Music from an Unknown Source

(From the drafts : on an exhibit held last December)

'Music from an Unknown Source', an exhibition of German artist Sigmar Polke's works was held in Max Mueller Bhavan earlier this month. The exhibition focussed on 40 gouaches that the artist had painted around 1996.

(I can safely say that I know nothing about painting techniques let alone their interpretations. I like to look at paintings, photos, just about any snapshot from outside. That is to say this post isn't a review or anything close to it, but you knew that already, didn't you?)

Immediately noticeable was the unique use of dots in most of the works on display. Painstaking effort surely to paint pictures in just the right light by using only dots, I later learned that these are called raster dots. I could only appreciate the style, splashes, colours in the works. For most of them were really abstract, could mean just about anything you wanted it to (isn't everything that way?)

A personal favorite apart from one of the first I set my eyes upon (see pic below) was the sketch of a little girl-boy pair playing tennis and a larger-than-life cat playing the violin on the side. The cat was sketched as though it was vibrating, a white dash'd outline and  then a black one. That ought to be some clue. Then there was a painting like a strip of photo negative, focusing on two shots of the same scene.

About the artist (from the Goethe Institut site)

Sigmar Polke was born in 1941 in Oels/Lower Silesia. Today he lives in Cologne.
His position as one of the most important artists of the current art scene has its seeds in an inexhaustible richness of ideas, the joy of experimentation, mechanical skills, but also because of his ironical perspective on social reality.

Jaaga - Creative Common Ground

Pallet racks are shelves used to store heavy materials in horizontal rows and on multiple levels. So they are an integral part of industrial warehouses. But pallet racking has now found its way to a nondescript part of Rhenius Street in residential Langford Town.
Jaaga (meaning space in Kannada) is a structure made of pallet racks, with metal wire mesh and plywood for flooring, paper honeycomb panels for doors and discarded Korean tarpaulin sheets for the ceiling, for tent-like flaps rather. It was built in 15 hours on a plot on Rhenius Street off Richmond Road. So the space in the true sense is the structure rather than its location for it can be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere anytime. Jaaga rose out of artist Archana Prasad's wish to have a place dedicated to art forms. The suggestion of building it out of pallet racks came from Freeman Murray, an American technologist who has built similar structures in the USA. 

 Pic Credit : http://www.designwala.org/2010/02/jaaga-creative-common-ground/

Last week I attended an event that happened on the ground floor of this space. In the dark, the Korean lettering on the front attracts attention but for which there is not much sign of this unique building's existence. There isn't a 'foundation' to the structure so it's just the ground covered with gravel. It's airy, minimalistic, yet equipped with the wiring needed to conduct events. The venue is available free of cost to those interested. 

Do check out this jaaga sometime. You can also visit the website for pics of how it came to be. 

The Wall in the Head

'Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall', an interactive 3D installation of a stretch of the Berlin wall is on at Max Mueller Bhavan till Jan 24th.

The project recreates a kilometer of the Berlin Wall as it was in the 1980's in an interactive format where the user can navigate through the virtual world using a joystick. Tourists in the artwork, when approached talk briefly about the history of the Wall and its transformation from a wall running alongside buildings to a fence with barbed wire and some more reinforcements to become the concrete structure that it was in the 1980s. As the toursists talk, you can see the wall changing. From here on it's all up to the user to explore the area, one's curiosity is the limit. There is a Viewing Platform in West Berlin from where you can see the Death Strip (No man's land) with trenches, layered with gravel (so as to identify footprints easily) bordered between the East and West walls. A symbolic stark contrast in spaces so close. 

The West Wall is covered with colourful graffiti, which have been reproduced as was. At the section of the Wall over Waldemar's Bridge, right ahead of St. Michael's Church in East Berlin, the Wall is painted with the lower part of the Church which it obstructs. Thus giving an optical illusion of the full front view of the Church. Approach the Wall here and you're drawn into a dream sequence revealing how the section looks in the present times.

            

Screen-shot (from the project website) of the Waldemar Bridge on the Western Wall where artist Yadegar Asisi painted a trompe l'oeil image of St. Michael's Church in  1980s.

The Engelbecken Canal which was filled in during the time of the Wall to create the Death Strip is now back to its original water filled sight lined with neat gardens. From a nightmare to a dream in a second. 

Walking across the park to East Berlin we are back in the 1980s. One of the viewpoints in East Berlin is the St. Michael's Church from the top of which you get a bird's eyeview of how the world looked back in the 1980s from an East Berliner's perspective. Another is the East German Trade Union/Hospital Mitte building, which was one of the few buildings open to the public from which the East Berliners could see across the Death Strip and the Wall to West Berlin. The sight of dingy, dirty buildings, a colorful wall against a clean, barricaded wall enclosing the no man's land. 

Walking around one discovers many scenes and sounds, some mundane like that of the printing press, of sheep bleating at the Children's Farm. And some others like the sight of jeeps zooming by, honking, the Checkpoints and the guards who when approached 'interact' with you and based on your actions, you might even end up getting arrested.

The artist team is T+T, Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter and the artwork is mainly funded from the Berlin Capital City Cultural Fund. Virtuelle Mauer is an ongoing project that's working on incorporating suggestions from personal memories of the Wall, and in widening the area covered.

The work is projected onto a big screen and while the virtual world is 3D, I'd expected a more 'real' experience when I read '3D' in the ad. It really was a thought-provoking experience, like stepping into a time machine, for, little remains of the concrete Wall in Berlin now. It resides in pictures, archives, in works like these and of course in the heads of the people. Most of us never will understand the 'Wall in the Head', taking a journey through a part of their world one can only imagine how it must have been to live "in the shadow of the Wall".

The installation is on till Jan. 24th from 9 am to 6.30 pm at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Indiranagar. Guided tours can be taken between 5 pm and 6 pm till the 22nd.

More info about the event on the Goethe-Institut site. Do visit the Virtuelle Mauer website if you can't make it to the installation,  it includes  details on the making of the project, screenshots of the work. 

The Origin of a New Genre

Attended a poetry reading organized by Toto Funds The Arts in collaboration with the British Council at a Crossword store last Friday. Ruth Padel, a British poet, great-great-grand daughter of Charles Darwin read from her book Darwin: A Life in Poems. Padel is in India on the British Council Darwin Now research grant to complete her next novel Where the Serpent Lives. The event started of with a poem she'd written two years back, verses on global warming, a Now-and-Then view on climate (with mentions of India - Sunderbans, Shiv no longer holding Ganga in his hairlock, etc)

It set the stage for poems from Darwin: A Life in Poems (published last year for the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth) What's special about this biography is that it is written in verses, a sequence of poems merging Darwin's own words taken from his autobiography, letters and notebooks, 160 pages in all!

The poems revealed the personal side of Darwin ... his childhood interest in collecting as a form of expression to escape his mother's death when he was eight, his thoughts on marriage (the famous 'pros and cons of marriage' made it's way into the book as an aptly named 'The Balance Sheet'), his beautiful relationship with Emma, the divide between them regarding belief in God (an important aspect in times of Victorian Christianity when it was believed that if either in a couple was not a believer, they would not be together in the afterlife)

Presented in Darwin's voice, the poems portray an intimate, everyday side to the famous naturalist. Take for instance his reaction on first seeing a tropical land (voyage aboard the Beagle to South America)

He’s standing in Elysium. Palm feathers, a green
    dream of fountain against blue sky. Banana fronds,
slack rubber rivulets, a canopy of waterproof tearstain
    over his head. Pods and racemes of tamarind.
Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn.             ...

Vegetation he’s never seen, and every step a new surprise.
    ’New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’
(Read the full poem Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes)

Darwin's famous 'to marry or not to' was a laugh riot at the reading ('The Balance Sheet').  Emma's letter to Darwin when she was pregnant, voicing her fears and Darwin's 'reply' left to be found after his death, the poem in the voice of the carpenter who made a plain wooden coffin for Darwin just the way he'd wanted it and then some .. all beautiful.

I hadn't heard of Padel before I went to the reading,  knew nothing about her except the Darwin connection. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature AND the Zoological Society of London. Her dedication to conservation efforts is inspiring, awe-inspiring. Am mesmerized by the way she writes about science with the knowledge that only comes with much research and yet the writing is so very lyrical. Definitely want to read the biography on Darwin, 52 ways of looking at a poem, her novel on tiger conservation Tigers in Red Weather, and more! Watch this space.

Padel also read from her next novel Where the Serpent Lives which is about King Cobra conservation and is based in India. A discussion with Bangalore-based novelist Anjum Hasan followed the novel reading, to be wrapped up by an interaction with the audience.
You can read a collection from Darwin: A Life in Poems here.

Spaced Out

BJ: You feel better?

Sidney: Yeah, I think I do a little bit. It's like spring at MASH. If you can't find it, can't feel it, you just go ahead and make it. Somewhere in here [tapping his chest] I'm coaxing a little bud to grow.

-M*A*S*H, Season 5

Yesterday I went to this photo exhibition at Max Mueller Bhavan. Art, Space and the City is being held in collaboration with the Bengalooru habba. It showcases the works of six city-based photographers. The theme was to be “on art and culture in the public spaces of Bangalore”. Though the brochure claims that the photographers set about to explore how far spaces in Bangalore can be deemed public in the sense of more or less uninhibited access – not all the works are of common spaces that everyone can relate to.

“Celebration” – Clare Arni
About six or seven photos of celebrations like arrangements for a Kavadi, walking on fire embers at an Amman temple, a hoarding of Mother Teresa that shines eerily under the string of fairy lights, a procession (for eunuch rights I think). Neatly captured bright shots, out of everyday. Not really everyday, but the pics are all relatable plus very much with the theme.

“Meet You There” – Vivek M
The artist talks about how time & people influence the way buildings and neighborhoods appear to one. This struck a chord. His works were amongst the ones that are to me very Bengaloor.

“Artists on the Street” - Vinayak Das
Looks into the life of a group of artisans from Rajasthan who live on the streets, earn their living by making wooden statues and other decorative items. Reminded me of innumerable such people one sees on the way to work everyday – opposite to the Sunshine Parking near Forum, near the Roman Catholic cemetery. There are actually lives right on the streets, under makeshift huts out of hoarding canvas.

There was Jyothy Karat’s “Performance Within”, Rudra Sharan’s something on the Turf Club, Vivek Singh’s “Bangalore_Spaces and Beyond”. To me, they were AlsoTheres. Some neat photographs, nothing special to write about these in general. Nothing to write about on a bored/tired Sunday afternoon.

Life and Nothing Else

Think Afghanistan and a couple of turbaned men and the Bamiyan Buddhas come rushing in ... war-scarred land, Mujahideen, Taliban, apartheid, war.

A photo exhibition titled ‘Life and Nothing Else’ (at the Max Mueller Bhavan) aims to showcase Afghanistan in its everyday light, as seen by the natives.

The catalog says that it all started with an idea to modify the way the world views Afghanistan. This could be done not by international journalists dispatched to capture exotic, aesthetically fine images of a war zone. So the Goethe-Institut Kabul in cooperation with the French media organization AINA and conducted by the German photographer Wolfgang Bellwinkel conducted a workshop in 2004 in Kabul to equip some locals with the basic skills of photography that they could then use to portray their homeland. The works of six artists are showcased in this exhibition. Living Rooms, Life in an Orphanage, Youth, Weddings, Religious life, Family life in Afghanistan are the chosen themes.

The photographs are not rich in the kind of beauty one is by now used to. But they deliver on the workshop’s aim – being to modify the way one looks at Afghanistan, how life goes on beyond all the violence that the world learns about.

‘Living Rooms’ across social strata are captured by one artist. Traditional carpets, pillows, curtains all mostly shades of crimson and red fight for space alongside the television, abstract paintings.

‘Life in an Orphanage’ reminded me of the orphanage in A Thousand Splendid Suns. Some of the photos in the catalog were more impressive than those displayed under this theme.

The photos displayed under ‘Youth’ weren’t very varying in that they do not capture images across the economic classes. There was one photo (in a jewelers shop) in the catalog though, which made up for it partly. But all the subjects pose for the photos and this does take away the candid, casual effect one would expect in this kind of exhibition. In his write-up, the artist talks about the limitation in photographing women for publication which is why we are to be content with seeing them only under ‘Family Life..’.

‘Weddings’ deprived of people could achieve only so much. I still feel even without any people in it, there should be more to a wedding than just the dais on which the couple would receive guests. (Or are there some restrictions there too?) But it does succeed in pushing away the drabness, sandy; grey that one has associated with the country.

‘Religious life’ mostly shot in shrines across the country had at least one photo of women in a place of worship. And another of a man at Namaz in his living room with a computer at the corner.

‘Family Life in Afghanistan’ by Farzana Wahidy ends up being the only window into an Afghan woman’s life. Families at leisure, women in the kitchen, lady and man out on the road, children playing in the background, kid sketching/playing while men of the family eat … wide variety on the whole.

It's all easy and dandy to be critical on the works; but it really was an awesome collection on the whole with or without the restrictions, limitations that the artistes had to work under. Look forward to seeing more of these.

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While I was looking up information on the Taliban regime and the like, I came across this on

NatGeo.

evam - Five Point Someone

I first knew about evam couple of years back through an article in The Week. I was impressed by the article, the name stuck and I watched out for performances by evam in Bangalore (days, weeks after the play, unfortunately). So, I never had a chance to enjoy one of their plays until this Saturday. Five Point Someone at Ranga Shankara.
Now, I haven’t read the book. In fact, it is the only book that I have left incomplete for no reason at all. I started reading it on the last train journey back from my college, and somehow could not and at that point did not want to get back to it, for the nostalgia, regret that it evoked.
I jumped up in joy when I saw a post on my college groups about the play, thanked all the gods that for once I was checking the groups before the play, frantically blocked a ticket online. Oh what joy! And then for the next two days, I went about publicizing the group, the play.

The day arrived. Close to opening time, Ranga Shankara was as always bustling with people at Sankars, in the canteen, at the evam stalls. That place is heaven for any theatre lover. At 3:30 PM after a Evam’s Sunil Vishnu came up on stage, talked about how over four years they had done 14 plays; and like for their 50th, 100th and 150th shows, the 200th show was at their favorite venue Ranga Shankara.

Being familiar with the settings, main characters in the book, one wondered how the team would compress it into a two hour play replete with the required props. The stage had a cot, a table, a chair, and a stage with steps – which morphed into class room, the bench at Sasi’s stall, the Insti terrace, dorm room, hostel, etc. The characters – Ryan, Hari, Alok, the author, Neha, Prof. Veera, rest of the profs were all excellent. Be it Alok who radiated tension, his frantic urgency in taking notes, his general Muggu antics or Hari, stuck between his two best friends, trying so hard to be someone like Ryan and Ryan frustrated with the IIT system, “infectious, Hari is an example of the infection”, as Alok puts it. The author Hari played by a different person, full of the regret, nostalgia, dry observations that one tends to make on looking back. The part when the professor and the students face the audience – and the three main characters respond as though the professor was facing them – was nice too.

The play on the whole was a laugh riot. I have seen a couple of plays at the venue before, but none had evoked applause from the audience for just about every two dialogues that were uttered. One of my personal favorites (and the one which won the biggest cheer –- from the Bangalore aka ‘engineer’ audience -- during the play) was when the prof reprimands the students at the viva voce saying something to the effect of – “the standard of the IITs is going down day by day. What are you? Commerce students?!” I loved all of Alok’s reactions too. Him being the nervous wreck and so the most emotive of the three was responsible for a king’s share of the audience reactions.
Pink Floyd ‘backgrounded’, and laid foot work many a time too. I can’t recollect the lyrics of the song that was played before Sunil came up on stage. Think as hard as I might and all I can come up with is “all things bright and beautiful.”

Playing a best selling novel has a great advantage of pulling in crowds (not that evam needs to rely on that for a full house! :)) and for precisely the same reason raises expectations, most of the audience would be familiar with the plot, have their own visualizations from the book reading experience. Evam did not disappoint, they exceeded expectations; they’ve left me and many others look out for their next performance at our favorite Ranga Shankara.