Re thinking the curation: Can Be Done In Any Corner You Like

Sometime during Shantanu Lodhs performance in front of the ‘british high commission’, and a conversation with Pratul Dash, certain conceptual loopholes in the project came to the fore, and it became clear that the curation had to be re thought and re positioned. One of the very important critiques that surfaced was that a curation coming from a reading of how the growing appropriation within the visual arts discourse had affected the concept metaphor called performance art; especially at a point when the visual art discourse in India is being swept over by the neo lib idea of the spectacle and this is having a profound impact on how an event as a marketing tool is being understood and practiced. Nonetheless the mode in which the curation was conceived was a three day event. Everything said and done the fundamental structural mistake happened there. 'Can Be Done in Any Corner you Like' went on to emphasize the dominant understand of curation as an event generating field rather than a discourse generating arena. If one had to allow for this criticism to shape the future of this curatorial project, then the project had to be re thought…re worked.

‘Can Be Done In Any Corner you Like’ is now positioned as an ongoing curatorial space which works at two levels. The blog (Can It Be Done in Any Corner You Like?), is positioned as a space for proposing and ideating, and also as the domain through which the documentation of the performances is shared and the text generates as the discursive context in which the documentation is embedded.

Planned, sporadic bursts of extensive poster campaign will be used to open up the project in terms of artists and viewers. There will no longer be an invited list of artists, instead the project offers itself as an curatorial platform for anyone who wants to do performance in non institutional/unprotected spaces in the re thinking the discourse. The project continues to be based in the imagined city of Delhi.

A formalized three member team is being put in place which maintains the blog, interacts with artists, ideates documents and fund raises. The artists participating in the project formulate a larger body which guides and works with the team. At this point certain features of the curation have been re instated after a lot of discussions with the prospective team and artists.

This remains a curatorial experiment which seeks to explore possibilities for creating art outside institutional support and spaces. We believe that there is an array of available spaces and agencies who can make such a venture possible (or impossible) but in order to locate re-think contemporary notions of curation one needs to engage with these possibilities. At a time when the alternative has either been forsaken or appropriated the project will seek to work with non mainstream modes of propagating, distributing and supporting itself. The blog is in a way the soul of the project, a site that makes the project completely transparent in terms of ideating, organizing funds and spending. The project itself will walk on the edge of being and not being an institution in a search to know whether such a space is yet possible.

There is a strong realization that contemporary culture supports a wide array of performance practices, and as we work with wider array of artists the focus should not be on the end product, the performance itself. Curatorially a deeper engagement with process is important. The failure of a performance to happen (either through negotiations within the site falling apart or due to ideological disagreements), is not a cause of lament if the process is documented and transparent.

In the spirit of de personalising this project and slowly handing it over to a team, the blog ulr has been changed fromhttp://www.ganjabengali.blogspot.com/ to www.theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.com , and the design of the blog has been completely re thought. The blog is the forum for random thoughts, demented mind and anyone interested in alternative curatorial and artistic practice. Short notes, large comments, essays cross posting are welcome. There are no administrative rights as such, who ever wants can come in and change things around.

Vibha's work

last time one ideated with vibha, she had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do. her work is theorised, but as an artist she is yet to find confidence in using her body as an medium of expression. she has been on the edge for sometime now

Mithu Sen's performance

the first letter


the second letter

these two letters (they enlarge and become readable if you click on them) summaries our attempts to put in place Mithu sens performance at the india gate. in between mithu and i had an exchange regarding police permissions vis-a-vis on site negotiations.

learnt (much later) that, the permission was denied the second time around cause 1st may was considered way too much a sensitive day.

need to follow this up urgently.

a much deffered post

February 28, 2008
Delhi-based performing artist of Iraqi origin Al Saidi Hassan, performed ADAM FEET, during a group exhibition of various artist at Anant Art Center, Noida on February 16, 2008. Curated by Marta Jakimowicz, the exhibition was entitled as “The Mechanism of Motion”.


photo credit - artmaharaj

In ADAM FEET, Al Saidi Hassan tried to raise issues of fragility, hostility and vulnerability related to the Freedom in Art in the contemporary Art scenario that prevails in post-colonial India. The performance was aimed at challenging the growing intolerance for the diversity of positions on a particular issue, even in the circles of the artists.

Using the performance as a medium of expression, Al Saidi, a member of the Progressive Artists Group, made an effort to articulate the concerns of those artists who are kept at margins and who often go unheard. It also asserts the right of artists to live a life characterized with dignity, equality and justice.

After being forced to conform orders of ‘the other’ and also being denied the right to air his voice as he desired, Al Saidi, the rebellious artist, decided to make his own contribution to the Art Freedom, in support of M.F.Hussain episode. .

Al Saidi removed his shoes and then entered Anant Gallery, walking on the black- grey Rajsthani stone pavement; he stopped standing in front of many cameras which were fixed on his naked feet; then he was asked to draw with black markers, both of his feet and put his name and signature there. Then he was asked to repeat the same procedure with regard to the second step. He was further asked to do the same, making it as bigger as the ADAM FEET, in a prepared sketch book but was not allowed to do more than what was ordered. Al Saidi found the whole exercise very boring and repeated the phrase around the outline of his drawn feet: For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain, For M.F.Hussain… Finally, he was asked to come on the microphone and pronounce his name. He was not permitted to utter a single word except that. It was followed by the order: “Please Take Your Shoe and Go Back to your Place”.

For Al Saidi, the lack of freedom at the Vivian Sundram Documentary Interact Performance made the latter a clone of: ‘The US Artist Fantasy in Vivian Artistic Philosophy’, designed to rule the scenario in the exhibition. “I am a comedian target and was forced to join Action against another comedian, in taking side with self-censorship by removing my drawing from the sketchbook. Thus, I am always ready to give the M.F.Hussain case an embrace even though he enjoys security in the Arabia Filics (Dubai)and have “Al Dorado Life Style” as a refugee in exile while there is nobody to protect me or support me in my struggle for my survival as an artist in India, says the Iraqi artist. He further describes the Interactive Vivan Performance as “unfortunate” because it did not allow him to give a free opinion in support of Hussain.

Through the ADAM FEET, Al Saidi made the point that it was drawings and names of artists which lent a colour of sacredness to the Vivian Sketch Book. By the same logic, he questions what was being practiced at the Vivan Performance as it also tantamount to denying the artists the freedom and space to express in the way they wanted.

As there is no public explanation; I feel no safe to my work in his hand. Also, I do not know to which collector or European Museum our work he will sell to; which is different from drawing my feet on the gallery pavement; and I found it genuinely valid as no one can carry the pavement with him-only Saddam Hussain during the 1992 Kuwait invasion.

“I felt in peace in ADAM FEET performance because it symbolised origin of us all, and also because my performance was not motivated by any politico-capital interest”, says Al Saidi. A colonial mindset seems to lurk beneath the contemporary Indian art culture. He accuses the mindset to try to keep ‘others’ silent in. He wonders that such praxis are still in vogue despite the fact that all of us come into existence as a result of the multiple of intermixing among origins, ethnicities, races and classes.

Al Saidi said on the occasion: “I know what I am doing. I am not stealing or confusing art. Though my idiom is different, I also am protesting and in the process, I am not masking action or manipulating the motivation, to communicate a higher truth, regarding the conceptual bankruptcy of the political culture and ideology”. He is of the opinion that it is this Racist Culture which is instrumental in perpetuating bad living condition of many artists who are left on the margin of galleries as they do get hardly get someone to buy their artworks. Ironically, it coincides with the boom in the domestic market.

Al Saidi’s anger as symbolized in ADAM FEET heightens the sense of survival crisis which pervades the circle of non-elite artists. Is it sane in this backdrop to hold only the Political Right responsible for incidents which bear similarity to the Hussain episode? One should recall justice for the trauma; the fundamental purpose of ADAM FEET.

jenson's performance 30th march

we met in front of the akshardham temple, the famous religio-tourist site that dominates the land with its carefully manicured monstrosity. the site is uncer ecological and cultural dispute with issues of river bed development, displacement and ecological violation stopping us from celebrating the alleged beauty of the temple a the commonwealth games village self imposing itself nearby



about a kilometer away from the the temple we descended upon the edges of the farm lands





Jenson's performance involved acts of drawing ..digging sculpting arranging destroying...searching and burying...

the farmlands near akshardham falls right in the middle of our blindspot..a neglect that allows the state and the corporates to overtake these sites causing great cultural and ecological damage to the figure of an imagined city called delhi

also see http://ganjabengali.blogspot.com/2008/04/fields-off-highway-1pm30th-march.html