Living In A Metaphor

Mentor : Anuj Daga

‘Living in a Metaphor’ was a five-week course on curatorial and exhibitory practices that aims for its participants to design their own learning trajectories and demonstrate them as potential manifestations of space. This course considers the environment of the exhibition as a dialectic relationship between the process of space making and knowledge making. The curatorial liberty allowed us to dive into collecting, constellating and articulating their point of entry within a broader provocative frame and make sense of the subject at hand through their own uncertainties and understanding. Through such a methodology, the course aimed at challenging existing institutional structures of knowledge production and pedagogy. It allows the mixing of forms, methods and modes while demanding the synthesis of several communication skills, graphics, information, and interior design. The purpose of this endeavour is to lead the student into the “green room” of the institution and challenge established pedagogical processes towards finding ways to take pleasure in educational pursuits. The course shall discuss methods and means of considering exhibition as not only the space of knowledge but also uncovering and constructing space as knowledge.

Week 1: Introduction to thematic and premise of the course

Week 2: Research and Reading + Site Identification

Week 3: Exhibition Planning: Collection of Works + Layout Design

Week 4 & 5: Execution and Installation

Readings

CURATORIAL CULTURES: CONSIDERING DYNAMIC CURATORIAL PRACTICE, BY KAREN GASKILL

In this essay the writer has described the evolution of an exhibition and the space of curation in a very comprehensive manner. A timeline of its evolution, how the exhibitory space evolved from being in a dusty museum to playing a crucial role in modern art is mentioned in this essay. The writer in this essay says that the practice of curating is live and temporal and is responsible for conjuring both a synergy and a dynamic that operates across a multitude of levels. Furthermore she says, Curation is a rapidly growing practice and discourse that is fundamentally shifting the ways in which we view and receive art.

She considers the curatorial role as that of an active practitioner, positioning it at a point of perspective. Traditionally the curatorial role was to collect, archive and preserve works of art, and was seen as separate from its variable display. According to her the practice of curation is shifting the ways in which we perceive art. Much of this shift has been influenced by the works being curated, and with a growing body of works being process-led as opposed to object-based; the practice of curation has had to evolve accordingly. This evolution also encompasses the use of alternative exhibition spaces, a movement away from white-walled galleries, and the historic agendas these imply.

Later the writer elucidates the ascendancy of the curatorial criticism in the 1960’s, giving rise to critiquing the space of curation other than the objects of art. Other than the curatorial criticism, there was an ascendancy of curatorial gesture too, which further gave rise to debates, critique and discussions regarding the curation of an exhibition space.

The importance of the preservation of art becoming essential as the focus of the curatorial role evolved is one of the key topics opened up in this essay. The necessity to archive digital and ephemeral works are mostly reliant on particular softwares and hardwares. But these associative technologies are slowly becoming obsolete. Hence collecting and preserving associative technologies is equally as important as collecting and preserving the works of art. Like for example, media art, where the necessity to archive digital and often ephemeral works is completely reliant on the survival of particular software and hardware. Therefore, as the writer mentioned in the essay “to preserve the work, the associative technology must also be collected and conserved by the museum or gallery. The practice of archiving contemporary artworks has broadened relatively with the expansion of practices, and the responsibility of ensuring the future presentation of many works is thus massively reliant on the preservation of increasingly obsolete technical platforms.”

Later the writer talks about the site and place in which the exhibition is located. She explains how the exhibition space is not a collection of objects of art, but a space where there is convergence of artwork, site and audience. The writer also points out the important relationship between the exhibition space and the audience.

Curation enables the space of exhibition to open up new possibilities for dialogue and exchange. According to her, the curatorial process also takes into account the relationship between site and artwork, and therefore is much more reliant on the audience to acknowledge and legitimize the connections made between the two. By doing this the audience can step outside their predefined role as a viewer and become collaborators or authors.

The increased integration of media-related artworks into mainstream art agendas has contributed to this development of the curatorial role, as it has for collectors, gallerists and archivists. Although it can be argued that performative and interactive works have been curated using traditional methods for a long time now, it is really media-practices that are demanding an alternative perspective. The writer concludes the essay by saying how responsive methods and approaches are called for when curating media-artworks, and how they shift the curatorial role to that of an active practitioner.

Exhibition Review

MEERA MUKHERJEE: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARUN GANGULY

Curated by Adip Dutta and Tapati Guha-Thakurta Venue: Project 88, Colaba Written By : Avi Mendpara, Devvratsingh Chauhan, Vijay Chavan.

The exhibition titled ‘Meera Mukherjee: Photographs by Arun Ganguly’ at Project 88 in Colaba, Mumbai documents the last two decades of Mukherjee’s life (1978-98) captured through the lens of photographer and friend Arun Ganguly. It was on display from 17th August – 10th September 2022. The exhibition has been curated by art historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta and artist Adip Dutta. Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998) was an Indian sculptor known for bringing modernity to ancient Bengali sculpting. She used innovative bronze casting techniques and ‘Dhokra’ method using lost wax casting. She was a sculptor, feminist, champion of community art. The exhibition marks the centenary anniversary of the artist.

Arun Ganguly started photographing and documenting Meera at work (while sculpting, beginning in 1978 and later resuming in the 1990’s). Ganguly says “Meera di lived very near my home but we did not know each other. We were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. I was asked to take some color transparency photographs of her for her professional use. However, I realized that color transparency in those days did not stay for long and her work definitely deserved to be documented. That is why I used a parallel camera and clicked black-and-white photographs, too. These photographs remained with me. After this, my relationship with her turned into that of an elder sister and brother.”

The main focus of the exhibition while curating was the life of Meera Mukherjee with a special projection of her work process, especially her participation in metal casting. She started by exploring indigenous forms and techniques of metal casting in looking for the archaic format.

At the center of these photographs is the theme of work and labor – and the intricacies and enormity of both in Meera Mukherjee’s techniques of making sculptures in the cire perdue (lost wax) metal-casting technique. Her indebtedness to the method learnt in Bastar flowed over to the community she lived and worked with in Elachi, on the outskirts of Kolkata, where she seasonally carried out the collective work of casting. Redefining what it meant to be an artisan cum artist, she recognized the critical role of collective work and bodily labor in the particular form of art-making to which she dedicated her life and being.

The exhibition has been distinctly divided into a few phases. From introducing the artist and her style of work to some of her famous sculptures, from the detailed visual representation of the process of metal casting to the story of how she practiced community art, from her personal life and relationships to her last work of art — everything finds place in extensive detail. The curation provides a space for the new generation to go through and appreciate the work of this woman sculptor who broke all social norms and established herself through her work. Sculpting has been an art form popularly associated with male artists. When we think of women in art, one often associates them with painting or craft, which are believed to be more mellow and apt for their ‘nimble‘ fingers. Sculpting, on the other hand, is often perceived as a more masculine art form. Sculptures of deities or other objects for religious purposes are often made keeping in mind notions of purity and rituals, which conveniently exclude women from participating in the process. These social taboos and obstacles were broken by Meera Mukherjee in her art forms.

Her sculptures are inspired by the mundane tasks carried out daily. Mukherjee’s work is not just a celebration of humanism but also a yearning to reach beyond the trivialities of everyday living and embracing freedom.

The environment of the exhibition was created such that it becomes easier for the viewer to read and go through the documentation peacefully. This was made possible by the spatial layout of the exhibition. For example, the viewer was compelled to go nearer to read the text of the documentation because the size of the placard was not big enough to be read from a certain distance; and hence coercing the viewers to read it carefully whilst also creating a solid engagement with the documentation.

Exhibition Curated

TYPEWALK

‘Typewalk’ takes one on a walk through the typographies that shape our urban consciousness. Precisely, looking at typography through the lens of everyday objects. These objects have gained cultural importance over time through our associations with texts and contexts that have subconsciously sunk within us. These everyday objects are defamiliarised from their context to put emphasis on the typeface and make them visible through the walk. Typography refers to the arrangement and design of alphabets and letters in a manner that makes the text readable or aids in conveying a particular emotion through the text. Text is omnipresent in our surroundings, but we often overlook its details and effect on our daily lives. Walking is a metaphor used for a slower, more contemplative way of doing a thing one takes for granted. Typography walk here suggests not just seeing but observing the world through its details in a manner in which it is visualizing the invisible.

Contemporary typographers have designed the ‘need for the hour’ texts in terms of the changing socio-political contexts. Meta frameworks have devised new technologies to generate font systems designed in accordance with the transient nature of time, for eg. Seven-segment display and Dot matrix types. The broader idea emerging out of this curation is also about the ‘state identity’ of discipline, the central idea of the power of governance, and the ‘private identity of the contemporary. This exhibition is a walk across time and space of typography which traverses one to spaces in the city. The space of the exhibition, the staircase, like a ribbon unfolds itself into a continuum escort for the walk. ‘Typewalk’ is an attempt to make people more conscious about catching sight of the typographies in their everyday lives and unveiling their meaning by placing them in their context.