Important: This
page does not include very many events that I have participated
in, or otherwise been associated with, or continue to be associated
with, globally, on account of my work with the e-arts since 2000,
as these are too many and too varied for me to document without
taking precious time out from actually doing such things
I have never really been, and never entirely am in the business
of arts-event management or being a fulltime artist. Did however
professionally put together quite a few business events
like conferences and seminars through the mid to late nineties,
while working to initially help set up and run my wife Poonam's
company, Public
Affairs Management. But I don't do that any longer and am
in any case limiting this page to just my association with the
arts, and that too, only just the more significant events I've
done.
Accordingly ~ the few relatively 'major' public arts-events
I have organized and (always) participated in through
life thus far have each been founded upon impulsive personal
responses to various circumstances of the time (often
a long story as you will find),.. and perhaps also
just a wee tad of those two old sutras from the Kamasutra,
which hold that [a] it is recommended as a small part of the
responsibility of every adult citizen to initiate, be involved
with and support good community activities and get-togethers
such as festivals, theatre & music-performances, exhibitions
and the like., and [b] an individual should always study a full
64 "Arts" in pursuit of evolving into a complete
human-being... which would make her/him always a bit of an artist
too, amongst many different things,.. at least when necessary.
For the record here, many commentators confuse
this Kamasutra concept of "64 Arts" (i.e. 'subjects')
to mean 64 different sexual positions!
 OPEN STAGE (Triveni Kalasangam
Open-Air Theatre / New Delhi / March 9, 1980):
The story of "Open Stage" began with my good
friend Rakesh Mishra popping down to India from Canada in the
late-1970s, to attempt establishing a tabloid youth-magazine
of his very own from an accumulated bankroll of about USD $1,500/-.
The very idea was a patently unlikely proposition of course,
but we were all pretty wild young bucks at the time and, as an
enthusiastic friend and fulltime journalist myself, it's not
surprising that I should have got involved too. In the end, we
did indeed bring out that good old magazine we called "Perception"
for a full 3 editions or so together,.. before bucks expectedly
ran out and had us all trickle back to our own original/individual
works again ~ exhausted and exhilarated by what we had done and
also what we had attempted to do!
It obviously didn't take any further than the first issue
for us to realize that we desperately needed to generate some
publicity and word-of-mouth if we were going to get anywhere
with the project. On the other hand however, committing any little
bit at all of our meagre funds was of course out of the question
for any such "tangential" concerns,.. and so that's
how we finally came up with the idea for "Open Stage".
Here's how it worked: [a] Rakesh and I visited Mrs. Sridharani,
mistress of the Triveni Kalasangam complex of cultural centre/exhibition
galleries/perfomance spaces/art schools & studios etc. in
Central Delhi, and sweet-talked the sweetheart into letting us
have the Open-Air Theatre for an evening. [b] We then carried
this good news down to the old audio-studio that used to rent
space in the Triveni basement at the time, and got them to agree
to also support the project with a full complement of microphones,
amplifiers and PA system for the night. [c] Finally, our printer
pitched in on a poster that we pasted up in all of the sorts
of places we thought it would be seen by the sorts of folks we
wanted to address with both the magazine and the show.
The notion of the show itself was simple enough too. In sum,
here was to be a fully kitted-out stage before a substantially
unforseeable audience, which could be addressed for a reasonable
period of time in the course of the evening by any reasonably
interesting creative performer in need/search of such an opportunity
for any reason at all, and all he/she had to do to have a crack
at it was contact us in advance so we could slot the performace
into the schedule. Expectedly, the "for western acoustic
music" phrase in the poster was already being amended
and expanded almost before the posters even started rolling off
the press,.. and there were a lot more aspirants looking to perform
than we could eventually accommodate!
In the event, more than a couple of hundred people turned
up at Open Stage, packing the little open-air theatre
and cafe next door to overflowing even though the show-date and
time eventually clashed with a major international jazz show
in another part of town. Fascinating creative and other folks
of all description somehow came together like they never had
before, and perhaps never would again in the city, and there
was lots of all sorts of music, all sorts of poetry, oratory
and even some theatre and political statements (!!) in the whole
kaliedoscope of what happened through that one long magic and
ever-so-slightly-mad winter evening so long ago.
Although many folks wished for us to replicate Open Stage
as an annual event, we were more than satiated with what had
come of this little diversion from what we had actually been
trying to do,.. and life moved on.
SOLO SHOW of Pen & Ink Works (Triveni Gallery / Triveni Kalasangam / July 27-August
8, 1981):
One early and sustained side-dish that emerged from Open
Stage was a surprisingly enthusiatic respone to the poster
for the show (above), which I had in fact
had to draw and design myself just because there was no one else
to do it!
So alright, I'd attended a few months of arts-college classes
before opting for a diploma in journalism instead, and I'd always
enjoyed doing a bit of drawing and painting on the side (and
ceratinly felt I could/should have done better with the poster),
but the response eventually had me actually shoot for a full-tilt
solo-show of pen'n'ink works within a year after Open Stage,..
and sweet lil' ole Mrs. Sridharani was kind enough to quickly
confirm that I could have the little Triveni Gallery alongside
the open-air theatre for this.
So ~ 'twas long and late nights then for several months leading
up to the show, after long days spent slogging life out as a
journalist. With pencils, erasers, crow-quills and ink for my
tools, I managed to create a fresh new drawing on a fresh new
sheet of handmade paper almost every night for a long long time
leading up to that show. (at that rate of
course, most were trashed, or at least never even included in
the show!)
So, what's to say? The show went off 'great', with a pretty
crowded opening and fun post-opening party, and I did in fact
sell several works on the very first night itself. Here's what
some of the newspaper reviews (which somehow
survived in my wife's records) had to say about it
all:
 "Several of Shankar Barua's
drawings take off from the human form. Extremeties, heads and
torsos are projected on the screen of white paper with the distortionist
and contortionist devices one usually associates with some of
the creators of Gothic arts....
"... While a few of the works overdo this to the point
of our discomfort or disconcernment, some others, like the snippet
on the old couple, is a meaningfully balanced composition..."
Keshav Malik / Times of India, August 4, 1981
"Shankar Barua presented
drawings which recall the sketches of Renaissance artists who
were bemused by pathological distortions of human visage and
anatomy. This is rapidly becoming a facile strategem for beginners
who find expressionist distortion much less demanding than realistic
drawing. Of less ambiguous quality were Barua's colour drawings
with brush and ink...."
Krishna Chaitanya / ...?
"Shankar Barua's drawings
and a few watercolour washes, now mounted at the Triveni Gallery,
show a fast maturing draughtsman with sensitiveness and rich
imagination.
"Particularly in distorting the human body, Shankar
Barua shows his masterly grip of the medium, that is, pen-and-ink.
Some of his drawings are touched up by black watercolour, and
one of them looks grimly intense (an elderly man and an old woman).
Even though his distortion of human forms verge on fantasy, the
general tenor of the present exhibition gives the viewer a feel
of the macabre:- men and women come out of dark limbo. A headless
female form is neatly tied up at the neck, just like a sagging
bundle of rags. Some faces appear almost shapeless, soft and
leper-like, showing deep cavities of the eye-sockets, suggesting
the skull beneath the skin.
"The image of the sylvan diety Pan undergoes a fantastic
transformation at the hand of the artist: the head reminds you
of one of those uncouth extinct saurians, only the shaggy goat-feet
and the reed-pipe hint at the transformed diety of the Greco-Roman
lineage.
"The evil and dark forces of life, and their victims
-- all these are Shankar Barua's subjects."
?,. / Indian Express / August 2, 1981
At the end of the day, the key bottom line of the whole show
for me was that I had earned nowhere near a year's wages
from almost a year's (albeit part-time) labour,.. and
so I gave the whole notion a toss and took off soon after this
into the wide world of adventure-travel writing & photography
for almost a decade before (eventually) coming back to
the Triveni Kalasangam complex for a show again almost exactly
ten years later (when I -coincidentally- also
did some professional illustration work too awhile).
MILESTONES (Ravi Pasricha,
Hemen Sanghvi & Shankar Barua / Sridharani Gallery / Triveni
Kalasangam / July 5-10, 1991):
This was perhaps the most successful show I've ever done thus
far in terms of the sheer impact it had upon a medium in (at
least) Delhi. Not a little part of the luck with this was
all about the standing and reputation and professional excellence
of the two photographers who agreed to be part of the show with
me ~ Ravi Pasricha (at left) and
Hemen Sanghvi (centre)... but I
may be getting ahead of myself here, since the story's pretty
interesting in being slightly important even to the history of
photography (again ~ at least) in this city!
Briefly then ~ in 1990, my little family and I moved to a
bigger house in a new development on the outskirts of Delhi,...
and found ourselves without a telephone for a full one year!
With regard to my career as a photographer, this meant that I
soon enough had to face up to the issue of how very dispensable
I could be as a professional by this little circumstance ~ as
in: "Can't get Shankar on the phone???!! Well, call the
next chap on the list!"
Not surprisingly, I was outraged and humiliated... and finally
reacted very poorly indeed one evening I'm afraid, by taking
out my entire photo-stock accumulated over almost ten years of
arduous treks and travels, and dumping it in a barrel of water
~ with soy sauce and vinegar.
Hilariously enough however, the very next day found me buying
another camera for myself, when I recognized a Leica M3 (dressed
up with a klutzy Russian flash-gun!) on offer for about the
equivalent of $40/- US amongst a spread of Russian camera gear
and other photo-goods at a pavement-shop in Old Delhi. Not quite
believing my luck, I first took aboard the notion that the camera
was probably just a cheap Russian copy with the "e"
and "i" of "Leica" interchanged or some such
thing, but handling it left me in no doubt that it was an absolutely
super piece of machinery regardless of who'd made it or where
it came from, and it seemed to be working just fine!
Then, I stopped and recalled what I'd done about my whole
photography career just the evening before and decided to check
out how intently fate (and perhaps even the very gods!)
was seeking to guide me here. First order of business was therefore
to 'bluff' the seller into re-quoting me a price for the camera,
"without the flash-gun,".. which unhesitatingly
brought down the asking-price about a quarter,.. and then I took
a double-handed grip upon my luck of the moment and declared
that since the camera seemed a really-really old model (regardless
of how well-preserved it may have been) I wouldn't think
to bid more than about the equivalent of $20/-,.......... AND
THEY LET ME HAVE IT thanksverymuch!!!!! (**
see note below)
Other things obviously also happened to my life at the time
with the shift of home and slowdown of assignments, of which
a key transition came about from meeting Ravi, who operated as
a commercial & industrial photographer in addition to running
Statfotos, a pro-photo-lab where all sorts of fascinating
photographers popped in to get work done and also shoot the breeze
on the medium and issues to do with it, with whosoever else happened
to be at hand. For the record here: almost all of my earlier
lab work as a professional photographer (that is, through
the 1980s) was processed and printed at Madan Mahatta's pro-lab.
Ravi and I became close friends, and I soon migrated what
little photography work I was still doing to his lab, where I
soon discovered Guru, his stone-deaf lab-technician who turned
out to be the only printer I've ever worked with who could intuitively
understand and produce almost everything I expected of my B/W
photography from my negatives.
It obviously didn't take long for me to get down to thinking
of photography as a creative medium,... with which I could logically
be able to actually do what only I could do, and
thereby make myself not so easily 'dispensable' ever again. And
so I carefully shot 6 rolls of black and white film with the
Leica, examined my results, railroaded Ravi and Hemen into digging
into their stock-piles to join me in putting together a good
show within a few months, and then got back once again to Mrs.
Sridharani at Triveni Kalasangam to have her open Triveni's main
"Sridharani Gallery" a week early after the summer-break,
just for our show.
Format was simple. As equal partners and good friends, each
of us just assumed independent creative freedom and responsibility
for our own respective parts of the show (with me coordinating
of course). Accordingly, we measured the total length of
hanging space available to us in the rectangular gallery and
shared that equally, with my images taking up most of the left
wall, Hemen's on most of the right wall and Ravi's on the far
wall from the entrance, spilling over to the ends of both the
left and the right walls.
And wellwellwell! Milestones blitzed Delhi like it
had perhaps never been blitzed before by such a 'regular' exhibition
of works from local photographers. As a touchstone example of
what the response was like ~ of the six copies of the publicity-still
that we printed and circulated (above right),
at least five were reproduced in top print-publications. And
there were interviews, calender entries, critiques and reviews
everywhere.
Here are some extracts of what was written about (mainly) the works I showed:
"The exhibition... exhibits
works of three innovative photographers, who have overcome constraints
of literalness by introducing creative images elevating the medium
to an art form, each one retaining his specific signature...
"...Shankar Barua is on a voyage of discovery. To
make his images come out stronger, he uses flashes of water colours
innovatively on black and white photographs. Stark images such
as the man with colourful umbrellas and a pair of shoes with
red painted laces, give Barua a specific niche in the world of
creative photography in India..."
Neelam Matthews, Hindustan Times, July 6, 1991
"It's a show that rests on
some grit, much orginality and a dash of bravado...
"... but probably the most determinedly innovative
of the three is Shankar Barua (35).... Using manual cameras to
take some very carefully composed, even innocuous looking stills,
he has transformed them by selectively overpainting parts of
each photograph... A pervasive humour and careful artistry distinguishes
his work..."
Gayatri Sinha, Sunday Times of India, July
7, 1991
"The exhibition... deserves
serious attention of those whose appreciation of photography
is not restricted either to the pure aesthetics of camera-work
or to their value as records...
".. Shankar Barua is comparatively more inward looking,
and shows a preference for the poetic. He is deliberate in the
placement of the objects and in the use of their contrasting
textures. He is a fine photographer, and that is why I wonder
why he had to hand-colour parts of his works... The practice,
I think is not necessary..."
Santo Datta, Indian Express, July 8, 1991
"Of these three photographers,
Shankar Barua likes to touch up his prints with colour...
"... I'd add the marmaladed boots as another handsome entry..."
Keshav Malik, Times of India, July 9, 1991
"... The other thing to do
with photography is to use it as Shankar Barua does; in the realms
of art.... It's there. You will find it in the stark partially
hand coloured black and white prints exhibited by Shankar. Images
of J&B Whisky advertisements and Andy Warhol flit through
your mind trying to connect to Shankar's images..."
Santanu Mitra, Economic Times, July 5, 1991
"If a picture speaks a thousand
words then there was a veritable feast of verbiage at Triveni
recently...
"... From Shankar Barua's almost pen-and-ink intricate
black and white shots embellished with a discreet dash of colour,
through Hemen Sanghvi's quiet sepia prints freezing the timeless
perspectives of old buildings, to Ravi Pasricha's celebration
of life in a kaeidoscope of riotous coulour, the exhibits enthralled
and never palled inspite of a definite repitition of subject
matter. The ordinariness of Barua's subjects: old boots, worn
down shoes, an abandoned basket resting on a nest of twigs, an
alley dog asleep framed by the claustrophic wall of the narrow
lane, take on an added interest in the artists' treatment of
his subject: the angle of the shot; the object he wishes to highlight..."
"... Barua's black and white photographs reveal the
latent meaningfulness of everyday objects..."
".. A word about the choice of frames. Obviously much
thought had gone into the selection, for the mounts not only
blended with the photographs but accentuated them as well. Pasricha's
choice for his bright colours was frames of painted monsoon grey.
Sanghvi selected wooden frames with a textured, heavy, old look
in brown. Barua's prints were mounted on a white backdrop against
textured hard-board, faced with glass and neatly buttoned in
place with four steel tacks. All were simple, but effective."
Rehana Sen, Indian Express Weekend, July 20,
91
(**And what of the Leica? Well, part of the story of why it
came to me so cheap seems to have been that it had probably lain
in the attic or trunk of an unappreciative owner or inheritor
for decades,.. and so the shutter-curtains of rubber-faced fabric
had stiffened in situ,.. thereby developing cracks and
pin-pricks after I'd shot not more than about 15 rolls of film
with it! Value for money? Maybe!)
So now, here's the little 'history' bit about the whole show
by my reckoning:
To begin with, what Milestines most certainly did almost
instantly was spur a very substantial and entirely unprecedented
domino-like tide of photography shows in Delhi over the next
several years. The first amongst these were of course by Ashok
Dilwali (who potted a suddenly-vacant slot at the same Sridharani
Gallery for just about a month after us, when he visited our
show-opening) and Ashim Ghosh (who scored three days for
a show of his own in the Committee Room of the India International
Centre on almost the same dates as our show, when he twigged
what we were upto from interactions with us all at Statfotos,
several weeks earlier).
The biggest and most important reaction to Milestones
however came, I believe, from our common good friend and social-landscape
Photographer & Commentator, Satish Sharma ~ whom we'd somehow
neglected to invite into our show. What he did at the
time may not be associated by many folks with a reaction to the
breakthrough success of our show, but I will always believe otherwise...
for very many good reasons.
So, very briefly, a couple of Satish's photographs had recently
been curated alongwith works from several top Indian news-photographers
by a pair of German individuals, into a show of Indian photography
that had been 'touring' Germany since then. Now, the Government
of India at the same time happened to be developing the "Festival
of India in Germany", and so the curators of Satish's
show petitioned for it to be included in the Festival (for a fat fee of course), but were politely
declined,.. just like zillions of proposals before and after
them.
This little matter was then stirred up by Satish amongst the
news-photographer and reporter community in Delhi into a massive
case splashed across the newspapers of covert government censorship
of a creative art-form, and pressure was brought to bear upon
the Minister for Culture at the time, Mr. Arjun Singh, to redress
the situation. Forced into a corner by what in the hulabaloo
was now coalescing into a pretty powerful sort of "News-Photographers
Union", Mr Singh at first sought to adroitly slip through
by commiting to officially commission a brand-new show of photography
for the Festival,... and this time, it was his offer that
was declined, on the basis that this was just another manifestation
of attempted official censorship ~ i.e. by selective inclusion
of participants and images instead of selective exclusion.
In the end, a quiet deal was eventually struck between the
news-photographers and the minister, with many little wheels
within wheels to it. Of that I am certain.
What's out in the open is that the cabal of Satish and his
news-photographer pals registered themselves soon after this
as a non-profit association of professionals called the "Forum
of Contemporary Photographers" (FCP), whose first order
of business was to discreetly translate the minister's equally
discreet peace-offering of a seed-grant of Rs. 5,00,000/- into
a two-day "National Seminar on Photography",
for discussing and cogitating upon grave matters of the medium
a few months later at the India International Centre.
There was approximately no pre-publicity at all for the event
and not many photographers from outside the cabal were invited
to that national seminar. A list of "photographers who
could not attend" published in the seminar-report later
also made quite clear that everyone and anyone else was uninvited..
like, for example, me! But I popped in anyway!!
The line-up around the table was pretty fascinating, with
the new office-bearers of the new FCP flanked by government officials
of the culture ministry taking up the head of the conference
table. Satish was obviously there too, bobbing about and interjecting
and holding forth every now and again as General Secretary and
prime-mover of the new enterprise. Several members shuffled quietly
about the room (and even out onto the window ledge!),
shooting images of the entire proceedings from every concievable
angle for history and posterity. A few of those small-town photographers
(and art-college teachers generally)
whom we all knew from their lifelong commitment to photographing
tribals and suchlike on the peripheries of their neighbourhoods,
had also been invited, and enthusiastically took their turns
to demand more government 'support' and 'recognition'
for the medium. A couple of senior photographers and office-bearers
of the "Advertising and Industrial Photographers Association"
(AIPA) were also present, but remained aloof from FCP membership
and the mainstream discussions of the meet, choosinsted instead
to only draw attention to IPR issues.
Extracts from the minutes of the proceedings of that national
seminar (including one version of the key comment I made several
times) are on public record in the seminar-report, but here's
a bit of my understanding of some of what was sought to be achieved,
and what eventually came of that.
[i] top order of business was of course to milk the Government
of India's Ministry for Culture to the degree possible. Accordingly,
by the time the FCP pretty much fizzled out some two years later,
every member had participated in, and been compensated for participating
in, at least two major government-funded photography
projects ("Project Punjab" and the "Biennale
of Photography"). Almost no one else was allowed the
chance in either case.
[ii] some part of the quid pro quo for this seemed,
at least to me, to be the endorsement and proposal contained
in the seminar-report for enactment of an official Government
of India "Policy on Photography", which would [a] recognize
the FCP as the institutional high-ground of all creative photographic
practice in the country, through which all government funding
to the medium would be funnelled, and [b] officially condemn
certain ill-defined streams of photographic practice.
On both counts, I will always claim to have been quite centrally
instrumental in bringing these propositions to naught via the
next event I created,.. and also (more importantly)
the series of writings I did on photography for the Times
of India from about the time of these events till some
two years later (check out "Writings
& Books" up top).
... Writings on photography ~ that was another downstream
by-product of all the many various happenings I like to link
back at least partially to Milestones. Newspapers in Delhi
jumped aboard the bandwagon enthusiatically: Satish Sharma began
writing for his pal Sadanand Menon, arts-editor of The
Economic Times; Vijay Mehta, editor of The Pioneer
piggy-backed the portfolio onto his senior correspondent, Amit
Prakash; Ratnottama Sengupta, Deputy Arts-Editor of The
Times of India deployed me; The Indian Express
& The Hindustan Times intermittently put folks
I don't remember onto the job for their own pages, and so on
and so forth.
It was an unprecedented and incredibly exciting time for creative
photographers and photography in Delhi, and helping it all on
it's way, along with so much else that had happenned post-Milestones,
was the next show I put together, below:
In Search of The Avant-Garde ~ a Dynamic Exposition
of Photography Projected on Screen
 (India International
Centre / Auditorium & Committee Room / August 1-2, 1992)
This event still stands as the largest interactive photography-related
meet to ever be held in Delhi, packing the IIC auditorium to
overflowing across four sessions over two days. Participants
invited to make presentations included India's top image-bank
of the time, the country's largest photography membership organization,
two of the top AV units, and twelve full-time photographers.
A few thousand images were projected before participants through
a total of up to 17 slide-projectors at a time.
At one level, this event can be seen in logical continuum
to Milestones, but a good part of it's genesis in my mind
also lay in personal reactions to the FCP's National Seminar
(see above). On the one hand, I
really liked the relative gravitas of the IIC as a venue, alongwith
the whole notion of headbanging seminars & conferences beyond
just exhibitions & shows. On the other hand, I think I also
felt quite personally threatened and a bit angry too, as an emerging
creative-photographer, by the whole business of the FCP's
projecting news-photographers as the vanguard of the country's
creative photography, and that sinister proposal for an
official "Policy on Photography" which would condemn
certain ill-defined streams of practice.
Actually, some sort of definition of some of
the sorts of photography sought to be condemned seemed
to emerge in the national seminar from a lot of derogatory comments
and observations regarding "unconcerned photographers
misusing a powerful medium to make just pretty pictures",
and also the seemingly cardinal crimes of indulging in "image-manipulation"
and "Romanticism" with one's images.
Part of what fascinated me about the whole business was in
fact this whole matter of categorizing and condemning certain
sorts of images without presenting a single actual example throughout
the entire proceedings of what exactly such images looked like.
In fact, not a single photographic image of any sort at all (whether condemned or eulogized) was presented
before the FCP's National Seminar on Photography.
As you'd expect, I thought I could do better, and I do believe
I did. But one often has to lose a battle to win a war.
We'd of course invited the FCP and several of it's members
to join In Search of the Avant Garde with presentations,
but were declined. In fact, the FCP's membership was unofficially
issued a whip to boycott partcipation, and so just a few of them
came in,.. and sat silently through the two-day event right at
the back of the hall.
They were there to witness a slightly embarassing event which
occurred on the first day, when the India International Photographic
Council utilized it's presentation slot partially to launch
an ideological assault on the FCP and it's covert agenda. And
they were also there to view my own personal riposte to the FCP's
agenda, innocuously cloaked as a simple series of images openly
daring condemnation as"pretty pictures", "Romanticism"
and "image-manipulation" (entirely
optical and in-camera, like the flowers on my photography page
- see top of page for link).
To me, it was like a little personal war I had no choice but
to fight, and I therefore even carried this personal agenda forward
into my writings on Photography for The Times of India,
India's top english newspaper, over the next couple of years...
... and by these means, and the work of so many other good
folks who also stood up to be counted in their own different
ways, the FCP and it's agenda of those bad old days was eventually
brought to a grinding halt within less than two years of it's
formation.
So then ~ where's the battle we lost? Well, [a] not a single
photograph exists or was every taken of this single largest interactive
photography event to ever be held in Delhi, even though there
were dozens of photographers of all description (including
several of the FCP's news-photographer members, with their huge
bags of gear held firmly between their feet) present through
both days!!,  [b] press reportage
of the event was almost totally blacked-out, and [c] I was personally
blacklisted as a photographer by many clients I shared with members
of the FCP,.. and therefore sort of retired entirely from
photography within just about a year after this event....
There was however, one overview of the event which the FCP
could not block from the front-page of the India International
Centre's next internal 'Diary'. Here's a copy:
India International Centre Diary (Vol. VI No. 4
/ August 1992)
In Search of a Visual Language
__________________
PHOTOGRAPHY: In Search of the Avant-Garde
A Dynamic Exposition of Photography Projected on Screen 1-2 August.
_______________
It was one of the most amazing events in photography to
have happened in Delhi or elsewhere for some time. A dozen Delhi
based photographers who had exhibited their works during the
previous year, two audio-visual agencies, a leading photostockist,
and a premier representative organisation like the India International
Photographic Council were assembled and curated together, using
an audio-visual format, for a two-day presentation.
The fact that every photographer prepared a special package
of his work and that on both days the IlC's main auditorium was
packed to capacity with a keen audience highlighted the genuine
and growing interest in photography and is a clear signal for
anyone who is listening that the medium is poised on a new threshold
of activity and importance in India and needs to be taken seriously.
It was the IIC and Destination Traveller who co-sponsored the
two-day event. But, for having actualised it, the young photographer
Shankar Barua (along with his wife Poonam) who performed the
combined roles of impressario/curator/letter-writer/technical
expert needs to be congratulated.
The roll call of photographers who showed their works was
impressive-including Avinash Pasricha (who also chaired the proceedings
on the two days), Swapan Biswas (a lecturer in the College of
Art, Delhi), Hemen Sanghvi (an architect), Ravi Pasricha (industrial
and commercial photographer), Ashim Ghosh (corporate photographer),
Bhaskar Mukerjee (commercial photographer and tutor of photography),
Sanjay Kumar (official photographer for the Sangeet Natak Akademi),
Tirtha Das Gupta (photo officer in the Indian Agricultural Research
Institute), and Prabuddha Das Gupta (fashion and advertising
photographer). Photographers Satish Sharma and Sadanand Menon
did not show any work but chose to initiate a debate by articulating
their concerns on photography as a medium as well as on the contemporary
trends in its practice.
Clubbed along with this was a series of audio-visual presentations
by Ajai Lal (regarded as the foremost audio-visual producerin
the country) who presented a 3-screen, 9-projector programme
which had been specially made for the India pavilion at the Barcelona
Expo; the India International Photographic Council's sampling
of the work of its distinguished members; and Radhika Singh's
presentation of the parameters of stock-photo marketing based
on her experience with running 'Fotomedia', one of the most well-stocked
photo agencies in the country today.
What these two afternoons of packed activity managed to
communicate at once was the sheer prolixity of modes and subjects
that is engaging contemporary photographers and the way in which,
slowly, right before our eyes, the medium is taking on distinctly
new shapes.
Sadanand Menon
[note: the actual invitation/flyers for In
Search of the Avant Garde, of which the proofs are reproduced
above, were black-on-black]
The Two No-Shows (1996
& 1998)
In the course of my writings on creative photography for The
Times of India through 1991-93 (approximately),
it became increasingly unacceptable to me to acknowledge as 'Art'
the works of photo-journalists and the like who parasitically
shot hundreds of found images per 'assignment' and then
meekly submitted these to sub-editors for selection, captioning
and use of individual images (sometimes cropped)
in articles and/or features. Worse still was how such practitioners
had of late begun to put together exhibitions of just 20-30 images
from lifetimes of such work, to lay claim to being artists.
Accordingly, I partially signed off my last column with the comments
that: "In an age when photographs can be scanned into
home-computers, fiddled with, and outputted as negatives, transparencies
or video, we need open creative attitudes and minds .. not one
photograph seen in shows over the last three years has seized
one with wonder."
As you can guess from this, I'd recently got computerized
for the first time myself (as a writer),
with a PC-AT286 riding 4MB of RAM, 40MB of hard-disk space and
a B/W monitor,.. and my expectations from contemporary 'creativity'
were therefore soaring by the day.
By 1996, I was ready to put up a significant exhbition of
digital-imaging in Delhi, in association with seven artists.
A major global computer-printer manufacturer was pulled in to
sponsor printing, gallery charges and the opening,... but at
the 11th hour insisted that the large-format printer they were
loaning us for the show be placed down the middle of the gallery
through the duration of the entire exhibition! This was entirely
unacceptable to me unless the participating artists were also
paid an endorsement fee for this, and so I called off the
entire show just about two weeks before it was to open.
By 1998, my fantasy had however grown far greater and I therefore
began putting together a much larger show of digital-imaging,
music, video, and lots else in association with the 'Jawaharlal
Nehru University Faculty Club' and the folks at 'Secular
House'.
This time, it was the South East Asian Recession that did
in the show, well before it
could happen, with folks I approached for sponsorship all begging
off on the plea that they were desperately preoccupied with just
holding on to their jobs!
Both of these shows and the encouragement I got from several
artists who'd been involved with them were part of what eventually
gave rise to launch of 'The IDEA'
in January 2000.
Explorations in Digital Imaging (Siddharth Hall / Max Mueller Bhavan / September 2-14,
2000)
In late August 2000, I unexpectedly received a heads-up on
an old conversation from nearly a year before then with Mr. Tilmann
Waldraff, Director of Max Mueller Bhavan (Goethe Institute),
New Delhi, India. It was the inimitable Anita Singh calling from
Tilo's office, inquiring after how things were progressing with
regard to a show of printed digital imaging that we'd speculated
(I thought!) on doing together in their gallery through early
September 2000 ~ i.e. just over a month away!!
By the time of the call, I'd actually forgotten entirely about
that conversation at a get-together with filmmakers that we'd
put together at his institution (MMB) almost a year earlier.
However, the opportunity was too intriguing to just respond to
Anita with an "Oops! Let's forget about it because I
forgot about it!!"
So, I offered to call back in a day or two after drawing responses
from some of the artists we connect with in Delhi (and
one in NYC), and was more than delighted to do so the
very next day with an "OK"!
Now, anyone and everyone who has ever had to marshal creative
folks and their creative works into a joint endeavour has probably
experienced how hellish this can be, and will appreciate how
it may indeed have proven lucky to us in the end that just a
month remained to put it all together.
At the end of the day, the show was a tremendous success in
terms of deploying mostly original works by more than a dozen
exciting e-artists from Delhi, and one from New York. And there
was plenty of press and television coverage.
However, I missed almost all of it after putting
up and opening the show, as my mum suffered a mild stroke and
was hospitalized on a visit to my younger brother in Bangalore
right about then, and I flew out to spend most of the two weeks
lending a hand there till she recovered enough to come home to
our place in Delhi for awhile before returning home to Guwahati
with my elder brother sometime later, where thank god she is
now quite well.
View from the Cusp ~ an itinerant communication
of Computer-Based Images, Soundscapes & Screen-works by about
8 Artist-Communicators out of India (2003)
This exhibition, first conceptualized about November 3, 2002,
was buried mid-February 2003, even though we had
already won a stunning team of co-curators and gallery bookings
in several countries to our cause by this time, with even enough
sponsor-support to carry it through!
I had made a grave error here,.. for the second time. Frankly,
the abandonment of all involvement with developing such enterprises
in lieu of a quest for better alternatives with regard to the
e-arts, was actually quite close to being the centrepiece of
The IDEA from the moment it first came to mind late-1999. The
first occurrence of the error of stepping back into this territory
came of course with "Explorations in Digital Imaging"
(above), but that was small and
I sort of missed it all anyway. But this time I should really
have known better. To me after all, this is not about whether
one can or cannot do something; it's about whether one
should or should not.
So what was wrong about it to me in the 'end'? Well, it should
have been HUGE and bucking to go way beyond me by February. Instead,
it was just 'interesting', 'looking good' and 'viable'.
Concept:
A multiple-media exhibition to be shared, exchanged and extended
with other artists and communities around the world, to creatively
and collectively explore, imagine, recognize, and represent a
most extraordinary transition we all happen to be living through
in the
history of our species. The exhibition attempts to represent
a multiple-media matrix of how about 8 very special Computer-Based
Creative Practitioners from India choose to view and represent
the "Cusp" of our theme and themselves as an extended
generation living it, to the rest of the world and the records
of our times. This in turn may be joined with works from e-artists
of venues along the way, as decided by the joint curators case-by-case.
Theme:
The philosophies, theologies, cosmologies and mythologies
of India have from times immemorial reverberated with the concept
of immense and epochal cycles of time ~ each unique and distinct
from each other and yet each emerging from one only to eventually
yield of itself another, and each time this through horrific
paroxysms of extreme change.
In this infinite canvas of ages in cycle, it is said that
we exist today in the wickedest of all ages, the "Kali Yuga".
And yet, it is also said that we exist at the very end of the
cycle of this Yuga, named for the Black Goddess derived from
the detritus of the Mother Goddess's cleansing of herself at
the very beginnings of all time. And is our time not indeed marked
by horrific paroxysms of extreme change?
Never in history has humankind sought to destroy itself
on a scale such as we have been witness to, and participants
in, over the last 100 years; never in history has there been
such a passage of entire landscapes and species of beings into
oblivion off the face of the earth on such an almost daily basis;
never in history has the very earth itself been assaulted to
the degree that it's own continuance as a life-sustaining planet
into the not-too-distant future actually seems at risk in so
many ways today.
And yet, as a mere aspect of the Mother Goddess herself,
Kali is benevolent too in her dangerously protective role, for
never also in history has humankind ever stood upon such a grand
new Cusp in its story as it does upon this Cusp twixt centuries
and millennia, epochs and eons and eras ~ reaching suddenly beyond
simple existence as a carbon-based species applying native neuron
cell-based computing to think, act and behave, to instead become
a species that will now continually augment itself into the future
with cosmetic, therapeutic, genetic, electronic and/or photonic
extensions, implants, engineering and other technologies, so
as to eventually evolve prodigiously advanced physical, virtual,
perceptual, cognitive, creative, even boundary-challenging qualities
and abilities.
... and it is the collective 'We' of our times, as one
extended "generation" so to speak, who are actually
living through the period of this epic and enormously accelerated
'Before' to 'After' upgrade in the eons old, and still ongoing,
evolution of all humankind.
Indeed, it is we who actually thus embody this Cusp in
so many various ways, rendering it imperative that our testament
be writ boldly in the sands of time by the artists of our time
in the mediums of our time, as the view we "saw" here
and now.
Curator's Statement [December
9, 2002]:
May it please not ever be said of any of my few trysts
with playing the role of a curator of creative public events
or incidents in life thus far, that I ever precisely knew what
I was putting together from the start in any case at all ~ except
perhaps just once, and that too perhaps unfortunately.
I prefer to think of such projects as potentially independent
organic entities, each ideally begun from good concepts
and good seed, planted in right season and right circumstance
to evolve and grow to maturity and final fruition in the good
soil of goodwill and good associations, with the sheer momentum
of shared crops of creative exploration, exhilaration,
exposition and exchange for [a] myself [b] my artists and other
partners, and [c] our shared viewers and/or audience.
Now, without in any way attempting to abdicate any curatorial
responsibility here, what that means to my effort with this show
is that the eventual manifestation of the project (i.e. the 'Show')
will for me be ideally the coming together of an essentially
unpredictable anarchy of creatively disparate individual
qualities, sensibilities, intents, talents, foci and purpose,
all dovetailed fleetingly together over the next few weeks and
months, to germinate the seed of a good concept according
to the soil, season and circumstance of the shared canvas of
this case.
And what's the basic shared canvas? To me, it's essentially
just the time and space we find ourselves in individually, locally
and locally+, at the cusp -as a species- between organic and
organic+ in this case, which naturally then prompts focus upon
Computer-Based, and therefore (again luckily, I hope) perhaps
even Unpredictable or Unprecedented, Creative Practices.
So, the first order of business is to win wonderful partners
to our side around the concept, which I'm delighted to therefore
report as well begun and also ongoing.
Next is to actually leave the concept ductile enough so
as to be able to evolve independent of this statement together
with these wonderful partners as we go along, as the essential
"Theme", reason and purpose of the show (see
project-memo). In fact, the theme is already to some degree a
distillate of inputs from several sources.
Third is to leave open a window, as long as possible, upon
including an equal number of artists more, to propel the eventual
show as close as possible towards the 'cutting-edge' of our time,
theme and place.
This text is in turn laid down, on request from a co-curator,
as my "Curatorial Statement" on the show, in
December 2002, just over a month from first conception.
So, what do I eventually expect to see, and show, in this
show?
Well, basically large prints, screen-works and audio,..
but actually, I really hope I don't know!
After all, that's got to do with a lot of good folks who'll
ideally surprise themselves and each other in the end with this.
For that's most certainly what I too hope to do myself as an
artist in the show, ideally with work I've never even done before.
As a curator however, it will be enough in the end for
me if each participating artist, co-curator and supporter
were to each be able to look back upon the entire incident when
we're done, as something of their own in various different ways;
something seminally satisfying and worthwhile to have been associated
with; something worthy of having given it everything that they
could, and; something also from which they gained everything
that they could.
And as for the viewers, I hope just that the show will
be worth crossing the street and giving it 10-20 minutes of their
lives for them, everywhere it goes till it is done in (ideally)
less than a year from first showing, scheduled for May-June,
2003
Supporters, Associates and Artists:
Arun Jethmalani, Andrey Martynov, Valeria Ibraeva, Joel
Chadabe, Steve Danzig, John Labadie, Afanassy Pud , Kirti
Trivedu, Jaideep Mehrotra, Arjun Sen, Nilanjan Das, Sophie Gaur,
Nandini Gandhi, Amitabh Gandhi and others.
text: Shankar Barua
~ March, 2002 & February, 2003
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