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30/9/2015

Yogesh Barve

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

‘Bharat harwala Ahey’ - India is lost. Among many of the posters that announce the details of missing persons at the suburban railway station of Borivali , one announces the intimate details of Bharat, a middle aged man who is lost and lost due to his loss of clear thought. Yogesh Barve’s solo debut explains itself out to the audience. The intimacies of the works on display run a clear line of thought illustrated by a line of paper shade cards from the print shop that announce equalities in size but inequalities of colour and placement. In/Equality is a constant in a show that reveals itself across appropriated videos, photographs and material that have been consciously found to be put into a utility - which is art.

At the other end of the railroad is an alternate effort at art in a suburb of Bombay that preexisted the metropolis as an ancient seat of music and then a port where the Portuguese carried out an inquisition. The Vasai Vikasini (Vasai Development), an art school built by Victor Pereira in the midst of a swamp somewhere seeks those histories by a change one would seldom ask artists to orchestrate. Yogesh Barve travelled each day into the suburb of Vasai to study art, having failed at securing a place at the Sir JJ School of Art - a neo-gothic architectural wonder in the centre of the city of Bombay, when he began to realise something that had been a part of his life since he can remember. In the midst of the salt pans and boxed concrete apartments that composed the landscape of Vasai were the unending railroads and electric cables that ran the commuter trains that carried its populace each day to Bombay. Barve the son a suburban train guard often accompanied his father in the signal room at the end of the train watching the lines merge and the landscape change as the train left the art-deco precinct of Churchgate the horizon melting away until it reached Virar, 60 kilometres away. His father got him a handheld video camera which then began to record the journey. These were drawings in film that were then converted into a 360 degree diptych using two fish-eyed lens cameras that caught views of the Eastern and Western sides of the city that the railway line divides Bombay into. This gradation of architectural views that happened as the train progressed into the suburbs become representative works of the artist demonstrating the idea of Equality/ Inequality.

The quest for India’s independence by Mahatma Gandhi began with an account of him being pushed out of the first class compartments of a train in South Africa. Gandhi was infuriated with the insult and cried out loud his rights as a British citizen, but to no success. Trains in independent India made away with the third-class specially in a republic keen to erase caste, but on most Bombay commuter trains people are packed into First and Second Class, many a times it does not reflect class but rather a system of monthly or yearly passes to regular users. The train system carries 6 times the number of people it was built to carry thus compressing commuters into spaces where caste cannot find space for untouchability rather dropping them into their safe zones - as they alight into neighbourhoods and suburbs that reflect a certain caste or linguistic hegemony.

The architectural line of the city that is inverted and transformed onto the ceiling of Clark House by a hanging colour spectra. This colour spectra was appropriated by opening up an ‘Asian Paints’ catalogue for home emulsion paints. In India shades of the skin are often well described in matrimonial columns. Access to good architecture is also a boon of the class you are born into. Thus aesthetic and the colour on your wall is well conceived before your birth much depicted in the change of the skyline in Barve’s rail videos ending up as depressive building blocks when the train reaches Vasai. Below the colour spectra is a wooden bidding line that displays the cutout nomenclature of paints describing comical names such as ‘ Cream Paris, Creamy Crust, and Creamy Pie much like what Indians might want their skin to look like.

Barve has an archaeological interest in the integrity of architecture. For the Kochi Muziris Biennale he had excavated the the layers of paint that had gathered on the walls of a 17th century Dutch Burgher home in Jew Town revealing the original paint that had been fossilised below carrying the memories of the space. A window panelling project he earlier did at Clark House in 2012 led to the restoration of the concealed rain windows that were built into the space when the building was conceived. This time he erases the years of emulsion paint and distemper that the walls have been subjected to in the last century revealing a mosaic of memory and aesthetic history told by colour. The idea to dismantle is a central theme at accessibility or circumventing the intention of utility of an object. He dismantles 3d printed objects that have no inherent utility to demonstrate the process of 3d printing. He breaks up a clock to discover the passage of time in materiality or breaks up a scanner and scans it to back into being a notional scanner printed out in paper much akin to what painters do with landscapes freezing the inherent utility one views of a field with cows grazing.

600 videos make part of the solo debut of collected and shot images. The smartphone revolution that has allowed one to shoot at whim demonstrates the equitability of such art practices. All the video here is low tech captured and displayed by a varied list of cheap mobile phones that are not in use or borrowed televisions from the artist group CAMP. These videos question certain intersection of art history politics and philosophy. Either illustrating the inherent taboo of the Badyun Dalam community from Indonesia that despises books as evil and does not permit their use or his own visits with his mother to an esoteric festival in the hills of Jejuri a few hours out of Bombay. Rejecting the caste prejudice of not allowing them into temples many Dalits gather at Jejuri outside the temple of Khandobaraya and his wife Mhalsa. Here using tumeric yellow they dance themselves into union with Lord Khandoba who enters the body of a sorcerer communicating with his people w ho are often turned away from temple doors. Barve began recording his relatives who without much to themselves were communicating , performing and being conceptually futurist unlike the forced instances of the same in the arena of art. Their rejection of religious texts and books that reject them reflects the artist’s want to exist out of an art history and philosophy that finds no space for his concerns or geographical position.

Barve collected more than 550 videos of online exhibitions that contained 4,208,523 Items which included videos, text, images, sound and street view. He made them offline through the act of recording the ‘the History Moment’ section from Google Cultural Institute online archive. Among the many and specially those who despite having access to the internet do not have the bandwidths to consume Google’s high definition videos of museum collections online are artists and Barve was one of them while in India. The internet was certainly a gateway to the world outside but once he began a residency at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris he realised the possibilities through faster internet connections and so decided to not add to an archive that has limited access in places without internet but rather take it offline and distribute it alternatively. Quoting Barve to understand his artistic process of edition ‘’ My relationship with the technology is a bit fu nny and serious at the same time. I like to play around with the technology and experiment with it. It's like everyday waking up and seeing the smartphone before brushing our teeth. Because of it's everyday encounter I like to use technology. But instead of transforming everything by using technology I like to do slight changes with the functions it has, in the end it ends up with a big difference from its intended utility. ‘’ - YB. We thus understand the archaeological editing he causes upon architecture, video and drawings.

Converting Eric Satie’s music into drawings on being commissioned by Amara Antilla for project that took place within a large Neo-Greco Palladian style building in Minneapolis or creating still images from damaged portable televisions and a video feedback project that was first used for his first work at Clark House in 2012, the incoherence of medium is exciting. Thus beside beautiful silver gelatine analog photographs of Paris that he made with a pinhole camera lies a series of portraits. Paris is a city of portraits. Caricaturing is a common habit by buskers near the Seine, Sacre Couer and the Eiffel, also caricaturing done by comedians and magazines that have been the centre of debate and a tragic crime over the last months. Magazines at times caricature their victims unknowingly. The success of the magazines, do not dwell on sales or distribution rather the branding and promotional advertisements pay for the budgets that pay the high premiums for fashion photo-shoots. This complex system of economies erred to caricature Europe's most powerful political leader. Angela Merkel was the face for Vanity Fair this spring. Off late along with Christine Lagarde they have been featured as strong women leading a fractured Europe, but the gloss print of those magazines that have politically corrected themselves rather is funded by products that often have no alliances with women issues rather objectify them with aspirational visuals of supposed beauty.

A set of black and white photographs and Slide-DIApositive films lit by back lights show a Maharashtrian family at marriage and then subsequent travel to America participating in the immigration a much aspired dream for most Indian middle class and the life of an East Indian Portuguese Christian woman who if alive would share Barve’s grandmother’s age and the same ethnic heritage. Found in Bombay’s flea market ‘Chor Bazaar’ he creates a fictional archive of personal intimacies he cannot boast of in his family. Because like travel, archives are discriminatory to class differences. The year 1989 is of a certain in vogue in the global art scene but Barve who was born that year rather talks out aloud the frustrations of the aspirational youth encountering technology in a nation that is now lost in defining its authentic identity.

- Sumesh Sharma 2015

Yogesh Barve (b.1989) is an Indian artist based in Bombay, India. Barve's artistic practice encompasses sculpture, film, multimedia installations and site-specific works. A common thread throughout his work is a critique of our cultural fragmented thinking. Barve uses the idea of the slash in the form of un/learning, de/constructing and non/conformism, and as a means of thinking and working. Using a range of materials, including found objects, digital technologies, such as his mobile phone camera, and search and game engines, Barve's work examines social and cultural experiences of in/equality, ir/rationality, the un/invited, and the in/outsider. Barve is a member of Clark House Initiative.
Yogesh Barve was a resident at the Google Cultural Institute, Paris as a part of the 89 plus program curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Simon Castets along with Julie Boukobza. Yogesh Barve was invited to be a comissioned artist at the online journal Ibraaz.org by Amanprit Sandhu as a part of the Ibraaz projects. He has shown at the Fondation Lucien Paye, Happy Market - Chez Michel Milk and Kadist Art Foundation in Paris. He was part of Insert 2014 curated by Raqs Media Collective, Para Site Hong Kong , Clark House residency on Manifesta Online, Art Dubai Projects 2014 , Decolonising Imaginaries and Transnational Pavillion Venice Biennale 2012. He has studied Leather Technology , Bachelors in Visual Arts from Rachna Sansad Bombay and Vasai Vikasini Vasai and has a Diploma in Visual Communication from the Telcom University Bandung Indonesia where he was a receipent of a scholarship.

Clark House Initiative, established in 2010 by Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma is a curatorial collaborative and artist union concerned with ideas of freedom. Strategies of equality have informed their work, while experiments in re-reading of histories, and concerns of representation and visibility, are ways to imagine alternative economies and freedom. Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative and a union of artists based in Bombay.

Preview: Thursday, 1 October 2015 | 4.30pm-onwards

Clark House Bombay
c/o RBT Group, Ground Floor, Clark House, 8 Nathalal Parekh Marg (Old Wodehouse Road), Bombay 400039. Opposite Sahakari Bhandar and Regal Cinema, next to Woodside Inn
Open: Tuesday-Sunday, 11am-7pm. Closed on Mondays.
Guided view by appointment: +91 9892640353
Open till 10 pm on Art Night Thursdays 8 October and 12 November 2015.

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