Elisabetta Marabotto of Saffronart in conversation with Sarnath Banerjee on his participation in Frieze Project East

Elisabetta Marabotto & Sarnath Banerjee at Saffronart, London

London: Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Sarnath Banerjee at our London gallery. The artist, living at the moment in Berlin, was in London for a talk about his latest work for Frieze Project East.

Sarnath, along with five other international artists, was commissioned to create site-specific works for the Olympic Host Boroughs in East London: Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and WalthamForest. This project was commissioned by the London 2012 Festival and CREATE, and curated by Sarah McCrory of the Frieze Foundation.

Sarnath’s work “Gallery of losers (non-performers, almost-winners, under-achievers, almost-made-its)” consisting of 48 billboards, posters in local newspapers, and hoardings in East London, narrates the shared history of competitive sport from a different prospective. Going against the grain of most other Olympics-related advertising which solely emphasized winners, the artist decided to focus attention on the losers, the people who almost made it but didn’t quite succeed.

From Sarnath Banerjee’s Gallery of Losers
Image Credit: Polly Braden

Q: How did this commission come about?

A: Sarah McCrory a couple of years ago saw my work for the first time at Frame, Frieze, and she liked it. She thought my work using text and image had a narrative possibility which may have affected a large community and was suitable for a public art project. Also my connection with East London made me a potential candidate. She asked me to present an idea for the Olympics and I proposed a “gallery of losers”, Barwa Khiladi (12^th man) who is always ready but the opportunity never comes. It got accepted.

From Sarnath Banerjee’s Gallery of Losers
Image credit: Polly Braden

 Q: Why did you decide to focus on “the losers” for this project?

A: I think there is a certain dignity about losing, and coming from India we had to hold on a lot to that dignity. We had few things to celebrate about: sports, economy etc., and the few wins were a matter of great celebration, but then we had great losses which we dealt with dignity and humour. Lots of modern India is based on this self-reflective humour and self-criticism. However, now a self-congratulatory middle-class developed and the society became winning oriented and the system started making us look like fools. And London on occasion of the Olympics has become a self-congratulatory place. I find winning and winners vulgar. So using my expertise in advertising I created a campaign about losing to humanize the Olympics.

The characters are lovable, very human. They are all parts of me, they are based on myself rather than sporty people. They are part of a photo-album of non-achievers. I have a boxer who is always thinking of dodging punches, a pole -vaulter who, just before a jump, realizes that perhaps he has chosen the wrong sport, a judoka who learned the sport through correspondence, a high- jumper, who only eats light food, has light thoughts and reads light literature because high-jump is all about levity. I also have a race-walker whose mind moves steadily towards the finishing line but her legs don’t keep up, a ping pong player who is suddenly aware of the eerie silence of the indoor stadium and tries to remember how one spells the word ‘eerie’. Some stories are dark like the one of a javelin thrower who accidentally hits a long jumper thus disqualifying himself and destroying the medal chances of the latter, and a fencer who is shaking because three other fencers are looking at her.

From Sarnath Banerjee’s Gallery of Losers
Image Credit: Polly Braden

Q: Can the concept of losing and losers be expanded to a broader context?

A: Surely it can. This is not about athletes at all. It’s about the people who are not on the list, people who cannot make it. It’s about myself, it’s about loss. I met the best losers in the world and I don’t win myself, but I don’t care about winning. There is no importance in winning, it is valueless.

Q: Do you think words are more powerful than images?

A: Words and images are equally important. I create events using words and images. They create meaning together. They manage to create an atmosphere in your head, a kind of shamanistic process. When text and image work together, they can really make you feel the situation and make you see things. As T.S. Eliot said “I will show you fear with a handful of dust”.

From Sarnath Banerjee’s Gallery of Losers
Image Credit: Polly Braden

 Q: You are one of the first Indian graphic narrators. Do you think it was harder for you to be understood and achieve success?

A: Yes, definitely. Pioneers are the ones who make the roads. They have the hardest job, people expect the top from them. At the beginning I felt misunderstood, people in India thought graphic narratives were only for children. Now the new generation is more interested in it. It has become a fashion statement. This is one of the reasons why I momentarily moved out from it and started experimenting new media.

In fact my next project is about the concept of Un-Heimlich (the German word for uncanny and un-homely) and I will use a different medium for this.

Q: What is the purpose of your art?

A: Ummm…the purpose of my art…I think everyone needs to find a place where he doesn’t feel rejected since the world provides us with every day rejections. So, I feel art is this place for me. Also creating a work helps me understanding things, it is a medium to reflect and record important events. Art opens up different ways of approaching knowledge and it helps to transcend from everyday life. Also, vulnerability creates art. Most of my works are homage to people I met, or people I think I know in my imaginary world. I transplant my imaginary universe into these people and then into my work. My art is very people oriented. It can also be considered an inner journey of spirituality because I’m trying to make sense of the world and I’m trying to express my anxiety about losing.

Q: Do you consider your art to be “typically Indian”? Is your work influenced by any other artist or school?

A: In this time and age there cannot be anything typically Indian. We are constantly surrounded by international things. However, I do think and work locally. International art projects don’t work, they tend to fall into very simple stereotypes. Also, you aren’t truly international unless you have a very deep sense of the local.

To answer the second part of your question, I’m continuously inspired by outside stimuli, not necessarily art related. It can be science, literature (E.T. Hoffmann) etc. They change every time depending on my current preoccupation. Recently I was reading a lot about the Moscow conceptualists, especially Ilya Kabakov.

From Sarnath Banerjee’s Gallery of Losers
Image Credit: CREATE Summer 2012

At the end of the conversation with Sarnath I’ve learnt an important lesson: losing is not an absolute condition and it’s not necessarily that bad..

Manjari Sihare of Saffronart speaks with Ram Rahman about noted photojournalist, Sunil Janah

New York: Renowned Indian photojournalist, Sunil Janah (born in 1918 in Assam) died due to natural causes at his home in Berkeley, California in June this year. Janah, who worked in India in the 1940s, is best known for his wide coverage of the infamous Bengal famine of 1942. A member of the Communist Party of India, Janah had the fortune of sharing an amicable relationship with political stalwarts such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and M.A. Jinnah. Janah’s passing was announced to the art fraternity by his close friend and associate, Ram Rahman, via an email (copied below). Rahman, an eminent photographer himself, and the sole authority on Janah’s work, mounted a large retrospective of his work in New York in 1998 in an informal but extremely well received exhibition of 600 vintage prints. Click here for a note on this exhibition by Rahman, and his proposal for a monograph on Janah is still to be published.

I would like to thank Ram Rahman for sharing this email with us, as well as his book proposal.

Sunil Janah, at his exhibition in New York, 1998.
Photo © Ram Rahman (not to be used without full caption and credit)

Sunil Janah’s Obituary by Ram Rahman

It is with great sadness that we have to inform you that Sunil Janah, the great photographer, passed away peacefully in his home in Berkeley, California on June 21st. His wife, Shobha, passed away only a few weeks before. He is survived by his son Arjun Janah of Brooklyn, New York.

Janah was born in Assam in 1918, but grew up in Calcutta. He was educated at St. Xavier’s and Presidency colleges in Calcutta. Like so many others at the time, he had joined the student federation inspired by left wing politics. When the ban on the Communist party was lifted by the British as they supported the allied front against the fascist forces of Hitler and Mussolini, he caught the eye of the visionary General Secretary of the Communist Party, PC Joshi. Janah was a keen amateur photographer, Joshi recognised his talent and overnight persuaded him to abandon his English studies and travel with him and the artist Chittoprasad to photograph the famine raging across Bengal in 1943. The photographs by Janah published in the party journal People’s War brought him instant fame as they revealed to the shocked nation the horror of the famine. He moved with Chittoprasad to live in the party commune in Bombay, where both were intimately associated with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) and IPTA, The Indian People’s Theatre Association. Janah had become the most famous photographer in India by then and was sought out by Life magazine’s Margaret Bourke White, with whom he formed a unique friendship and working relationship in 1945.

Unlike other photographers, Janah was an active political worker whose political work happened to be photography. Because of his talent and reputation, PC Joshi happily acceded to requests from the Congress party, The Muslim League and The National Conference in Kashmir to allow him to photograph their meetings and conventions. As an insider with a political ideology, Janah’s photographs stood out for their passionate engagement, idealism and an uncompromising artistic vision. He became intimate not just with all the legendary cultural figures associated with the left in the 1940’s, but also the entire spectrum of the political leadership. His portraits of these legends stand out for their intimate and personal power. Most were published in the Party journal People’s Age.

After the political split in the Communist Party when PC Joshi was sidelined in 1947, Janah moved back to Calcutta and opened a studio. He was a founding member along with Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Das Gupta and Hari Das Gupta of the Calcutta Film Society. Satyajit Ray designed his first book of photographs, The Second Creature (Signet Press) in 1949. In Calcutta he started photographing dance and dancers making iconic pictures of Shanta Rao, Ragini Devi, Indrani Rahman and many others. He also made an extensive document on commercial assignment of the new steel mills, coal mines, power plants, railway engine factories and dams being built in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa – the great temples of the new India coming up in the 1950’s. His later documentation across India of the tribal communities, done with the anthropologist Verrier Elvin, was another landmark.

In my view, his work is the defining epic document of the last decade of the freedom struggle and the first decade of free India – the ‘Nehruvian’ years. Janah remained a committed communist till his last breadth, though not a party member. Sunil Janah had married Shobha, a medical doctor, and moved to Delhi in the sixties when she got a job here. Never very good at commerce, Janah became very bitter at his work being extensively used without payment or credit, and fulminated particularly against Mulk Raj Anand who used his pictures in Marg – pictures which educated an entire generation about India’s temple architecture and sculpture. This bitterness made him a recluse in later life and led to the huge body of work being hidden from public view for decades.

I was able to mount a huge retrospective of his work in New York in 1998 in an informal exhibition of 600 vintage prints, which created a sensation. A full- page review in the New York Times brought scores of people to the gallery, many older Indians left sobbing in tears, so moved by the history they saw. Sadly, I was unable to ever raise funds for a book and failed for years to persuade the government of India to acquire the treasure of his archive, which sits in his basement in Berkeley. The government of India awarded Janah a Padma Shree in January 2012, mistakenly awarding him the same honour which Indira Gandhi had given him in 1974. Embarrassed, the government upgraded it to a Padma Bhushan. It had not yet been presented to Janah by the Consul General in San Fransisco at the time of his death.

Sahmat pays tribute to Sunil Janah with whom we had an intimate relationship. Sahmat hosted a major lecture on his work by Ram Rahman at The Nehru Memorial Museum at Teen Murti two years ago. Janah’s photos of Gandhi featured in Sahmat’s posters during their commemoration of Gandhi and his photographs, books and pictures in People’s War were recently exhibited at Teen Murti in Sahmat’s symposium on the Progressive Culture Legacy of the PWA and IPTA in Teen Murti. Ram also presented his lecture on Janah at the Town Hall in Ernakulum, Kerala at a huge public meeting.

Sahmat will host a memorial meeting shortly.

Ram Rahman

Manjari Sihare contemplates the possibility of international museum franchises for India

A computer image of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel
Image credit: http://www.yeeeeee.com/2008/07/02/dubai-louvre/

New York: I have always been an avid follower of Delhi based writer and art critic Kishore Singh’s insightful articles in the Indian press about the state of the arts in the country. Mr. Singh is an arts and lifestyle opinion columnist and critic and currently heads exhibitions and publications at Delhi Art Gallery. In one of his latest offerings in the Business Standard, Mr. Singh wrote about the museum-going audiences of India. On a recent trip to Europe, he observed the enthusiasm Indian tourists had for Western museums and the treasures they contained, and questioned their resistance towards museums back home. In his analysis, he blames the Indian government for their lack of ability to market museums in the country, and ponders over the prospect of inviting Western museums like the Tate and Louvre to build franchises here. As I read the article, I was swamped with questions about the infrastructural reality of such an enterprise. Does India have a clear policy to deal with these museums? Art is a heavily taxed enterprise in the country. Take the case of the India Art Fair earlier this year, which saw many Western gallerists complaining about heavy tax tariffs and bureaucracy, which forced them to only ‘exhibit’ works in India rather than sell them. An article in ARTINFO-India, What’s Holding Back the Indian Art Boom?, engages with some of these issues.