My enlightened readers have already thought of two images; of the apocalypse and Noah’s Arc. It is apocalyptic in a sense that it reveals something (apocalypse also means revelation) and it reminds you of Noah’s Arc because it is in this vessel the grand old man, Noah collected all the specimen species for future distribution. Pooja must be envisaging a time when the architectural forms erasing the presence of human beings and making them live like mice within those structures conceived and executed by them. Also, the artist must be thinking of a scenario in which on the Day of Judgment, when the deluge covers earth, architectures will turn into floating devices and take people away from divine wrath.

It could be one way of reading Pooja’s video. However, I don’t want to stop it there. I want to probe the possibility of interpreting the architecture transforming into a ship against the light of shock doctrine (studied in detail by Naomi Klein in her book titled ‘Shock Doctrine: The Disaster Capitalism). In Pooja’s video, if you look at it carefully, the architectural form does not really turn into an arc, instead it turns into a warship with all its menacing features. And also you see that this ship is not carrying anyone away from an impending calamity.

Shock doctrine is a theory developed out of the practice of the early psycho therapists, who used electric shock as a remedy to cure mental imbalance. Their idea was/is to ‘rub the slate clean’. A patient’s brain is rubbed clean through electric shocks. This crude method of indoctrinating discipline and cure was later used by punitive facilities of military regimes where they subjected the captives to shock treatment in order to ‘make them clean’. The American economist Milton Freedman found out the potential of shock doctrine in engineering social changes. For example, he proposed that a calamity whether it is natural or man made, is not a calamity but an opportunity (He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”) You give the shock to a particular society and wipe it clean and the cleaned area is not a result of devastation therefore useless, but an opportunity to start everything afresh. This theory was later used in claiming back New Orleans from poor settlers and squatters by the corporate builders who had been eyeing the property for ages. When Hurricane Katrina hit the shores of New Orleans, decades’ old desire of the corporate houses satisfied in one go. The shore was wiped clean and the squatters were uprooted and shattered. Same shock doctrine was used over Iraq during the second Gulf War. America carpet bombed Iraq to shock people out of their wits and inscribe their minds with the image of the mighty new savior; the USA.

In Pooja’s video, the imagined apocalypse appears as an opportunity; it suddenly rips open the glossy covers of the political system. And we come to see that behind the façade of social progress there is a militaristic system that subjects human beings into inexplicable difficulties. Here, in this new age day of apocalypse, we see the architectural forms, which herald the arrival of real global corporate culture into our lives turning into a war ship. It eventually does not take anyone to safer shores. It leaves the people behind to witness the roaring ocean turning its color into the gloom and darkness. Our minds are now wiped clean and a new indoctrination is possible now. Any calamity is an opportunity for the political-militarist powers. Pooja’s video has this sub-text. For her apocalypse is (whether actual or perceived) something that produces ‘real change’. And with her genuine subtlety, she points a finger of critique at this notion of ‘real change’.

It could be quite accidental that Pooja’s project happens at a time we all witness the effects/efforts of disaster capitalism. In the name of Commonwealth Games the powers that are have created an actual ‘disaster’ in the city of Delhi. Though the shock doctrine applied on the city of Delhi was meant for positive changes in terms of city planning and organization, it has resulted into a major disaster from which we are all sure that the political and economic powers would reap several opportunities.

Pooja perceives the effects of this subtle shock doctrine applied by the global capitalism in the proliferation of urban architecture. She creates miniatures of late/post capitalist corporate architectures using stapler pin as her medium. Stapler pins, practically are devices that holds pieces of paper together. Brittle and minute in themselves these pins, metaphorically speaking, emblematize the ‘strength of the weak’. The stapler pins, painstakingly put together by the artist on the one hand shows the artistry and innovative quality of Pooja and on the other hand forwards a critique of the menacing character of the urban buildings, which lean, twirl and twist like creatures from a nether land. These imagine architectures show how urban spaces are created not by keeping living organisms including human beings, flora and fauna as the centre of its discourse but as keeping presence of power as its point of departure. Architectures in Pooja’s sculptural installations with stapler pins are not only the symbolic of the might power but also their underlying message of threat.

What happens when the topography of a place is chartered and marked by well defined and designed architectures and streets? True, that it makes life easier. But If we look at it from a different perspective, which is more human, we come to know that such planning make governing easier. Planning in fact controls the human movement, it curtails the human beings’ innate desire to revolt and go under ground. It also reveals every nook and corner of a place/space while pretending that it exactly hides such places. A planned city is a place where the possibilities of revolt are minimized. Usually, we say that in the chaotic third world urban places, guerilla activities flourish thanks to its ability to absorb people into it innards. But with the establishment of corporate cities, the ruling powers flush out such unmarked spaces by incorporating them into the planned topography. By creating idols of such defined architectures, Pooja makes an ironic statement on progress and through that she forwards a critique of shock doctrine through urban planning.

Pooja’s drawings and paintings are minimal and they bear concrete and abstract qualities of two dimensional art at the same time. The scratching and doodling of her early works on parchment and canvas have given way to more painterly strokes and carefully added blobs of wax as if they were beads attached to a traditional wear. Metaphorically and symbolically, at least for me as an art critic, they are the corners and abandoned spaces traced out from our urban locations. These corners and abandoned spaces, while being integral to the main architectures, do not find articulation in the discourse of planning. That’s why they become the places to spit, urinate or hide. These unarticulated liminal spaces find a voice in Pooja’s paintings and drawings. And from different distances you find different visual qualities to these images. From the middle distance of viewing, you find that they are pillars, joint of walls, corners, armatures, scaffoldings, blueprints and so on, which normally are not taken care of in the final counting of the urban spaces.

As an end note, a couple of things I would like to point out. Once again as an accident, you find this show of Pooja opens on another 9/11. Nine years back, on this day, we all were shocked by a terrorist adventure in the US. That was the shock doctrine of a different kind. The militants were using the same logic of shock therapy to the political mind of the first world (read the USA). Today, we have Pooja’s architectural forms remotely reminding the collapsed twin towers. There is an uncanny feeling you get while stand before the works (Once again quite by chance, a stapler pin sculpture fell down and broke into pieces. Was there an Al-quida wave in the air? J)

Finally, oh my God, I have got an opportunity to see a woman artist’s work without vaginas, menstrual blood and pubic hair. There is no hint of it in Pooja Iranna’s work. Feminine approach in art could be many times bolder than the male approach. With no phallic symbols, with no toothed vaginas and no trace of sanitary napkins, Pooja proves that it is possible. And I am happy for that and all of you know that between this critic and this artist there is a secret bonding. To know that check my profile in facebook and check her date of birth in Palette Art Gallery website.

JohnyML

http://johnyml.blogspot.com/2010/09/without-vaginas-menstrual-blood-and.html

Uma Nair 
10 October 2010

At ARTCELEBRATES2010, (Lalit Kala Akademi) the video that stands out for its iconic intensity is Pooja Iranna’s ‘Swas’. Pooja is a part of the Art Alive presentation.This video is a single channel video, 3.45 min long and Pooja says she entitled it ‘Swas’ because she wants to draw attention to the thought of a building breathing. The images of the building with its grid like patterns become a riveting resonance of sorts.



‘This  is a single building breathing,’ says Pooja . ’I wanted it to draw our attention towards the spaces we live in and create. These are alive and breathing just like us. They might be standing mute for some but they are there and carry vibrations which we usually are ignorant of.’ Pooja works with photographs that she has taken, on many travels, and architecture becomes a moot point of her commentary .



Intriguing perhaps is the truth of the fact that the landscape becomes subsumed within an architecture that is hypermodern and is already the voluntary accomplice of media legend and surveillance regimes. Instead of the beauty of a sky, she scrutinizes a skyscraper; in the past she would care little of the flow of a  river, and instead give us a bridge; and as viewers, when we try and map our position, with respect to her vision, we see only an ambient darkness, that perhaps brims on the fear of exploitation. In the Photoshopped images of built form shot in the USA or Singapore, or Korea, she takes the structures riffs and repeats their identity  to create a false perspective that invites us in and captures our gaze and minds. In this case it as if she has folded geometric patterns  to form mirages, to orient the viewer , into her own space of thought.



What Iranna develops in the course of these exercises is not the commemoration of structure so much as the deepening of bhava, a mood that eludes precise verbal explanation while yet generating unmistakable sensuous response. Her works convey a spectrum of emotional temperatures, ranging from the fragile to the tough, the auratic sensation of beyondness to the quotidian awareness of light and darkness. In a melting black backdrop, a building floats like a bejewelled lantern, the faint presence of a crane suggesting the ongoing nature of her signature of ‘construction’ activity. 



In an interview a few years ago Pooja said: “I have always liked treating my material differently, taking on the challenge of its unpredictability while working. For me seeking my own language has always been a struggle and continues to be. Initially I start off with many sketches that are basic drawings of nature and structures that I respond to. With the rudimentaries in place, it proceeds rather intuitively within self imposed restrictions.”

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/plumage/entry/pooja-iranna-swas

Like Pooja Iranna, I belong to the city of New Delhi, a city that has transformed so rapidly in the last few years that we the residents are left bemused at its expanding scale and baffled at the implications of this rapid urban metamorphosis – from a post-Independent refugee Capital city defining and shaping the modern nation to becoming one of the key stations in the Post-global economic and political network. It is in this context that I feel compelled to read Pooja’s work, and it is to this nexus that I feel she contributes most as an urban artist.  

Pooja’s art has made slight visual shifts every few years since she began working after graduating from the College of Art, New Delhi in 1995 but she has remained true to her inspirational precedents – built urban structures, how they order and articulate space and the response of the human body and the human psyche to these spaces. 

The particular brand of her visual language has existed in the blurred boundaries between painting, photography, mixed media collages and sculptures and between architecture, urban spatiality and abstraction. But it is my belief that it is this very interstitial nature of her work that opens up a set of dialogues on contemporary habitats rarely embarked upon, except in terms of ecological activism. There in nothing in Pooja’s work that discusses the ‘peri-urban’ phenomenon, the place where the city and the countryside meet, where the natural and the manmade clash. Nor does it talk of architecture as dwelling, thus referring to the built structures as habitats. If at all, it is the very opposite of this particular dialectic of space as ‘lived’ that helps us initiate a conversation about how we can think about our lives lived in bounding metropolises and among towering and omnipresent buildings. 

Of particular reference are the photographic works (Reflective Energies I & II, Converging/Segregating I, II & III, all 2008) from Pooja’s oeuvre, digitally manipulated, often mirror images of photographs of buildings and other built structures, like bridges, taken by the artist. Rather then carrying the burden of too close a cultural or geographic reference, these images identify a certain characteristic of contemporary structures: to fulfill a potent symbolic function reflecting the ideology of ‘newness’, or if you like, radical and forward-looking development. 

When looking at the photographic works we are aware firstly of the soaring access, of spatiality articulated as a spectacle. This free movement is aided but also ordered by the architectural elements, creating frames which are patterned by grids, reducing the magnificence to the manageable. What they are are present day high-rises, headquarters of Multinational Corporations, Banks or World Agencies, shiny glass clad buildings that belong to no-place and can be seen in every-place. But what they have become in Pooja’s work are radical architecture, emptying space of time and event thus creating a shock of absolute fragmentation and dislocation.

A striking feature of Pooja’s work is the lack of human presence. It begs the question, what are the social and cultural implications when the act of building monuments overpowers the actors themselves, when these structures are devoid of utility and take on an existence much larger, much more monumental then the humble-ness of the lived or occupied space? They surpass even the discourse of design and become monstrous in their ability to pass over the one aspect of architecture that makes it relatable, its absolute necessary relationship with the human body. Our occupation of space is not quantifiable or abstract but very material and culturally specific: gestures, habits, performances, residue-leaving practices, poetic/political discourse/collective imagination, commemoration, everyday practices, spectacles, ceremonies, and the like… can Pooja help us come up with an understanding of spatial(izing) art and lived practices?

How do we then respond to this deflection of relatability if not attempt to fill the space with emotions, thoughts and desires, when our body is too limited, too small for the challenge? Her work flies in the face of the dictum that ‘all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’ (Bachelard, Poetics of Space). And yet her art is an articulation of the essence of the phenomenological experience. It brings to mind Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flaneur, a city-wanderer who experiences the city through walking without being recognized, with a freedom one would not find in rural settlements. For urban living is very intimate (spatial proximities of modern housing and work areas) and very distant (social distance of anonymous existences) at the same time. 

Pooja’s art is preoccupied with the urban environment as the location for this experience. She experiences space through her senses, thus we get, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “not texts but texture”. While we can still identify the physical precedents of the photographic works it is in her paintings Apex/ Base I & II that we experience the ultimate sense of nothingness, a space then filled with immense possibilities. There is still the articulation of three dimensionality but it is a visualization of intangible ideas, of emotions and of individual experiences. It is in this aspect that one sees the poetry in the austerity of Pooja’s visual language, her limited palette and the spaces she creates, spaces which are alien and isolating and also, in a weird way, inviting, encouraging your thoughts to soar high, glide along the smooth planes or settle in the nooks and crannies. We not only create and transform architectural spaces, but we also produce stories, myths, imaginations about them. These spatial imaginations can not be dissociated from the material corpus of the city.

It is not so implausible to consider poetry, architecture and art together, for their interest with form, their use of meter or structure, and their stance toward their environments. They involve our perception and how that perception is translated into a created, or built, environment. Pooja inserts into this triangulation us human beings, the creators and receptors of such activities. The human presence is not the central visual character of her work but present more in essence, a viewer whose awareness of self is heightened by the lack of others. I may not be present in Pooja’s art but it has been made with the knowledge of me.  

Miniscule Monumentality: Pooja’s New Sculptural Exploration

The fascinating new development in the current body of work are the intricate sculptures made by the artist using staples. Resembling building models they cleverly replicate many of the ideas in the digital works and paintings but also the formal aspects of composition, colour and form. The vast expanse of Confluence I, the complex geography of the pyramid in Convergence/ Segregating I and the lyricism and precision of Confluence II are astounding. They give some indication of the unique vision with which Pooja sees the world, as a collection of abstractions that fit together, as a digital design but also as a ‘new nature’ that is defined by us and in return defines us. 

Her play with scale from the vast to the miniscule, an aspect that has been a part of her creative process from the start, is worked to perfection in these sculptures. Though this is not the first time Pooja has made sculptures, in 2006 she made Standing Strong where she laminated digital prints onto boxes and stacked them as towers and To My Kids With Love where similar boxes formed a grid wall it is with this work that we see the maturing of Pooja’s style. There is none of the ad-hoc or the vainly constructed in these staple sculptures. Their strength lies in how they belie the fragility of their size and material and take on the persona of a much more powerful thing, like modern architecture – shiny, metallic and ordered. As Pooja puts it, ‘They look delicate and yet they are strong. Any strand left loose or a frail part ignored can make the whole structure crumble and fall apart never to be built to the same strength.’ But it is this very aspect that the sculptures celebrate, the ‘human endeavor’ that urges us on to better what exists and to push the limits of imagination and possibility.  

In conclusion,

the public space appears as an architectural and identity space, one fully open to small narratives. So then do we begin to consider this over-equipped city around us as a new landscape, even with the aesthetic connotations attached to this term? The city is an environment consisting of the work of man, and this work carries the mark of visual considerations. In fact, nothing could be more false than to assert, as one often does, that today’s city testifies to a total indifference with regard to form and ambiance. On the contrary, from building fronts to billboards, almost everything is designed and seeks to attract and seduce the eye. The chaotic character of the large, contemporary cityscape originates, as witnessed in Pooja’s art, more from an over-abundance of aesthetic intentions than from their radical absence. The artist takes pleasure in multiplying architectural perspectives in order to mislead the spectator. This architecture may cause anxiety due to its potentially limitless character, yet it is the limitlessness of the constructed that also frees it, and us, from the shackles of confinement and thus urban imprisonment. The ever-expanding boundaries of the built space become our new frontiers, our anxious landscapes. 

Deeksha Nath
January 2009

In the visual arts, also, the vibrancy of landscape as subject has coincided with major technological revolutions that threatened to overrun nature. The Romantic and Impressionist engagements with landscape, for instance, coincide with major transformations of experience: even as colonial expansion, steam, electricity, and the railways changed the countryside forever, artists tried to address and capture the natural through the optics of the Sublime, of nostalgia, of social critique, or fantasia. Importantly, also, both the Romantics and the Impressionists maintained close links with science and technology, consulting meteorological almanacs, reading studies of light and accounts of experiments with locomotion and electricity, and keeping up with alternative or new media at every stage, whether tube paints, the telescope or the camera.

*

Today, the natural has been menaced or re-formatted by a new triad of forces: the media, militarisation, and surveillance. The media have turned nature into the readymades of exclusive holidays and postcard memories, broken it down into Facebook shareware, and presented it as a quilt of historic landmarks and intimate neighbourhoods, all rendered equally available on Google Earth. Militarisation subjugates nature with barbed-wire fencing, checkpoints, mine-fields and watchtowers. Surveillance, which marks the intersection of media and militarisation, also reduces the natural to a landscape of potential threats, footage to be scoured for signs of unrest and insurgency, whether that landscape is the hinterland or the metropolitan street.

Indeed, the landscape is no longer clearly designated by regional characteristics or specificities of cultural practice. It is a conceptual terrain, inscribed and re-inscribed by narratives that reshape it to their own purposes. The landscape, which was once the paradigm of location and belonging, is today a guarantee of uncertainty, disturbance, and disorientation. Thus, I arrive at my formulation of ‘The Landscapes of Where’ in relation to the work of five artists – Prajakta Palav Aher, Pooja Iranna, Prajakta Potnis Ponmany, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya. How do these artists position themselves and reclaim the landscape in a time of radical dislocation?

*

The Aladdin complex of globalisation ensures that we can rip images at will, click a button to add to our cave of treasures: Mount Fujiyama for the album, the Petronas Towers or a stretch of Michigan forest for a screen-saver, a piece of Californian sky to sleep under. We can transport the Taj Mahal to Colorado and dispatch snowflakes to Bangalore in our digital dreams. Every image becomes an archaeology of templates, waiting to be excavated, layer by layer. What then happens to our notions of ‘land’ in a landscape, to the placed-ness of place? Does ‘land’ become a composite image of recognisable and unrecognisable places: does it seem like our own but also like somebody else’s? But this litany concerning ‘elsewheres’ should not prompt the reader into the kind of alarmism that regards new technologies of digital manipulation as the work of the Devil.

It has been claimed that these technologies, pervasive in the era of globalisation, will impose an automatic cultural homogeneity, erase diversity, and diminish local autonomy. But in truth, new technologies enter a situation such as contemporary India at uneven rates of speed. They are assimilated and indigenised to various degrees, depending on local factors and regional parameters. Two of the participants in this exhibition – Palav and Iranna – deploy Photoshopping techniques to reshape images grabbed from the Net, or the print media, or, as in Iranna’s case, her own photographs. The results manifest differing notions of self, agency, social location and desire.

Prajakta Palav Aher’s recombinant landscapes evoke the beauty and terror of the Sublime by seamlessly stitching diverse elements together: for instance, she takes a ‘scenery’ sourced from Google Earth and melds it with the photograph of a mountain in a Bombay suburb that has become invisible beneath the overgrowth of slums that it now bears. These paintings deftly mongrelise our experience of landscape painting; they mimic the magisterial scale and presence of high art, but also refer to the angelic ‘sceneries’ (as they are described in many Indian regional languages, the word adapted from English), cheap landscape posters deployed by some sections of the middle class to decorate their homes.

This is not a cut-and-paste job made possible by the genies of globalisation. Palav manifests an intuitive vision – intuitive because she does not articulate it as such in words – of the counter-sublime. It is conveyed through the threatening abundance of the multitude, and the proliferating built form that overwhelms both the individual in the metropolis and the cosmos at large. [1] The viewer knows that the settlements on the mountain in the distance will stealthily rip through the sap green and viridian of the ambient landscape, erasing the memory of the earth’s skin forever. And the river will choke on the houses that will not stop growing. Apocalyptic events take place silently in Palav’s painting, just as they do in the paintings of that master landscapist Brueghel, who shows the farmer continuing to plough the field, the cattle grazing, and a ship sailing on, while Icarus falls unnoticed into the sea.

For Pooja Iranna, landscape becomes subsumed within an architecture that is hypermodern and is already the voluntary accomplice of media legend and surveillance regimes. Instead of sky, we see a skyscraper; instead of a river, we see a bridge; when we try and map our position, we see only ambient darkness. In the Photoshopped images of built form shot in the USA or Singapore, the structures are riffed and repeated to create a false perspective that invites us in and takes us captive. Or then the buildings are flipped over many times, geometries folded on geometries to form mirages, to disorient the viewer.

What Iranna develops in the course of these exercises is not the commemoration of structure so much as the deepening of bhava, a mood that eludes precise verbal explanation while yet generating unmistakeable sensuous response. Her works convey a spectrum of emotional temperatures, ranging from the fragile to the tough, the auratic sensation of beyondness to the quotidian awareness of light and darkness. In a melting black backdrop, a building floats like a bejewelled lantern, the faint presence of a crane suggesting the ongoing nature of Iranna’s ‘construction’ activity (Encountering Illusion II, 2008). By contrast, ‘Encountering’, 2008, signals a monster building that is seemingly ready to take off, a flying machine or menacing UFO that is paradoxically also a moving target. In Iranna’s work, the role of the landscape has been wholly usurped by an architecture of authoritarian control, as suspicious of airplanes straying from their flight paths as it is of unauthorised whispers in the street.

In the midst of the unpeopled landscapes of Palav and Iranna, an old couple sitting in a Shiva-Parvati pose suddenly materialise in a verdant meadow festooned with Mickey Mouse balloons. While they seem to be enjoying a yogic lightness of being, their modest, even rustic clothes do not match the holiday brochure backdrop that promises luxury and recreational ease. Imran, the technician at a streetside photo studio in Bombay, has Photoshopped the image in layers. His brief was to represent the couple as though they were on a tirtha-yatra, a religious pilgrimage. Instead of the conventional pilgrim destinations of Hardwar or Prayag-Allahabad, Imran chose a phantasmagoric template: he told me that he felt the old couple would feel comfortable in the open maidan-playground-like space with a river and colourful balloons and sent them on a pleasant fictional journey. He secularised the yatra by evacuating it of its religious content, replacing the pilgrimage centre with the holiday resort. In this new social play of fantasy, the conventional categories of nationality, ethnicity and religion can no longer usefully account for the identities that are being generated at various levels of the popular imagination.

I am left with a question: Who is the sva in the rupa, the self in the form? Is it Imran, or is it the photographer? Or is it the couple represented within the image? Or their children, the clients who produced the demand for a fitting visual tribute? ‘Yatra’ is an image produced by a complex coalition of desires. It challenges our regimented ways of understanding how culture is produced, and injects the virus of the demotic aesthetic more forcefully into the gallery space than before. [2]

We move on to an artist for whom the interior and the exterior exchange valency. Prajakta Potnis grows, rather than builds a site-specific installation that transforms the walls into skin. In the current site-specific installation, she blurs the line between architecture, nature and the human body creating environments that address the processes of a landscape’s growth and change, as much as they do the body’s cycles. Landscape for Potnis is calibrated along a scale of intensities: it can be as intimate as skin, as distant as mountains framed in a window. What unites these intensities is Potnis’ horror of the violated surface, the membrane threatened by external impact or internal disquiet. She dwells on pore-punctuated skin, painted walls whose wiring suddenly jerks alive, the smoothness of organs that conceal cysts and lesions. This time around Potnis has ambitiously worked with scale and material to create a seven-foot silicon floor sculpture that breeds like a concealed malignancy. The trope of disturbance, for Potnis, is excrescence: as rash or acne on skin, as tumours within the body, as denuded mountains and quarried hillsides. [3]

This exhibition includes voices from the North-east, rarely heard in mainstream Indian discourse or seen in the festive ambit of contemporary Indian art. India was a country of elsewheres and elsewhos even before the digital revolution inaugurated the fashion of cryptonyms and second lives. Cartographically, the North-east is shaped like an arm that refuses either to swing straight or be amputated, dangling from a body that will neither claim it nor let it go. The seven states of the North-east have suffered the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the AFSPA, for many decades: curfews and crackdowns punctuate normal life, and bomb attacks and battles between the armed forces and militants of various shades are routine events. Emergency is the most typical shape that normality assumes in the North-east.

Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya, who live in Guwahati and are co-founders of the Desire Machine collective, achieve a memorable degree of political attentiveness in their video poems by relinquishing all devices that are obviously political. For Jain, the idiom of the urban documentary becomes a point of departure to be thoroughly recast and reinvented. In her flaneuresque contemplation of implied landscape, she transmutes a streetscape in Shillong – ‘discovered’ through seemingly chance encounters around lottery stalls, moving traffic, loiterers and busy people – into a river song. Fluid as a dream, drenched in shades of limpid aqua and bleeding green, the visuals are edited rhythmically to the lapping of waves and the splash of oars. The tender lyricism of this video work belies its philosophical complexity. The riverine metaphor emphasises the need for a confluential multiplicity of ideas, cultures and positions in a society wracked by violence.

By turning the city’s spatial patterns into the flux of a river, by inviting us to read land as water, and by cuing us into re-interpreting the visual subliminally through the acoustic, Jain orchestrates several subtle shifts in our viewerly assumptions. Turned into a river, the city is shaken loose from the competing regimes of surveillance and terror. It flows freely, like poetry, blood or the desire for emancipation. Geared to operate at a subliminal level, the film literally occupies a threshold space. The number 25/75, proclaiming the winning lottery of the day, is repeated like a visual mantra. Its random appearance could suggest the probability of victory but also of plain survival; and it speaks, also, of the ever-present tension between majority and minority, elite and subaltern, winners and losers. Jain generates the moving allegory of a landscape where freedom is furtive, chance is worshipped, and any moment may throw up a transformative encounter with fate.

*

For Mriganka Madhukaillya, abstraction becomes a route to speak the unspeakable: to voice the breath that is choked, to indicate the window that can never be opened, and if opened, will only confront you with the darkness within. In ‘Passage’, he draws us into the spirit and textures of a threatened society and ecology, using the motifs of twinning, partition, rupture and suturing. The film focuses on a single window in the Chaudhari Bari (the House of the Chaudharies) an old haveli in Baruipur, in the southern 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. It is an optical experiment that records the properties of light coming through the wooden slats of a window, the subtle shifts effected by the movements of shutter and pane, with light and breath becoming interchangeable with one another.

The sound track, built from the magnifications of breath, underlines the struggle of a restless body in a prison-like atmosphere suffering from sensory deprivation. The mirages of light are masculinist in tenor, vertically oriented columnar, spire- or linga-like. But they are never stable: they are repeatedly subjected to tremors, pulled apart, violated and abruptly banished into the dark. To explain this cycle of repetition and disjuncture, Madhukaillya cites Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as questioning “whether repetition should be considered as the throb of Eros or should instead be seen as something that lies beyond pleasure, threatening it with violence – something that must therefore be identified with death.” [4]

But all is not bleak. The yogic operations of breath, composed with a telegraphic yet allusive intensity, lead to the occasional epiphany signalled by the clang of a temple bell or the hint of a lama’s chant. Madhukaillya’s vision is auratic in its etymological multiplicity: it is breath, as well as gold, as well as light.

Curatorial Essay by
Nancy Adajania

Notes and References

1. Nancy Adajania, ‘The City in Reverse: Prajakta Palav Aher’s Image Rotations’ (exh. catalogue essay; Delhi: Vadehra, 2009). See also, Nancy Adajania, ‘Bonsais or Bullets: Prajakta Palav’s Oblique Portraits of the Middle Class’ (exh. catalogue essay; Bombay: Gallery Beyond, 2005).
2. The present author held an Independent Research Fellowship from Sarai-CSDS in 2004-05. ‘Yatra’ is based on her research into the digital transmutation of the family portrait in urban India. See Nancy Adajania, ‘In Aladdin’s Cave: Digital Manipulation and Transmutation of the Private Image in Urban India’, in Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ eds., On Difference #3, Raumpolitiken/ Politics of Space (Stuttgart: Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2008).
3. Nancy Adajania, ‘Conceptual Humidity’ (exh. catalogue essay; Bombay: The Guild Art Gallery, 2009). See, also, Nancy Adajania, ‘The Spell of Objects’ (exh. catalogue essay; Bombay: The Guild Art Gallery, 2006).
4. Pers. comm., April 2009

The compelling ambiguity of her painted image is indeed intriguing- it is neither the image of a thing nor a specific object nor without a reference to it. It is neither abstract nor representational, nor merely structural or sculptural. Yet there are facets that belong to each/all of them. In negating the notion of the outward spectacle, the artist oscillates between arrays of pictorial possibilities. 

Notice here the typically transparent watercolour is layered to exude effects of viscous lava, the burning colours of intense fire. Employing a sparse vocabulary, Pooja creates poetry that whispers; yet the strength of her voice resonates in the stony ambience. The dark and haunting specters evoke unnerving presences that humble the human intellect before the forces of the sublime. The viewer is made to sense the awe of nature without making an explicit reference to it. While the work does not qualify either as landscape or architecture, the quest intends to go beyond the scaffolding of space and structure. Even within the precincts of abstraction, Pooja is able to weave her subjective experiences that reveal emotional and psychological states using the barest economy of color and form. 

The Intimacy of Perception

Having travelled extensively for the last three years, Pooja admits that for the first time she has experienced the vastness of nature indeed more intensely than ever during her metropolitan upbringing. In the city, nature is enclosed in pockets between buildings, or then framed and bounded as a manufactured backdrop. To Pooja, it is the unframed, unbounded and deterritorialized nature that evokes a sublime mystery. Through selective details that are amplified or subdued, she accentuates the coexistence of contradictory forces in a suspended tension. 

An exquisite vision is in play here with an uncanny capacity for visual communication. There is an elusive introversion embedded deep within these restricted colors and textures that heighten the volatility of spaces. The most stable forms are made unstable through the experience of displacement and disequilibrium. In between the tilted views, steep slopes and arduous hostile spaces wherein vision is blocked and points of contact lost, Pooja plants a pocket of concentrated light or a rim of kinetic energy, touching on aspects of the surreal, the minimal and the lyrical. The painted image is potentially wedged between anticipation and fear. 

For the last decade or so that I have been looking at Pooja Broota’s works, I have consistently noted that she is never in a rush to create. She assigns ample time to mulling over ideas, observations and sensations that draw her attention. She clarifies her conceptual image with innumerable preliminary drawings before she initiates the appearance of the image on the paper. Every detail regarding colour, shape, length and thickness of shapes is pre-meditated and yet all is not measured or based on pure empiricism as it may empty it of all its mystery, and reduce it to a mere quality. The inevitable “unknown” of the desired form unfolds through the worked layers to translate the intimacy of perception. 

While contemplated through architectural spaces, Pooja’s images are not about buildings as much as about vibrations, frequencies and relationships that are realised through them. The human is absented but only to become a witness to the changing face of the earth. This is accentuated by her passion for photography that has made her see the world with more alertness and engagement than ever before. The bulging stresses of heaving forms, the pressured load bearing columns, the out-of-joint edges, neglected nooks and corners, all stir her imaginative powers and elicit psychological responses closer to human feeling and experience. Often the insignificant details hold pictorial potential and spring surprises to gain magnified presences in Pooja’s works. 

There are many conventions broken here. Encountering her recent watercolours on paper, one is struck by an expanded metascape that is seen from no where, an experiential vision that does not need to be enclosed in a linear perspective. I was instantly drawn to the unusual choice of her medium, her preference for watercolour to paint her large, stark non-representational imagery, the largest being four by eight feet on paper. Relinquishing the ascribed attribute of immediacy with the watercolour daub or its liquid brushstroke, Pooja works in dense layers, veiling different colours by gently tending the surface of the paper with short and rapid hand movement, bringing solidity to the fragile membranes of her structures. As a result, the forms do not remain static but exude a silent energy. 

“This is the biggest I have ever gone (4ft. x 8ft.)”, says Pooja, who is known for her works in small format celebrating the intimate touch and warmth of her hand as transferred on to the various materials that she works with – paper mache, straw, sticks, threads, crushed paper and paints. Interestingly, in these paintings, the large expanse of the surface has gone even sparser, erased of all cultural markers, suggestive of physical energies that endlessly circle the vistas of infinite time and space. Rejecting the ease of a thick impasto stroke in acrylic or the viscous sweep of oil paint, she gets adventurous with the watercolour medium known to be more suited to intimate paper sizes and indulged for free spontaneous dabbling of paint. Another revered attribute associated with traditional watercolours is its effect of transparency that brings light and airiness while retaining the white paper base as part of its final image. Pooja has instead laboured the medium to work out a new language. Her rather dark and dense paintings use watercolour to sculpt the image, turning as it were the liquid into ice via her process, transforming it into a solid substance. The hand-drawn structures with their pressured contours and irregular edges capture the hand painted variance in a blanket of minute strokes. 

In the many layers that coat the paper, the artist seems to be testing the resilience of the medium itself. For Pooja no other medium would have effectively worked to simultaneously convey both vulnerability as well as the resilience that characterise human existence. 

In her words,

“I have always liked treating my material differently, taking on the challenge of its unpredictability while working. For me seeking my own language has always been a struggle and continues to be. Initially I start off with many sketches that are basic drawings of nature and structures that I respond to. With the rudimentaries in place, it proceeds rather intuitively within self imposed restrictions.”

The perfection of geometry is negated in her imagery to address the crooked and zigzag contours that go out of shape either bearing weight or then confronting irresistible force. She is averse to using the straight edge, which she feels pulls a dead line without vibrancy or force. “My lines never go straight…if they go straight they will go dead”. Certainly, there is no straight line in nature as such. Nature by itself is not geometrical though artists like Cezanne and Picasso have investigated and deduced its basic structure through a formal geometry. For Pooja, it is important to evoke varied emotions through her hand drawn forms. Compressed as if by time and history they acquire a weathered look, but in their imperfections and inflections, they carry the vortex of energy, the regenerative powers of the womb. 

Starting from swaying a thick brush soaked in the fluid colour, the paper is veiled with earthy colours and made relatively opaque. Gradually, the size of the brush shrinks and from broad bands of colours Pooja arrives at drawing linear textures with a fine brush. The quick drying tendency of watercolour allows working in a rhythmic flow. Using a consistent modulation of the rapid feather touch strokes, Pooja alters their routes to suggest surface undulations. Her colour palette is a deliberate choice as Pooja believes that while working on earth colours, they get more and more mysterious with each layer and draw out the stored forces of nature. There is however one work that shifts to shades of aquamarine and brings to mind the colours of the deep sea. The attempt is at capturing the flowing sea and its rhythm within the imaginatively sliced forms. One may ask- how do we hold the sea in a form? For Pooja, it is never through direct transcription but through vibrant colour and gestural mark making that symbolise its mystery. 

Finally, we come to the ultimate paradox. Pooja intricately paints, filling the entire surface in order to create emptiness. This emptiness but overflows with primal energies that help realize the mute meanings of existence. 

ROOBINA KARODE
(Roobina Karode is an independent curator & historian based in New Delhi)

Pooja Iranna has long been interested in architecture and the representation of it. In her art she has both attempted to communicate something of the power and presence of architecture as well as employed images of architecture as metaphors for society and her own personality. Previous series of works were directly inspired by the experience of the Mughal monuments in her home city of Delhi, the synthesis of geometrical forms that are both structure and ornament and the seemingly organic nature of these mathematical paradigms. As if creating details from Mughal structures, the artist has built up elaborate relief works which are both picture and object, resembling a portion of a labyrinth and the complex interweavings of the multiple personal relationships each of us juggle. Culled from both craft traditions and modernist abstraction, these relief works celebrated a fragility of materials and a discipline of program, rendering the ancient and anonymous into the contemporary and individual. Through these works, the artist felt that patterns in her own behavior and attributes of her own psyche could be expressed and compared with those of others, bridging the divides of time, space and perspectives with other human beings. 

More recently, Pooja has been attracted to modern and contemporary architecture and their potential for creative manipulation. The geometrical complexities of Islamic architecture has given way to a Modernist grid and its permutations, a more straight-forward geometry perhaps but one still loaded with significance. Artists such as Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre exploited the potential of the grid in art practice some thirty years ago but today, with the advent of post-modernism, computer technology and digital imaging, the grid has taken on increased ambiguities and associations. Pooja’s interest in the grid has been in the possibilities for unlimited variations within its repetitive structure, in its accommodation of idiosyncrasies and its merging with other forms and structures. Windows, doors and staircases often break the regularity of the grid, to say nothing of the reflections found within the glass skins of many buildings or the pulse of life which moves through them. 

Like many artists of her generation, Pooja has begun to explore the camera as a tool for sketching, record keeping and manipulation. In her most recent works, she has photographed details of architecture and rearranged the colors and lines of these details on the computer. This enables the artist to both personalize the architectural details and to allow the attributes of chance and discovery to shape the final picture. Pooja takes pleasure in allowing this evidence of distortion by technology to remain visible in her work, to both refine and adapt the original details and to comment on man’s increasing dependence on technology for his own self-image. The artist feels this technique mirrors the refinements in her own life in the past few years, reflecting the maturation which has come with motherhood and the focused concentration she has been able to bring to her own art practice. 

The works themselves are kept miniature, almost in defiance of the gargantuan scale of architecture, as if one is examining a city through a microscope. Contradictory to what may be one’s expectations, the digitally-manipulated pictures are messier and rougher than the watercolors from which they begin, colors are both stranger and softer, line work feels more organic than in the originals. Pooja is fascinated by the pulsating rhythms which emerge through these processes, harmonies seem to form easily out of the geometries of the architecture while a notational scripture for the patterns of life, or even the synapses of the brain, is achieved. These works become something of a meeting point between the experiments of the first generation of Minimalists in the 1960s and 1970s and the elaborate detailing of palaces and forts found in Rajput and Mughal miniatures since medieval times. 

The camera has also allowed Pooja to extend her investigations away from the wall and into three-dimensional space, an appropriate direction for the investigation of architectural imagery. Photographs of the skins of contemporary buildings have been digitally manipulated and repeated, becoming the faces of cubes that are stacked on top of each other slightly askew. A parody of skyscrapers, of course, but also a formal exercise in the potentials of opticality as the solidity of the structure melts behind the flickering staccato imagery which sheaths it. With these works, an interplay of flatness and volume is their proscribed goal, a study in the vibrations of opposites and the viewer’s attempt to resolve these polarities. Fragility and transience also inspire these works. Pooja takes pleasure in the quick assembly her manner of construction allows, as if the temporary and transportable natures of the homes of nomadic tribes have been applied to urban office buildings, a perhaps fitting design solution in these days of globalised business and decentralized offices. 

In summation, Pooja Iranna’s works may seem highly iconoclastic in the context of an Indian art scene still very much infatuated with the human figure. Yet her works, though entirely devoid of human images, are very much about the consciousness of the figure and its placement in and experience of space. This experience is both physical and visual, both in real time and in memory. Pooja’s work attempts to trace the effects of architecture on the emotions and the psyche, attempts to find traces of our emotional and psychological lives in the structures and patternings of architecture. Her’s is a struggle to find unique expressions of her own experiences, to acknowledge the distortions and manipulations that play with our emotional lives, and to create elaborate scenarios through an economy of means.

PETER NAGY IS A WRITER AND ARTIST OF INTERMATIONAL REPUTE. HE ALSO IS THE DIRECTOR OF GALLERY, NATURE MORTE BASED IN NEW DELHI.