Negotiation in Contested Space – Part I
 

Exhibiting the works of: Jyothi Basu, Pooja Iranna, G.R. Iranna, Baiju Parthan, Sumedh Rajendran, K.P. Reji, N.N. Rimzon, T.V. Santhosh, and Gigi Scaria

Conceptualised by Renuka Sawhney

Perhaps it’s appropriate that we begin this second iteration of Negotiation in Contested Space Part - I with a quote mined from twitter. Richard Feynman, the remarkably erudite physicist, once may have said, so my twitter feed informs me, ‘If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.’ One must resist the temptation to say, as art writers are wont to do, ‘the point is to not understand! Only in not understanding do we uncover some truth,’ followed by the most Foucauldian shrug possible.  But what did Feynman know of explaining complex ideas? He was affectionately, one hopes, nicknamed The Great Explainer, for his ability to make complex theoretical physics accessible. Having read the Feynman lectures of physics, of which I understood perhaps three pages in each of three volumes, why is clarity available to the theoretical physicist but not to be found in art or its many frameworks, as the first edition of this very essay will testify? 

Explaining the mechanics of an idea, the process by which it is formed, the way in which it works and alters other ideas, things, bodies it comes in contact with, are perhaps easier to explain in the realm of physics, even though one may argue that the canvas upon which the process takes place in each case, is a contested place. In the case of physics, the place consists of binaries -  the seen and unseen world around us – whose properties are either confirmed by way of direct and indirect evidence-based experimentation, or by theoretical conjecture in the form of abstract language formations – i.e. maths. While in the case of pictorial space, representation fights for one place amongst many in the jostle of ideas that do not only, already exist, waiting to be found, but also new ideas, in this case perspectives, created by one individual, themselves, a not fully-defined nor complete bundle of complexities. 

If nothing is absolute in physics, then in art, almost everything is relative. What is similar in the explication of both, is the exclusionary role of its lingua franca at the zenith of its ideal - math and representation respectively shorn of human subjectivity, establishing the outer limits of possibility, and technological superiority by way of its abstractive, objectiveness in construction and reception. Is it any wonder that both ideal versions of math and representation contest, in a sort of ironic version of, ‘holier than thou’, alternative versions of themselves? What is dissimilar – that art, despite its makers intent, invariably unearths the political through representation, leaving physics behind in a self-constructed space without other contrasting claimants to its occupation, except that One – not seeking to address itself to myth, bias or belief. Art does not transcend its languages, arguably because it is created by, received by, and read by individuals – making us all co-creators in its existence. The very act of seeing a perspective other than our own defines a political frame – whether one stands in opposition, in the middle, astride or aside – seeing is political, and understanding, even fractured, is political. To be clear, the term political here is not defined just in relation to just organized political bodies, but also in relation to contemporary forms of ontology, and the spaces in which being is asserted, and finally the spaces in which several forms contest their rights to exist. 

In some ways, then this second iteration of this essay expands the existing framework to include not only more works, but enlarge the space under negotiation, to ask, what is the relation between this political and that representation, and why negotiation is a difficult yet vital task of existing in contested spaces – often the purview of the individual fashioning political and social complexity in its many, many forms of existence at concurrent moments. To return to Feynman’s words; to simplify representation and therefore to understand, is not to clarify but to isolate, divide and examine each piece by itself, an ontological luxury no longer available to any of us, as the works here attest in their search for languages and representation with which to negotiate contested spaces.   

Given this shift in perspective, do we define the artist here as directors of spaces, as the first iteration did? Perhaps, they are both, directors and participants in their created spaces – testing the limits and efficacy of negotiation by participating in its creation and framework both – artists as test subjects in their own experiments? Perhaps not, perhaps the artists here have done more than just stage themselves – by suspending the gamut of modernist, traditional, and contemporary forms and uses of representation while accommodating multiple subjects, objects, and contexts the artists have staged fractured complexity in their pictorial spaces. By making specific choices in myth-making, symbolism, architectural framing, and perspective, these artists claim their place of occupation as the frame within which systemic structures, individual narratives, forms of representation, and multiple contexts engender one another’s negotiation for the same ontological space, speaking necessarily in fractured and collaged languages. No peaceful co-existence seems possible here.

Jyothi Basu’s Wall Paper 3, oil on canvas, uses perspective to stage his language, presenting three hierarchical and distinct perspectives; the distant facades of buildings, interspersed with lego-shaped trees, replete with lidless eyes gleaming out of the arches crowning buildings; the centered shadow of a bomber plane imposing a bird’s-eye view upon the painterly surface; and a red brick cross superimposed on the center, containing six comic-book symbols of explosions within its arms. The use of these perspectives stages a hierarchy of views - ground, air, and the cross as stand ins for games - and centers fluidity in Basu’s language while the playful comic-book explosions carry ominous undertones; as director Basu is the mischief-maker who delights in leaving the viewer entranced in the details of each perspective. As the creator of contested space, Basu stages the plasticity of our existence in tightly packed buildings, amidst unreal trees, watched by eyes from the top of facades recalling HAL 9000 the errant computer from 2001 A Space Odyssey, overseen by destructive shadow of ever present existential dread; proposing a state of constant war at every presented perspective.  

Basu’s language here covers the canvas– while playing with perspective – is the dread of existence overlaid by living in closely contested and oft overlapping space, or because it offers some architectural comfort in close quarters? Basu’s negotiation here is staged between the unseen and undefined human element – exiled to outside the frame - who, it could well be argued, only comes into the constructed space after negotiation has resolved in favor of the technological, and with whom the human element must nevertheless continue to negotiate if only to disrupt continuum of exile. 

Pooja Iranna’s A Thousand Thoughts to Build and Only One to Bring Down, stages architecture to create sculptural elements that bind with the instability of human existence. Constructed using acrylic and collage cut-outs to create jigsaw like pieces - some that stand out up from the surface of the paper - the work makes the viewing experience sculptural, tactile, and fragile. Representation of the human element takes its form in the visible composite construction of edifices intermittently fragmented, suggesting the frailty of a structure that could be compromised by one unstable foothold, or obstacle.  Balancing a double representation of the structure and construction of human thought, the work effortlessly folds into its own the vulnerability of the constructs governing language and thought, where complexity v. binary (the disruption of sculptural elements v. the deceptively flattened surface) is a contested place requiring constant negotiation. 

Pooja Iranna’s Gates to Yet Another Spectacular World built with staple pins uses the conformity of its material to create a double illusion. Stacked together, individual staples create a sculpture which is placed on a mirrored surface allowing it to reflect itself – echoing Gigi Scaria’s double but slightly altered perspectives. As in Basu’s work, the human element in Iranna’s is confined to and imprisoned by the architecture it once created – tackling the immense pressure upon each piece by the use of conformity – should one staple fall out of place, the whole edifice perhaps comes apart. Again, the human element can perhaps only enter as a viewer – our exclusion is thus contingent on our willingness to see beyond structural edifice, to follow the gates to another world – where the other world is perhaps an illusion of belief – could a road leading to another spectacular world simply lead back to our own? Despite the conformity of each staple holding up the edifice does the sculpture not speak to the immutability of architecture to respond to the human conditioning of and to social contexts – invariably reproducing the underlying fear that lends conformity validity in its abeyance to the norm. The material speaks against it – representing both pinnacle in its form, and social obedience in material and yet, we as the viewer, viewing from above and outside, are fascinated and seduced by the possibility of a gate to another realm.

The large oil on canvas works that form The Blackboard Without Further Space echo the transparency and layering of the collage, A Thousand Thoughts…The space here hints at memory of things past, with layers of bricks or staples in mesh-like formations – more appropriate perhaps in this case to suggest they echo bricks and therefore brick walls. The use of layers here, then suggests excavations, memories of walls enmeshed and imprinted in time. Pooja here stages the past as fragmented and broken in its links to the present – whole edifices build brick upon brick in the past, come up here as layers of two dimensional slides under a microscope, where the distant past co-exists however faintly with the surface in the same frame. This, it could be argued is the human mode of existence – the telling and rewriting of our stories in and out of context and subject to interpretation. Here, we are invariably present, and invariably culpable.   

Gigi Scaria’s sculpture Under the Water, and watercolor, Roots, stages sets of binaries; between above and below, horizon and beyond, and between planned space and naturally occurring space. In Roots, the horizon cuts across the center of the paper, cleanly delineating the space in half. Two constructions take their place side-by-side: a bridge holds up nameless mostly uniform, uninhabited buildings, with dark windows facing away from the sun, while its red veined roots under the horizon line creep towards the depths of darkened unmarked space; on the same plane in the corner rises a green rock with a winding road whose prism-like angles reflect varied shades of green; while it's underneath - it’s mirror image is another set of uninhabited buildings. Notable, as in most of Scaria’s work is the flatness of the background - a clean even surface of silver and grey unmarked by the vicissitudes of lived space staging the formlessness of time against which human construction swings between rebirth and destruction. 

Under the Water, a metal sculpture presents an even bleaker view. Reworking the bridge, the sculpture removes the element of water marking the resonance with Roots as a finite space contained by the sculpture, open and seemingly bereft of life. The sculpture echoes the use of architectural space as the edifices of constructed primacy.  What remains of this contested space when its human inhabitants and its life-giving elements are taken away? Possibly the same thing that happens when the subject is removed from the occupation of collective space - the viewer as the only observer who remains to negotiate the parameters of reentry.

Basu, Iranna and Scaria’s works are notable for the absence of the human element - all three together elaborate and bind architectural structures upon which human frailty, perspective, and collective space impose instability. While the human element here is physically absent, it is integral to the foundation of each work with each artist capturing the ever-evolving mediation between presence, absence and representation, often in favor of process, structure, and imposition. 

G. R. Iranna’s two untitled works hover between abstraction realism and symbolism. The paper work(diptych) portrays a collection of journals piled upon each other, with a flower sprouting from a corner. The analogy to learning, knowledge and its effect on life seems a linear one. The accumulation of journals however forms an abstract geometrical pattern that at once leads to a visual experience of an isolated dusty room full of  journals forgotten unarchived, left to be discovered accidentally. The other untitled work with a network of snaring spreading branches, bespeaks  of a network of tangled enmeshed world that is  interconnected in a causality agency.  

Shifting to an exploration of symbolism, Baiju Parthan’s Aqua Regia takes alchemy as its language, to contest rebirth through elemental transformation and attainment of perfection. Parthan’s considered space is the process of myth-making in the context of alchemy. Aqua Regia (royal/noble water), a mixture said to dissolve gold and platinum, resounds with the Philosopher's Stone. Denoted here by the rearing lion with the symbol of rebirth in the form of the sun and phases of the moon above its head, Parthan’s symbol for royalty, also stands in for the ascension of man attaining supremacy over nature-based belief systems. The foundational myth of the enlightenment, the primacy of reason over belief, and the scientific organization of knowledge is here ensconced in the symbolism of alchemy deftly linking the attainment of knowledge to a far older knowledge -  in the need for myth-making and symbolism.

In Perfect Solution, Parthan takes this further – myth-making is as much about the stories we choose to tell, and the way in which we choose to construct symbols as it is about the ability to do so – to create metaphors from our varied histories. To do this Parthan, turns to the objects of myth – the sword, the castle, the goblet of wine, through to the fantastical elements, stags, meerkats, a symmetrically exact flower and one single eye. Staged in the center and in the foreground, with all other non-human elements faced towards it, is the goblet topped by a flower that seems to echo the divine Pi ratio, inside which and in the wine/blood? stand a woman and a man – the latter holding a sword – gathered around the base of the flower’s stem which is afire. 

Framed in the background, against the latitudes and longitudes of our planet, Parthan perhaps suggests that myth-making continues to evolve in relation to the symbols of our primacy - those symbols, now quantified measurements. If rational knowledge is implicated by political machinations, Parthan thus begs the question: in the contested space of quantifiable knowledge and evolved politically-implicated symbolism, what are the possibilities for myth-making, when our primacy is constructed as nearly absolute in every sense?

Complimenting Parthan’s work, Sumedh Rajendran’s works use symbolism in relation to the mechanistic messiah. Rajendran’s mixed media collage, Untitled, frames a footless man grasping towards a headless fleeing animal, with hills in the background forming a horizon, sending wisps of metal roads outward to the feet of the two bodies tethered to each other in an overwhelmingly isolated landscape linked only by metal. The human, perhaps reaching out to capture, or in search of comfort extending a hand to the only other metallic embodiment in the same plane. Alongside the work of Iranna and Scaria, Rajendran’s collage also leaps into constructed architectural space by way of material use, echoing the complexity of transitional flimsy constructions of internal occupied spaces, while the precarity of a metropolitan city’s teeming inhabitants makes armored existence a futile endeavor in a open-air, collectively occupied shifting space.

Meanwhile, Rajendran’s mixed media on paper, Untitled,  carries echoes of Otto Dix’s bleak and dark drawings of the horrors and the trenches of World War I; the work does not afford its inhabitants any protection or armor. Packed, as the elongated bodies are, so tightly together that a hint of the dark spaces of occupation trickle from between them and surround them; carrying the feet of fellow travellers as they walk upon the hunched shoulders of those below them; black gaping holes litter the center of the paper running mainly across the faces and the shoulders of line of bodies below gazing bewildered forward or at their feet. Rajendran tackles the space of work, of jobs, of armor, of the daily departure of bodies to contained spaces - footless, for perhaps they cannot leave - with fellow headless companion bodies occupying often the same spaces, suggesting invariably the fragility of their existence - not framed by architectural elements as it were, but by the collective human occupation of already occupied spaces. Returning the human to these contested spaces, Rajendran’s works here, offer a bleak indictment of the forces constraining our lived experience, but offers a respite in the ability of bodies to reach for the companionship of others jostling in the same constrained space.

Of the works in the exhibition, perhaps only N.N. Rimzon’s paperworks can claim the creation of a space in harmony with its conceptual and physical components. In a recent essay Marta Jakimowicz describes Rimzon’s propensity to extend a holistic sensibility into ‘...current reality (where) he sees people and other entities as participants in a continuum of eternal, past, and current states punctuated by cosmic and mundane rhythms in the cycle of living, dying, and rebirthing, where benign forces coincide with damaging ones on all levels from the familiar to the political, none being independent of the others.’ 

Rimzon’s works defy abstracted language formations of contested space. He uses charcoal and pastel on paper to suggest mediated time between symbolism and abstraction. By outlining and not filling in voluminous forms such as: the elliptical at the base of each work; the pots that gather together at center of one work; the silent sentinels of houses and walls; and the figure of the man holding up a torch; Rimzon exposes paper to the vulnerability of time, allowing volume and time to occupy the same space, while negating neither. Note, while human, human constructions, and the barks of living trees derive from outlines, the stars the skies and the moon framing the top of the paper are fully filled in, suggesting their absorption of/in time. The ground crossed and delineated, the darkened windows of houses, and the receding rectangular shape in the ground are filled in with dense charcoal and pastel. The symbols of birth (the pots), of rebirth (the torch), wells of memory (the rectangular shapes in the ground), and the lyrically intertwined boughs of trees, and coconuts tucked under their branches, suggest symbolism situated as a mediator between formed time, and formless abstraction. The role of mediator also changes as the viewer’s gaze moves from the top of the page to the bottom. Each component shifts as the other does. Viewed in relation to one another, and the whole, the occupants of this complex interplay propose a space that is seductively composed. Not a clash, or contested space certainly, but a space of mediation created by its occupants and embodied with abstraction and symbols.

K.P. Reji’s diptych Fishes Under the Broken Bridge tackles the politics of public space. While not wholly contested by some of its occupants, Reji’s public space, in which its occupants are by turns content, playful, and generally going about their business of leisure is framed by an interplay of friction and intimacy. Reji creates in the foreground, framed by sand at the bottom and interrupted trees above, a place for school children and their playful time off. Surrounded by school bags, some play with frogs, while two doze, even as one boy straddling a branch of a tree lowers a dangling cockroach into the open mouth of the dozing boy below him. In the background, a broken bridge divides the canvas in half, interrupted only by a plane half sunk into the blue waters. The bridge is occupied by people fishing while seagulls hover above looking for an errant catch.

The work is notable for the peace which prevails - deceptively so. The petty cruelties enacted by the children - the frog in the tin box, the descent of the cockroach, the slightly smug, buddha-like smile on the boy in the trees whose face is almost hidden by leaves - all suggest the politics of intimacy, or daily routine, lived out in open spaces. In the distance, the people on the bridge seem benign by comparison, but gathered along with the seagulls make a private wait for a bait to bite, a dramatic experience. It is not just the seemingly mundane activities of people that animates the work, rather it is the intimacy of lived-in space that is so occupied, and filled with micro aggressions, which makes public space the site of contestation. This is Reji’s language: intimate actions and interactions, informed by the private narratives of its occupants, enacted in public space. 

T.V. Santhosh’s canvases tackle the veracity of the image by creating four perspectives. The first, in writer Santhosh S.’s words, ‘through a curious linguistic initiative (of subverting a media image from its positive into its negative, creating the archive) he proposes that the negative is not the archival truth but the self-annihilating same of the positive. These works also propose that the copies which claim the representative status of the real through the spectacular nature of presentation, production and dissemination actually and virtually construct a one-dimensional world.’  Santhosh S.’s proposition whereby this image constructs an internally unstable one-dimensional world, is here countered by the external placement of the negated image as the sole subject within the frame, which pushes the viewer to question the usually-in-tandem elements of content and form, now at oppositional ends in the spectrum of veracity and, of the process through which a viewer evaluates credibility. Placing this on a spectrum allows Santhosh to suspend the image, in a no-man's-land of sorts, positioning the image as fundamentally and doubly (internally as well as within the frame) unstable. Further, the ‘real’ in relation to the image echoes the same parameters of selection as in where one image is ‘real’, so is one set of people, as is one ideology, as is the populist who speaks for ‘real people.’ 

Embarking on this instability the second perspective offered to the viewer is the faces of the negated image of a schoolgirl gazing serenely at the viewer, while in the second canvas, the face of a soldier from the Sashastra Seema  Bal (Border Security Force) serving at the Wagah Border that divides India from Pakistan. The soldier gazes beyond the viewer, while the schoolgirl engages with the viewer. What makes both faces unstable is the interplay between the bright crosses occurring intermittently on the face of the canvas (the third perspective), denoting movement, while a background of deep green foliage of leaves and star-shaped flowers, deceptively anchors the fourth perspective. 

Creating this complex play of shifting realities, generated at the center by the instability of the image Santhosh effectively turns the entirety of the canvas into unstable ground, destabilizing any claim to the ‘real’ on part of the viewer, the artist or the occupants of the image, and further implying that any such claim from these constituents is necessarily outside of their awareness of this constructed reality. 

Together the works suggest the one axiom in contemporary art narratives that undergirds the exhibition: namely, that the ‘real’ from one perspective to another is necessarily constructed - by individuals, by the spaces that they occupy, and the manner in which they are in these spaces. If these constructions are not recognized, awareness is often supplemented by myth-making reusing and updating symbols: the constructions that are recognized as such, are created to denote the complexity of the ‘real’ that works in tandem with myth-making in order to exclude and divide, and only rarely to include and build, a subset of the ‘real’ for use only by those who speak the self-same language in an act of imposing primacy, or delineating boundaries. 

The artists in this exhibition defy linearity by staging their occupations against simplification to present instead, the complexity of negotiation, the increasing precarity of their human and non-human subjects, and the power of those subjects to create their own, often fractured, ‘realities’, drawing a line linking every level of unstable frame that shifts in accordance with its internal contexts, when so much else of the ‘real’ occupies a viewer's distracted gaze – making the act of seeing, and choosing context, image, and representation the responsibility of the viewer, and therefore explicitly political. 

Renuka Sawhney 

New York, 2017-18 

Renuka Sawhney is a writer living and working in New York.