Describing the sense of unease that the unsuspecting viewer might feel in such a situation, Shilpa says: “[I] am part of the shadow! But they didn’t ask my permission, was I born into it? Am I born into my country, into my society, into a religion? … but I can step out of [it]…” Transcending the negative implications of nationalism, religious fanaticism and fundamentalism is what Shilpa tries to convey through her work by

grabbing the attention of the viewer through a variety of media — via websites, touch screen interfaces and interactive data projections. I first met Shilpa in the mid ’90s when she had just completed her Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai. Trained as a sculptor, she very soon began working across a range of new media, engaging with the political and cultural world around her. Her art practice has since taken several forms — religious websites, a shop selling take-away kidneys, the distribution of simulated bottles of blood to commuters on the local trains in Mumbai; and the artist herself has switched personas in her video projections, from performing marionette in army gear to a devout pilgrim doing the rounds of the religious sites in India. At 31, Shilpa has shown her work both in India and abroad.

Suman Gopinath: Let’s start with Untitled (2004), your ‘video projection’ at the Lyon

Biennale. You have always used the Internet and other kinds of software in your work, but even for you, this particular piece was a great leap forward in your use of technology, wasn’t it?

Shilpa Gupta: I have always been interested in the role and function of art and therefore its relationship with the viewer. On entering this life-size interactive video projection, the viewer becomes part of it via his/her shadow generated by livecapture

technology and becomes an integral part of the narrative, making it move forward. This interrelationship between the artwork, the viewer and the shared social space, all becoming an infinite loop, is what prompted the shift towards this series of video projections. Besides which, the technology incorporated in the piece also allows reflection about the very nature of itself, such as media technology, where the viewer is in a relationship with information that is not visible otherwise — especially in an age where old hierarchies are being replayed via dominant media in everyday life. And at another level this could also be at play in the mind on the subconscious level, or even in the gaps between the seemingly collapsed geographies in a quickly globalizing world — all of which are reasons that have contributed to the realization

of the third in the series of these specific kinds of interactive projection.

SG: “Typically, the viewer who engages with one of your works is invited to follow a protocol, a sequence of steps by which, presumably, the meaning of the artwork would stand revealed.” But, as the Indian art critic Nancy Adajania notes: “on the contrary, the viewer who does everything right, ticking off the steps on the protocol, faces a surprising turn of events at the end and is confronted by an aporia, or is left

pondering over an ambiguity or is stuck in a dilemma.” Would you agree with this? Perhaps you could illustrate your answer by using one of your artworks as an example.

SGU:Well, yes. This situation is something that I have been using as a tool over the course of the past ten years, such as in a work when I placed a counter in a gallery from which to sell packs of memory. The viewer is enticed with the possibilities and then once he or she has the object in his or her hands is left to think what its ‘intended’ or even ‘real’ role was anyway? When one considers the past and present of my practice, it is apparent that this has become a tool, though quite unconsciously. This perhaps comes from having become a participant by default in the series of events which we deal with in the larger social and political space. In this space dominant companies/groups provide us with codes of behavior which in turn provide them with the capacity to administrate the masses. This leads to manufactured consent, which can have dangerous implications in a democracy.

SG: There Is No Border Here (2005-06), There Is No Explosive in This (2007) are some of the titles of your recent works. What are the preoccupations that underlie these titles and works?

SGU: Most of the earlier works do not have titles and become identified by the text printed on them. The concerns remain the same, such as in Blame (2002-04) in which viewers have been asked to separate bottles of blood by race and religion. There Is No Border Here is a series of mass-produced and mass-distributed rolls of

adhesive tape that addresses the impossibility of creating geographical differences in the face of deep cultural or human links. It is still charged with a utopia: a world in which people will not get raped, abducted and brutally killed in the name of nationality, race and religion. This utopia is turned upside down in There Is No

Explosive Here where an essential truth becomes worthy of suspicion — visitors were

invited to take suitcases with the statement “There is no explosive here” printed on them into the streets. What both the works have in common, and which also runs throughout my practice is the zoom in/zoom out view, say, of the camera, which, when you zoom onto so much detail — whether on a piece of land or skin — blurs all the differences and there are no borders and so no explosives!

SG:You always speak about ‘the default politics’ of the choice of the media you use in your art practice. Can you elaborate on this?

SGU: Whether it’s a DVD, or the bottles in Blame, the tape in There is No Border, or digital photographs, there is no original and they all can be mass-reproduced and easily distributed and shared — this is essential and a core political reality of the medium — by which notions of art commodification are challenged. Here, rather,

data is easily transferred or available on the Internet. Even while installing such works, the pieces themselves require public environments, mostly spaces in institutions and museums, rather than in exclusive spaces. The very structure of the work obliges the producer by default to essentially share it as ‘experience’ rather than treat it like a commodity. All of these aspects are indeed default to the medium the

works are made in.

SG: A lot of your work is interactive and webbased. How does the response that you get impact your work?

SGU: Making interactive work is always an exciting learning process; responses become residue and are incorporated into future projects.

SG: You have worked as an artist and a curator on many projects — your most recent one being that of curating a section of Bombay’s Time Out magazine. Can you tell us a little more about this? You are an artist and, now, a curator. How do these two roles interact with each other?

SGU: I do not see myself as a curator — rather as a facilitator specifically from the position of an artist who functions in a space where there are very few opportunities to share work with the public. So instead of always waiting for someone to come and always blaming the system, I prefer to work on projects such as Timeout, Video Art Road Show or even Aar Paar (which started in 2000) for which fellow artists are asked to produce work for distribution in the magazines or on the streets. I must admit that I am also interested in how artists employ language in the public sphere vis-a-vis the language and codes they otherwise use in a gallery space. I think this difference is reflective of the changing trajectory art has undertaken over the years.

Suman Gopinath is a freelance art critic and curator based in Bangalore.

Shilpa Gupta was born in 1976 in Mumbai, where she lives and works.

Selected solo shows: 2007: Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi; Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. 2006: Bose Pacia, New York. 2003: Chemould Gallery, Mumbai. 2001: Gallery 4A, Sydney.

Selected group exhibitions: 2007: “The Politics of Fear,” Albion, London; 9th Biennale de Lyon; “Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves,” ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; “Private/Corporate IV,” Daimler Chrysler Contemporary, Berlin; “Edge of Desire” National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai/National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; “Objects: Making Unmaking,” Vadhera Art Gallery, New Delhi; “New Narratives: Contemporary Art from India,” Chicago Cultural Center, USA. 2006: 4th Liverpool

Biennial; 9th Havana Biennial; “Subcontingent. The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art,” Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; 2006 Biennale of Sydney; “Hyper-links for dead links,” Hiroshima City Museum of

Contemporary Art; 6th Shanghai Biennale; “Estrecho Dudoso,” TEOR/éTica, San Jose, Costa Rica. 2005: 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan. 2004: “The Ten Commandments,” Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden; 3rd Seoul International Media Art Biennale.

AMAR KANWAR’S A Season Outside (1998) — a contemplation on the sources of

violence, consisting of a mesmerizing mixture of voice narration, sound and documentary material shot at the northern borders of India — was one of the highlights of Documenta 11. At Documenta 12 he presented the video installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007), in which the traumatic experiences of women

during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 are taken as a point of departure for a complex survey which explores the narratives of sexual violence in political conflicts in the Indian region. Currently Kanwar is completing “The Torn First Pages,” a new body of work on the political and humanitarian situation in Burma (Myanmar). Different parts of “The Torn First Pages” have been exhibited in the last

year and by the middle of 2008 the series will begin to travel as a whole. 

Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen: For a few years you have been working on “The Torn First Pages,” a series of works that focus on Burma: on the military regime, the repressive conditions of Burmese daily life and their struggle for democracy. In The Face (2005) for instance, you literally reveal the face of military repression by zooming in on the features of General Than Shwe who, since 1992, is the supreme

head of the Burmese military dictatorship. It is based on film footage clandestinely shot at a ceremony in 2004 at Rajghat, the funeral site of Gandhi in India, where Shwe paid tribute to Gandhi by tossing rose petals over the site where he was cremated. General Than Shwe is known for the distance he keeps from cameras.

The video is a subversion of the official representation of power as it ends in the almost comical faster and faster petal throwing by the junta leader. By taking Shwe’s visit to India as the subject of your video, you obviously criticize the

newly established ties between the New Delhi and Rangoon governments.

Could you shed some light on your interest in the activist movement in Burma? How and when did you get in touch with the resistance and how do you collect your material?

Amar Kanwar: I began working on a film project about the Burmese resistance in 2002-03. The resistance has been on for many years, with several struggles of great courage and amazing resilience but still largely ignored by the international community. It has also been a political movement that is complex and difficult

to understand.

“The Torn First Pages” is a work in progress consisting of a series of films, some short and silent pieces and others longer in duration. They are all filmed outside of Burma. So far, the series is made up of the films Somewhere in May and the four film installations The Face, Thet Win Aung, Win Ma Oo and The Bodhi Tree, all of which compose Portraits. Filmed in India, Europe, the USA and Thailand, the project is conceived to exist as a moving image constellation that tangentially engages with the Burmese resistance and the question of democracy, exile and individual courage. It intends to draw us all into the Burmese resistance no matter where and how far away we are. The films are varied interventions; I wanted to reexamine the question of evidence, the process of collecting evidence, archiving and presentation, its validity and aesthetics with reference to crime and political resistance. I also wanted to intervene in the realm of the image that supposedly belongs to ‘news’ — the image that is valuable, is continuously repeated and forgotten. The Face appears first within the language of ‘TV news’ and then

suddenly the film and its events explode to give it another energy — an energy which simultaneously pays homage to Gandhi, critiques the Indian government’s support of the Burmese military as well as becomes evidence of a moral and spiritual crime. The films are also conceived so as to be able to reinvent themselves in the way they are exhibited as they travel through different exhibition spaces and communities.

MVN: On a more general level one could connect “The Torn First Pages” to several of your other bodies of work, as they deal with ethnic and religious conflicts, violence, resistance, the psychology of power and the emotional effects of repression on personal/individual levels.

AK: I could almost say that maybe all my work can be viewed laterally as well. You could move from the center of a film made in 1993 into another in 2005 and still be traveling within the same narrative spiral — sometimes it seems as if the characters are being reborn. It is a journey in multiple directions. Besides I do not exist within the politically drawn boundaries of the Indian nation. It is necessary for me to say in

the region of South Asia as that is a more accurate description of the region that we are all in.

MVN: You have recently been collecting material for new parts of “The Torn First

Pages.” Could you talk about the character of these works? As the situation in Burma has deteriorated since the bloody suppression of the protests by the monks in September 2007 it is probably even more difficult to get access to footage.

AK: I am tangentially relating to the Burmese resistance. I have recently filmed extensively in the US with several leading Burmese activists and artists belonging to a previous generation and now in exile but still politically active while making a living as factory workers in the automobile industry. I have also been shooting in India as well as teaching a few Burmese journalists and activists. This is something that I often do. Training people to be able to film themselves and therefore create newer vocabularies of recording, documenting and even making ‘news.’ I have not been filming in Burma as I am not allowed by the military junta, but there has been a lot of clandestine filming which has now become an important source of information and evidence. That’s why it is important to train ‘non professionals’ as well.

MVN: In your talks, writings and visual work you often refer to Gandhi and his teachings — for example in A Season Outside (1998) and in To Remember (2003). It is quite striking to read in some press reports that Gandhi’s strategy of non-violence and civil disobedience is now seeping through in the religious heart of

Burma: in the Sangha, the cloister communities in Mandalay, where the monks are inspired by Gandhi in their resistance to the military junta. This must be of special interest to you.

AK: Yes, it is of great interest, though we must note that there are several incredible and innovative non-violent forms of resistance taking place in the Subcontinent at this time. Many of these are challenging the notion of a ‘shining new and vibrant India’ that the world seems so happy about. Gandhi has always been relevant and his teachings are in practice even by movements that take up arms at different times.

Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen is curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Amar Kanwar was born in 1964 in New Delhi, where he lives and works.

Selected solo shows: 2007: Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi; Whitechapel, London. 2006: The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. 2004: Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

Selected group exhibitions: 2007: “There is no border, there is no border, there is no border, no border, no border, no border, I wish,” Galerie im Taxispalais,  nnsbruk, Austria; “Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves,” ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; “Shooting Back,” Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Documenta 12. 2006: “Subcontingent. The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary

Art,” Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; 2006 Biennale of Sydney. 2005: “Populism,” Frankfurter Kunstverein/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam/The

Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo/Contemporary Art Center Vilnius (CAC), Vilnius. 2003: “Territories,” KW, Berlin. 2002: Documenta 11. 

‘LOCAL VERSUS GLOBAL’ was a slogan that was much in circulation during the ’90s,

notably in countries experiencing the first flush of the onslaught of the new imperialism that goes by the name of globalization. It has also proved to be a critical catchword for a generation of Indian artists who emerged in that decade, providing a modus operandi, whether consciously or not, for reckoning with the new world order into which India had recently been catapulted.

The video projection Global Clones (1998), by Sharmila Samant, is a witty take on the homogenization that follows in the wake of commodity fetishism and the cult of the brand name. In the video loop projected on the ground in a darkened space, eighteen types of women’s footwear chosen from some of the countries that were once traversed by the old Silk Route that linked Asia and Europe are set in motion, that is, the image of each shoe is morphed onto the next and further animated to simulate a walk. The braided babouches and sequined slippers appear to advance and yet remain in the same spot. In a parody of Zeno’s paradox of the impossibility of movement, the shuffling is also an allusion to the handcrafted footwear’s eventual obsolescence in the face of the industrially produced, massmanufactured

imported sportswear now marketed in India, an example of which — a real pair of Nikes — is placed on the edge of the projection. For Samant, the running shoes are “a marker of the universalizing and flattening effect of global corporate culture and its products,” an object that will get locally ‘cloned’ or counterfeited in its turn.

If many of Samant’s activities are acts of resistance to what might be called ‘commodity

conditioning,’Subodh Gupta’s work, in contrast, has mined the object-world of small town and rural India to explore a dynamic of cultural dislocation. His ingenuity lies in transposing the everyday into the currency of art. The kitchen utensils in gleaming stainless steel that have become a signature element in his work are not only objects with a specific use value; in villages, where they often form part of the bridal dowry, the cups and tumblers and plates have an exchange value, too. By inserting these objects in a non-utilitarian context, Gupta would appear to be playing with the commodity as sign, except that the fetishism thus implied is internally riven by the culturally coded nature of the goods in question. The shiny replicas are, by the same token, the symbolic residues of the functionality of the ‘original objects.’And since these objects’ raison d’être is utilitarian (their meaning is their use), what is at stake here is not quite the celebration of the commodity in the manner of a Jeff Koons, or a critique of it in the manner of a Sherrie Levine. The singularity of Gupta’s work resides in the unabashed nourishment it derives from the memory of a sense of locatedness, however much he himself has (geographically) moved away from the place of his origins.

The trajectory between the small provincial town in Bihar where Gupta was born and the

capital to which he moved has proved to be an energizing resource for his art. Jitish Kallat’s

work, on the other hand, registers a quintessential metropolitan experience, proposing a streetlevel view of the megalopolis that Bombay has now become. Not the city of Bollywood and its tawdry fantasies, but rather the distressed, scarred, grafitti-ridden, monsoon-stained

façades of built space, of which the scrofulous surface of his paintings is the analogue. Kallat’s work, whatever the nature of the medium, has always been in scare quotes, and nowhere more pointedly than in Onomatopoeia/The Scar Park (2005). At first sight the set of 68 photographs, displayed in serried ranks in a gridlike structure, appears to be a series of pictorial abstractions, each ‘unit’ distinguished by the particular quality of its surface markings. On closer inspection, however, these ‘painterly incidents’ reveal themselves to be the rather more ambiguous traces of accidents that owe nothing to the play of the brush. These are the scars that attest to a brush with danger, the dents on the gleaming surfaces of cars. So Kallat gives a strange twist to the topos of the crashed automobile in  contemporary art (John Chamberlain, César) but in the context of the newly rich and empowered Indian middle classes and their penchant for luxury commodities of all kinds, including the craze for foreign cars: the dents on the bodies of cars registered by the deceptively seductive surfaces of his photographs could be seen as constituting a parodic inventory where social difference is inscribed not as a brand name but as a scar. The danger that seams its way through the urban fabric is also the motif of the three-dimensional

work called Petrum Opus (2006): a near-amorphous mass of vehicles precipitously

come to a halt on an unfinished highway.

Transforming the city into a vast construction site, such overpasses or highways are, of course, ubiquitous in Bombay.

That they also signal a potential state of entropy is heightened by the very nature of the material deployed: the translucid resin in which the wax sculpture (of melted vehicles) has been cast preserves as if in amber an indeterminate heap of petrified matter. Another perspective on the reality of street life in India is proposed by Vivan Sundaram in the

installation he calls Great Indian Bazaar (1997). Alluding to the makeshift Sunday markets that mushroom on the pavements of Delhi, the work consists of 400 postcard-sized photographs heaped on the floor in a circle, a placement that is analogous to the ground level at which the desultory commerce on the street takes place. Indeed, the photographs taken by the artist are of the most disparate objects and bric-a-brac purveyed by the vendors, a plethora that is a ragbag of discards and secondhand goods. For the markets in question are neither an oriental bazaar with its ‘exotic’ wares nor a flea market holding out the promise of a lucky find to the scavenging aesthete, but rather a succession of makeshift spaces rudimentarily demarcated by the plastic sheets on which are accumulated the things that nobody wants to keep. “Used objects carry their personal histories, the quixotic juxtapositions can be read as surreal collages,” Sundaram has observed. “In the moment

of examining/photographing the temporary shop on ground level, the hands or feet of the seller and buyer appear at the edge of the frame. By not including the full figure in the frame, your eye focuses on an old shoe, comb, toothbrush, underwear, computer chips, sewing machine. It focuses on reality at the poverty level of ‘consumption.’” This last remark underscores the critical framework in which Sundaram has conceived his installation, just as the real metallic red frames that he found in the market jumble as opposed to isolate the individual images: the viewer is invited to sift through the pile in the manner of the marginals and outcasts attempting to salvage what they can from the detritus.

Sheela Gowda is another artist interested in critically recoding used materials or substances

with a vernacular connotation; but her recycling (in the ecological sense of the word) has a rather more pointed moral inflection than, say, Subodh Gupta’s intuitive play with cultural signs.

The raw materials to which she is drawn bespeak the harsher realities of manual toil and labor: witnessthe imposing structure called A Blanket and the Sky (2004) made out of flattened tar drums, a transposition of the kind of improvised makeshift shelters fabricated by migrant laborers hired on a daily basis to lay cables or maintain public works. The austerity of Gowda’s sculptural object avers a ‘truth to materials’ that has an ethical basis far removed from the purely formal understanding of that venerable modernist shibboleth. Indeed, the monumentalizing of the modest dimensions of the shacks is a paradoxical way of commemorating their own precariousness as well as that of those for whom they provide a roof for the night. Gowda’s preference for poor materials reflects on her engagement with environmental issues and so-called women’s work. From the standpoint of these preoccupations, the recycling also amounts to a critical recoding of whatever formal associations with post-minimalism or Arte Povera. Thus, such elements as string, pigment, charcoal powder and gauze — that go into the making of the work called Breaths (2003) — have a symbolic valence that is necessarily different from the recourse to comparably modest materials that register Arte Povera’s resistance to the technocratic basis of minimalism. So the truncated limb-like forms smeared with charcoal and tipped by blood-red pigment and placed on a long narrow table could well be called ‘still life,’although that generic title would resonate differently for someone aware of the massacre of Muslims that took place in Gujarat in 2002, and in whose aftermath this work was made.

The idea that contemporary life might be approached as a fable has long exercised N.S.

Harsha’s pictorial imagination. Often panoramic in format but miniaturized in its delineation,

his paintings are both expansive and intimate, and maintain a continuous and lively interplay

between the detail and the whole. The myriad vignettes drawn from everyday life are presented as an extended frieze, as a succession of superposed horizontal lines rather in the way sentences follow each other on a page. This allows for an overall structure and for a play of repetition and difference. The multitudes that people his paintings are particularized by the minutiae, by their wayward and quirky details. Those familiar with the stories of R.K. Narayan set in an imaginary small town in south India will see in Harsha’s paintings the work of a kindred spirit. Like Narayan, Harsha casts a bemused, affable gaze at humanity and its foibles. He is interested in the circulation of cultural markers or signs, and the manner in which these are interpellated, especially in the context of the globalized present: villagers posing for a photograph with the leaning tower of Pisa as painted backdrop (Mass Marriages, 2003) a peasant crossing a river and carrying on his head not the usual bundle of cloth but… Duchamp’s urinal !(We Come, We Eat, We Sleep, 1999-2001). These are details and of course they gain in wit when seen as part of the larger configuration of the paintings in question. The playful re-routing of cross-cultural references informs the sociability of Harsha’s world. In R.K. Narayan’s short stories, “a pattern of existence is brought to view”; in Harsha’s paintings, for all their endearing formal qualities, that pattern does not exclude the motifs alluding to the drudgery that life is for the less privileged. A recent painting, Creation of Gods (2007), shows serried ranks of small-time tailors working on the same swathe of black cloth as it winds itself from one sewing machine to the next. In all likelihood, this is outsourced labor paid at a pittance. Is that why their faces are spectral, or that the planets and comets and shooting stars festooned on the black cloth might appear unreal to them? To raise the question is also to acknowledge the delicacy of Harsha’s way of posing it.

Deepak Ananth is an art critic and curator based in Paris.