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Radical Housing and Socially-Engaged Art

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Expect heavy rainfall this week. Expect heavy footfall this week. Expect the gallerist, soothsayer of the market, vanguard of the cutting-edge; expect the curator, finger on the pulse on the scene. Expect the scene (and expect the scene kid). Expect your hero, their life an enduring testament to the labour and legacy of making. Expect your peer, beelining for the beer and digging for sound in the black hole. Expect friends. And friends of friends and possibly nervous dates of friends. Expect the eyes from across the street, reluctant to land on your doorstep. Expect the occasional adolescent. Expect the Canteen regulars. Expect all the irregulars. Expect the critic, new glasses in tow for the big day: now is no time for blurry vision. Expect blurry vision. 

It’s hard to say how you ended up here, swimming in all this company. In the beginning there was only the voice and you with your sketchbook— ‘deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself’1. This was all your company.

As a boy, you saw how the rain walked slantwards into your home. Bal Thackeray glowering at you from the ceiling through leaves and leaves of newsprint sheathing the feet of moisture. Today that roof is company. Through days and nights in the Dutch midwinter, you knew your body as knots. Pain too is company. Alone in the sullen afternoon of girlhood, everything’s a secret. Every secret a body in your sketchbook, every body your company.  

A man, so ashamed that his hunger made his comrades go without eating one night, no longer had any use for his life. Your mother’s exhaustion moved like the phases of the moon. 

And you with your sketchbook—witness, medium, watchtower, storyteller, ‘still devising it all for company’2.


Last week, when time wasn’t yet the landlord who claims to live in Gurgaon but just happens to be in the neighbourhood the day you have company, the Peers were wrestling with the looming spectre of the audience. Someone would ask them: tum kaam kiske liye banate ho? Another would say: the public is fantastical. Is it necessary for people to get your work? Is being misunderstood a grave, unremitting wound? Does perception come to alter the work? Do you want this crowd to enter your work? Does your work speak to the burdens of our time, does your practice hold the door open? Are you accountable, are you responsible? Do you have the right to shun, do you have the right to show? Is the critic going to let you have your fourth chai in peace? Do rebellious teenagers find you cool? Does your mother see you in what you make? Do your people think you got it right? Do you have a people? Does your work have a people?

In Khirkee, a tangle of telephone wires guards the myth of sky and rage is a barrel rolling down the street everyday. Stepping out of Khoj and into that scene is a dissonance so sharp it might topple your practice if you let it. Late one night, Dhiraj tells me of his auto ride to Nehru Place to recover the lost footage from the hard drive that went kaput a few days before Open Day: ‘chaaro taraf frustrated insaan, thhake hue, aur main sala apne dimaag, apne project mein itna ghusa hua hu; inn logo ko kaise samjhau aur kyu inhe fadak padega?’ I don’t think this anxiety resonates as deeply as it does because any of us are the Buddha or Marx. It would be a cop-out to oversimplify the social content of Delhi’s art scene or to resign ourselves to a near-total cynicism about the (im)possibility of communication and mobilisation across barriers of caste and class, or to agree to certain reactionary, even anti-intellectual, pronouncements about the inaccessibilty of ‘high art’ and contemporary art. It is likely more difficult to sit with that anxiety and let it stew, and to steer through that discomfort driven by a stubborn belief in the aesthetic mode, in languages made strange only to be made more familiar. To see and agonise over the world and its codes; to pin the unruly ebb and flow of experience on a spectral anchor, and then to give that anchor back to the world in a language not estranged from that of the heart.

Will people get it? How do you make sure they get it? Even if the point is not getting it and your work is in fact a crusade against the tyranny of ‘getting’ things, how do you make sure they get that?

Image by Suhasini Pande

Pratik’s practice is a case in point because his way is the way of the poet and for Peers, he wanted to think through vision and its obfuscations in a way ‘jo idhar ka insaan idhar ki bhasha mein samajh paaye’. A sensitivity to the extra-logic and extra-grammar of the poetic register suffuses his thoughtful work: I never saw the prosaic make it through the threshold of his studio. Does the artist then end up being more protective of the way in which his work means, or does he choose to place his faith in an esoteric assembly, an imagined community that may be much bigger than we think? Coming back to the living room on Open Day, I remained stuck on the acute vulnerability of that position. Someone asked me whether I’d gotten a call from my landlord again.

I wish there were an unsentimental way that I knew of saying: indeed, all artists court vulnerability like that. At Khoj, Bhavneet spent time with difficult memories: a long battle with psychosomatic pain and a search for sources of nourishment, living alone in the West. Thinking through her experience, her time at the residency was a discovery of medium: aluminium that wraps the roti, aluminium that is used in pain-healing, aluminium that is mined and mined and plundered, aluminium that shapes an estranged body in her work. Debashruti’s work too drew upon personal experiences, evoking the magical, the fantastical, and the otherworldly through a system of idioms that I saw her developing with care. The vocabularies and sensitivities that enable access to non-representational modes of aesthetic communication are not necessarily something that an art education alone promises, this we know: there are ways for each of us to understand a work, through the much-maligned modalities of instinct and emotion, through a shared knowledge of how pain works, how betrayal stings. And yet there is always that possibility of being lost in translation. Over countless rambling conversations with the Peers, it is the fear of that loss that I was trying to understand. When you know where a story is coming from, you’re conscious of its details, you’re aware of its movements in your body, in your hand, but how can the core of that affect be transported across a dreary terrain ridden with the frustrations and failures of language, to the point where it strikes a chord, where it forces the person coming to see your work, their mind clouded by exhaustion and saturated with information, to take a beat? To pause, and to care about what you have to say when so many have so much to say, to be shaken out of a stupor and to be moved. Or even to be left curious.

Image by Bhavneet Kaur

On the flip side, there is the danger of letting the audience get inside your head. One night in our room, Swati tells me: ‘Sometimes I hear other people’s voices so loudly they threaten to drown out my own.’ At the residency, what struck me as most fascinating was the specific role carbon paper played in helping her navigate that commotion: ‘viewer blur hogaya, focus sharp hogaya’. She imagined herself as the medium in telling an intergenerational tale: the blind drawings on its surface already receding into the past, the movement of peeling figuring processually as an unstable and shifting present and yielding the emergent image on the wall as a to-come, as arrival and as future. 

When the artist imagines themselves as the medium, a further layer is removed between the work and its public: a vulnerability of voice that makes you wonder what on earth could invest an individual with that courage. 

Image by Bhavneet Kaur

The anxiety over the artist’s position with respect to their community and with respect to audiences at large popped up often in conversation with Dhiraj. When displaying the work at the detention camp, he chose to eschew drawing altogether – ‘udhar mujhe abstraction nahi laana tha, mera intervention nahi laana tha’. How much to show, how much to withhold, how much to intervene—the project’s drivers are deeply embedded in an interrogation of the artist’s power and responsibility in sharing a story about insurgency with a society in thrall to the magic of the nation-state. At Khoj (and in Delhi), however, Dhiraj chose to invest his work with a gaze of scrutiny, installing it in a corner and casting the spotlight on the audience, looking back at us for once to see if vulnerability is a thing we can be trusted to touch. 


Image by Bhavneet Kaur

Over six weeks, I was their first audience: some company. Bhavneet, pacing back and forth on the foil flooring, agonising over the shoulders and their shadows the night before Open Day; my beer and I at the threshold. Debashruti on the table with her friend, threading long tresses through the gaps of a mesh body wedding a mesh body. Dhiraj peering at the cluster of images at the convergence of his corner: ‘Is this too much darkness? Am I pushing it too far?’ Swati in the cushions, restive and furtive, stitching away at her book, a labour of love through sleepless nights; Pratik with his hands soaked in plaster, his eyes on the light and its untraceable scatter. 

‘Still devising it all for company.’

‘Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. 

Alone.’3

1  ‘…Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he devises too for company. Leave it at that. Confusion too is company up to a point. Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that.’ (from Samuel Beckett’s Company)
2 Ibid.
3 This text and this writer owe their deepest allegiance to Samuel Beckett’s Company