Beyond frontiers, the artists are working together, sometimes without realizing it, on the thousand faces of a single work which will rise up to confront the totalitarian creation – Albert Camus
Overview
South Asia is land of great beauty, opportunities, natural & cultural diversity. Its a land of varied beliefs & practices in culture, literature, religious life and identities ; which have co existed and negotiated their space through dialogues. South Asia is not a paradigm but a ‘discursive formation’, with its remarkable capacity of ‘giving birth simultaneously to mutually exclusive objects, without having to modify itself.”
The region is a also a hotbed for conflicts and more often than not arising out of vortex of political ambition of superpowers and exploitation of fissure lines which are intrinsically present in context of religion and ethnicity, leveraging the poor economic conditions. South Asia is in the current era of corporatization, has been affected by an eugenic drive to suitably create condition for the area as a potential market and also a site for cheap production of goods & services which threatens to submerge spaces, identities & communities into procrustean polarities. Fascism has been on the rise, “dialogue has been replaced by polemics” in all sphere and drive towards totalitarianism is palpable. The voice of art has been throttled, manipulated & patronized to voice the dubious ideologies, as ‘intimidation’ is the the order which threatens to transform ‘humanity into ‘silhouettes’.
Yet there have been voices which have existed and them too sometimes appropriated by ideology. Art has the responsibility of providing a bulwark against the rampaging madness of rationalities & its appropriation of technologies which are destructive to the ecology and peaceful co- existence. It is art which can make sense and harmonize the diverse condition of the South Asian region, for are artists ‘forced to be refractory’. throwing up a myriad possibilities of co -existence & technologies for a sustainable future.
The South Asian entity is also but a “social relation among people mediated by images”. In forging this social relation is a journey of wading through reality towards a future aesthetics, which can only emerge from the tools and resources available and how it flows through or around various obstacles which are both ‘real & ‘unreal’. The process of negotiating and renegotiating is hence the very essence of emergence of new possibilities.
It is with the idea of connecting the artists of the South Asia region, in spite of the differences and lack of resources in order to find ways to be sustainable in their practices. In this we would like The South Asian Fringe to provide new artists to showcase their work, which the frames of ‘mainstream’, would find meaningless to consider, to bring them in focus ; in touch with global practices, provide them with access to information & tools and resources, whereby they can express freely. We will also create the platform for visibility and networking which will help the artists in their future endeavors. We plan to take the festival to The South Asian diaspora all over the world.
The South Asian Fringe explores the following :
South Asian spaces
We would like to explore and bring to focus spaces within South Asia through arts. In this we will climb the mountains, meander through bylanes and soak in the coasts. Spaces which seek transcendence and galvanizes our attention to their vulnerability in the face of the changing ecology. We hope that our festivals will discover new venues and sites and lead to allow an insight and transform the spaces into sites of exploration of possibilities and creativity, while at the same time reiterate their unique situation in our world and hence our responsibilities towards them as fellow humans.
South Asian identity & communities
In the contemporary, in the era of globalization, rooted as we are in traditions with its many hues, when fundamentalism seeks to herd us into a paradigm of isolation ; we struggle to shed this past and paradigm and seek not a void, an anarchy – but to state consciously our myriad identities. The Fringe brings us closer to the world and we co create, dance, sing, recite, tell our stories and feel renewed. It is bring into focus communities who are being threatened to oblivion, for art and artists to be in solidarity with them to give them a new voice in this crazy world.
Sudipta Dawn
Parnab Mukherjee on The South Asian Fringe
In 1958, Harold Pinter wrote: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot.
As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”
With myriad use of body, pitch, off-bass voice, installation, puppetry and body-as-a-live sculpture, theatre, butoh, video installation montages, the idea of this fringe is specifically designed for an interactive ambiance with the audience. The audience here is a reference point to bounce the script. What emerges is a powerful pastiche of events lined up to push the envelope of both the manual and digital.
Why another fringe?
It is about exploitation of a system. But more than that the rampant globalisation of a set of outmoded stereotypes.
Into that realm of thinking lies the true conscience of our social questioning.The fringe will seek to collect, curators and issue-based activists. and create a tapestry of immersive experiences.To build bridges with the community and urge them to create relevant art interventions.
Kicking off with Dharamshala, South Asian Fringe will be an unique show that looks at the both the physical and the metaphorical body.
To quote Jean Baudrillard:;The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication — this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response. … Now, the totality of the existing architecture of the media founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevent response, making all processes of exchange impossible…”
Be there to see the exchange process of making, unmaking and becoming.
COMPRISING OF a QUARTET
a: Mountain Fringe (South Asian Mountain Fringe)
b: Coast Fringe (South Asian Coast Fringe)
c: Bylane Fringe (South Asian Bylane Fringe)
d: Community Fringe (South Asian Community Fringe
The Mountain India Edition
Resilience : to stand in the path of lightning
Resilience : to walk when darkness falls at noon
Resilience : to grind yourself fine in the turning mill
Resilience will come to you
Lal Ded
We dedicate the Mountain India Edition of The South Asian Fringe Lal Ded, who is a lived and in Kashmir in the 14th century, was a mystic. Drawing inspiration from her life and resilience in belief in the face of unbelievable odds and hence paving the way for future thinkers, mystics and poets to seek salvation from the oppressive conditions, we seek to give voice to this edition. The uttering of Lal Ded stands resolute much like the mountains through centuries. Her ways were that of compete devotion to the seeker of knowledge and aesthetics and may say she was a member of the Tantric underground.
We climb to the mountains of Dharmasala to seek this spirit of resilience to rediscover our inner self and fill the spaces with new forms of artistic expressions, which embody the spirit of resilience against the vicissitudes of art & the artist, and here we celebrate at The Mountain India Edition, this resilience of the artist.
Although the festival steers clear from any ideological affinities, nor influence the choice of the artist’s work, which have now crystallized and confirmed in the later part of this page, yet i feel this serendipitous revelations of Lal Ded’s uttering as translated by Ranjit Hoskote at this moment when the festival was been conceived, impels me to allude to a commentary which is on the situation emerging and prevailing during the course of 20 years, which is the time it took him to complete the translations. I think it reflect our fears and aspiration in the present too.
To quote Rankit Hoskote
” The duration of my apprenticeship to Lalla has been mapped across the rise of aggressive Hindi majoritarianism that threatened the core value of the Indian Republic; and equally, the consolidation of a global Islamism, flying under the banner of Salafism or Jihad, that is intolerant of difference. These two movements mirror one another in their desire to replace an actual diversity of cultural and philosophical expressions with an imposed singularity of belief, and are most dangerous to Hindusim and Islam, the religions whose interests they claim to respectively to represent. My political purpose in undertaking this translation is to make a small intervention in the debate provoked by the contention of these rival forms of politicized religiosity in India… . In an epoch dominated by majoritariansim, sectarian intolerance and the deployment of faith as a political instrument, Lalla asserts the duty of critical intelligence, to be exercised alongside the right of belief.”
Indeed this critical intelligence is even more required today as we confront not only the rise of Islamisim, Hindu majotitatairism and indeed now we see the rise of jingoism in the West, which is threatening to all come together to justify the rise and rise of fundamentalism & orthodoxy against the more liberal values which seek advancement of thought and aesthetics. Also equally or more dangerous and linked is the the swelling of an information age which is submerging the faculties of critical intelligence and in its stead with the obtrusiveness of ready made solutions for physiological, emotional and philosophical needs.
And hence on to the Festival now :
The Mountain India Edition will be held at multiple venues – indoors & outdoor at the Jogibara Village, Mcleodganj, Dharmasla, Himachal Pradesh India. The dates are May 5-7, 2017.
Artists from South Asia, Europe and South America will be participating at this festival. The events lined by would include – theatre, dance, performances, performance art, poetry, video art, sound art & music.
The Mountain India Edition of The South Asian Fringe has been bought to you by Culture Monks in collaboration with Subbody Butoh School, Mud House, Francesca Fini Performance Art India, Robert Cahen, W- OW (We are one world) Project, Nezaket Ekici, Marcus Shahar, Maham Suhail & several other artists from throughout the world.
The Spaces
Retreating into the cusps of the Himalayas, these spaces are the most beautiful you will ever find to express yourself, meditate on your art and experience new forms & make new friends.
We use open spaces, indoor studios, village huts as the venues for our performances & workshops.
Program List
Segment : Video Art
# International Video Art Xibition
May 5- 7, 2017 | 3 pm – 10 pm
Details
Below the are details of the artists, their statements and the videos which will be screened.
Artist : Robert Cahen
Bio & Curatorial Statement
Robert Cahen is one of the most important and internationally renowned artists in the realm of experimental video. Right from the early 1970s, he was among the first Europeans to tackle the technology of electronic imagery and to employ new machines, testing their effects and attempting, like a pioneer, to extract their fullest expressive potential.
As a musician who adopts a poetic approach to images, Cahen is primarily inspired by the image itself and what it evokes. That constitutes the key visual core of the work of this artist who still remains hard to classify. Yet Cahen’s overall oeuvre also engages with and recasts stereotyped genres like documentary, fiction, and news reports, along with more recent, less traditional genres like dance videos.
Sandra Lischi, 1997, Edizioni ETS, Pisa, Italy.
Videos
Voyage d’Hiver (Winter Travel)
From “that was” to “have we gone?” “Antarctica approached, observed, scrutinized, analyzed, displaced. Questions about the reading of the landscape, the reading of movement: a journey of memory, in slow motion, like “to have time to know finally” (Roland Barthes).
It was in post-production that the imagination of the place came to us, the expected winter white missing, we were in full southern summer and it was necessary to cover artificial ice, digital, forms, geological structures, this immensity. In 1992, I wrote about this, “to imagine these white places, I think I can announce that my work will be, to a certain extent, confronted with a minimalism of color.
I shall therefore seek, in accordance with this minimalism, from white to blue white, in the light of day rising, or in that diffracted from the clouds, to rhythm my work of shooting, and to organize as a painter prepares his color. (Robert Cahen, Revue Turbulences Video n ° 34, January 2002)
Le cercle (The circle)
The Svalbard, the archipelago of the Arctic North, marks the end of our sensitive world: beyond that, the frozen expanse , Uniforms, abstract The blue of Robert Cahen’s film, which is the image of cold and loneliness, the slowness of the landscapes to which birds fly and the movement of appropriately equipped men to confront the Mysteries of this unique land, are in harmony with its bewildering desolation.Svalbard imposes, to whom it traverses, its law, which is that of the confines: to explore and to know them, to agree with them. (Daniel Baillon)
Sanaa, passages en noir (Sanaa, passages in black)
The video was filmed in Sana’a, capital of Yemen, where women veiled in black go through a narrow alley. The fleeting but repetitive aspect of the reworked image gives the video a hypnotic character that reinforces the choice of music: an excerpt from Jean-Sébastien Bach’s Passion according to St John. Beyond the work on The notion of passage, the artist stages an unexpected exchange between two cultures.
Plus loin que la nuit) (Farther than night)
Hanoi 2004, a woman wears her hair in the night, a train passes between houses, a crowd presses, jostles and works, a forgotten child waits.
It is above all a question of transport, portering, traveling. Bikes, packages, trucks jostle in the image, cross it, pass it. A train like a ghost which seems never to arrive at some station in Hanoi, which perforates, absorbs, swallows an overpopulated and confined urban space; It is an emblem of the daily tension and the usual inattention of the people in front of an order of things that they rub shoulders since their night of time.
Nothing of ethnological or sociological obviously in this short film. The relation to individuals, faces and looks can not be established.
That after having captured the permanent move of the anonymous crowd that crosses a superb screen.
And it is in fact like an interior, memorable, timeless journey which assigns to images and sounds no immediate relation to meaning, to continuity, to rationality, which sometimes demands that movements slow down, that another Horizon appears – this mountain planted in the sea that suggests another enigmatic immensity -, that night gives way to the day, that night comes back, that black and white draws the cinematic impression towards the photographic framing.
“Farther than the night” ends on the face of a little isolated girl that seems a little lost in the urban agitation. He speaks against the feeling that a city will always escape us as it even seems absent from this little girl.
This film, at bottom, does not tell anything else and it is already huge: it is the reverse of a visit, the opposite of a documentary approach, its denial, a proof that knowledge, even recognition , Exist only on the surface, a little vainly, when experience doubles the sensation and irremediable strangeness of the world do not precede them.
Curator : Francesca Fini
Bio & Curatorial Statement
Francesca Fini is an artist working with new media, experimental cinema and performance art. With in-depth training as a digital artist and filmmaker, she has worked for 15 years in the field of TV production.
She says, “I am basically a performer. The action of a body, generally mine, in space and time is essential in my work. My videos and my tangible works are the chapters of a never-ending story of which I am the protagonist.
My body, the ship on which I make this long exploration, has always been a battlefield. Former anorexic, eternal feminist, still and always a lone wolf in search of the moon between the branches of the trees.
Recently I am interested in the creation of surrealistic and site-specific performance-based art films. They are medium-length or long-feature films that try to interpret the place in which they are conceived and produced – indeed its “genius loci” – through a very hybrid and experimental language that includes video performance, videoart, participatory symbolic actions, documentarism and “situationism” in the form of artistic video guerrilla. All these works always begin with a deep preliminary research on local culture and history, possible locations for filming, the symbols, objects and significant materials to be used in the actions, the human resources to be involved from the community: performers, actors, local professionals.”
ITALIAN WAVE : a selection of video works from Italy curated by Francesca Fini
My work as a videoartist has allowed me to know over the years, through festivals and exhibitions – in Italy but especially abroad – many Italian artists with whom I share materials, suggestions, methods and destinies. Recurring names that I often find next to mine in exhibition catalogs, Facebook events and press-releases. People that I meet for the first time – as it happened even too often – on the other side of the world. Then I smile and feel a sense of familiarity and respect; here is someone like me who carries on her/his work with absolute stubbornness, often against everyone and everything.
The videos that I have chosen for this Italian selection within Momentum Festival in Kolkata, are the works of the most interesting Italian artists that I have known over the years. These videos tell – with different languages ranging from video performance to 3d animation – the infinite possible ways to be alive in this battered world, to renegotiate our relationship with the others, with our bodies, with the landscape, with that sense of loneliness and separation which often comes from the constant questioning we share in Art.
Italian Wave program – in order of appearance :
Francesca Romana Pinzari / I ain’t superstitious
A lonely bride walks through an empty church. None is walking with her and none is waiting forher. The pavement is made of mirrors that she crashes under her hills at every step. Italy is a very superstitious country, actions like crashing mirrors and get dressed as a bride not on your wedding day is bad luck. The lonely bride walks over traditions and superstitions and crash them under her shoes, by doing that she crashes her own identity by crashing her own image inside the mirror.
Elisabetta Di Sopra / Legami
A heart becomes symbolic place of emotions. Pierced by a red thread it represents all ties. We baste it with the people we love. Every time is an attack to the heart; love is unbreakable from suffering and the human condition to be vulnerable, prevents us from separating them.
Eleonora Manca / Reverse Metamorphosis
The suggestion given by the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, potentially immortal (it is reported to have a “reverse metamorphosis”, as it is able to revert to the stage of sea anemone, reliving backwards each stage of its metamorphosis, to develop again into jellyfish) was here chosen in order to highlight the life cycle of every being. At the same time, it supports a sort of “yearning” for what we were about to meet in our “journey”. Thus, a path of metamorphosis, into the heart of the energy of what we were going to “become”.
Alessandro Amaducci / I Am Your Database
You have only one life. In the videogame of life the final battle has begun, and the winner is already decided. Database of life, database of death.
Igor Imhoff / Kurgan
The meaning of kurgan is grave. In fact, here reigns feeling like a gravestone in a Scene deliberately hyper-realistic, made with a technique in 3D. In this context materialize the characters, ghosts, or rather of simulacra, who immediately opposed in a fight to the last ‘particle.
Gianluca Abbate / Panorama
Panorama is the first chapter of a trilogy on the city. The video is a review on a polis that stretches away over an infinite global space with no more uninhabited places nor frontiers where we can take refuge. In this landscape we cannot see any way of readmission for those who have once been excluded, and this recalls imaginary worlds in search of a balance.
Chiara Mu / Decresce (Decrease)
Working around the concept of the Degrowth, as expressed by the economist S. Latouche, I made the point to consider how fruitful it might be investing our time into the oneiric state, instead of pushing each other into the inescapable spinning wheels of the super production, shamefully required today by the ruling capitalist system.
Debora Vrizzi / Frame Line
Frame line is a space between two frames, a line separating feelings from rationality, it represents the empty and still space of waiting. By revisiting Penelope’s myth, I want to underline the conceptual and physical density of emotions, the turmoil caused by a failure. Penelope weaves her hair like the spider its own net; the wind, now melting into the water, moves her dress in a seducing dance for the emptiness.
Curator : Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Bio & Curatorial Statement
The W:OW Project – We Are One World was launched 2017 as a media art project directed and curated by Agricola de Cologne to be realized in an exchange between virtual and physical space (online/offline) – the Global and the Local, dealing with the most essential question of human existence, eg. the survival of the human species on planet EARTH. The project is covering a wide range of digital artistic media (moving, interactive and static images, and non-visual media like soundart) to be released in different presentation formats during a period of several years – the online/offline W:OW project core, the travelling W:OW Art Film & Video Festival and the virtual and physical W:OW exhibition in different constellations (digital & analogue media).
W:OW – We Are One World – that‘s a statement of self-confidence, a real existing positive value and philosophical knowledge, however, an Utopia only, but no real existing practice. As a topic, it is therefore not reduced to some essential issues like ecology, biodiversity or sustainability but the whole bandwidth of issues based on compliance with human rights, mutual respect, equal rights, equal access to education and equal chances for all, the freedom of movement, freedom of the word, art and sciences which however are guaranteed just by a few democratic constitutions, but practiced in real even on a more marginal scale.
If we are truly one world, then whom does it belong to? Governments? States? Corporations, industrial companies, banks? Individuals? Or probably the citizens of the states, the inhabitants of the earth, that is, mankind? Or does it belong simply to life, and it is mankind as the only intelligent structure being able to take its responsibility for protecting the entire biological life in all its facets against any exploitation and misuse at the expenses of the Whole, no matter what biological system it is, whether the human, animal or plant life, the rainforest or the deep sea, or the meadows and streams before our own doorstep.
Without supranational administrative structures which would have the power to set through these fundamental rights for all inhabitants on Earth and solve the global threats, without the knowledge, that each individual on Earth has to take its individual responsibility for the Whole on a local scale, it will be a very long, probably too long way to overcome all the manifold threats preventing that the Utopia may come true – nearly all of them are –human made – that’s also the basic keyword: just to name some threats – the exploitation of the natural resources to the short notice profit of just a few globally acting corporations destroying the natural environment sustainably– the global warming and the climate change as a result of this misuse taking a dramatic impact on the environment and the nature as the living habitat enforcing people to migrate, threatening animals, plants and the biological systems with extinct, making the resources of fresh water shrink on all continents which has the huge potential for military conflicts in future , the military conflicts of the Present to the benefit of some totalitarian regional powers like in Middle East, Africa or Ukraine, and the overwhelming globalization as a result of the rapid development of new technologies, making people anxious they might loose their identity and privileges, and populist political movements try to manipulate and misuse the emotional uncertainty of these people and destroy all the real civilizational achievements made during the past decades and centuries, by reviving most destructive ancient nationalistic, extremist, fascist and even terrorist ideologies which have the potential to catapult the human civilization back on an pre-industrial stone-age like state, while the true problems of global and local nature leave, however, unrestrained escalating.
Based on the two maxims „We Are One World“ and „The Global meets the Local“, referring to the biggest and the smallest nucleus alike – the planet as a whole and the smaller geographic and social unities like the continents, regions, country, town, village, community , tribe or family or nature as a biological living habitat – each one representing a cosmos of its own: the smaller the unity, the more people feel emotionally affected being willing to take personal responsibility, the bigger the unity, the more the common world and taking responsibility for it becomes an Utopia.
The dynamically structured W:OW Project has to be considered as such a sample cosmos, a progressive and experimental common world on a small scale in which the participating instances (artists, curators, etc) are taking a particular responsibility for the “Whole”, as well as for each other. In this way The W:OW Project is representing for them the platform for approaching the Utopia by developing concepts, asking questions and giving answers through the creative works to be incorporated.
As a global networking project between artvideoKOELN & The New Museum of Networked Art and associated networking partners, „The W:OW Project“ is inviting cultural activists like artists and curators from all over the world working in different disciplines to reflect (critically) Present and Future of our planet as the place where life as such, the amazing diversity of a magnificent nature and the human species had the chance to arise with all the civilisatory achievements based on humanity, empathy and creativity, expressed for instance, in art, the sciences and a free and open society.
CologneOFF 2017 India II
WOW.03 / India
W:OW Art Film & Video Festival
(We Are One World // Art Film & Video Festival)
We Will Fail :curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Videos
Olga Ozieranska (Poland) – We will fail, 2015
The video is about a relation between girl and boy living in the same flat, but different rooms. They don’t know anything about each other. Their rooms are symbols of different realities. Strange things begin to happen in the flat. When the boy is out the girl sneaks into his room and discovers this secret.
Olga Ozierańska was born in Poland, in 1986. She is a photographer, film director and editor. Olga received her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Art in Poznan in 2011. She also studied in Spain and received a grant at Central Saint Martins in London. In 2011-13 was working with artistic group OKO.
Her works have been exhibited in Holland,Germany, Spain, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania and Poland.
Ninfa Sánchez & Karen Vilchis (Mexico) – Absence – Breve Ausencia, 2014
A man trapped in a memory.
Francois Knoetze (South Africa) – CAPE MONGO – PAPER, 2015
Born in Cape Town, 1989, Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, sculptor and filmmaker. He holds a BA Fine Arts degree from Rhodes University and an MFA in Fine Arts degree from Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT.
In 2012 Knoetze featured as one of Art South Africa magazine’s ‘Bright Young Things’ and was recently selected as one of Mail & Guardian’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’ of 2015. Knoetze’s work incorporates video, performance and sculpture, as he retraces the life cycles of discarded objects and explores junctures between material and social histories. In his Mongo* sculptural suits, the synthetic is welded to the human – bringing focus to the objectification of persons, through the personification of objects.
His most recent work, Cape Mongo, formed part of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival Main Programme in 2015. He has participated in group exhibitions, such as U/Tropia at the Wiener Festwochen in Germany (2015), Slow Violence at the University Stellenbosch Art Gallery (2015) and Designing Futures at the Lagos Photo Festival (2015). His work has also been shown at a number of local and international film festivals, including the 17th Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema, Artvideo Koeln: Audiovisual Experiences in Cologne (2015), Infecting The City Public Art Festival in Cape Town (2015), Usurp Zone5 Film Festival at the Usurp Art Gallery & Studio in London (2015), the FILMIDEO International Film Festival at the Index Art Center in Newark, New Jersey (2015) and OK.Video Film Festival in Indonesia (2015).
Cape Mongo follows a number of characters as they journey through the city of Cape Town. Each Mongo character is made from the city’s discarded waste –mythical ‘trash creatures’ which have emerged from the growing dumps of consumer culture. In the film s, the creatures revisit the spaces of their imagined pasts –the locations associated with their material existence and the constitution of their social relations – as if walking against the consumer -driven currents of city. The film following the Paper character provides an account of CapeTown’s current housing crisis and failure to address the deeply entrenched racially and spatially defined economic disparities of the past. I have also explored notions of home by interrogating my experience of belonging in the city as something which is mediated by power structures produced through the dispossession and alienation of others.
Mongo n. slang. object thrown away and then recovered.
Ausin Sainz (Spain) – 3 2, 1 Liberty, 2015
“The social conditions to which we are subjected by the system, from the moment we are born and until our death, are important enough that they go unnoticed. I denounce the irregular by resorting to the weapons I have, the work of art. With a figurative treatment, endowed with a certain artifice and contemporaneity, I argue each of my works.
From the subtle and symbolic to the brash and violent realism, I conceive the subjects with which I work with great respect. Developing projects from a research perspective, understanding the creation process as part of an act of communication relevant and necessary for a better knowledge about the complex society in which we live and the changes to which it is subjected.
I present a critical reflection on the values established by today’s society, on the quest for success at any price, for rejection of failure, for ugliness, for rarity, for the need to always be original but never different, globalization, Consumerism and our accelerated pace of life.
I conceive the world as a theater in which humanity is subdued and the only way to escape is death. But that death, which may well be emotional, social, or physical, is cushioned by romanticism, the beauty of the context or by the symbology (in many cases religious) that diminishes the desolation of the fact itself and endows meaning with the composition Ending showing feelings like pain, guilt or loneliness. My life, my experiences and those of my surroundings are the source of inspiration. I try to make a social complaint of everything that in my opinion is subject to modify.
I look for timelessness and a lack of localization , Based on neutral funds, in order to achieve maximum generality. The models used are always the same, my sister for the female figures and mine for the masculine, focusing even more on established ideas.
The hardness of the treated subject contrasts with the beauty of the result. Through this beauty I capture the attention of the viewer. Being in the room means participating directly or indirectly in the subject matter. The floor and walls carry joint information. The visitor steps on the work since the ground is worked with adhesive forms. In many works he is asked to participate directly, This is how we can bring our world into this world.”
Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 20,968 deadly terrorist attacks since 9/11. When and where will be next?
Gabriele Stellbaum (Deutschland) – “ill-timed moments”
Gabriele Stellbaum was born in Berlin, Germany. She exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Europe and the U.S. Her video work is in public and private collections in the US and abroad. Her video work has recently been reviewed at Artnet.com and Director’s Lounge. Stellbaum is director, producer, script writer and actor for her video works.
“ill-timed moments” captures a short episode in the life of a middle aged woman brewing coffee in a her tiny kitchen. A small but unexpected incident leads to an intense liberating reaction. One by one she is destroying her old tableware. With an enormous focus she is taking herself out on the broken dishes, stamping them to small pieces with her feet. Her agitated clean-up action ends with smashing her head into the kitchen cupboards. The melodic sounds of her performance play a crucial role in this video.
Francesca Lolli (Italy) – The last day of humanity , 2014
The last day of humanity is a metaphor about the extinction of the human race, which will happen when the last woman on heart will be buried at the hand of men.
Art Is Indivisible
Videos
Anca Bucur (Romania) – The confession of an aphasic writer, 2014
The confession of an aphasic writer is a videopoem based on the main statements of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico – Philosophicus which put into discussion the relation between language and reality, focusing upon the structural isomorphism, the logical identity between the two. The aphasic subject finds himself in the impossibility of actualizing the connection between reality and language, lacking the capacity of expressing the language he contains and which in turn contains him. Therefore, his only solution remains the invention of a new language which would legitimate his existence in a linguistically structured world.The videopoem is generated by a program coded to synchronize the frequency levels of the voice with the visuals. Glitches are produced by randomly altering bytes in each frame and the amount of randomness is determined by the sound spectrum. The interrupted, fuzzy, glitched image constitutes a representation of the incomplete aphasic discourse, while the polyphony emphasizes the necessity of repetition into (dez)organizing the body.
Gregg Biermann (USA) – Iterations, 2014
“A sequence from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is sliced into nineteen columns, each moving at a slightly different speed, getting progressively faster from left to right. Only at one instant do all nineteen columns briefly align. This film invites us to experience different instants of the scene simultaneously, invoking our desire for time to cohere into a single instant but only briefly allowing for this satisfaction.” — Jaimie Baron
A video artist whose work comes out of the avant-garde filmmaking tradition but takes advantage of the power of recent digital technologies to advance rigorous compositional strategies.
Machia & Lolina (UK) – Chamelion Seeking Colour, 2015
In a darkened room, children whisper secrets to each other and enter a world of pigments. They imagine geometrical shapes that mutate like chromophores. The ability to change their colour is a notorious characteristic of the chameleons, but only recently it has been observed that they love dressing up as housewives, metalworkers, greengrocers.
Filmmaker Martina Moor and animator Giulia Palombino were commissioned by Fondazione Magica Cleme Onlus to create a playful short film with a group of children who are currently undergoing therapeutic cancer treatment. The children are both protagonists and co-authors of the film.
Emil Zenko & Evgenij Romashov (Belarus) – Maslenitsa, 2015
It’s difficult to motivate the most part of Belarusians to be interested in Art. People rare attend exhibitions. Although, there are crowds of people on such festivity, as Maslenitsa with kitsch decorations and burning of the “Maslenitsa” effigy. In our video “Maslenitsa” we worked with metaphor: empty fields were similar to empty galleries. Also we have burned out our first academic works in the name of our future success. There is a popular belief: the act of burning of “Maslenitsa” effigy should bring fruitful forces. Our “performance” -it’s the desire to pay attention of Belarusians to the contemporary art
Valerio DE BONIS (Italy) – “I would claw my eyes out”, 2015
This videoArt work tries to suggest to better direct your own point of view. The concept lies in the relationship between appearance and reality. Sometimes it happens that a lot of side effects are caused by the preponderance of the aspect among the content.
“I would claw my eyes out” show you that by directing your personal perspective you can reduce that undesirable effects.
Francesca Fini (Italy) – Virus, 2012
VIRUS (2012) a video by Francesca Fini produced by Bionica 4 Dummies music by Luciano Foglia A video on the obsessive manipulation of my own image, which becomes a metaphor for the general confusion between real and virtual of the “Société du spectacle” prefigured by Guy Debord. The digital culture and its tools become a self-destructive virus. I could work on the face of Osama Bin Laden, but the fake photo-montage spread by the media as proof of his death is already an unattainable work of art . I then brought the concept within myself, in the heart of my “feminine”
WOW Israel : curated by Ynin Shillo
Curatorial statement- Ynin Shillo
Thanks to the predetermined theme of the W:OW project, I chose to the Israeli strip only works that I really loved and love is not something that can be explained. Actually I placed the works in the way I placed them on the timeline by a wave that is reflecting the rhythm of this love of mine.
Videos
Shahar Marcus (Israel ) – Seeds, 2012
The work “Seeds” explores the phenomenon of the buried mines that exist in Israel and the world over, exposing how these areas still carry the consequence of the war within their soil while supporting the new populations who must inhabit the conflict area. It examines the power of the present moment in these places where efforts are beginning to shift these death zones into places that consciously affirm life, embracing continuity in the very place where it once was blocked.
Moshe Vollach (Israel) – 31 Cubes, 2013/2016
Landart
31, π x π x π, cubes aliened, π distanced from each other.
A row of, 61 identical-size cubes, is stretched toward the horizon, composing a string of: matter cube –space cube – matter cube – space cube……
The cubes are made of ice, placed in the desert ona hot summer day. The defrosting process is documented from the air and from the ground.
When the process is complete, a row of 61 identical cubes remains: space cube –space cube –
space cube – space cube………..
This land-art project discusses: global warming, icebergs defrosting, radical climate changes and desertification. The project accentuates –formative, climatic, physical, mathematical and geomorphologic -contrasts. The art-work refers to the relationship between matter and space in the field of art in general and sculpture in particular.
Ynin Shillo (Israel) – War, 2014
The video ends with a duplication of an image of a woman revealing herself from the darkness that is surrounding her, and the sentence: “And they did not understand”.
This is a part of a series called “We came “(Anu Banu) that deal with roots.
Regev Amrani (Israel) – Fathers, 2015
(no summary available)
Aya Nitzan (Israel) -Gun Barrel Track Gaze, 2016
(no summary available)
Natali Issahary (Israel) – Dune, 2016
Dune” is part of a larger project called “Phe\Noumena” which explores the interplay between reality as it is (Noumena) and reality as it is perceived (Phenomena).
In this series, I investigate action and reaction, both chemical and physical and examine how these relate to our Culture, the Laws of Nature and Man’s Place in the Environment. I perform pointless, pseudo-scientific experiments and expose different materials to extreme conditions all the while, documenting their progression of death and decay (Vanitas).
Developments which usually take years are measured in mere minutes, while the passage of time is transformed into an almost physical presence.
Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus (Israel) -Fossiles, 2014
In the video performance Fossils, we encounter Ekici and Marcus as an isolated pair of human beings in a new desert: this time it is a gray landscape of slagheaps, where they move in search of useful (mineral) resources. What they find is what is left behind by coal mining: they bring this slag back whence it came: underground, into a mysterious labyrinth of caves where their camp is located. It consists of a bed, a resting place, but one that does not offer the performers any protection. Their camp appears to be extremely tense and constantly threatened by falling remnants of stone, until the bed becomes a coffin under the weight of the accumulated slag. Does humanity suffocate under what it has wrested from nature? Or is this too an image of the human connection to the earth on which they live and by which they, like all living things, are absorbed which like all living things, are absorbed when they die.
Artist : Shahar Marcus
Bio & Curatorial Statement
Shahar Marcus (b. 1971) is an Israeli based artist who primary works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations- incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’ and more.
Food is also a major theme in Marcus’s works. For instance, his recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By working with food, a perishable, momentary substance and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting.
His early video-performances feature himself along with other artists, with whom he had collaborated in the past. However, in his recent works, Marcus appears by himself, while embodying different roles and characters. ‘The man with the suit’ is a personage that was born from an intuitive desire to create a ‘clean-cut’ version of an artist, juxtaposed to the common visual stereotype of the artist as a laborer. Drawing influence from Magritte’s familiar figure- the headless suit, a symbol of Petite bourgeoisie, Marcus embodies this man with a suit as an artist who is in charge, a director.
His most recent works deal with local political issues, by approaching iconic Israeli landmarks with a critical and humorous point of view. Thus, Marcus reflects on his own heritage, environment and the creation of local historical narratives. His works are influenced by the visual language of cinematography along with familiar themes and tributes to art – history and artists, such as Ives Klein, Paul McCarthy, Peter Greenway and Jackson Pollack.
Videos
Homecoming artist
In the video work home coming artist you can see the artist Shahar Marcus driving with his parents in his hometown Petah Tikva which is a small city near Tel Aviv. During the ride the people of the town are being asked do they know or heard about the artist. None of the people know and most of them don’t care about art at all. The drive implicates the gap between the art scene and the common citizen in small towns such as the artist hometown.
Leap of Faith
The video leap of faith starts with a shot of the artist wearing a suit, standing on the window’s edge, getting ready to make the leap of his life to the wide open space. The artist is hesitating, having difficulties in creating a momentum to jump, but eventually jumps. Surprisingly he freezes horizontally, while his feet touch the window’s edge – homage to the known work of Yves Klein “Artist jumps into the void (1959). When the shot opens up it appears that the window from which the artist was afraid to jump is just a few feet above ground. The camera stands still presenting a grotesque and surreal image of the artist hanging between heaven and earth.
The camera focuses on the artist’s point of view, who wants to break through from the inside to the outside. The artist is presented trying to jump out of the window, like Icarus who tried to climb up and reach the sun, when his ambition is to overcome gravity and his own fears with the help of willpower and courage. The artist chooses to do so in an exhibitionist way, through a huge window, that allows everyone around to see the struggle of the artist and watch his fears. By the leap through the window the artist eliminates the physical barrier as he breaks through. The surrealist position of the artist where his feet touch the sill and his body is suspended between heaven and earth merger the inside and outside.
In the video the artist chooses to use the window in an unusual way, in order to achieve his goal. The artist’s fear, arising from a possible failure, leads to hesitation in accomplishing his goal. The failure, however, is not so painful as the window is just a few feet away from the ground. The work criticizes two characteristics of the human nature. One is the fear form failure and social criticism that can paralyze and prevent breaching borders, while in many cases, like in the work, such fears are only in the person’s (the artist) eyes, as the fall is not so painful. The second is wining glory at any price, where like in the work – the act seems heroic, in the artist’s perception, while it seems grotesque in for the viewers.
Freeze
In this video art by Shahar Marcus two figures play chess with large chessmen made of ice. The passage of time is marked by the melting of the ice and the movement of the huge hourglass filled with Styrofoam balls that revolves with every move of the game. Inside the hourglass the artist stands like Chronos, the Greek god of time. The rotation of the hourglass, the melting chess pieces, and the alternation of black and white stand out in the location in which the scene was filmed: the plaza outside the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. This building houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the famous War Scroll, which describes the apocalyptic battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, when the familiar passage of time will give way to the timescale of myth.
The Curator
The video work “The curator” offers a glimpse into “behind the scenes” of the art world which characterize mainly biennials and large festivals. The work is using comic effects and describe the art scene as a detached, elitist bubble. The video is built as a trailer like in the Hollywood film industry. The quick short scenes tells the story The revelation and the rise of the curator in the art world. Accompanied by a Hollywood style voice over narrator and a fast rhythm editing the work suggests a wider look on issues of our contemporary culture like idolizing celebrities and the instant superstars that are being born every new day.
Performance Video : Marcus Shahar & Nezaket Ekici
Nezaket Ekici
Bio & Curatorial Statement
Born in Turkey, Ekici moved to Duisburg in Germany with her family when she was 3 years old. Since then, she has lived within two cultures: German and Turkish. After finishing an apprenticeship as a printer in Duisburg, she moved to Munich to study painting, sculpture and art education, and later moved to Braunschweig to study performance with Prof. Marina Abramovic. She studied 4 years by her and did her Master Degree in Performance Art.
For more than 15 years she has been on the move, never staying longer than 2 weeks in one place. Describing her cultural outlook as “German, Turkish and International,“ her home is “where I am to do art”. Taking this literally, she is a nomad of art.
Nezaket Ekici has done more than 200 different performances, isntallation, videos, in more than 150 cities; more than 50 countries on 4 continents in the world. She speaks about her intercultural experiences on her world spanning travels in performance art. Many works are inspired by traditions and behavior in different cultures.
Ekici lives nowadays with her husband in both Berlin and Stuttgart as well in Istanbul.
In-Relation
“In-Relation” is a art project of Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus, that developed from the collaboration of the two artists´, exploring time, space, culture and religion, resulting in the exhibition at Bravermann Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2012.
The exhibition includes a unique live-Performance “Floating Ourselves” as well as 4 video-performances,
The two artists´ are in relation, because they collaborate cross cultural and cross religious as German based muslim and Israeli based jewisch. As well they bridge long distances between Berlin and Tel Aviv, therefore taking travel time to cross space. But there is a more significant point to it. Focusing the origin of the latin word “relation”, meaning: “bringing back”, the real approach of the two artists reveals itself. Looking at the video works of Nezaket and Sharhar, they apparently bring back a knowledge that has been vorgotten by most of us: They bring us into relation with ourselves. All 4 video works shown in the exhibition take place on holy grounds, the Isreali desert and the dead sea, where people of all times and from all continents came to find out the truth about themselves, about god and the eternity of being. All works in this exhibition work on the old philosophical task, it seems: “gnôthi seautón” – recognize yourself.
The video-performances confront us with the fact, that time is running through our fingers like sand and brings into mind that ´“everything is in flux´, like ancient Heraklit said. The artists´ point out the transcendence of life and fulfill the circle, that “In Relation describes: Coming to together, here is a coming to oneself.
On first sight, it is striking, that all works are related to water and salt, eventhough desert means the opposite. Looking more closely to the theme, this is an essential point. Water and salt are the basis for Life and underline the statements of the video-works directing to the inner core of our self-understanding. Nezaket and Sharhar show very clearly, that we have to be aware of the time, we are living in, as well as we have be aware, that nothing can be taken for sure – that everything is floating. And we have to understand, that our life is in between this world and another and therefore a temporal effect on the border between life and death. This all comes down to the task ”recognize yourself” and become, who you are.
It seems, that this journey, Nezaket and Sharhar is taking us to, is only possible when people are willing to cross borders and speak to each other, like the two artists´ did, when they decided to collaborate. New perspectives, that may even give us a clearer view on reality, only arise, when we confront ourselves with other cultures and believes, because only than, we can not take for sure anymore our common believes and moral opinions. To achieve something means to work together and it seems to be inevitable but to leave the comfort zone of our own paradigm, like Nezaket and Sharhar did, when they decided to get “in relation”.
Text by: Dr. Andreas Dammertz
Andreas Dammertz reviewed his doctorate in Philosophy in 2001. He is a freelance art critic, publishing articles on websites, in art books and magazines. He currently manages the Corporate University of Bosch (Suttgart, Germany).
Videos
Nezaket Ekici
Bio & Curatorial Statement
Born in Turkey, Ekici moved to Duisburg in Germany with her family when she was 3 years old. Since then, she has lived within two cultures: German and Turkish. After finishing an apprenticeship as a printer in Duisburg, she moved to Munich to study painting, sculpture and art education, and later moved to Braunschweig to study performance with Prof. Marina Abramovic. She studied 4 years by her and did her Master Degree in Performance Art.
For more than 15 years she has been on the move, never staying longer than 2 weeks in one place. Describing her cultural outlook as “German, Turkish and International,“ her home is “where I am to do art”. Taking this literally, she is a nomad of art.
Nezaket Ekici has done more than 200 different performances, isntallation, videos, in more than 150 cities; more than 50 countries on 4 continents in the world. She speaks about her intercultural experiences on her world spanning travels in performance art. Many works are inspired by traditions and behavior in different cultures.
Ekici lives nowadays with her husband in both Berlin and Stuttgart as well in Istanbul.
In-Relation
“In-Relation” is a art project of Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus, that developed from the collaboration of the two artists´, exploring time, space, culture and religion, resulting in the exhibition at Bravermann Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2012.
The exhibition includes a unique live-Performance “Floating Ourselves” as well as 4 video-performances,
The two artists´ are in relation, because they collaborate cross cultural and cross religious as German based muslim and Israeli based jewisch. As well they bridge long distances between Berlin and Tel Aviv, therefore taking travel time to cross space. But there is a more significant point to it. Focusing the origin of the latin word “relation”, meaning: “bringing back”, the real approach of the two artists reveals itself. Looking at the video works of Nezaket and Sharhar, they apparently bring back a knowledge that has been vorgotten by most of us: They bring us into relation with ourselves. All 4 video works shown in the exhibition take place on holy grounds, the Isreali desert and the dead sea, where people of all times and from all continents came to find out the truth about themselves, about god and the eternity of being. All works in this exhibition work on the old philosophical task, it seems: “gnôthi seautón” – recognize yourself.
The video-performances confront us with the fact, that time is running through our fingers like sand and brings into mind that ´“everything is in flux´, like ancient Heraklit said. The artists´ point out the transcendence of life and fulfill the circle, that “In Relation describes: Coming to together, here is a coming to oneself.
On first sight, it is striking, that all works are related to water and salt, eventhough desert means the opposite. Looking more closely to the theme, this is an essential point. Water and salt are the basis for Life and underline the statements of the video-works directing to the inner core of our self-understanding. Nezaket and Sharhar show very clearly, that we have to be aware of the time, we are living in, as well as we have be aware, that nothing can be taken for sure – that everything is floating. And we have to understand, that our life is in between this world and another and therefore a temporal effect on the border between life and death. This all comes down to the task ”recognize yourself” and become, who you are.
It seems, that this journey, Nezaket and Sharhar is taking us to, is only possible when people are willing to cross borders and speak to each other, like the two artists´ did, when they decided to collaborate. New perspectives, that may even give us a clearer view on reality, only arise, when we confront ourselves with other cultures and believes, because only than, we can not take for sure anymore our common believes and moral opinions. To achieve something means to work together and it seems to be inevitable but to leave the comfort zone of our own paradigm, like Nezaket and Sharhar did, when they decided to get “in relation”.
Text by: Dr. Andreas Dammertz
Andreas Dammertz reviewed his doctorate in Philosophy in 2001. He is a freelance art critic, publishing articles on websites, in art books and magazines. He currently manages the Corporate University of Bosch (Suttgart, Germany).
Videos
VIDEOS
LINES
The piece delves into the multi-pronged issue of drug abuse in Punjab- a land besieged with social, political, geographical & emotional recuperation of the drug trafficking and increasing youth addiction
EVE TEASING
The short movement based piece attempts to capture an ordinary day for the women on Indian streets.
ARTICLE 19
A short dance film on the distress caused by the recent cases of intolerance in the country.
Segment : Performance
Performances by Parnab Mukherjee
A spoken word performer, independent media analyst, curator and a performance consultant by profession, Mr Parnab Mukherjee is one of the leading alternative theatre directors of the Indian sub-continent.
A performance text writer and charismatic performer, he has diverse experience in non-proscenium, verbatim, site-specific and physical theatre.
Currently, he is a roving editor with Five Issues: performance-publishing interface. He has earlier worked for a sports fortnightly, a chess tournament bulletin, The Asian Age, Kindle India and Sambad Pratidin.
He is an acclaimed practitioner on Badal Sircar’s theatre practice, Shakespeare-in-education and specialises in theatre-of-conflict and theatre-of-the-campus. He is considered as a leading light in alternative theatre practice in the country having directed more than 160 productions of performance texts including six international collaborations.
He has devised, conceived, designed and directed/collaborated both experimental performances and workshops for a number of institutions, activist groups, support groups, schools, colleges, youth groups and social movements across the country.
As a journalist and human rights activist, he has extensively worked on the dynamics of human rights and economic systems of the country. His writings have mirrored the aspirations of the fringe in the nation state especially as into the parameters of economic growth that fails to mirror the widening chasm between the haves, have-nots, have-beens and yet-to-be.
As a journalist, he has critiqued to the national imagination of mixing up the rapidly increasing remoteness of the power centers with the grassroot notions of development, the constructed mainstream history with cultural amnesia.
He has developed theatre advocacy tools for international agencies including UNoDC and UN Women have concentrated on this growing inter-connectivity between human trafficking, conflict.
He has created a personal idiom of using spaces for theatre exploration. He has extensively worked on a range of human rights issues, which include specific theatre projects on anti-uranium project struggles in Jadugoda and Turamdihi, Save Tenzin campaign, rehabilitation after industrial shutdowns, shelter issue of the de-notified tribes, a widely acclaimed cycle of plays against enforced disappearances and prisoners o cf conscience, and a range of subjects on north-east India.
Some of the most memorable productions of the collective include Where is Imphal? (For Birla Academy of Art and Culture), Trilogy of Unrest (Hamletmachine, Necropolis, This room is not my room), River Series (used as a exploratory advocacy tool by UN Women, Undoc and Kripa Foundation), Only Curfew (for IPTA Jamia), Rehearsing Antigone, Raktakarabi-an urban sound opera, Buddha Files, Kasper-dipped and shredded, They Also Work, Dead-Talk series, Conversations with the dead, Crisis of Civilisation (for Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad), Shakespeare shorts, Man to Man talk, Inviting Ibsen for a Dinner with Ibsen, Fractals/Your path wrong path and And the Dead Tree Gives no Shelter.
Four of his major workshop modules: Freedomspeak, The Otherness of the Body, Conflict as a Text and The Elastic Body have been conducted with major theatre groups and campuses all over the country.
He has written four books of performance texts.
As a theatre soloist, he has extensively travelled with his repertoire and has performed in a range of cities including Bali, Surabaya, Tehran, Mashad, Chittagong, Biratnagar, Cardiff, Colombo, Negombo, Batticaloa, Dhaka, Copenhagen, London, Liverpool, Dili (East Timor), Ottowa, Manchester, Singapore, Bangkok, Patumthani, Montreal, New York and Vijlandi (Estonia).
He has written five books on theatre. And have contributed to a range of publications including Dancing Earth-An anthology of poetry from North East India published by Penguin India, Tehelka, The Spectator-London, Montreal Serai, Imphal Free Press, Avenue Mail-Jamshedpur, Mathribhumi-Kerala, Chandrabhaga-Cuttack and Hard News.
He is presently touring with Tagore Now ! a piece commissioned for the Embassy of Sweden in India for the 100 years of Tagore’s Nobel prize and Museum of Million Hamlets dedicated to the 450th birth and 400th death commemoration of William Shakespeare
Performance Title
Synopsis:
“Last to dry was the hair.
When we were already far from the sea,
when words and salt, which had merged on us,
separated from one another with a sigh,
and your body no longer showed
signs of a terrible ancientness.
And in vain we had forgotten a few things on the beach,
so that we would have an excuse to return.
We didn’t return.
And these days I remember the days
that have your name on them, like a name on a ship,
and how we saw through two open doors
one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds
with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers,
who waited for rain,
and how at night, when the world cooled off,
your body kept its warmth for a long time,
like the sea”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai’s poetry is a meditation on the semantics of power, renunciation, the present life and the aftermath of a mind’s journey from cognition to transcendence. It is an ocean of wisdom and gleanings, our performance delves on to a performer’s letter to Amichai written to remember his birthday which fall the performance.
Interspersed throughout the play are references from his writings on matters ranging from the concept of time, the idea of inner lives, Aesthetics to being alive and of course the philosophical core of Amichai’s pacifism: what is the threshold/tipping point of a stance and when does life become overbearing and then you need to leap across boundaries of time, text and boxes. Our play looks at the idea and dialectics of inhabiting many lives inside one life.
Parnab Mukherjee
Note by Sudipta Dawn
This performance is also about the dynamically changing relation of the poet with time which is tangible. Condensed as he is now as figure of history, physically insignificant, his musings in our hands are but subjected to our vagaries, vicissitudes and dispositions. The legacy of his moralities is stretched and stretches time and hence the delays . His address in India has been found, in strange & hitherto unsought of places, delayed but not stale.
Performance Title
Museum of Million Hamlets:
Directed, designed and performed by Parnab Mukherjee
A theatre performance on palimpsest and field notes of Hamlet rubric, dreams and nightmares inspired from a patchwork of Hamlet narratives/memories/writings/notes/scribbles of Nam Jun Paik, Heiner Muller, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenneth Koch, Jim Morrison, Gunawan Maryanto, Takeshi Kawamura and Sohrab Modi
A theare performance on palimpsest and field notes of Hamlet rubric, dreams and nightmares inspired from a patchwork of Hamlet narratives/memories writings/notes/scribbles of Nam Jun Paik, Heiner Muller, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenneth Koch, Jim Morrison, Gunuwan Maryanto, Takeshi Kawamura & Sohrab Modi.
Duration: 55 minutes without any intermission
Director’s Note:
DESPATCH 1:
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. – Marcel Duchamp
The production looks at the myth of what is a ruling class. Who rules and who is being ruled. Ashok Rudra writes in his booklet : Intelligentsia and Ruling Class” a very important set of lines: ….the State is never neutral between the different ailsclasses in the Society. The state necessarily serves the interest of a certain ailsclass (or classes) at the cost of the rest. It is this class (or classes) which are called Ruling Class or Ruling Classes and the same classes are used to characterise the state when talking about its class character, It is the idea of the social cost as opposed to the globalised idea of opportunity cost which is explored through a series of actions that transports a series of Hamlet memories in the context of south Asia.
Whether it is notes of Tarkovsky, Hamlet fragments of Kenneth Koch or Kawamura’s ( T-factory material ) called Hamletclone says: ….reconsidering these questions from the perspective of contemporary Japan.War, keeping-fit-madness, genetic engineering and unemployment – are these the signs of our time?…..The visual references of Japanese society become signifiers of the Japanese condition. For example, fashionable high school girls transform their identity and bleach their black hair to a golden blonde shade. The incidence of young people becoming homeless is on the rise. Meanwhile healing seminars and cults are in fashion. What do these things mean? What is the family now? …..How can we play Hamlet in Tokyo today?
Muller echoes similar concerns when he evokes post-apolcalyptic landscape:
….The dead have their place on his stage, nature has the right to vote. That means, in the language of the 19th century, which is still a conference-language between the Oder and the Elbe; Shakespeare has no philosophy, no sense of history: his Romans are from London. In the meantime the war of the landscapes which work for the disappearance of the human beings which ravaged them is no longer a metaphor. Gloomy times, when a conversation about trees is practically a crime. The times have become brighter, the shadows have gone out, a crime now to be silent over trees. The terror emanating from Shakespeare’s reflections is the recurrence of the same. A terror, which drove Nietzsche, the godforsaken pastor’s son, out of the misery of the philosophies into his sword-dance with ghosts from the future, from the silence of the academies to the red-hot high-wire of history, spanned BY AN IDIOT FULL OF SOUND AND FURY and TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW. The stress is on the And, the truth travels in the lower berths, the abyss is the hope…
Our concerns are similar yet radically different.
….. the young refugee kid-whose hands were chopped off in the camp, a Reang mother or a Rohingya faher struggling to define what is home….we take these monologues in our body and perform… we change nothing,.. not even ourselves but as their monologue hits the tongue, I know how fundamentally theoretical perverts we are…we coined subaltern to suit our academic needs to frame resistance…forgetting the need for a far more humane framework and far enhanced and humane pedagogy to study the same…
And as Gunawan Maryanto writes in Five Stories from a Hamlet Pathway:
This path has witnessed many stories. It’s just an ordinary path. On the right, there is a house with bamboo walls. Empty. There was a low brick wall covered in moss in front of it. To the side, there was a rosewood tree. A swing made from a used tire hung from the branches, swinging in the wind.In the distance, there were rice fields. Not revealing anything. Just lying there, open to the sunset.
First Story
We passed it once, in a bit of a hurry: that path that led to the cemetery. I was Oedipus, you were Antigone. I was blind and you were too young.
“There is a breeze blowing a used tire at the edge of the road. Over there, a low brick wall,” you said, as usual serving as my eyes.
I smell moss, my child. I smell the rotten scent of death.
“There is nothing worth describing: a mossy wall, an empty house. Rice fields in the distance. You have seen it all, Father, before the pin struck your eye. Is this the place of the promise? Where are we going to live?”
No. We have passed it once before. I don’t know when. You were Oedipus, I was Antigone. I asked who hung the tire swing there in the rosewood tree. And the moss. Why is it so loyal? Clinging to the wall beside us.
I remember that we exchanged bodies. In this very same path.
Second
“This is a haunted path, Older Brother. No one dares to pass it.”
If that is so, then we are near, Younger Sister. The oracle is never wrong in giving directions. I smell the rain that has recently passed. It has soaked into the brick walls; penetrated in between the clay tiles. I hear Ismene laughing, swinging on the rubber tire. Her laugh sprinkles like rain splashing in our house.
Oedipus and Antigone hug on the nameless path.
A pathway that has long been left behind by the travelers.
Third
I ran once. Very far. I left my father’s death and the beauty of my mother’s body. Then, on a damp path, I killed a traveler. A low wall recorded and saved it beneath its moss that is older than sadness.
It’s quiet. Only the wind blowing the swing. Swinging Jocasta’s shadow in a daydream. Then, we made love in an empty house. Before it got dark, before it was completely dark, I saved the sparkle of her tears.
“Why are your legs swollen like an elephant’s?”
I was quiet, remembering the grassy field. Someone grabbed my feet.
Ever since then, I called myself Oedipus.
Fourth
Father just laughed, letting me run the length of that path. The giant machines arrived. Chewing up our rice fields into bits. We watched every evening. The machines destroyed the dikes where we ran all day chasing kites. We laughed watching them. Now, quietly, behind me, father cried. I didn’t know why he cried.
Then, one evening, he banished me. I was fifteen years old then. “You will kill your father and marry your mother. So, go!”, he said. The only thing I could do was cry.
I left taking a path, a bamboo house, a brick wall, a rosewood tree, and a swing—that my father made from a used car tire.
Fifth
A path. Surely someone has passed this way. A house. Someone surely has lived there. A mossy wall. A rosewood tree.
A swing swaying slowly. Someone just got off of it. I don’t know who.
Where do these fragments lead to? Hamlet memories…from the robes of Sohrab Modi’s Khoon Ka Khoon (1935) to Muller’s dysfunctional landscape littered with embers of fire that gutted my prison… throwing clothes into the fire…digging the clock which was heart out of my breast. And then going onto the street,clothed in that blood.
What do I struggle with these multiple faultlines of memory…I have plugged in my hard disk. Memories float. I have plugged it out now. In this arid landscape, I am trekking with a bag full of 200 terabytes. Ten hard disks of 2TB each, in addition to the 1 TB of my laptop and my memories of childhood and those sepia tinted photographs inside numerous albums all over my house and memories of another million snapshots that are etched but never taken. The selective wear and tear of this memory, the convenient modification of this memory and the inconvenient trek of the memory from the deepest pores of angst…all this makes me a memory junkie.
There are so many memories in my backpack. Memories, I plug in. Memories I plug out. Memories with whom I am fighting this boxing match…each of us want to deconstruct dissent. Both thinks that we know the way. Do we? In this scrapheap of broken shards aren’t we constantly bleeding…don’t we realise the extent of the haemorrhage.
What can a memory junkie do? Saving files…text, data, jpg, nef, tif, pdf, scans, more scans, flv, torrent downloads, applications, trial pack…saving and saving more..so much that accumulation is the key. So much that the micro-emotions of reaching out becomes an easy casualty in this race of knowledgability (sic).
I am tracking and trekking with memories. One day, I will die. Soundless. No bullet. No knife wounds. No heart attacks. No extended spells of coma. Nothing..simply dropping dead.
Call me a memory martyr.
DESPATCH 2:
The murmurs ebb; …onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.
The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba, Father,
Everything is possible to thee.
I am fond of this thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
(Hamlet poem by Boris Pasternak, translated from Russian by Anne Pasternak Slater)
This piece pays tribute to 450 years and 400 years of William Shakespeare’s birth and death commemoration respectively. The spoken text looks at an internal duologue that goes inside Hamlet’s mind.
The purpose of the piece is to peep into a director’s mind as he rehearses the play. Not to make Hamlet, a storyboard character or a dramatic treatment. And more importantly to decode the goings on in the world from a South Asian pair of eyes and not make the Bard a construct of the diction-delivery-costume axis.
When it was Desdemona’s time to sing,
and so little life was left to her,
she wept, not over love, her star,
But over willow, willow, willow.
When it was Desdemona’s time to sing,
and her murmuring softened the stones,
around the black day, her blacker demon
prepared a psalm of weeping streams.
When it was Ophelia’s time to sing,
and so little life was left to her,
the dryness of her soul was swept away
like straws from haystacks in a storm.
When it was Ophelia’s time to sing,
and the bitterness of tears was more
than she could bear, what trophies
did she hold? Willow, and columbine.
Stepping out of all that grief,
they entered, with faint hearts,
the pool of the universe, and quenched
their bodies with other worlds.
(From Boris Pasternak’s English Lessons …Translated by Mark Rudman)
This piece is a quilt stitched from a director’s point-of-view of designing a piece called Hamlet.
Who is Hamlet? A man lost in life…a waylaid person.. a woman coming to terms with her domestic and public person..a person grappling with what is political, apolitical and non-political..is Hamlet another word for death of a dream…Is it a byword for social alienation? Is Hamlet a term for the all the fringe and minority of the world.
Hamlet
The buzz subsides. I have come on stage.
Leaning in an open door
I try to detect from the echo
What the future has in store.
A thousand opera-glasses level
The dark, point-blank, at me.
Abba, Father, if it be possible
Let this cup pass from me.
I love your pre-ordained design
And am ready to play this role.
But the play being acted is not mine.
For this once let me go.
But the order of the acts is planned,
The end of the road already revealed.
Alone among the Pharisees I stand.
Life is not a stroll across a field.
Boris Pasternak, (translation: Jon Stallworth and Peter France)
Humanity is at the cross-roads. We are all faced with a series of questions. Some of the most pressing ones are ‘what are we up to? why do we exist? what is the rationale behind arms race? why hasn’t non-violence become a mindset? how do we tackle the increasing vulnerability of all kinds in the lives of millions of children? These questions refuse to go away. If all of this is swept under the carpet…the fabric of globalisation and standardisation…will that carpet rupture..one fine day..
How do I distinguish between what is right and what is just? How do I differentiate between the revolution of here and now and the lessons of there and then? What is right may be temporary and popular but what is just may be permanent and long-term. But then how long is the long term.
Or like all lifetime prepaid cellphone cards..there is an expiry date.
Our movement piece is an interior monologue, a duologue and a chorus of installations. This piece talks about the diverse strands of Hamlet lurking and festering inside us and a little more.
POSTSCRIPT/RHETORIC:
Are we industrially producing newer clones of Hamlet…who is programmed not to react…or are we walking across the neon-lit superhighways of digital desire not knowing the Hamlet pathway is strewn with landmines.
Performance Title
Gita – the most significant Psychotherapeutic Discourse
Modern Individual indulges in self – exploration, self – reflection, self-actualization and of course Selfies. The world has evolved technologically; no real change has taken place psychologically.
People are still fighting, jealous, angry, ambitious, greedy and heart broken. Gita focuses on individual and is a great source of inspiration for psychological development and expansion as it focused more on within and self as against outside and materialistic.
The verses of Gita bring a strong co-relation between what happens in the world and how should it be related to the divine power within.
The artist brings to stage the psychological interpretation of Gita – the inner traumas, fears, anxiety of the present day human being who’s is the midst of war, insanity and chaos. The dancer attempts to interpret Gita through this production where she focuses more on the content which is for individual as against the verses in their original phrases.
It is OK to be nervous and fearful – but it is important to seek help and ask questions. Knowing that Gita exists is not enough, it is more important to take the key lessons from the great song of Krishna: “Showing may not necessarily mean seeing & experiencing; Telling may not necessarily mean Learning”
World at large is at war but do we understand why? So, the dancer tries to portray the moment before the war, the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna – which throws the light on the reasons.
Taking the shlokas from selected chapters focusing on Karma – Action, Vigyana – Logic. The performance goes through the sequence of the verses in Gita and explains the psychological interpretations of the text. The performance explains through five (5) acts:
Starts with the Battle scene, how Arjuna remembers his relatives, feels weak and falls, followed by his refusal to perform his duty and action
Depicts Krishna’s gentle rebuke of Arjuna’s state of mind and his explanation of Karma. He also reminds Arjuna of ill-treatment of Draupdi and her insult. Followed by how his action are his social duty.
This section depicts the anger of Krishna, his Virat Swarup and realization of Arjuna about who really Krishna is.
This part deals with the feeling of guilt that Arjuna experiences after understanding what Krishna is trying to explain to him
The discourse ends with Arjuna standing up for himself and agreeing to do his duty ,the war and its after effects
The performance concludes with the SHANTI PAATH- for world peace.
The Key messages this program promotes are:
Nimit Matra Bhava – Be an instrument to the divine will, how in today’s society we need to remember, embrace and depend on the divine.
In the higher actualization there is no place for Pride, Ego or me, myself or mine.
The teachings and learning’s from Gita need not be larger than life as portrayed but can be inculcated in simple day to day acts. Something as simple as rearing or caring for our children or respecting our elders can be imbibed from the teachings of Gita.
How the psychological view of Gita is relevant in the modern context.
About Dr. Dimple Kaur:
Dr. Dimple Kaur, PhD, MS, CHt is the founder director of IMATTER Institute of Behavioral Science and Sumangali Institute of Valuable Arts (SIVA), based in New Delhi, India. An accomplished Indian classical dancer ((Bharatanatyam, Vilasini Natyam and Chaau) and a practicing psychotherapist, she has done pioneering work in area of mind body development, dance movement therapy and has through her research brought therapeutic benefits using dance for number of physical and mental illness. She is also visiting faculty for Indian Classical Dance at various universities
The professional experience of Dr. Dimple Kaur, her great intuition, her ability to uncover the depths of the human soul, which pulsates behind each human mask, allows each participant to make a significant step along their individual path. Her institutes aim at preserving & promoting the cultural heritage & promoting the mental well being of people through research in arts and science. She is a former student of Padma Vibhushan Sonal Mansigh and Padma Bhushan Swapna Sundari and Padma Bhushan & Padma Sri Dr. Padma Subramaniyam
As an actor, she has worked trained and acted under direction of F. Alkazi, Bhaskar Ghose and has also acted in various TV serials and movies. She has directed over 20 professional dance and theatre productions. Her solo shows Main Amrita, Rape Unreported, Kali Darpanam are continuing their tour across India and Abroad.
Dr. Dimple Kaur has been awarded with multiple awards and recognitions including Nritya Ratna, Nritya Tharragai Award ,Apurba Pratibha Award and Lasya Mohini Award.
Performance Title
What is a life about?
This is the core question that is gonna be asked in the audioplays ,soundscapes and visuals made by Anna Lena (Germany) and Fredda (Canada) both Students of the Subbody Butoh School in Mc Leod Ganj Dharamshala.
The work can be seen as a research for the own surviving in a continously changing world “for our own understanding, what is it about humanity, what is it about living in a place up in the himalayas where people from everywhere in the world meet?”.
The artists are creating vivid and colourful audio-landscapes with Audio and Visual recordings of natural sounds and interviews made with a variety of people living Mc Leod Ganj. Some of them are tourists, some of them are locals, some are monks , some are artists. They or we are all living many different lifestyles for many different reasons. “But at least two things we all have in common, we are breathing the same air and we are sharing the same earth.” The vivid soundscapes are building a colorful frame for the stories that are actually happening in Mc Leod Ganj.
Come in, into the chillout area of the mud house and enjoy fresh baked snacks and lovely tea while listening to real stories of real people put together as a performance for the senses.
Performance Title
Shadows of Fire by Naireet Basak
This is a solo Butoh performance that delves into the subconscious of our body and mind and tries to call out to the fire hidden within us; but does fire have a shadow? This piece explores the birth of an untamed creature, its growth and its play with the different elements found in nature. It looks for freedom from all these, with help from the balance of the ambers and blues in a body, but gets stuck in some dilemma of energy. This creature tries to intimidate the watchful eyes and reacts according to the energy of the place of its birth every time. Eventually it either escapes the cacophony of the watchful eyes or it perishes. Click here for a glimpse of the performance at the Butoh Festival at Mcleodjang on the 30th of May 2016.
Performance Title
Tantra remixed A prayer to Gravity by Honza Svasek
Only when Shiva and Shakti combine can action, movement and creation arise. Until energy is impregnated with consciousness it is ignorant, disordered, aimless and “blind”. Energy alone can produce nothing; consciousness bestows upon its content, form and direction. Conversely, consciousness without energy is dormant power, sleeping energy, and on its own is unable to be the cause of anything.
Only when gravity and the life combine can action, movement and creation arise. Until life is impregnated with gravity it is ignorant, disordered, aimless and “blind”. Life alone can produce nothing; gravity bestows upon its content, form and direction. Conversely, gravity without life is dormant power, sleeping energy, and on its own is unable to be the cause of anything.
Performance Title
Kashmir by Lhamo
Dance Improvisation in honour of Lal Ded.
Performance Title
Going there by Laura Monning
Homes of avoidance, you, me and the kosmos.
Performance Title
Performance Title
Performance Title
Dance Theatre presentation on recent refugee crisis by Rashee Chauhan (India)
How does it feel when you are forced to ignore and go against your inner voice. There is pain, tears, sorrow, grief. Besides all this sorrow there is hope, hope to once again live and listen to your inner voice.
Performance Title
Yama no Mai by Yoko and Haori (Japan)
Prayer to Himalayas (Dance and Music)
Performance Title
N things you hate about me
Artists Bio & Statement
Shambhavee Sharma is pursuing her matsers in Arts & Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, new Delhi. She has studuing Oddisi from Kummum Lal and is a Virashad in Kathak from Bhatkhande Sangit Vidyapith, Dehradun. She has performed at various spaces and likes to experiemnt with form and interact with mixed media.
About the performance
My piece focusses on the dilemmas concerning our bodies that we, as humans, face on a daily basis, and the containment and vilification imposed on us as women, on account of our bodies. This is an attempt to break away from norms that would seek to contain and restrict me; and to be myself in a way that may upset strictures and cause discomfort to patriarchal definitions of femininity. This is my and my generation’s response to body shaming and gender and sexual stereotypes,and the violence that often accompanies it.
Concerts
Electronic concert by Yidam ( 5 Volt)
Artists Bio & Statement
Discovering electronic music in the mid-90s in India, Varun’s habit of compiling and manipulating sounds led to a DJ career under several aliases until he found the name Yidam, a concept synonymous with a meditative approach to music.
Gigging extensively in the US, he formed the chillUmafia DJ collective with DJ Damon from Poland in 2005. Later years were spent managing a record label (DBR) and organising events around the country. After experiencing Burning Man in 2008, Varun returned to his hometown, Kolkata.
Since then his sets and tracks have been heard in Nepal, Poland, Switzerland & Portugal. A background in computer engineering has also now led to a project 5volts which involves the use of analog synthesizers, digital sensors & interactive coding to create immersive audio-visual experiences.
Past Notable Gigs
The Greenville Experience (India) – 2014
Border Movement Lounge (India) – 2014
NH7 Weekender (India) – 2013
Goa Dupa Open Air (Poland) – 2013
Cypel Trzech Kultur (Poland) – 2013
Earthdance Festival (India) – 2012
Boom Festival (Portugal) – 2012
Goa Dupa Open Air (Poland) – 2012
Kalachakra Festival (Poland) – 2012
Bollywood Film Festival (Germany) – 2012
Universal Religion (Nepal) – 2012
Y&S Live at Soho (India) – 2011
Go:Madras Festival (India) – 2010
9 Feet High Festival (India) – 2009
Primitif Party (Switzerland) – 2008
Mouse on Mars – Opening set (India) – 2009
Shanti Jatra Festival (Nepal) – 2007/2008
Putiklub-Berlin (Germany) – 2008
Burning Man (USA) – 2007
Gaian Mind Festival (USA) – 2007
Secret Fire (USA) – 2007
Audiotrophic (USA) – 2007
Regroovenate (USA) – 2007
A.U.M Festival (USA) – 2006
Earthdance Festival (USA) – 2006 / 2007
Crystal Sky Full Moon (USA) – 2006
Concert
Electro Acoustic concert by Gorka Ferroro
Workshop
Butoh Workshop led by Honza Svavek
Workshop
Voice workshop led by Gorka Ferrero
Workshop
Performance Poetry
Embrace by Maham Suhail
ABOUT MAHAM SUHAIL
In her own words , “My journey through life takes me to strange places, within and without of me; and everywhere, the strangeness melts into sweet familiarity! I am a Light-seeker.”
Exhibition
Maham Suhail (Pakistan)
- ‘Earth in Rotation’
- ‘Unwinding’
- ‘Mirror’
- ‘Urban Cage’
- ‘Paradigm Shift’
- ‘Sponge’
Danyal Rasheed’s photograph titled
- ‘Bhaati Gate 01’
- ‘Lahore Railway Station’
- ‘Mahmood Booti, Lahore’
- ‘Makli, Thatta (Sindh)’,
- ‘Train to Hyderabad, Sindh’
Age is being updated , kindly check back for more details
for any inquiries please contact sudipta@culturemonks.in
Culture Monks 
One thought on “preview of the south asian fringe : mountain india edition, dharmasala”