the next three days when we start our conversations, things might change for us, even if not for the gallery.

A Letter by Himanshu Sabharwal

The man that you see in this picture of the group,my father, in his last moments , disheveled and helpless, stood 5 feet 11, robust and smartly turned out. A romantic at heart and a philosopher in the mind he was known to never leave his house without his prized possessions of his Ray ban sunglasses and his cross Gold pen. These only indulgences in luxury were I think 15 years old gifts… he would clean his car himself after his 2 km long morning walks which always looked like it was just out of the showroom. A car that he bought so that I don’t feel inferior in my snob school.

A migrant of 1947, he came to Ujjain at the age of 5 having lost his father in the riots. A self made man while studying for his doctorate he worked as a time keeper in the Public works Department to fend for a family of 2 younger brothers and an ailing mother. He a studied Hindi medium through out ,his knowledge of English literature was admirable , which he made efforts to learn on his own. Although he would always call ‘Zee Tv’, ‘Jee Tv’ and on my correcting him, answer with a smile… “old habits die hard”.

That man had the vision to send me to one of the best residential boarding schools of the country and would never forget to come for my house evenings, annual days and other functions. His reason to come for it were the delicious ’samosas’ served in the evening tea, well i know now, that he came for me alone. Each visit would have a rehearsed surprise of producing a cadbury milk bar out of the upper pocket of his shirt for me.

On my first day of college he especially came to Delhi to see me off gifting me a tailored shirt and a trouser, proud that I was going to be a graduate. For, in his times it meant even metriculation meant a lot. Although I was the only one dressed like an executive in the whole of Delhi University where everybody else was sporting a jeans . when he got to know this he laughed no end at himself. That was one thing of many that i admired about him, his courage to laugh at himself and add a poetic couplet or a funny anecdote to build it. He knew poets like kabir, Rahim, Ghalib and many more by heart.

When I decided to study in film school, he did not know how to react , because by what he had seen of life being in theatre, film, art etc meant being a popper in a never ending struggle. I salute the spirit of that man when he responded and said ” hamare khandaan mein kabhi kisi ne film nahi socha hoga, chalo tum hi sahi” . He himself was a brilliant actor having worked with the likes of M. K Raina in plays like Inna Ki Awaz and knew the addiction it was.

Sometime in my first job, he quietly asked me one evening if I would like a drink . The first one that I had was with my father. He treated me more as a friend than a son. One could discuss with him anything under the sun. Religion to sex. anything.

After he got tired of answering to people used to having knowledge of conventional fields, about my nature of work , he used to answer it with a humorous ” pata nahi sahab kya karta hai, magar mujhse paise nahi mangta” .

Kids were a magical therapy for him. The most popular uncle in the neighbourhood he had a never ending supply of chocolates for them.

When he came to visit me in the June of 2006, I offered him a holiday in London with me, a strange smile lit his face, he had never been abroad but he denied saying perhaps in the next incarnation.

On the 26th of august’2006 this man was killed in cold blood after his face was smeared with mud, his clothes torn and he kicked and boxed in the chest which broke his ribs and punctured his lungs. I saw his body on the 27th, blue and black in the mortuary with eyes static in oblivion.

For this man I demand justice.

Himanshu Sabharwal

Indian Cinema Circuits 25th and 26th June 2009

It would be difficult to sum up in detail a two day seminar but more of what I took back from it.

The seminar gave one an overall view of Indian film studies specifically in the circulation of that object which was called Indian cinema. I am very sceptical though about the object that was under discussion. Most of the papers focused on Bollywood and Roy Stafford’s paper ‘ Bollywood and the False Profile of Indian Cinema’ was a breath of fresh air.  Just from facts I know that Tamil cinema enjoys a wide degree of circulation and yet the language never found itself represented in this seminar. So is it an obvious choice made by the organisers or the researchers or is it the object itself (bollywood) that enjoys this kind of circulation. I found that very little in fact none except the paper by Lotte Hoek even went close to looking at the content of bollywood. Maybe it was irrelevant. One of the questions that did come up was how the researcher’s own fan-hood influenced their papers and some of them did seem like fans! There’s a sense of despair almost that works which require research like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Ratnam, Girish Kasaravalli are nowhere in sight and the research somehow stems from an interest in actors and the cultural commodities that they create. Does it have to be spectacular to evoke interest? Does a PhD need Amitabh on a white horse at Wembley?

What has been historicised, the language Hindi as apparently spoken, understood, representative of India seemed to still flow through today’s research interest. There seems to be apparently nothing to write about the other side of the Vindhyas. And I couldn’t get rid of the idea that the research still seemed very foreign, an outsider looking at India, Britain and America looking at India.

The seminar took place in The Old Cinema where the Lumiere brothers had shown the first film in the UK. I found Brian Larkin and Ravi Vasudevan’s talks setting the theoretical contexts of research, circulation, the concept of bollywood, the spectator and research methodology.

What was very exciting for me was the film premiere of Cinema III made by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma. The film looked at how voice, image, sound, memory collide/interact/dialogue. It was a work that looked at the now out of use Ritz cinema in Coventry. Layered with oral history interviews, light and sound offering glimpses rather than the whole picture, shadows, paper models all these added a certain multiplicity of readings to the space which I found very exciting.

It was great to be there, the kind of warmth and openness was a very welcome change from the spaces that I usually land up in.

Also I know A man can become of an incredible wickedness suddenly

Homi K Bhabha’s lecture explored the concept of the banal turning into evil. The title of his paper that he presented was Time, Agency and the Banality of Evil. He looked at the conecpt of the neighbour and how a neighbour, the space of which is banal, suddenly turns in to someone who perpetuates genocide.

The theoretical as usual seemed extremely difficult to follow since my understanding of  Foucault, Arendt, Gramsci and Levinas is very little. What was interesting for me was the concept of the neighbour and the role that this concept plays in understanding genocide. Reading through a lot of witness testimonies whether in Rwanda or in Gujarat or in Mumbai what is of note is the surprise that the witness expresses concerning the role of the neighbour in the genocide.  What also held my attention was his understanding of the space of traumatic studies and what he thought was a major lapse in the way traumatic studies understood trauma. Doing my M A research in this space and sitting very comfortably in the understanding that trauma is something that cannot be articulated, I did find this interesting. He believed that trauma studies needs to go further and look at the concept of agency. And the agency as located in the concept of the neighbour. Someone who is close and yet a stranger. The neighbour as one who regulates.

He also talked about the concept of suddenness in witness testimonies a word that appears in a way to help the understanding of the agency of the neighbour. It is clouded in the mysterious and the supernatural as well.

A past that refuses to die. A future that will not wait to be born. Choices that must be confronted within the present. What would I have done had I known?

Soundwalk with Investigation Three

Some of the photographs taken on the Soundwalk with Investigation Three on July 4th 2009 in Elephant & Castle.

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