In his picture book meditation on pipes, plumbing and the taste of water titled The Water Cookbook, Delhi-based artist Bhagwati Prasad has argued that water never reaches us in any unmediated form. It comes not from nature in any direct way, but as and with an infrastructure. It is through the complexity, collisionary force and contamination of complex infrastructures, that access to water is made easy as well as denied, lived and experienced, as daily necessity and perennial need. From street battles for water taps to long queues in front of hand-pumps; from relaxed hot showers to the repeated re-telling of riverine myths, and the annual news cyclical event of flooding drainage in the wake of the monsoons—the myriad flows of water in our lives are all entangled and enmeshed. As Prasad says, there is no one colour of water like the idyllic blue of our childhood crayons. It is many, varied, and mixed.
Similarly, a question we have been exploring for some time now is how and when does art confront and intersect with living dynamics of the world, and what is the infrastructure that makes both its congealment and its traffic possible. And how, then, does the curatorial work with this awareness?
In 2018, when we began our research and investigation towards making the Yokohama Triennale 2020, we were already seized by what we felt was an urgency to think about—and with—the presence of the toxic in the world and our lives. Here, by the ‘toxic’ we don’t necessarily mean something that has to be banished away from life; rather, we are interested in the ways in which life-processes, especially those that have do with acts of care, can work in response to the inevitable toxicities that are attendant on them. How to heal and care with toxicity was a question for us. We were coming to this question because our histories, specifically, our dominant ‘Indic’ traditions, have a historic numbness and insensitivity when it comes to dealing with toxicity. It is this low ethical, aesthetic and imaginative threshold that has reproduced the phenomenon of untouchability in South Asia for thousands of years.
One of our first meetings for YT2020 was with Masaru Iwai. He spoke to us about his rigorous practice of cleaning, and the necessity of ‘deep cleaning’ in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011. Masaru worked in the cleaning team for Fukushima (and its environs) and was contemplative and critical of thinking in Japan on the issues of radioactivity and to contagion. It was with such conversations that the infrastructural grid, that produces, channels, and misshapes the flow of toxicity, besides structuring the recurring act of cleaning, emerged as a critical civilizational gambit for all.
A masked human with a broom sweeps empty streets and takes a photograph of the broom, the body, the street, and then uploads it onto social media, with a simple four- point set of instructions: mask, clean, shoot, share.
Soon, in the afterglow of the original post, there are many masks—colourful, whimsical, touching, angry— and many more acts of sweeping the streets. A tendril of care becomes a network of gestures on an expanding map of street-corners. Amidst the messy realities of a pandemic-besieged world, a moment finds its multiplication, blurring borders between what is online and what is not, between physical spaces cordoned off by politics and sanitary controls, between art and everyday life, between toxicity and care, between an instant and its perennial possibilities.
‘Broom Stars’ by Masaru Iwai is a meditative, solitary gesture, and an instance of social multiplication through caring and cleansing. Here, the artist’s act—of embodying a masked presence that enables the multiplication of a persona and of enacting the ritual of— cleaning -- is hosted by a custodial network that gives it a home. It enables thought and inquiry about its own significance, and amplifies it to the world, thus enabling the sharing of the gesture between the artist, a public, and further, between those members of the public. Between the artist’s act and its informal-institutional custodianship in time and space stands the bridge of the curatorial move. It facilitates a crossing; artists move towards publics, and publics move towards artists. The moment of the artwork, filling a present instant, moves towards the future’s memory of our time. The curatorial opens out the infrastructural foundation that makes these moves possible, in all directions.
An incident is a fold in time—a quickened heart-beat, an epiphany, a flash of insight, an outbreak of goosebumps, a moment of excitement, an occurrence, an encounter, a sighting, a memory. An incident is anything that transforms the way we live or think, a conversation that carries a surge in its wake—an event that makes us rethink everything. Millions of incidents can populate a duration, making it come alive as an embodiment of temporal plenitude. That plenitude is a ground for making things anew.
A unique assembly of more than hundred artistic actions stretched over one-and-a-half years between 2019 and 2020 in Delhi. This was ‘Five Million Incidents’ (FMI): an artistic ‘occupation of time’ that punctuated twenty months in Delhi and Kolkata, from April 2019 to December 2020. Artistic actions lasted hours, days, and weeks through artworks and performative processes that renewed, investigated, interrogated and transformed terms of co-inhabitation.
In FMI, our curatorial modality was framed by questions around the nature of artistic peer relationships. It was to produce milieus that welcome and sustain a multiplicity of practices with the comfort and confidence of durational, incremental, and layered artistic acts which would build, and cascade. The premise was to create a momentum so that an accretive density could take shape over the months. The experience was to enable a field that highlighted how artistic practices are best expressed in a perennial state, and by conjoining intensities of different modes and ways.
This intimate companionship of willing strangers crossed over personal and bodily boundaries in an atmosphere of trust, while at the same time being able to address and draw the energy of mass movements into its fold, to defend citizenship happening at the same time in the cities of the country. An arena was created, one that could speak across generations, across species, across mediums. These peer conversations nourished companionship and convergences free from performative pressure and aesthetic/occupational hierarchies.
FMI continued to take place even through the Covid-19 lockdown time, when the actions migrated to an active online platform. A key moment in this phase was an action undertaken by the artist Rajyashri Goody. She took the canonical compendium of caste rules defining exclusion and punishments—an ancient text of sanctions, prohibitions and punishment known as the Manusmriti—and on live video, shredded its printed text, and then pulped it into little balls of malleable paper-dough. It was an instance of the deliberate mangling and pulping of the cruelly ritualized protocols of hierarchy and inequality. The choice of going live, online, with this gesture, at a time when new protocols of who and what could and could not be touched, and how gatherings could or could not happen, because of the pandemic, brought the infrastructural question into sharp and poignant relief.
What would have been an ephemeral performance, faced with the challenge of a lockdown, turned a custodial question on its head: not, ‘how should we postpone/cancel a planned artistic action’, but ‘how should we navigate the migration of performative energies from a shared presence in real space to a commitment to sharing time’. (The artist could not, as she had originally planned, get her hands dirty together with many others, to pulp the hated protocols of caste.)
There is a need to take into cognizance the thresholds and forms of breach that allow for an entry into, and the making of, culture. Obviously, the question of the breach is a critical one—culture both articulates and contains the ‘breach’. It attempts to escape from the breach, but equally seeks to absorb and thus attenuate it. Culture is after all a terrain of multiple intersecting cleavings—and the curatorial is situated within this.
A recent threshold that had to be crossed was the sudden impossibility of occupying a moment in physical space, and what it meant to make a mark in time through a ‘live’ set of instances, that would remain online, much after they were concluded by the artist.
The breach here was both an infrastructural as well a conceptual one. Rajyashri was acting as hackers would, with software. Except that the software she was hacking into was the ‘code’ of caste itself. Code, we know, works through firewalls and permission. Culture starts at the point of the breach or the breakdown—and the curatorial is the acute sensing and observation of the world that shapes around this cleaving.
Thus, the question that activates acts of the curatorial is: “Who does it carry along, what does it distance or repel, and what does it make in operative?” It’s interesting to think through these questions when considering what it means to make space for an act of pulping the Manusmriti. This is the infrastructure, not just of space, but of life itself.
In the Yokohama Triennale 2020, we initiated a process to investigate, write, and perform the aporias arising from assertions of equality. These are claims made with bodies, with words, sounds, costumes, images, instruments, and with shifting forums. This investigation draws from the insights of a minor strand in legal theory which engages with the way people have been able to transform the courtrooms as forums, and have been making the act of speech itself as the site for claims to justice. We invited an artist, archivist and a curator to work as an ensemble and build an arena around this with multiplying protagonists.
The ensemble argued,
“…Millions march down roads in Hong Kong. Thousands in South Africa discuss consent on Twitter. Women run households via smartphones from makeshift protest tents blocking a highway in Delhi…These brewing situations open a terrain of justice. They are intangible courts of poetic appeals, of argumentation through myths, stories, and care, and are not daunted by the Law; law is but one dialect…We call in the carnivalesque and the masquerade, draw in the middle earth of healers and shamans, play with technologies of renewal and admittance, work with appeal, apology, gratitude, and indebtedness, practice the art of counter-monuments, and pose the discursive as a site of stakes & wagers, codes & limits”.
Drawing upon our invitation, the ensemble of Kabelo Malatsie, Michelle Wong and Lantian Xie created a multi-platform procedure through which they investigated and experimented with what would constitute discourse, and what makes for a site of justice.
The Discursive Justice Ensemble, as this triangulation styled itself, produced a series of events, calling upon artists to call upon artists, setting off relays of gesture, word, sound and image, discussing protocols of invitation and presence. They made merry across continental distances, staged Zoom parties, held webinar concerts and untangled knotted histories with myth and allegory. Sometimes they simply told stories that almost never ended as the night wore on.
A step sideways and backwards in time from the Discursive Justice Ensemble in Yokohama takes us towards ‘51 Personae’, another infrastructural exercise. The catalogue entry for the book outlining the ‘51 Personae’ for the 11th Shanghai Biennale, ‘Why Not Ask Again’ (2016) in the holdings of the Asia Art Archive carries the inscription, “perennial exhibition”.
For ’51 Personae’, we had invited a formation of young curators, researchers and artists that met in a small house in the narrow streets of the Dinghaigiao neighbourhood in Shanghai. Chen Yun, a catalyst of the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, enjoyed entering the thicket of lives in the city in which she grew up. She widened the conversation to include teachers, cultural activists, care volunteers and researchers. What emerged out of this vortex was the transformation of unrecognized life zones of the city into spaces of mutual visibility, as fifty-one personae—a cast of ordinary and exceptional characters—met, talked, performed, enacted rituals, sang, shared memories, walked, danced, cooked and ate together.
The forms that the ‘51 Personae’ undertook ranged from the scripted to the aleatoric, from the conversational to the polemical, from the nostalgic to the prophetic, from the intimate to the impersonal. Each carried with itself its own world, its own city, its own street. The protagonists were as varied and diverse as the cast of characters in the drama of a mega-city. They included urban chroniclers, street hackers, channelers of street life and neighbourhood lore, musicians, enthusiasts, performers, aficionados, apartment building story-tellers, garage impresarios, purveyors of pavement paradoxes, merchants of street corner dreams, traffic intersection historians, public transport philosophers, busy-bodies and sharp tongues in Shanghainese and a host of other dialects of the human imagination, and a ferris wheel.
‘51 Personae’ is still continuing as an enmeshed practice of living in the city.
From our engagement with free and open-source software culture in the late 20th and early 21st century, we understand that one has to write openness, design-flexibility and the capacity to modify and re-purpose into the very architecture and rhetoric of a piece of code. If it is not explicitly written in, then, as usage conditions attach to the software’s presence in the world, the software adapts and grows in unidirectional and secretive ways. These matters of protocol replay the always-present collisions of bondage and freedom. Only, sometimes, the bondage becomes efficient and profitable, and freedom, like always, comes with blurry borders and messy realities.
Cultivating a curatorial sensibility of the infrastructure is both a necessity to loosen this grip, as well as to find forms of relationships that instil new histories and uncharted itineraries. It is a possibility to become hospitable to unexpected claims, and to discover a porous and perforated world.
Curation, in this sense, is a durational exercise, produced by an infrastructural mobilization of protagonists, objects, and intangible relationships. As it tames time, it opens itself to disruptions arising out of the disorder caused by untimely eruptions and obdurate presences. We begin to listen to the music of the unstated contrapuntal notes emerging across the two curatorial instances. The music is dissonant, maybe even a bit messy, but lively. Borders blur, again.
Raqs Media Collective (*1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) finds itself at the nexus of contemporary art, historical enquiry, and philosophical speculation. In several languages, the word “raqs” denotes a state of revolution, whirling and turning into an intensified state of awareness. They interpret it as ‘kinetic contemplation’- a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation.