NB. the following texts are from two different websites, as I found them both a helpful example to think about how to write text to accompany exhibitions, catalogues or even what my contextual statement for the end of the year look like, and how I can discuss + unpack my work through text.
Extract from the KADIST website:
Gauri Gill - Acts of Appearance
Gauri Gill. Untitled, (32), from the series Acts of Appearance, 2015 - ongoing
"Acts of Appearance is an ongoing series by Gauri Gill consisting of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, in Western India, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Adivasi people are part of the tribal groups population of South Asia. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives. Instead of consecrating gods or demons as per local tradition and lore, the masks become self-portraits and exercises in the symbolic representation of lived reality, across dreaming and waking states. I feel that this reflects a use of traditional uses of the masks, like portraying "gods and demons" becoming re-explored through an explorative enquiry. Tradition made into something that is more of an introspection into people and communities, almost exploring their own roles within these lores. And perhaps also interweaves history with contemporaneity through merging the two, through the masks and people living in the current climate.
Then, she painstakingly orchestrated medium-format portraits of the makers wearing their masks in everyday settings, such as in Untitled, (16) and (32). Without uttering a word, the resulting images unfurl narratives that become vast commentaries on time, leisure, work, pleasure, hopes, dreams, fears, and futures. Gill’s photographs occupy the same threshold between human and spirit as the Boas photographs enacting the dance of Hamatsa (a Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous community), and depict the frozen moment of an elaborate performance to be a powerful—and politically consequential—thing indeed.
Gauri Gill is interested in the social contract of photography. Her photographs propagate expression to subaltern existences within rural Indian states, even as they critically denote a fundamental imbalance in their own existence, at once accredited to Gill as well as the cultural, social, and political statements of the collaborators that she photographs. Her practice operates on a surface level that opens up onto an ephemeral, vital set of relationships, both through and beyond her social engagement with the communities, individuals, and practices that drive her photography to hold much more than what it directly portrays. There is also so much in her process, and engagement with the people or communities she works with, that happens before and after taking a photo. This makes me question whether only her photographs are the artwork, or whether her work is actually an ongoing project that encompasses the various stages and research that are performed in order to get to the stage of the 'final product,' the photograph. Maybe there is the project, and then outcome of that, at least the outcome that the art audience experience are the photographs. Of course the outcome for the artist may be very different, or contain a lot more of a personal experience of the project than what the audiences see. This makes me think about exhibition, and how much the audience need to know about the project...should the artist, or me being an artist be compelled to hold back certain aspects of the project, or have a motive to edit/control the exhibition to an extent? Does each iteration/series of work provide clues and inklings to the overall experience/idea ?
In doing so, her works inquire about the circulation of expression from the margins of contemporary life, Gill’s work forms an estuary of repressed voices that leaks outward into the discourse of the greater art world. The Western structure of the singular artist as genius disintegrates against these somewhat anonymized, though strident sources. The sense that there is an expanded, unwieldy network of individuals at play throughout her works is present in their sometimes overflowing serial quality: almost all of her series are ongoing, and overlap each other."
Further text from the NATURE MORTE website:
New Delhi -- Acts of Appearance -- 20 January—27 February 2018
"In her photographic practice, Gauri Gill chronicles the lives of those rendered powerless by state forces and societal structures, often portraying itinerant ways of life, rural communities and fragile livelihood structures. Drawn to the means through which individuals try to overcome their circumstances, in the last years she has been working alongside local artists to interpret stories.
Gill’s most recent series Acts of Appearance (2015—ongoing) has assumed its form within a village of traditional Adivasi paper mache artists from the Konkana tribe in Jawhar district. Further inland from Dahanu, it is one of the most impoverished districts in Maharashtra. In Rajasthan, among her Jogi friends during the festival of Holi, Gill had first encountered people casually wearing store-bought masks to play-act and assume various personas as part of the fun of the festival. In Maharashtra, she learned of the Bahora procession, held once a year in many Adivasi villages, in which the entire village participates in a ritual performance over several nights, to enact a mythological tale. The performers are chosen from among the residents and wear elaborate masks made by artists to represent different gods, demons, and ancillary figures. In the course of each story, which is as codified as it is improvisatory and has many twists and turns, the good must vanquish the evil. Well-known Hindu epics such as the Ramayana are absorbed into local tales, and gods such as Ganesh and Hanuman feature alongside tribal deities like the Kul Devta and Vaag Devta, in addition to the gods that are omnipresent, such as the great Mahadeva (Shiva) and Parvati.
The Bahora masks take weeks to make, are sacred and consecrated, and constitute a moral and imaginative universe, but also conform to strict rules of creation as they represent powerful archetypes refined over generations of storytelling. They are made only occasionally—once a year, or once in several years—and then carefully stored by families to be brought out for the yearly procession. The men and women who make them spend the rest of their time making objects for domestic display: mother and baby deer, monkey heads, elephant heads, tortoises, or the face of the Buddha. The artists travel to fairs in towns such as Nasik or Pune or supply to smaller stores in Maharashtra, including government run shops set up to serve tribal communities. The raw material is always paper, pounded to a pulp and mixed in with glue derived from a particular tree to make a paper mache object, which can then be ‘finished’ to various degrees of perfection of surface: rough or smooth, painted or lacquered, depending on its purpose, and the time and resources available to make it.
In January 2015, Gill sought out the acclaimed brothers Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, sons of the legendary craftsman Dharma Kadu, with a proposal. She wished to commission them, along with their families and fellow volunteers, a whole community of artists, to create a set of masks—not of gods or demons as per local tradition and lore, but rather as representing individuals existing in contemporary reality. The interpretive creations were to come from them, with the suggestion that they embody different ages, depict varied rasas or emotions such as love, sadness, fear or anger, and those experiences common to all humans, such as sickness, relationships, or ageing. In the course of the dialogue, animals were naturally a part of this universe. Later, ‘precious’ objects entered the frame, as they are understood to have life and be sentient too. Wearing these masks, a cast of ‘actor’ volunteers (many of them the same as the artists) would later improvise and enact different ‘real’ scenarios in and around the village, across dreaming and waking states.
Gill imagined using the freedom afforded by the masks as a way to create distance from and reflect upon the self and place; as a possible means to explore one’s life and circumstances in the lived present rather than the distant past. “If I had the ability to create different visual identities to tell a story about my world, how would I do it?We are all heterogeneous beings, constituted of as many different selves as moments in time; we all ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. Others read us in their own subjective ways, perhaps different from how we imagine ourselves to be. The question also arises, to whom does my face belong—me, or the world that views me?” Although the impressions of these enactments are mediated by the camera (and Gill), the viewer is denied access to all within the frame: to the likenesses of the particular subjects and their personal expressions which, concealed by the masks, might arguably be as fully revealed and unselfconscious as they will ever be—yet knowledge of these ‘true’ faces of the creators is withheld from the camera, to be replaced by their art.
Accompanying this new series are echoes from an earlier and ongoing project. Since 1999 Gill has returned to the desert of Western Rajasthan, creating a photographic archive of rural communities, including peasants, nomads, migrants and minorities. Notes from the Desert (1999—) encompasses distinct narratives and sub-series within it. The Mark on the Wall (1999—) documents drawings composed by local artists, children and teachers in government schools operating under the since discontinued Leher Kaksha scheme, initiated by the State to help children learn visually from the walls in their classrooms. From the most tentative marks to those more sophisticated, from depictions of children making their way to school to expressions from nature, or emblems of the nation, in what these fragments choose to express are offered glimpses of the collective mind of a rural community.
With Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, Subhas Dharma Kadu, Yuvraj Bhagvan Kadu, Rahul Arvind Kakad, Rahul Bhagvan Kadu, Makhaval Bhagvan Kadu, Madhuri Subhas Kadu, Rangeeta Arvind Kakad, Darshana Devram Kakad, Ganesh Ganpat Lokhande, Sangeeta Ganesh Lokhande, Sangeeta Navnath Kadu, Kusum Bhagvan Kadu, Harishchandra Rama Kadu, Suvrna Harishchandra Vad, Anjana Sachin Kurbude.
And Sachin Sankar Kurbude, Sanjay Sakharam Vatas, Ganpat Ganga Lokhande, Rupesh Arvind Kakad, Nalini Pradip Valvi, Jyoti Sanjay Vatas, Shravan Budhya Tumbda, Saraswati Subhas Kadu, Sapna Bhagvan Kadu, Bhawna Bhagvan Kadu, Pooja Arvind Kakad, Tushar Prakash Vatas, Tushar Dinkar Vatas, Vijaya Navnath Kadu, Suraj Tukaram Vad, Nishant Tulshiram Thalkar, Nilam Sunil Marad.
Gauri Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh, India) has exhibited within India and internationally, including Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; 7th Moscow Biennale; Prospect 4, New Orleans; Kochi Biennale; Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; Wiener Library, London and National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi and the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography.
This is Gauri Gill’s fourth solo exhibition with Nature Morte in New Delhi. A portion of Acts of Appearance was first exhibited at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany in 2017.
Nature Morte is located at A1 Neeti Bagh, on the main August Kranti Marg, between Siri Fort Auditorium and Ansal Plaza. The gallery is open every day but Sunday, from 10am to 6pm, and by appointment. It will remain open until 8 pm on 9, 10, 11 and 12 February for the India Art Fair. Please contact archive@naturemorte.com for more information or press images.
"A Multitudinous Cast
The mask is a continuation of selfhood, a mirror of dream states but also a means of rendering a face to characterize those disjunctive life scenes that become alluring and haunting refrains, as inevitable remainders. It is that grey terrain where lucid interplay between reality and fiction ensues. Fernando Pessoa has written, "Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life." so basically what we can do through art - a way to explore, as Pessoa says, intimate details, as well as things that get overlooked, or things that we are not able to express in 'real life'. In Acts of Appearance (2015-ongoing) Gauri Gill initiates a collaborative process among an intergenerational group of Adivasi papier-mâché artists from the Konkana tribe in Maharashtra's Jawhar district. The creation and donning of masks is constituted here as a collective practice deploying show-and-tell, co-acting and improvisational scripting with the entire village: from the water pump, public hospital, shopping stalls, to private homes and the bus stop, which operate as animated backdrops.
In virtually re-writing the rules of masquerade in accordance with local festivity, mythological role-play, kinship with the animal kingdom and daily conundrums performed as a civic dramaturgy, the protagonists in Acts of Appearance encounter us frontally, while embedded within communitarian ties. Gill cautiously manoeuvres her return to colour within this series of performative photographs that are expressively charged and life-like, while still delving in the realm of the absurd. Led by characters opting for subversive humour and lore to chart surreal tableaus that emerge from the wider social imaginary. In contrast to the black and white chronicles in her long-term series Notes from the Desert (1999-) that detail family life and lasting friendships, birth at the hands of a great midwife and the aftermath of flood in arid geography, this series carries a more playful stance yet locates a fragile balance between estrangement and belonging. Let us consider here, the words of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, "Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one's own ways of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one's Self." Amazing. The mask allows for games of friendship as well as solitude, while navigating a return to bodily thinking and to what might be called a corporeal "I." Two friends take on the garb of the parrot and the owl, walking hand in hand on a dusty road…
The Mark on the Wall (1999-) plots scenes from the visual pedagogy and didactic exercises mapped onto the outer and inner walls of rural desert schools and Proof of Residence (1999-) unfolds as a portraiture of 'pucca' (concrete) homes of the Jogi community that are locked up and abandoned, while circuits of migratory labour, nomadism and dispossession remain entwined and persist. In these series, there is an eerie absence of the human figure and still the transient nature of home-the dwelling that is carried upon one's back-and exclusive claims made over habitation and learning, are some of the provocations these works unleash each time they are shown. The uneven terrain of neoliberal development is an obvious fact and yet how are we to reckon with the wilful blindness and amnesia of privilege that results in an asymmetrical representation of the everyday across rural India's built environment? In the latest work, Gill carries on with investigating the contemporary paradoxes of rural dwelling, but here the village inhabitants project meaning from their experience as construction labourers, inhabiting partially finished houses and posing in newly furnished living rooms. The woman reads the local newspaper at her front porch, knowing the farcical reports and journalistic parodies only too well.
Acts of Appearance opens the path toward egalitarian staging and the mode that is considered Sahrdaya, which implies for the viewer a sense of oneness with the authorial voice. - So important in relation to my own work! The idea of egalitarian-ness and oneness within a society, a landscape, a democratic treatment amongst humans, societies, objects, terrains, lands, etc. How an artist can initiate a reconsideration of such overlooked issues through their own experiences and ways of recognising the situation. According to Rasa theory a viewer does not think of herself as an audience but as part of a community of believers. In building a taxonomy of emotional states over the years, that maps union and separation, bliss and despondence, attraction and rejection, Gill and her collaborators bestow a sublime poetics to the technical life of photography. Eventually, we are made aware in those moments of Pravrtii (activity) and Nivrtti (repose) how counter-publics are formed, and the radical potential of arriving at wholeness through the performative route of incommensurability. - referring back to those "Pravrtii (activity) and Nivrtti (repose)" traditional aspects and ideologies and reconnecting them with the contemporary world through her work - which I find so empowering as thus we can start to breakdown the meanings/significances of such lore, traditions, and stories, and start to understand how they can perhaps still operate/be relevant or beneficial in the contemporary climate.
At documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, where Acts of Appearance was first exhibited last year, the mask became a liminal trope interwoven across several artistic positions . In K.G. Subramanyam's paintings and murals, the mask is a tool of transformation that bears theatrical purpose conversing with myriad paradoxes in the human condition and the legends of chimerical creatures. In Khvay Samnang's Preah Kunlong (The Way of the Spirit), a choreography of masks composed of woven vines asserts a "queering" of identity camouflaging with forest ecology, sequences in 'becoming animal' and foregrounding indigenous life-worlds that rupture the colonial relationship toward ownership of natural resource.- ideas of liminality, change, transformation and paradoxes - also themes that i am trying to explore through my practice. In Kwakwaka'wakw hereditary chief and carver Beau Dick's practice, masks are vital ingredients in the long arc of storytelling and ceremony. They spoke of wildness and protection while narrating the legend of a young boy who fell into the oceans and discovered another entrance into the netherworld. Masks are danced and then ceremonially burned at Alert Bay; hence also a temporary abode and cipher of passage. Inevitably, masks re-codify the processes of naming and being named into an interrelated act-one that is more equanimous than the binary of self and other. - this is also so important...
A face with greenish tones and neatly parted hair, somewhat like a Noh theatre mask, is pictured within the narrow mirror hung over a dry stonewall. He is lean, appears slightly cross and stares back in a reversed gaze. This solitary stance leads one to deliberate over the masks we adorn daily that highlight individualistic tropes while immersed in a sea of digital interfaces. The 'filtered' portrait is after all not merely a social media tool but also a mask-one that is entrenched in a vicious loop of alienation and boredom, while disrupting the very notion of truth and self-image. These ideas can be looked in comparison to artist and cultural critic Hito Steyerl's artworks and essays. For example, Steyerl talks about the themes of immersion in the digital world through common, everyday devices like phones, and how this filters our experience of the surrounding world and its stories. She talks about filters and ways humans can appear through a digital interface, or how humans can disappear from the real world into the digital realm, thus becoming "invisible.' Steyerl deliberates on human interaction and communication through the filter of a digital device, or how we see the world through the daily influx of images. These ideas dip into topics of portrayal, daily life, and cultural norms which overlaps into Gill's explorations of traditions and explorative storytelling, as well as with my own research into deconstructing humans' interactions with surroundings and traditions of portrayals of nature and land. Gill's portrayal with masked beings proposes an alternative mode of engagement that inculcates what Elizabeth A. Povinelli has regarded as an "ontology of the otherwise" . Is my work in the realm of the ontology of the otherwise? Being something that seeks to disrupt familiar values and ways of treating or seeing our surroundings, and tries to bring about alternate, 'other' ideas into practice and consideration? There is a direct address to collective survival and vulnerabilities that navigate between the hidden and the revealed, shattering the assumed hierarchical spectrum of hyper-visibility. In this bind of intimacy and double consciousness, the photograph becomes the groundwork of resistance.
"Masks! Oh Masks! Black mask, red mask, you black and white masks, Rectangular masks through whom the spirit breathes, I greet you in silence! And you too, my panther headed ancestor. You guard this place, that is closed to any feminine laughter, to any mortal smile. You purify the air of eternity, here where I breathe the air of my fathers. Masks of maskless faces, free from dimples and wrinkles. You have composed this image, this my face that bends Over the altar of white paper. In the name of your image, listen to me!"
Prayer to Masks - Léopold Sédar Senghor
Natasha Ginwala Colombo January 2018"
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