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19/10/2014

Tales between borders

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

Artists:
Pablo Bartholomew
Ismaila Manga
Prathap Modi
Prabhakar Pachpute
Amol K Patil
Shinobu Mikami
Troots (Akshata Mokashi, Tanvi Parab, Zeenia Dalal)
Zied Ben Romdhane
Jamboys (Peter Kærgaard & Lasse Mouritzen)
Neha Grewal
Marije Gertenbach.

This project is curated by Nikhil Raunak who is an artist member and till December, one of four artistic directors of Clark House Initiative, Bombay.

This is a curatorial project on migration, which mirrors and compares the artist's own nomadic path, with their subject matter and work describing other kinds of migrants. As people come for work, with them come ideas, language, clothing, food and genres. They are pulled by war, politics, desire, and hunger or “to go where work is”. Like languages, birds, a disease, from colonization and trades, artists migrate. The migration of artists is a factor that also shapes art and culture.

Pablo Bartholomew, half-Burmese half-Indian shows 24 photographs of the Chinese community in Calcutta in the seventies. Ismaila Manga, from Senegal, makes drawings with charcoal and iron dust on canvas, on the idea of people migrating within Senegal especially students who travel for education. Pratap Mody from Andhra Pradesh in India, moved to Bombay for an artist residency at Space 118, and started making woodcuts on plywood. With aesthetics of matchboxes he started to make portraits of shop keepers, tea sellers, wathcmen, Japanese translators, who were migrants to the city. He presents also a video of interviews with his subjects. Prabhakar Pachpute, makes a panel with charcoal about Long Walks and migrations of people through landscapes. Amol Patil works with the Bombay Municipal Corporation sweepers of Grant Road Station, using a video projection of cleaners that passes through a cement sheet with squares cut outs, resembling homes. The projection that falls on the wall takes the shape of several windows. Shinobu Mikami from Japan living in Bombay, makes a blank note book inside a birdcage, whose cover reads, “what’s your natioanlaity?”.

Miniature painting developed during the 10th century in the state of Rajasthan and with it, artists travelled to various parts of India. Late Indian miniature art adopted and developed more local styles of host places as artists moved to where work was found. During the Mughul period, exchange, influence and adaptation of many styles can be seen in Indian miniature painting, similarly the same can be seen during the colonial era, where Western influences started to make an impact on Indian art. Some artists developed a style that used Western ideas of composition, perspective and realism to illustrate Indian themes. The Progressive Artists Group, established shortly after India became independent in 1947, was intended to find new ways of expressing India's international universality in the post-colonial era.

Zied Ben Romdhane was born in Tunis to a Berber family from the island of Djerba. He has worked in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Yemen - documenting the island of Socotra. Zied began as an independent photographer in 2013. In his series 'Waiting Zones', each photograph is structured as a narrative, and are proof of arrivals, but also of departures, the blanking out of arrivals, the process of removal of all traces of someone who once was there. Zied’s works occurs on the margin of big stories about politics, geography and a long wait for civil war to end.

In odd ways, the unevenness of migration has stimulated art and artists. While migration has been a by-product of wars, political conflicts, and natural disasters, contemporary migration is predominantly economically motivated. Two artist collectives have propelled the ideas presented around the theme of migrations. The following paragraphs have been written along with Troots, three artists from the Sir JJ School of Art textile department in Bombay, and Jamboys, a Danish collective of two artist friends.

Modern Mumbai was built on the economic foundations laid by its textile mills. In 1887, the first textile mill was built in Bombay Swadeshi the first of the factories that spread over many parts of the island city in the next decades. After a prolonged and destabilizing confrontation of the great Bombay textile mill strike in 1982 and after collapse of the strike numerous mills were closed. The closure of textile mills across the city left tens of thousands of mill workers unemployed and, in the succeeding years, most of the industry moved away from Bombay and settled in Bhiwandi, a small city in Thane district. Of late the city seems to be almost seamlessly transformed from a manufacturing centre to being a significant node for finance capital, driven by the service economy. The closure of textile mills and the conversion of their real estate into palatial high-rises or luxurious offices herald the birth of the new global-city. Work by textile designers Akshata Mokashi, Tanvi Parab and Zeenia Dalal seek to interrogate this public profile of contemporary Bombay by listening to the experiences of an almost invisible but crucial memories of former and current textile workers.

While Jules Chéret is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of the modern poster making the idea of poster-making is dramatically changed as time passes. They were made for advertisements, and to spread political propaganda messages. In our time poster making can also change a social structure and challenge our concerns. With methods inspired by social science and anthropology, the Danish art collective Jamboys consisting of Peter Kærgaard & Lasse Mouritzen, has worked and collaborated with the informal workers of Colaba. In this project Jamboys created 17 posters with informal workers in Colaba and also did public interventions on the walls of Colaba market. They have an artistic approach in which formation of friendships and understandings between culture, hierarchies and agendas is the point of departure. The aesthetic has come about through a process of conversation and this led into a public poster as a conversation between two nomadic tribes of globalization; the traveler and the local working immigrant. While the traveler is on top of globalization pursuing new individual experience, the local immigrant has come to the city with the common objective of finding a job and supporting their families. They stand as a spectator of the global world and the formal representations of the city. They occupy the streets of Mumbai and make their living in very fragile circumstances, often suppressed by political influences claiming their right to the city as illegal. Jamboys’s artwork tries to question the legal and representational borders of the city, by adopting the local informal workers in a commercial language, and thus create an urban intervention that recognizes and includes the unheard voices of the city.

Text by Nikhil Raunak and friends

Clark House is delighted to announce the artistic team in charge of Clark House Bombay till December 2014. The artistic team comprises the artists Rupali Patil, Nikhil Raunak, Sachin Bonde & Sattik Bhattacharya.
Clark House Initiative, based in Bombay, was established in October 2010 by Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah as a curatorial collaborative concerned with ideas of freedom. Since then it has functioned as a union of artists. Clark House, from which the initiative took its name, and from where their projects are based, was once an office of pharmaceutical research, an antiques store, and the shipping office of the Thakur Shipping Company that had links to countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Japan. Curatorial interventions in the space hope to continue, differently, this history of internationalism, experiment and research.

Image: Troots, 2014

Exhibition opening: 20 October 2014, 5pm-9pm

Clark House Initiative Bombay
c/o RBT Group, Ground Floor, Clark House building, Colaba
8 Nathalal Parekh Marg (Old Wodehouse Road), Bombay 400039, India.
Open all days including Sundays from 11am-7pm during exhibitions.

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