Coriolis Effect: Currents Across India and Africa
Khoj International Artists’ Association
Coriolis Effect: Currents across India and Africa
International Residency 1st – 31st August, 2015
KHOJ. (to) search, hunt, explore, discover, discern, seek, inquire, trace, track, quest, research, investigate.
Khoj began as a proposition: a space for artists, run by artists.
From its modest beginnings in 1997 as an annual workshop, Khoj has established itself as a not- for-profit, contemporary arts organisation based in Delhi which provides a financial, physical and intellectual space for artists through its various programs. It has built an international reputation as outstanding alternative arts incubation space. It plays a central role in the development of experimental, interdisciplinary, and critical contemporary art practice in India– constantly challenging the established thinking about art.
Through a variety of programmes including workshops, residencies, exhibitions, talks, and community art projects, Khoj has supported the experimentation of many leading Indian artists well before they went on to receive international acclaim. While catalysing a vibrant art-community in India, Khoj has also actively developed the South Asia Network for the Arts (SANA). Khoj has also hosted over 400 international artists from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Uganda, Kenya, Turkey, Pakistan, Japan, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Korea, UK, Germany, France, Mexico and the US.
With a focus on building such networks, developing alternative pedagogies, and learning through collaboration and exchange, Khoj programmes have created unconventional synapses between art and disciplines such as science, architecture and fashion. Khoj facilitates change by encouraging artists and audiences to engage with vital concerns such as ecology, sustainability and community participation. It is constantly expanding the understanding and development of cutting-edge contemporary art practice in India, thereby creating a legacy for the future.
About this Project
‘Coriolis Effect: Currents across India and Africa’, is a project which seeks to activate the social, economic and cultural relationship and historical exchange which exists between India and the continent of Africa. In part, the rationale behind Coriolis Effect is in response to Khoj’s immediate neighborhood of Khirkee Village Extension; a dense urban –village environment in New Delhi that has been home to a stream of immigrants from within the Indian Subcontinent, as well as migrants from countries such as Cameroon, Somali, Nigeria, Kenya, Afghanistan and Nepal, to name a few. This hotpot of cultural difference has long been a source of friction between residents, often bubbling into acts of discrimination based violence. This project has grown out of a series of encounters and conversations which took place in and around Khoj through 2014.
The project invites participants to unpack notions of geography, memory, cultural exchange as well as tension and fear of the ‘other’, through history. The Coriolis Effect will not only use the present context of 21st century migrations, but equally refer to various moments of exchange through history; from the recent past of the Non-Aligned movements in the 20th century, to the cultural relationship shared exchanged by Indians and Africans from the 1st century AD onwards.
Specific areas of interest for this project include ‘Identity’- whether informed through ideas of race, ethnicity and cultural difference; or informed through notions of ‘belonging’, within the changing context of what constitutes a nation, and what delineates a city, in today’s burgeoning landscape. Identity can also be construed through understanding of gendered and sexualized spaces, in particular, the presentation of ‘masculinity’ as a trope of fear and aggression in the context of racial difference. The project will also investigate the presence of ‘memory’, through a re-collection of this shared history, and remnants of this history in physical and intangible forms alike. A final point of departure for this project includes political imaginings, as informed through allegiances created in the late 20th century, following the period of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned period.
(Text by Sitara Chowfla)
Presence
Amshu Chukki
Chukki’s work looks at the speculated love story that took place in the 13th century between Razia Sultan, and Jamal ud din Yakut, an Abyssinian slave turned nobleman who rose to the ranks of the Delhi court. Yakut soon became a close advisor and was widely rumored in the court and amongst the nobles to be the queen's lover.
Through the medium of video, Chukki unpacks the notion of dilemma and how the idea of belonging and memory work in this context. The artist’s interest lies in the character of Jamaluddin Yakut, and the dilemma that he faces as a slave, a warrior, a lover and a noble in the court. “I want to construct fiction through a conversation between the two lovers and look at this dilemma that still exists in contemporary society amongst African Indian couples. By developing the idea of belonging through fiction it further allows the shedding of hierarchy between the two characters and of them in regard to history”.
At around the same time of the two lovers in the 13th century, the traveler Ibn Battuta travels from East Africa to India. His travels chart a physical compass that measure the scale and physicality of cultural difference and confronts this dilemma of identity. Chukki looks at Battuta’s journey and the existence of these two characters at the same time in history. Through the idea of the traveler he attempts to look at the notion of memory and remembering as a catalyst, and also seeks to examine how fictions of the ‘other’ and the notions of black masculinity are created through memory, remembrance, rumor and the act of chronicling.
Chukki’s work enters this historical jump; from13th century medieval India to the contemporary moment. This project observes the notion of dilemma, and its’ continued existence in belonging and memory when we look at the African identity.
(text by Amshu Chukki)
Amshu Chukki (b. 1991) lives and works in Baroda. Amshu Graduated with a BVA (Painting) in 2012 and an MVA (Painting) in 2014 from Fine Arts, M.S.University of Baroda. He has mainly been working with videos along with paintings, installations and photographic prints incorporating narrative structures of filmmaking. His major source of inspiration is cinema and the cinematic language, folklore and literary fiction. In his working process he tries to incorporate the characteristics and implications specifically related to the use of either film or video techniques and editing patterns or video montage along with literary narratives. He works with various sites and people, shoot videos and later edit it on editing software. The experience of making the videos is addressed in the paintings, prints and installations along with the video itself.
UNTITLED: Circle. Of desires deterred and of dreams deferred
(A Poetics of Precarious Navigations in Enigmatic Space).
Bernard Akoi Jackson
Untitled: [Re]-Social fabric: HerStory, HiStory, OurStories…
Bernard Akoi Jackson’s first point of entry is cloth/dress/adornment. “Cloth” is a complex entity. Fabrics, textiles and items of clothing always bear histories. Of origins, identities, traces of use, signs of wear-and-tear; bodily secretions and many more. Even before they are used, textiles, by the fact of their manufacture are very loaded with histories, markings; both for embellishment and identification. After cloths and clothes have outlived their use, they are discarded, donated or repurposed. Jackson is also interested in “cloth” because of certain historical acts, like the famous presentation of a hand-woven lace cloth to the Queen of England by Mahatma Gandhi and the long tradition of narrow loom Kente weaving in Ghana. The project borrows from the aesthetics of weaving, quilting, appliqué and tapestry making traditions to create individual and communal visual narratives. He has collected cloth and other items of clothing from many people, including co-participants of the residency. He also bought some cloth. Using various forming techniques (i.e.: stitching by hand, with sewing machines, gluing etc), Jackson has created a large ‘tapestry’ that embodies collective stories and imagined aspirations of the communities involved. This tapestry may be presented as a performable cloth, or as a hanging installation.
Untitled: …a waning moon’s walking through glitter into festering dusks and dawning futures…
True to the artists’ nebulous practice, all his projects remain works in progress and in flux, melding into each other, existing on their own or exiting the larger matrix and becoming new situations altogether.
The size, dimensions and scale is constantly variable and certain site-specific details are always introduced or omitted, to engage the varying contexts aptly. In these particular ‘walkings,’ Jackson has created fictive characters that momentarily occupy certain spaces. Here, the specific spaces are the Select City Mall, Khirki Village and INA Market. These fictive characters walk slowly within the designated spaces.
After the performances, a video documentation will be presented as a part of the installation. Three specially staged photographs of these characters, taken within the three different spatial contexts are presented.
Untitled: …slightly un-aligned, a little non-aligned, with a billowing line above…
In this work, Jackson is producing some "flimsy flags" (30) which will be juxtaposed by the projection of a stop-motion animation of the Indian flag in flight. The image presents a beautiful ambiguity. The flag becomes a dancing sculpture in space, billowing and singular in performance, whilst the other flags form an embodied chorus of diversity.
(text by Bernard Akoi – Jackson)
Bernard Akoi-Jackson (b. 1979). (MFA, Kumasi) is an Artist/Writer whose multi-disciplinary work becomes a project in continual metamorphosis. He interrogates hybrid post-colonial identities, through ephemeral, make-shift memorials and performative rituals of the mundane. He employs critical absurdity and moves between genres; dance, poetry, installation, photography and video, to confront the complexities of his specific cultural moment. In his work, ‘jest’ is as profound as ‘clout.’ A balanced dose of these become the crux. In a similar manner, his writing tracks the development of contemporary Ghanaian and African visual art and culture in a largely poetic, jovial, albeit sublime mode.
He has created multi-layered installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, performative situations, participatory ‘pseudo-rituals’ and developed post-conceptual praxis through the navigation of personal and collective history. One major intent is to question the ‘autonomous object,’ and its “genius” creator. Hybridity and collaboration become a reality in his work. Akoi-Jackson has written essays for exhibition catalogues with an interest in contemporary art in Ghana and beyond.
Across Oceans
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan
Dattatreyan’s ongoing work focuses on 20thand 21st century cultural and political connections that span Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean imaginaries. His two installation pieces on display at Khoj International Gallery cling to the notion that biography and history seep into one and other in intimate narratives we tell about our families, our journeys, and ourselves.
In his first installation Dattatreyan utilizes his father’s photo archive as a trace of India’s postcolonial relationship with Ethiopia and a recollection of his father’s 20th century aspirations as a representative of a newly birthed Indian nation-state. Embedded in these traces are Dattatreyan’s longing for Ethiopia, the land of his birth, and for Africa, whose cultural pulses he imbibed while growing up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s amongst children of the African Diaspora.
His second installation draws from over two years of ethnographic research and relationship building in Delhi’s pan-African enclaves. Dattatreyan captures his Somali friends’ remembrances of home, all framed in their ongoing relationship with Delhi and the Indian imaginary they have carried with them across oceans.
Dattatreyan would like to thank:
K.V. Dattatreyan
Nandukumar Dattatreyan
Young Hafes
Abdullah Idris
Abdul Sievo
Ola Jason
Tina Schouw
Malika Ndlovu
(text by Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan)
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan holds a joint PhD in anthropology and education from the University of Pennsylvania. His recent film, photo, and writing projects focus on urban change in Delhi, India from the perspective of low-caste and immigrant youth who live in the margins of the city's burgeoning economy. Dattatreyan's interest in urban change from the perspective of those who have historically been economically and socially disenfranchised stems from his work in arts education and non-profit management in the U.S. for over a decade prior to his doctoral studies. Working with youth of color in Washington D.C., San Francisco, and New York City, Dattatreyan developed a keen awareness around the kinds of issues and opportunities young people from communities on the edges of the American dream encounter as they grow up in cities that have been re-imagined and rebuilt to meet the new economic realities of a post-industrial age.
In the dark all cats are black
Juan Orrantia
Through photographs in urban villages and private spaces occupied by African migrants, in combination with appropriated images and other referents of historical moments, this work reflects on the idea of opacity in relation to African presences in New Delhi. This idea refers to the role of in/visibility in contemporary urban life, including the invisibility of histories that were once part of the imaginaries that moved postcolonial India. Through moments in time the images speak to the instability and fragility of dreams. Relying on the intrinsic ambiguity of the photographic medium, Orrantia takes this same ambiguity to question what we see and how we see the absent presences in the city.
(excerpt, In the dark all cats are black)
In the stories of movement that belong to the city’s own spirit one can feel the allure of unstable promises. Some of these are nothing more than leftovers of history, the clippings of postcolonial imagination that remain in their absence. Part of the Nehruvian model of modernity, Afro-Asian solidarity belonged to a futurist desire intended to redraft the nation and its cities.
But things don’t usually turn out to be as they are imagined. Postcolonial modernity and its ideals would be unraveled, dismembered, much like its futures.
This city is now filled with absent presences. Some new, some old. Inhabiting narrow lanes, stained walls, markets and dimly lit rooms they fuel desires, almost lustfully. They shift in meaning. They continuously attract and repel. Living between visibility and invisibility, refusing the grasp of representation, they are more comfortable in states of opacity than clarity.
Sometimes you spoke about them. And disregarded them at others. And sometimes they spoke back, reminding me of the unstable nature of the road taken.
(text by Juan Orrantia)
Juan Orrantia (b. Bogota, Colombia). Working in the documentary arts, Orrantia’s practice is based on the evocative possibilities of photography as a critical form of documentary. He also explores the medium in its relation to text, sound, ethnographic film and new media. Orrantia is interested in questions of memory, history, dislocation and time, through projects on the aftermath of violence (Colombia and Mozambique); postcolonial cities and nostalgia; autobiography and the Colombian cocaine trade; and more recently, the anti-colonial thinker Amilcar Cabral and his traces in Guinea-Bissau.
Awards include the Tierney Fellowship in Photography (2010) as well as various grants and residencies at research institutes, and has held solo exhibitions in Germany, Colombia, and South Africa, as well as participated in various group shows including the New York Photo Festival, Le Cube (Paris), Cape Town Month of Photography, Bonani Africa Festival of Photography, and Ethnographic Terminalia (New Orleans). Orrantia’s work has appeared in publications such as Sensate (A journal for experiments in critical media practice), Visual Anthropology Review, Iconos, and online platforms such as Foto8, Documentography, and F-Stop.
We Were / Are Here
Insurrections Ensemble
Tina Schouw, Malika Ndlovu and Priya Sen (with inputs from Sumangala Damodaran, Sabitha TP, Pritam Ghosal and Ahsan Ali)
Over four weeks Priya Sen, Tina Schouw and Malika Ndlovu from the Insurrections Ensemble, have engaged through creative collaborations and spontaneous conversations with Delhi-based artists, poets and musicians from the India-SA Insurrections Ensemble, fellow KHOJ residents, and members of the public. This engagement is reflected in the work presented here—poems, songs and narrative text, musical compositions, photographs, videos and audio recordings.
Our sites of intervention through music, word and song, have been this pop-up recording studio at KHOJ, and spaces in the city that remain hidden from the gaze of power and surveillance, by virtue of them being perhaps too “underground” or written off as “urban failures”. Some of these have included being at a hip-hop battle with 400 participants in Gurgaon, a collaboration with a hip hop MC from that encounter, recordings at a forest near a shrine in the middle of the city, and journeying on the Circular Rail that runs through the centre of the city and yet remains unseen and unheard in city narratives. Being within these spaces with colliding as well as individual practices has produced a shared body of material that we are presenting in the studio space, accompanied by a live performance with fellow Insurrections Ensemble members - Sumangala Damodaran, Ahsan Ali, and Sabitha Satchi.