In conversation: Shumita and Arani Bose with Dinesh Vazirani

Josheen Oberoi shares a recording of a talk between Shumita and Arani Bose and Dinesh Vazirani 

New York: Saffronart hosted a preview for their forthcoming Autumn Art Auction, last Saturday in New York. The auction, which will take place on September 24th-25th, includes Property from the Collection of Shumita and Arani Bose, the co-founders of Bose Pacia and features seminal works of contemporary artists that define an epoch in South Asian artistic narratives. Established in 1994, Bose Pacia was the first gallery in the West specializing exclusively in contemporary South Asian art. Over the past two decades, Bose Pacia has held over 80 exhibitions and is internationally regarded for promoting the South Asian avant-garde.

The evening began with a conversation between the co-founder of Saffronart, Dinesh Vazirani and Shumita and Arani Bose that discussed their collecting practice and it’s inspirations, the changing landscape of South Asian art and the way forward with their +91 Foundation.  The audio and transcript of the talk follows.

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Transcript:

Date: September 14th, 2013

Location: New York City

Dinesh Vazirani: Thank you all for coming. This is an informal discussion with Shumita and Arani, its great to have them here. Let me introduce you, Arani and Shumita. Dr. Arani Bose and Mrs. Shumita Bose, co-founders of Bose Pacia. Established in 1994, Bose Pacia was the first gallery in the West specializing exclusively in contemporary South Asian art, over the past two decades Bose Pacia has held over 80 exhibitions and it is internationally regarded for promoting the South Asian avant-garde. The gallery fosters an active discourse between the contemporary South Asian arts and the international art community by featuring exhibitions that can contextualize contemporary art from this geographic region within its rich artist traditions and current social tensions. The Shumita and Arani Bose collection, you’re just seeing a part of it here, is one of the largest and most comprehensive South Asian contemporary collections in the US. With strands both in the pre independence and post-colonial spheres the collection can be viewed as a survey of the most pivotal artistic developments in the Indian subcontinent. With outstanding examples of visual art ranging from photography, painting and new media to sculpture and installation the collection represents dynamic strands of artistic practice and discourse. So welcome, Arani and Shumita.

Arani Bose: Thank you.

Dinesh Vazirani: I want to go back a long way. What got you interested in art?

Arani Bose: We were always kind of interested in art in the theoretical sense that we would go to galleries and museums and then I had a particular connection to the art world in India particularly because of my father and my uncle who was Arun Bose. He was a product of the Government Art College in Calcutta and for 30 years he was the head of the graphics department at Lehman College and Pratt institute before that. There was a certain tendency to be interested in art from a family stand point. Then in the early 90’s after Shumita and I were married…

Dinesh Vazirani: And what year was that, which you got married?

Shumita Bose: Oh boy, that was a long time. 1989.

AB: So we went to India and we didn’t want to spend all our time at the homes of relatives so we asked my uncle in New York, “give us something to do when were there” He said “well you can visit these galleries in all of these cities” so we said “Ok great” took down the names, so we visited. We took pictures of the work that we saw there, there was quite a lot of compelling stuff there and when we came back we were hanging out with our best friends Steve, who’s right there.

DV: Hi Steve!

AB: He asked a question when seeing our photos from our trip, “this particular artist, I’m sure I could get this artist here, I’d love to get this painting; I wonder who sells this work? Or represents this artist”. So that lead to an investigation of how to get that work and as you know that was impossible in 1993 to find. There was no representation of Indian or South Asian artists in New York or anywhere outside of India for that matter. And that was true at the gallery level, at the museum level and I came to realize that when we started to investigate and look for that. That started the whole process.

DV: Shumita, what about you? Was it only Arani?

SB: No.

DV: You know husband and wife. Both my wife and I are at the same business, Saffronart. How do you reconcile your differences in taste and the way you look at art? Are there arguments or is it always big hugs at the end of it?

SB: I’d say in that taste we have a similar aesthetic. Also with a lot of these were personal relationships with artists aside from the aesthetic sense of the work. A lot of them are friends of ours and you get interested in the thoughts and ideas it often goes beyond just pictures that you want. So both of us along with Steve felt that we wanted to support these artists. A lot of times we would purchase things that we hadn’t even seen, but conceptually it seemed interesting or we just believed in their work.

AB: A lot of people ask how I handle a work, of this scale in my home. Frankly, we often don’t. There are storage facilities for that. Then people ask why would you buy an art work to put in storage? That makes no sense. The answer is really, you’re buying a work because you believe in the vision of the artist and that is what we both agreed on. The artist, the vision and then, the work was in a sense superfluous to that.

DV: Since the opening of the gallery in 1994 how do you think the collector base for modern and contemporary South Asian work has evolved? Especially in the United States?

AB: When we started there was, perhaps, because Steve and I both have a medical connection, many of the collectors were Indian physicians.

DV: That’s interesting

SB: We should say physician.

AB: Yes that’s right. Indian physician.

SB: A very important Indian physician.

AB: It started out as often in a venture, being supported by one angel essentially. We had that angel. That gave us time to explore avenues, other avenues and nurture those relationships with other people and often times they were not United States based people, European collectors. It grew from there. Primarily for many years, it was primarily an Indian or South Asian collecting base and then starting from 2000 it started to broaden into a European and Asian collector base.

DV: If you could just explain to us briefly about how your strategy of collecting art has changed over these years. If I look at the gallery itself you had representation of Souza at one time, then you had contemporary artists, then you had Arpita, so it was a cross over from Modern to Contemporary. Has that influenced the way you have collected art? The interactions with these artists and what had happened over this last decade and a half?

AB: Yes. It definitely has impacted. The relationship with the artist is a major impact.

SB: I think we also felt, since at that time we were really the only window into South Asian contemporary art at that time, even though we had a tiny space in Soho we felt it was important to have a permanent space where people could come and consistently see good shows. We felt that it was important to see the development of contemporary Indian art. So it was important to show the modern painters, Souza, Husain and kind of educate people in the sense of where it’s coming from, what the trajectory was. I think consciously we had several shows from Souza to Husain to Bengal school and others that we felt were important just as a background to all these other contemporary artists.

AB: And in a sense one of the most pivotal shows that we had was Kalighat paintings. It was about eight to ten Kalighat works that Steve, Shumita and I acquired from Ram Gopal, this famous Bharatnatyam dancer based in the UK at the time. We went to London. None of us at the time could really afford to take a trip to London, we were residents or newly minted attendings in medicine and Shumita was a newly minted software engineer. We used our Visa card and bought these tickets to London to go see these shows, to go see this collection. We were notified of this collection by Vijay Kumar.

SB: Also I must say, he was a very important person for the gallery.

AB: Yes, as many of you may know, he’s a New York artist. He called one day and said that there is this collection of this Indian dancer in London, and you should go, and you might be interested in it. We called this guy and went to see this collection and we bought the collection as soon as we saw it and showed it to the British museum after buying it. T. Richard Blurton of the British Museum was curator at the time; he was flabbergasted that these punks from New York could swoop into London and grab this incredible work from London, and take it away. So the show got a write up in the New York Times. But it was a book that was published by the Victorian & Albert Museum called “Kalighat paintings” by Archer- in that book there were two pages, one of a Kalighat painting and the other of almost identical brushwork, almost, and the subject matter was quite similar, of Lejeune. That image of Kalighat painting, done c. 1850 and a Lejeune done c. 1910-1915 was so identical that it had to have been seen by Lejeune. The essence of that statement was so antithetical to what was being said at the time- that all Indian art production, it was felt in 1994, was derivative of the West. And this was a wonderful example of not only the untruth of that statement but the fact that it goes both ways. The West can derive from India or South Asia just as easily as South Asia can derive from the West. It was that sense of injustice, intellectual injustice that was the driving force of a lot of Bose Pacia and a lot of +91.

DV: Which we will get to in a bit. You know, you were one of the first galleries that represented Indian artists in the West. What was the reaction of artists when you approached them about exhibiting in New York?

SB: It started with Art India Now, which I think was  back in 1993. We literally went to Calcutta and Delhi and much of it was thanks to Arun who had made some introductions to a lot of the Calcutta artists and we literally went from studio to studio. We had no funds to do this; we had no means of acquiring works. We just had an idea and a passion for doing it.

DV: Because artists weren’t mobile at that time.

AB: They weren’t mobile. So Steve, Mita and I would walk into Jogen Chowdhury’s house in Santiniketan and the reception would always start out being a warm reception, as it’s a Bengali house, but then beyond that it would be “ok this is very interesting please sit down have some tea, what can I do for you” and we would say “I have this gallery, I have this idea of promoting Indian art” and it’s 1994 remember, “we’re hoping to consign some work to take to the United States”. That did not go over well.

DV: You mean the work has to leave India?

AB: Yes, the work has to leave India. And then it was always about a two hour discussion and conversation and then suddenly; we remember this vividly, there was a turn and it happened almost in every instance, in every meeting, in every home over this cup of tea. Whether it’s Ganesh Haloi or Jogen Chowdhury, anybody… and the turn could be demarcated with a line. After those two hours of talking about what we were going to do, there is suddenly a realization. “Ok you’re trust worthy” and work starts to come out.

SB: I remember him pulling out drawings from beneath his bed.

AB: Under his bed! He brings out art work and goes “you gotta see this one painting, this is amazing”. So we were able to come back.

SB: Everyone was very generous and we ended up with one or two works from eighteen artists. We had the show called “Art India Now”

DV: Was that your first show?

SB: Well, our first show was called “Beyond India: Two Generations of Modern Art” and it was Vinod Dave and Arun Bose. We had rented a space in Soho, we didn’t have a permanent space at that time. We had 500 people at the opening, it was amazing. We had scrambled up a mailing list and had never hung a show before, hung this a couple of times. But the energy was amazing.

DV: I remember with Saffronart, the first showing was on the terrace of my building in Mumbai. We strung things together and just made it happen. But even you’ve been in the gallery world a while, you’ve been a collector, how do these two roles evolve? And what influences have they had on each other?

AB: I suppose the collecting, the gallerist’s role is, at least for us, an attempt to provide a professional platform, a commercial platform to showcase South Asian contemporary art the way it should be showcased. And back in 1994 there was no platform outside of India. With proper labels on the wall, in a proper gallery setting, not in somebody’s apartment or somebody’s living room. We felt that if the artwork was going to be taken seriously it had to be shown seriously with proper press releases, etc. That was the intent with showcasing the work. And then at the time there was such a discrepancy between the perceived value of the work and the monetization of the work. Work was selling for under 5,000, under 10,000 when it was being produced by one of the most talented artists from a billion people. It was a no brainer to us that this was ridiculous; it should be valued much higher. There was a point that we just couldn’t afford to buy the work ourselves. If we could, Steve, Shumita and I would have bought everything. Then we wouldn’t be able to keep the gallery doors open, so we had to sell. As we each got to a point in our careers where we could afford to buy some work, we bought work. Really, because we always knew that it was amazing work and then our budget caught up with what we wanted to do. We often sold work and then bought it back because we believed that it was still undervalued.

DV: When you’ve seen the progression of starting with more of the modern works and then you have contemporary, video art, installation, you have new media. How do you see the collectors evolving and appreciating this movement of art across genres, as a gallerist? You see new collectors developing new tastes and collections that they actually want to build. Have you seen them actually appreciating the new media as much as they do the modern and contemporary?

SB: I think recently more so. In the beginning, way back in the 90’s or 2000, it was definitely Latin American art or other genres, and it was typically from the auction catalog and it was the moderns who were selling at that point. Those were the artists that collectors would tend to start buying but then we saw over the years there hadn’t been that many shows of media artists. We started showing Raqs Media Collective or Shilpa Gupta for the first time. That was in about 2005, 2004. 2006. That was really one of the first times for Raqs Media Collective; they hadn’t really shown in India at that point.

AB: They had only shown at the Venice Biennale. We met them soon after the Venice Biennale.

SB: Ranbir Kaleka, an amazing artist and really one of the first artists anywhere in the world who did this incredible merging of painting and video; almost enhancing painting, adding things to painting, to a canvas that you can’t achieve.

AB: These were people that were pushing the barriers of art in ways that other people were not doing. That fact had to be acknowledged and supported. It really almost didn’t matter if it was new media or video installation or painting; they were doing something so novel that it had to be supported, because novelty and true inspirational work needs to be supported. The west or the non-sub continental west, is better at doing that because they expend the resource that’s necessary.

SB: Well, they’ve been doing it longer.

AB: Yes, they’ve been doing it longer and they expend what’s necessary to foster that type of collector. In South Asia, not- in South Asia or out of South Asia, we don’t really have the tendency to foster those kinds of collectors and that’s our fault. We need to.

DV: Some of the reasons for that? Why are we not able to foster them?

AB:  I think the institutions for fostering those types of collectors don’t exist within India and outside of India. I was having a conversation earlier today about MOMA PS1- every small town in America has a contemporary art museum, every small village in Germany has a kunsthalle and there is not a single non-governmental, non-bureaucratic , grass roots effort in all of South Asia to develop that sense of collecting.

DV: There’s no public art either in India.

SB: Also I think in terms of getting a tax deduction…

DV: There isn’t that in India.

SB: Philanthropy, the support of it.

AB: That may be why we don’t have a lottery system like they do in the UK

DV: Or a system for grants; that doesn’t exist. Let’s just come back to you. What is the first painting you ever bought?

SB: Salma Arastu, an artist based in Pennsylvania

DV: And where is that? Is it hanging or in storage?

SB: We still have it; it was hanging for many years in the apartment.

DV: As you look at the collection here which are some of your favorites?

AB: Air Show is a favorite.

SB: Steve’s favorite too. The shutters are amazing. Ranbir, one of the most incredible painters to come out of India I feel. Nataraj, Seher… we have personal connections with so many artists that it’s hard to pick.

DV: Tell us about the relationships with artists you have built over time…some interesting anecdotes of these artists that you interacted with?

SB: Jitish is a good one. We visited him, after midnight.

AB: Jitish, yes. I used to make about five trips to India a number of years ago. Jitish Kallat, his studio used to be in Worli and Steve and I have gone out to the studio multiple times. It was about a two and a half hour commute, at the time, from central and Southern Bombay out to his studio. I would do it late at night; we would always end up very late at his studio drinking. One such visit he said “ I have this idea, for this work, I want to take mirrored surfaces, large mirrored surfaces and write on them the text from Nehru’s speech, the freedom at Midnight speech, and write in epoxy. I’ve done some investigations and I think it’s possible. Then I want to burn the epoxy and that will create a flame which will then indelibly mark the epoxy so that it is visible and it will warp the mirrored surface and that I think will be an interesting effect.” I had one too many drinks so I said that sounds like a fantastic idea. I’ll buy it. And he goes “yeah if you buy it then I can do it”. So I said ok. That work, now he’s done several like it, one of the works is called “Public Notice”. It’s a spectacular work, so that’s in our collection.

SB: That’s been one of the exciting things over all the years, just being able to make ideas happen. So many times with Atul, we felt it was our responsibility. As much as we could within our means to really push artists to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. Especially as the market got more and more strong and works were selling, it seemed it was even more important at that time. Because it was so easy to just keep making the same works that would so easily sell. So, often we would push Atul, one of the artists, from his project in Venice to his show at Bose Pacia, we would encourage him to “don’t worry about the sale, push the idea, just do it, just make it”. Mithu Sen with her It’s good to be queen show in New York; often those kinds of experiences. Bari Kumar with his five panel work that he was thinking about painting for years and he didn’t feel comfortable doing and we just said just do it and he painted this amazing five panel work. That has been for us very exciting and very rewarding.

DV: I’m going to ask one more question and then open it up to the audience, because it is six o’clock. Now talking about ideas, + 91, the Foundation. That’s an idea, something you’ve been thinking about for a long time.

AB: It has components that originate in what we have been doing for the last number of years. The gallery was and has been from early on and certainly in the latter years had been seen as a resource, a study center, as a place to do research on Indian contemporary art and it has been used by many people for their Masters, PhD dissertations and research in college and graduate school. So that aspect has been going on for some time. The idea that the artists, that the art space could be used as an interactive studio of sorts we have been investigating as Transparent Studio since Bose Pacia stopped its commercial operations. That’s an artist residency program where the artist uses the gallery space as a studio for about three months at a time. We have been loaning to institutions for a number of years. We’ve been keeping track since 2005. We’ve loaned from the collection to more than 50 institutions, hundreds of works of art, in five continents or so throughout the world. The Bose Archive has been an effort to take the collection and other collections and archive them, document them and make them accessible for research study purposes to the general public as an entity. The +91 idea, +91 is a nonprofit foundation we’re starting, +91 standing for the cell phone country code of India, that is an effort to bring all of these activities under one roof. To have a study center component, to have an archival component, to have an interactive component, to offer exhibition platforms all under one roof.

SB: Also, what we were talking about just before this, that idea of pushing artists… for us it’s always been such an important part and we’d like to continue that through the foundation. Working with artists that may not have commercial representation and allowing them to try out ideas and also artists that might be doing quite fine and continuing to push their practice as well.

AB: Yes, to encourage creative risk taking within the South Asian artistic community and to basically, as Sadia, our director of the foundation, who’s right here, put it quite elegantly “To mediate that risk taking between the artistic studio, the artistic practice and the general public”. That mediation is the best way to describe +91.

DV: Well thank you and congratulations on all the initiatives. I hope it really works out and does some great things. We can open it up for questions.

Audience question: I’m interested to hear – what the state of the collectors is now and was there an impact in terms of the financial crisis, not just from a financial point but as it’s caught on and everybody’s into it could become very flashy and materialistic instead of actually art.

AB: Yeah. Part of, let’s say before the crisis, the Indian subcontinent began, as the middle and upper class began to become larger they became to value the heritage of the country so there were a lot of Indian collectors. Simultaneous to that there was a huge influx of museum shows in Europe after the Tate Modern show that happened in 1999-2000 “Century City” after “Century City” there were shows everywhere Berlin, Barcelona, Manchester, Paris, Sweden all over Europe from 2000 onwards. That created a number of European collectors. As the market began to shift towards China, there are a number of Asian collectors. And then the crash affected everyone but by that time there was enough European Asian and South Asian collectors that it somewhat mitigated or allowed a bounce back a rapid bounce back of the market.

DV: I think there was a period, where especially before the financial crisis there was a lot of speculation in contemporary art, and after the crisis what I think we have are serious collectors. People look at it in a very different way as opposed to looking at it from one point of you. That’s why the point of view of Arani and Shumita is to encourage experimentation, let artists create something they are proud of as opposed to something they can sell. I think the whole mindset has changed; the way people buy contemporary art and the way contemporary art is produced.

Chitra Ganesh’s Residency at Bose Pacia, New York

Kanika Pruthi of Saffronart discusses Chitra Ganesh’s fantastical works in light of her ongoing artist residency at Bose Pacia in New York City

Secrets, Chitra Ganesh, 2007

Secrets, Chitra Ganesh, 2007. Image Credit: http://www.chitraganesh.com/dc6.html

NEW YORK: Brooklyn based artist of Indian origin, Chitra Ganesh is the current artist- in residence at Bose Pacia in New York City as part of their Transparent Studio initiative, showing her works from June 18th to July 16th, 2013.

The Transparent Studio is an artist studio program founded by Bose Pacia where the selected artists are provided with a studio space in the main gallery. The intention of turning the transitional gallery space into a temporary artist studio is to enable an atmosphere of engagement and conversation around the creative process, allowing an opportunity to engage with the artist is the given set up.

Chitra Ganesh received her BA in Comparative Literature and Art Semiotics in 1996 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. Ganesh’s work has been exhibited widely at venues including PS 1/MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, the Asia Society, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Fondazione Sandretto in Italy, Nature Morte Berlin, ZKM in Germany, and the Gothenburg Kunsthalle.

Ganesh’s art and practice draws equally from her Indian roots as from her engagement with contemporary discourses regarding identity, the feminine, history and such. An adept multimedia artist, her works range from text based canvases, illustrations, prints, installations and collaborative projects. Her visual oeuvre serves a concoction of mythology, folklore, sci-fi, Indian bollywood, graffiti- drawn from her international experiences- a heady mix nonetheless a stimulating portion for a discerning connoisseurs’ palette .

The female protagonist is central to Ganesh’s work, reminiscent of the male super heroes of the comic book traditions. The ‘heroine’ often takes on the garb of the superhero- challenging and questioning societal norms and beliefs. The artist’s narrative is fuelled by her efforts to challenge the established canons- of history, literature, art, culture. The super ‘heroine’ of Ganesh’s works gives voice to the excluded narratives which are often relegated to the periphery of the ‘popular’ and ‘accepted’.

A consistent element of Ganesh’s visuality is her adaptation of the comic book layout in her works. An important point of reference is the Indian Amar Chitra Katha comic series that the artist encountered early in her life. They present religious and cultural narratives based on Hindu mythology and Indian history. She combines these with her interest in Greek mythology, western fairy tales and fantasy literature. She skillfully adapts the popular comic book format to her large scale works. Her use of the comic script as a trope to infuse the otherwise playful visual with an intent and relevant narrative is one of the many high points of her practice.

The humor and lightness of the visual elements balance the weighty discourses she handles in her practice. The blown-up and larger than life scale of her works also references the multiple points of entry and focus. She uses the busy and sometimes overwhelming imagery to give material form to an abstract concept- which through this process becomes accessible to multiple viewers. The use of text in her works is an inviting point of reference which opens the eye to the fantastical landscape at view. The words interject her visual narrative, and the two elements together take the viewer on a journey that titillates multiple senses.

Bose Pacia will be hosting an open studio on 11th July 2013 where the artist will be present.

Conversations Through a Lens

 Shradha Ramesh speaks with Professor Kathryn Myers from the University of Connecticut about her current project, “Regarding India, Conversations with Artists”

New York: Professor Kathryn Myers has been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1984. She is an artist and educator who for the past ten years has been involved in documenting Indian art and culture.

On May 29, she gave a lecture at The Attic, New Delhi. The lecture featured short clips and excerpts from her ongoing project “Regarding India, Conversations with Artists” that showcases video clips on 14 Indian modern and contemporary Indian artists.

Regarding India: Conversation with Artists, Kathryn Myers

Regarding India: Conversation with Artists, Kathryn Myers. Image Credit: http://in.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/907957/lecture-alert-kathryn-myers-on-her-conversations-with-50

As soon as I heard about this project, I was drawn instantaneously to know more about it and Professor Myers’ journey and experiences with Indian art. Below is the outcome of a very interesting exchange I had with Professor Myers.

Q: Can you tell us more about your current experience of presenting at The Attic, New Delhi?

A: I have known the directors of The Attic for several years and have given and attended talks there. It is an intimate space, drawing a diverse audience, who, I gather, attend many of their fine events.  I was a bit nervous about showing my videos in New Delhi for the first time and felt The Attic would be a welcoming space to screen this nascent project. I was touched and a bit overwhelmed with the interested, generous comments and questions from the audience.

Q: When did you first start to channelize your attention to Indian art, as a professor or as an artist, who or what inspired you the most?

A: I first came to India in 1999 to attend artist residencies at the Kanoria Centre, in Ahmedabad, and Sanskriti Kendra, in Delhi, with only superficial knowledge of Indian history, culture and art. Although I visited many museums on that first visit, it was the miniature painting galleries in several cities and the Handicrafts Museum in Delhi that had the strongest initial impact.  I was inspired upon my return to learn as much as I could about India.  One of my colleagues has generously described me as a “self-taught area studies specialist.”  I gradually became familiar with the contemporary art scene in India, but at first it was primarily through exhibitions in the United States.  Bose Pacia, Aicon and Talwar Galleries in New York and museums, such as the Asia Society in New York and the Peabody Essex Museum of Art in Salem, Massachusetts, were my “education.”  At those galleries I met others, Indian and non-Indian, who shared an enthusiasm for the burgeoning contemporary Indian art scene and with whom I felt a sense of community.  I was able to return to India many times to continue to study Indian art, particularly through two Fulbright Fellowships, in 2002 and 2011.

I have been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1984; for the past three decades, my life has been balanced between being an artist and educator. India inspires my own paintings, but when I become interested and excited about something, I always think of sharing it with my students. I had the wonderful opportunity in 2005, when UConn began an India Studies program, to design a new course on contemporary Indian art, “Indian Art and Popular Culture. In 2004, I organized a large exhibition for our university museum, The William Benton Museum of Art, titled “Masala: Diversity and Democracy in South Asian Art.”  This fall I am curating an exhibition titled “Convergence,” including 15 artists from India and the Indian diaspora for the Benton, based on the University of Connecticut’s collection of South Asian art.  I am very pleased that I have been able to return to India over the past decade and to have opportunities to make good use of my enthusiasm for and growing knowledge of Indian art and culture.

Sculptor Krishnaraj Chonat by Professor Kathryn Myers

Sculptor Krishnaraj Chonat. Image Credit: Professor Kathryn Myers

Q: How did you select the artists for “Regarding India, Conversations with Artists”?

A: It was both a planned and serendipitous process.  I started with artists whose work I admired greatly, was already very familiar with and had been teaching about for many years. I also went through over ten years of Art India magazines, which I subscribe to, and created an additional list of artists whom I tried to contact through their own websites, if they had one, or through their galleries. Often, when looking at a gallery website for the work of one artist, I would also be drawn to the work of another. After I arrived India to start the project in 2011, I discovered additional artists whose work I became acquainted with for the first time, became very excited about, and added to my already very full interview schedule. Because I wanted to have some sense of regional diversity, I made a particular attempt to interview artists in South India, such as at the historic artist colony of Cholamandal, as well as in Kerala and Goa, as these are regions often on periphery of the art scene.  I think the bottom line, however, is that it has to be work I have a strong response to, as I spend an extensive amount of time researching the artists before the interview and then in the editing process.

Photographer, Ravi Agarwal, by Professor Kathryn Myers

Photographer Ravi Agarwal. Image Credit: Professor Kathryn Myers

Q: While interviewing the artists, were there any enthralling episodes, if so, do you wish to share a few highlights with us?

A: There are parts of every interview that are very memorable.  It’s often a combination of what the artist is saying and how they say it, perhaps, in contrast to something else they had been talking about. I’ve made a series of selected clips of these moments for most of the videos. One that is particularly remarkable is when Ravi Agarwal, after talking about the important environmental and urban issues that are the subject of much of his work, including his concern and uncertainty about the future, begins to speak about his strong aesthetic response in the moment of taking the pictures. “It is this moment that draws me, if this moment was not there, I would stop doing it, it would have no meaning for me.” He becomes very caught up in this description, which is near the end of my conversation with him. It’s an inspiring and moving part of the interview, expressing a wonderful balance of his artistic and social commitments.

Photographer, Dinesh Khanna by Professor Kathryn Myers

Photographer Dinesh Khanna Image Credit: Professor Kathryn Myers

Another is from a very recent interview with the photographer Dinesh Khanna. When I arrived in Delhi in late December last year, I was drawn to an image in his monthly Urban Trivia column in First City Magazine, published shortly after the Delhi rape. I found his image of two women casually sitting in conversation behind a barbed wire fence to be a beautifully subtle reflection on what had happened. Before I had a chance to ask him about it, he began explaining in a very measured way how he selected and interpreted the image and suddenly stopped short to say that he had two daughters and how deeply he had been affected by the tragic incident.

After Arpita Singh’s description of a series of paintings based on the Gujarat riots, I inquired about her images of people who looked like they were “waiting.” Her quiet, halting response has a haunting resonance.  “I can’t explain it, you know, as if they are waiting for something to happen to them; always, aren’t we all waiting for something to happen to us?” Feeling pressured by me to perhaps explain the inexplicable, she exclaimed with a sense of humor, “how can I say, why did I do it? I’m not a psychiatrist! I can’t explain things in that way.”  In all the cases that I’ve described, words don’t do justice; the effectiveness of the video has so much to do with the presence of the artist and the cadence of speech.

Q: What are your plans for the future and for the project?

A: I have many more artists to interview and look forward to the project being ongoing, I love the editing process; while working I feel totally immersed and engaged with each artist and their work. I have already been showing the videos at different universities and conferences in the United States and hope to have more opportunities to share them in the United States and in India.

Q: In the future, since the videos are more curatorial and educational, do you see yourself creating a video archive for website viewers?

A: I would like to archive not only the finished videos but also much of the original footage.  They will be part of the University of Connecticut libraries’ video collection. I will also donate the material to the American Institute of India Studies Center for Art and Archeology in Gurgaon, which has holdings on contemporary Indian art, and I have also been in contact with Bose Pacia Gallery in New York about their archive project.

Aside from the finished videos, which range from about 10-20 minutes each, I often have up to two hours of conversation with each artist.  Because the edited videos do not include my own voice, aside from rare occasions, my part of the conversation, which often moves in different tangents from the original question, is edited out.  I also had to make difficult decisions about what to edit out and what to include, as I wanted to keep an average time limit of around 15 minutes for each. So, there is a lot of material that someone else might find of use. I myself have utilized parts of the interviews that are not in the edited videos in my course on Indian art.  For instance, Dinesh Khanna talks about the notion of “caste” in relation to his initial desire as a young man, not to follow the profession of his father who was a commercial photographer.  This was a very different way of thinking about caste that I had not considered and which I now include in my class lecture when I discuss the history and significance of the caste system.

For more information on this ongoing project click here.

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