About WE



"I shall speak, not of self, but of geography." - Pablo Neruda (1968)

In several languages of India, such as Hindi and Urdu, शब्द /شبد means ‘word’; it also means sound. The term शब्द (śabd), brings together the ideas of ‘word’ and ‘sound’ under a canopy. A word, which manifests visually, has its audio counterpart too. Both word and sound could be expressed through this single word शब्द (śabd), yet it suggests different meanings to perceivers. Resemblances and voids between the ideas of ‘word’ and ‘sound’ initiated a query about togetherness, separation, dislocation and contradictions. The query started a journey and the journey resulted in the curatorial research project - ‘WE’, a शब्द /شبد (śabd).

‘WE’, a शब्द / شبد is a resonance of artistic practice as a part of several overlapping communities and individual interests that are under quest. As a social identity, ‘we’ is much discussed and debated in the scholarly practices. ( for example: Turner, J.C. & Tajfel, H. “The social identity theory of intergroup behavior,” 1986; Clarkson, Carrol."Drawing the Line," 2014). There has been contestation over the legitimacy of communities, regional boundaries, and national-transnational identities. While, global contour pushes us to engage beyond the abyssal human living, the term ‘we’ draws our attention towards the thoughts of inheritance, independence, in-between’s, and interactions. Enriched by these much-contested ideas of togetherness, the curatorial research project aimed to experiment and explore the shifting ideas and identities of an individual and the collective. The first phase of the research project culminated in the exhibition that was conceptualized and curated by Baishali Ghosh and Rajarshi Sengupta at the Korean Cultural Centre, New Delhi, in August 2016. The exhibition opened up a dialogue around the notion of ‘practice’- as a process of producing artworks and also as a process of questioning identities and freedom of expression.

Our identities are always in flux. Identities can manifest into palpable visual traits but can be intangible as well. The tension between various existences is embedded in the idea of togetherness in multiple voices, which appear like noises, chaos, and chorus. For us, the word शब्द / شبد is an in-between form, which could be tangible as a visual or could be transient as a sound. The contradictions of tangibility and intangibility point towards a search - a search of belongings and also a sense of longing or return.

The project sought to investigate the intricacies, meanings, and negation of the word ‘we' and its complex meaning in various vernacular languages. For each of us, togetherness triggers different ideas, forms, sounds, and images. The idea of togetherness also implies entanglement of diverse ideas, opinions, and actions. The conceptualization was explored through a range of experiments with visual and audio in this project. In the second half of 2015, it developed as a collaborative curatorial project involving artists, poets, writers, artisans, and art historians.

Perhaps, the most crucial aspect of togetherness is the human connection. Human connection made us consider the fluctuating feeling of togetherness. We jostle to think beyond identities and fear of differences. The focal point of the curatorial project was the Department of Fine Arts in Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication in the University of Hyderabad. The alumni and students of the department, situated in Hyderabad and other places in India, communicated and formed a cross-geographical network of their connections. As a result of it, participants from South Korea, Iran, Mauritius, United States of America, Canada, Ecuador, and India shared views on liminality and the shifting senses of ‘we’, and its relationship with vernacular and global languages. The journey of confrontations, contestations, compromises, and integration that erupted from the discussions of the participants have morphed into the six installations that were exhibited at the Korean Cultural Centre from 12 August to 10 September 2016.

These six installations, which were displayed at the Korean Cultural Centre are ‘Naqsh,’ ‘Excerpts from Our All Wet Talk,’ ‘Wee-Arc,’ ‘Dining Together,’ ‘Twin Paradox’ and ‘Anthology of Unknowingly Yours.’ They are an integration of sound, poems, videos, sculptures, paintings, embroidery, photographs, and drawings.

‘Naqsh’ represents an entangled network, constructed with narratives of dislocations, travel, and memoir. ‘Excerpts from Our All Wet Talk’ is about squabbling community identities explored through a set of look-alike or listen-alike vernacular languages, claimed on the ground of linguistic. ‘Wee-Arc’ deals with the sonic intervention that is integral to everyday walk. ‘Dining together’ is an animistic interference in the ecstasy of eating together in metro cities. ‘Twin Paradox’ focuses on the mirroring ideas and images presented in the printing blocks and prints while inviting the audiences to participate in the process of meaning-making. ‘Anthology of Unknowingly Yours’ plays six videos in the loop to unfold a zone of isolation, separation, and longing.

‘WE’, a शब्द /شبد has thrown together : Ajit Kumar (India), Alessandra Santos (Canada), An Gyungsu (South Korea), Anindita Chakraborty (India), Baishali Ghosh (India), Bijay Kumar Nath (India), Beom Jinyong (South Korea), Cynthia Bodenhorst (Ecuador), Hwang Soonwon (South Korea), Moon Ewon (South Korea), Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (Canada), Jagadeesh Reddy (India), Jeff O’Brien (Canada), Krishna Luchoomun (Mauritus), Kunal Karla, (India), Nagashree Upadhya (India), Nasim Peikazadi (Iran/Canada), Neermala Luckeenarain (Mauritus), Paramita Das (India), Rajarshi Sengupta (India), Ranjith Raman (India), Ravi Chunchula (India), Sapha Yumnum, (India), Sarah Shamash (Canada), Sharmistha Kar (India), Shanthi Swaroopini (India), Sheikh Ansari (India), Sofija Sutton ( United States of America), Somedutta Mallik (India), Steve DiPaola (Canada), and Yaron Lapid (United Kingdom) .

Anthology of Unknowingly Yours

6 videos,  minimum 3 min. – maximum 7 min.
Artists: Alessandra Santos, Cynthia Bodenhorst, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Jeff O’Brien, Moon Ewon, Paramita Das, Sarah Shamash, Steve DiPaola, and Yaron Lapid.

Anthology of Unknowingly Yours addressed the issues of “Imagined” community, who are connected through their responses to the idea of isolation within and outside communities. Details of the six videos are as follows.

Mixed Isolation. 2:32 min., 2014. Ewon Moon
“Beautiful is that we are different. Some think being different is being wrong when the isolation between one another begins. I pursue not a ‘Mixed’ society but a ‘Blended’ society, for which we need ‘Interest, Concern and Embracement,’ be aware of preconceptions formed by little experience.” - Ewon Moon.

Casual mechanisms. 2:30 min., 2007. Yaron Lipid
“Casual mechanisms is an attempt to establish an unlikely connection and a meaningful dialogue, despite cultural economic and geographic distance. I see this work as an exercise and a reminder for myself, of the existence of a ‘We’, in the complex, faceless and increasingly alienated human interaction of our time.” - Yaron Lipid.

Memory has enough wit to root place. 5:23 min., 2016. Jeff O’Brien
“Place does not become a trap as it becomes an image, for memory has enough wit to root place,” writes Mahmoud Darwish. Memory has enough wit to root place. For nearly 2,000 years, the village of Lifta was continuously inhabited, from Canaanite times onwards to al-Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. In Roman times, the prosperous village outside of Jerusalem was called Nephtoah, then Nephtho under the Byzantine period and Clepsta by the Crusaders. When it was ethnically cleansed by Jewish Zionist forces in 1948, around 2,550 Palestinians resided in Lifta. The village coffeehouse was the site of a massacre on December 28, 1947, just a few months before Nakba would become policy, with six people murdered by two Jewish militias led by Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, who would both later become Prime Ministers of Israel. 418 other villages would be “depopulated” in 1948, leading to the displacement of around 800,000 Palestinians. Today, Lifta is a site of ruin, once left for the rubble to be forgotten alongside a Jerusalem bypass. Few ruins remain, as many ethnically cleansed villages were demolished and built over, such as Tel Aviv atop Jaffa, or reforested by the Jewish National Fund to erase further what was once present.

We: the bonafide. 6:15 min., 2016. Cynthia Bodenhorst
The video is set at Ben-Gurion International Airport, notorious for its security screenings based on profiling, intelligence reporting, and a focus on the passenger and “eye contact.” The entire system is set to try to identify if a passenger is a bonafide vs. a suspect. Israel's security experts claim this system of individual profiling is perhaps the world's most effective airport screening systems. Individual questioning is designed to try to find out whether one belongs or has an affinity with a community, including anything that might fall under the category of “nonviolent activism.” As people from all over the world arrive in Israel for all sorts reason: tourism, religious quests, business, work, political activism or bearing witness; the apparatus of control and power is indeed at odds with all notions of ‘we’ and any action that engages with aesthetics of sociability. States of isolation and disengagement are worked through mechanisms of occupation, racial and ethnic profiling and structures of apartheid. These mechanisms are always unfinished as distinctive and resistant identities are dialectic forces that stem from longing, belonging, solidarity, transnational bonds, and communities of effect.

'Bichhed' (Separation). 7:02 min., 2016. Paramita Das
I walk following the shoreline.
I walk following my imagined lifeline.
I walk in search of a strange fruit called 'We'. I walk in search of the door of my womb.
Stoned.
My womb is stoned.
I am my foetus.
I cringe inside the darkness of my womb.
A shrink.
A recluse.
I attempt again and again to sleep near the door of my womb.
Me and my womb, If only could be sealed by the desperation...fear separates us.
Fear of ecstasy.
I need to sleep. 
I howl as I couldn't heal myself. 
My womb is not mine.
My womb is not mine.

The Real, The Virtual and the We (re-activating Lygia Clark’s The I and you:
Clothing / Body / Clothing, 1967). 10:37 min., 2016.
Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Steve DiPaola, Alessandra Santos,Sarah Shamash

Lygia Clark (Brazil, 1920-1988) was a multi-media artist and a pioneer of participatory art. Her work explored the body in all its dimensions through the creation of embodied and multisensory experiences in which spectators were co-creators and active participants. Her work entailed installations, performances, interactive objects and, later in life, art as therapy. In the performance ‘The I and The You: Clothing / Body / Clothing (1967),' a man and a woman explore each other’s bodies while wearing a hooded suit that obstructs their sight and keeps them connected through an extension jutting out of their abdomen. In this performance, forcing the participants to explore each other through touch, Clark makes a comment about interpersonal relations, the limits of communication and different ways of knowing oneself, the other and the world.

In response to thirst Days concept of “love, intimacy, and (com)passion within a geopolitical context” we re-activate Clark’s ‘The I and the You’ and investigate how her explorations are relevant at a time when our social interactions are increasingly mediated through digital technologies, and when the limits of our real and virtual bodies are constantly being blurred. One may ponder, is there an ontological distinction between electronic image and electronic being? What new potentials are opened up in between the interstices of human scale and electronic possibilities? How do we empathise in an era of social media and war on terror? How do we choose to interact with art and with others or to avoid art and human interactions? How are subjectivities projected in interactivity? ‘The Real, The Virtual and The ‘We’ (re-activating Lygia Clark’s ‘The I and the you: Clothing / Body / Clothing,’ 1967) is an interactive durational performance and two-channel video installation that explores the above questions through a re-imagined performance of Clark's original piece. As part of ‘Thirst Days no.3,’ curated by Denise Ryner and Tonel, it was performed at VIVO MEDIA ARTS, Vancouver, BC on April 28th, 2016. Thirst Days is a monthly series of video, film, performance and ceremony events curated by Jayce Salloum.

Dining Together
Banana fibre, golden grass, jute, parchment leather, hair, ceramic and fabric, size variable.
Artists: Bijay Kumar Nath and Shanti Swaroopini.

‘Dining Together’ is the reflection of our civic life and collective imageries that are produced in the urban eateries. The site-specific installation titled ‘Dining Together’ by Bijay Kumar Nath and Shanthi Swaroopini was an intervention that explored the sense of us with human, non-human and hand-made objects. What are the things that become part of dining and set aside apart from the foods? It is not only about eating together, but also about the togetherness of groceries, crockery, furniture and sensation of smell, sound and light; what we accept and accommodate; what we reject and resist. 

Bijay Kumar Nath and Shanthi Swaroopini’s sculptures of hands, modelled in banana fibre and golden grass; jackets made of parchment leather; coaster made with hairs and parchment leather and ceramic bowl are a consolidation of cultural discourses on dining together, stereotypes and concerning otherness – often aberrant in the public restaurants. The cafeteria in the Korean Cultural Centre in New Delhi is decorated with simplicity and a comfortable restaurant. It is never loud even when the place gets thickly crowded. It was chosen as the site of installation. The artists installed the works on the table, chairs as well as in the navigating space of the cafeteria that would be used by the visitors. The artists observed how visitors and daily users responded to those when they found the installation next to their food, just beside their hands and feet. Thus, expectations, regularity, and irregularity started playing key factors to feel of ‘being together’ with the objects, people and spatial distribution in the cafeteria. The installation intruded the users to sense of 'us' and 'other' in a shared space of eating together. Thus, the workers and customers of the cafeteria started uninstalling, reinstalling, moving and shifting the installation. At the end of the exhibition, the installation moved from the cafeteria to the formal gallery space of the Korean Cultural Centre. 

Excerpts from Our All Wet Talk:  words in exile
Thread, fishing net, lacquer; 30 ft. height x 10 ft. width
Artists: Anindita Chakraborty, Bijay Kumar Nath, Sapha Yumnum, and Sharmistha Kar.

“Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together to make a new world" - Audre Lorde (1981)

‘Excerpts from Our All Wet Talk’treated each text written, shared and exchanged by the artists in their mother tongues as rhetoric of linguistic structure as well as the structure of the installation in the exhibition. They wrote and shared the notes on what they feel when they think of the word ‘we’ in their mother tongues (here, the languages are Meitei-Mayek, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya.)

The artists threaded the fragments of their notes ‘asymptotically.’ They struggled to hold their allusion on ‘we’ together by incorporating asymptote lines of the alphabets and words in their respective mother tongues that they talked about in their conversations. However, the artists did not intend to synthesise the text but tried to hold the idea of related and separate as well. They intimated unravelling emotion while doing the work. They sutured alphabets to make words that form togetherness of the ‘alphabets’ and the artists’ expressions. It is like ‘Dasein’ of the alphabets and words.

Naqsh: cartography of travel and friendship
44 ft. (length) x 2.5 ft. (height) x 8 inch. (depth), watercolour, pigment paints, and charcoal on paper and cloth, canvas, embroidery, print, motion-light projection, and videos.
Artists: Ajit Kumar, An Gyungsu, Beom Jinyong, Kunal Kalra, Moon Ewon, Nagashree Upadhya, Nasim Peikazadi, Rajarshi Sengupta, Ranjith Raman, Ravi Chunchula, Sharmistha Kar and Sofija Sutton.

The term naqsh or naqsha is an Urdu word. It means map or trajectories which could be drawings or networks of lines. The work started developing as an exercise of making a plan of human connections; an exercise to revisit how pity, negligible memories of each other transform into a web of relationships spanned over geographical boundaries. The working process of Naqsh was an experimentation of how one memorises togetherness instead of how one understands the notion of togetherness; how the act of writing or writing biography contributes to the historicity of your being and becoming. The artists in Naqsh are primarily artists, art-educationists, poet, and art historians. Between late 2015 and mid-2016, all the participants were put in touch through their e-mails. They communicated on a regular basis forcing everyone to actively take part in sharing their ideas, opinions, and contribute to the formation of a map of life and writings. Through this exchange of e-mails, over time, the team members constructed an archive of memoirs, anxiety, movement, and newly found friendships.

Sharmistha’s three pieces of travel stories are stitched through the uneven body of hand woven silk. Making marks on textiles by piercing through its matrix recreates her footsteps through memories. Her work revolves around a geographical map of the world and the places relevant to her journey, for example, the campus of the University of Hyderabad and Newcastle upon Tyne. The geographic images are overlapped with the mental images evoked through her friend Sofija’s letters.

For Ajit, the city of Hyderabad, with its historicity and surprising recent developments, becomes the nurturing ground of his ideas. His stay in the University of Hyderabad campus informed his thought process and image making. His fluid linear reverse drawings on transparent acrylic sheet carry the spirit of the circular staircase from the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad campus- where he bonded with the group members and discussed his ideas.

Ravi’s images address his movement between times, where he connects the events or experiences of the past with his present. For him, the past becomes an imagined space where he is able to take refuge and also a visual language, which supports the development of his visual practice. Ravi’s images address his movement between times, where he connects the events or experiences of the past with his present. For him, the past becomes an imagined space where he is able to take refuge and also a visual language, which supports the development of his visual practice. Sofija’s journey in visuals explores the metaphor of thread and cobweb. She worked on two illuminated spreads and a video. The cobweb in Sofija’s work starts from her personal memory but does not develop as a closed system. Her immediacy to memory, warm colour scheme, and the visual metaphor of ever-expanding cobweb draw others to be part of her narrative.

The metaphor of landscape and its close correlation with the representation of self and the other emerges as the point of departure for Beom. His works focus on the transformations between “inner-landscapes” and “self-portraits.” The artist in his concept note submitted to the exhibition team in June 2016 uses these terms. Anyway, the distinct forms in his work assure the identity of his visual elements; the enmeshment of lines inside the bodies speaks for the transformations within.

The representation of the self and the inner and physical landscapes also become a pivotal part in Ranjith’s image-making. His image-making revolves around stitching practices, creating connective tissues mapped on a series of vertical strips of textile pieces.

Kunal translated his remembrance of Hyderabad into the two sets of works. He calls it "Hyderabad Diaries." One part of his work consists of six engraving plates arranged in a panel on the wall. Another part of his work is a sculptural form of a diary. It lights up when the viewers open it up.

The silhouettes of mighty trees and their branches became the metaphor of human relationships, connections, and disconnections for Nasim. “They are the Tree,” a single channel video by Nasim is done with photographs and her poem. A sense of isolation among togetherness is visualised through her images and poetry. Nasim's organic lines resonate with Sofija’s concept of the cobwebs.

Rajarshi’s images in association with texts are centred on repetitive visual fragments, which carry the shadows of his memories with three fellow participants. The repetitions of visual and textual pieces through the journey indicate the reflective nature of experiences and multiple associations. For Gyungsu, the idea of visualising landscapes becomes an exercise to revisit his experiences with objects and human beings. He considers his image making as a process of removing layers rather than creating layers on a pictorial surface. He deals with the landscape produced, painted and imagined by the audience. He produces landscape paintings and then installs them in a tangible landscape that serves as a reference point for the painted landscape. After that, he photographs the painted work within the actual landscape setting. In this way, his painted landscapes become mediated relationship between human and earth.

The elements of landscape also appear in Ewon’s works. Pebbles dominate her image surface. The round pebbles that are formed, eroded and tamed through the course of nature are explored as allegories for human relations. She observes that pebbles get rounded through the friction with other pebbles. Thus, Resistance, for her, is an inevitable phase for a way of being. Ewon’s work speaks of this unique nature of co-existence. She states that through the repetition of comfort, sadness, pain, understanding, sympathy, cynicism and reconciliation, roundness appears and disappears in human relationships.

In Nagashree’s poem, the barrier is blurred between humans and spaces. She puts herself in one of the group member’s shoes to initiate an interaction between her experiences and occurrence from different realities. Nagashree’s words, phrases, and sentences present palpable complex imagery sprung out of those interactions.

Twin Paradox: of mirrors and parallel world
Wood and stone blocks, wooden draws and printing bed, iron stand, cloth, organic colour, variable dimension.
Artists: Neermala Luckeenarain, Mohammed Afaque Ansari and Rajarshi Sengupta.

Twin Paradox was experimentation with the ideas of mirror images, and objects that travel across the world. A renowned idea in Physics in the beginning of the twentieth century, Twin Paradox is centred on spatial relativity, time, age and twins.

One string of this work continued between Rajarshi’s engagements with block-maker Mohammed Afaque Ansari. For Rajarshi, the idea of twin is intrinsically related to mimetic encounters between blocks and imprints; images and their inseparable counterparts. His interest in wooden blocks grew in his college days in the streets of colonial print shops in Chitpur and Burrabazar in Calcutta. The collaboration between Ansari and Rajarshi was intended for bringing Ansari as an active part of this show. In this show, they opened up the idea of collaboration through participants' engagement and forms of co-existence. Collaboration between artists and artisans in India to produce works has been a slippery ground in the contemporary art practice where artisans are generally treated as the source of skill who can execute the works for the artists. This mimetic relationship between artisans and artists indicate to a hierarchical nature of co-existence.

Rajarshi revisited words, expressions, and images corresponding with the notion of Twin Paradox. He said that "the term ‘Edge’ appeared significant to me, not only for its linguistic meaning but for the visual appearance of the word. Four alphabets in this word are arranged in such a way that the first half of the word mirrors the later." In his handwriting, the alphabets 'g' and ‘d’ appear as upturned images of each other. He played with the visual aspects of the alphabets in his drawings. The overturned alphabet ‘e’ in his drawing of the word ‘edge’ was to enhance the embedded spirit of mirror image.

Neermala Luckeenarain from Mauritius worked with the marginalised creole children in Curepipe in Mauritius as a way of learning in common ground. Neermala experimented with the idea of togetherness with the children and blocks and accidental sameness of the images that the artists produced under the same shelter. They made the blocks in wood and sandstone to print. Neermala sent the blocks and prints in different places of the world to see whether the block and its prints ever meet again or not! Thus the twins – block and its edition were on the voyage. She connected her practice with the history of colonialism and journey of indentured labours in the history of Mauritius. Thus the print blocks from Mauritius and Calcutta travelled to Delhi for the exhibition --- a beginning of a journey of the art objects – and its contact zone beyond the artists.

Wee-Arc
3000 PET Cups ( each 6 x 2 x 4 inch.) painted with phosphorescent colour, sonic composition, variable dimension.
Artists: Hwang Soonwon, Jagadeesh Reddy,  Krishna Luchoomun and  Kunal Kalra.

Wee-Arc is a sonic-illuminated installation focused on the idea of walk. Every ‘walk’- whether in a group or alone, is subject to time, space and identity. A walk has different disposition-- political, social, gendered, racial, emotional, historical, personal, public, mechanical and prohibited. The nature and gesture of walk depend upon how, where, when and with whom it happens – that adds the dimension of sound and silence to it.

Hwang created an illuminated form of a sound wave with the painted PET cups that was juxtaposed with Kunal’s sonic composition on 'religious summon and noise of closing door.’ Jagadeesh’s sound composition on ‘breathless walk on a steep hill road’ was installed in the elevator of the Korean cultural centre. Along with smooth ride in the elevator, the daily users got jerk in hearing ‘breathless walk on a steep hill.' Jagdeesh’s another sound piece titled ‘car and crow walk’ was set up with the washbasin’s tap in one of the washrooms. The washroom users heard Jagdeesh’s sonic work while they turn on the tap of the basin. At the end of the exhibition, the staffs of the Korean centre mentioned that it attracted curiosity and the washroom users started playing with it by closing and opening the tap, which led to the misuse of water.

Luchoomun’s ‘walk on the sea-shore and antique wooden staircases’ is about residual of existence and sense beyond the horizon. It was installed in a foyer that is called ‘Garden of Delight’ in the Korean Cultural Centre, New Delhi. This foyer is a hangout zone in the cultural centre. Luchoomun’s sonic composition made an intervention in the sounds of laughter, whisper and conversation that roll in the foyer. It compelled the users of the space to pause, wonder and think about the noise and voice that they hear.