To continue on similar trajectories that Karishma has begun, I find it interesting to see new methods of documentation, archiving and research to facilitate more effective systems of disseminating information. The British Library has an ongoing exhibition called Growing Knowledge that showcases innovative research tools. The website has all the details of their 10-year vision and the initiatives that are being taken via interactive exhibitions, debate and participatory evaluation, to structure and design new research environments. One of the projects that are being exhibited as part of the exhibition is an artwork by Blast Theory that combines theatre, game-play and technology where each participant’s performance becomes a document within the work, and as a result expands the range of experiences that every potential participant could encounter.
Documentation of any kind is a process that requires focused time and efficiency. Most individuals today who own a collection of music/ books or even a small archive are needing to digitize all their documents for better preservation. While museums and public libraries are equipped with both technology and human resource to ensure the stability of this process, there are many millions of precious documents of history that are unfortunately disintegrating and getting destroyed everyday by the inability to adapt to better methods of archiving, by negligence and in some horrific cases, by violence and war. For artists, it becomes very important to understand the value of good preservation of artwork and documents and requires an involvement in its process in parallel with their art-practice.
Malavika Rajnarayan
Image from http://www.artchive.com/artchive/L/lawrence/lawrence_the_library.jpg.html
I had recently visited the Center for Contemporary Theory to attend a presentation of a paper. The Center has an extensive collection and the website has a complete documentation of the library, so one could preplan one’s reading quota/plot ones reading list online!
I was introduced to Nimisha Desai, the founder of Olakh, by Albertina Almeida, a lawyer and activist, who I had met through work I had once done for the Bailancho Saad, a women’s organization in Goa which wanted paintings for a traveling exhibition, that was to be a part of a campaign of AIDS awareness.
Olakh will be on its fifteenth year soon. The team works with the dissemination and discussion of feminist philosophies through workshops, meetings, and a library database of resources on feminism and related fields of equality, and it has a rapidly growing lending library and archive of periodicals, journals, books (fiction and non-fiction), and newsletters – in English, Hindi and Gujrati - as well as cupboards of movies and documentaries which are also a part of the lending library. In response to an SMS from a friend who works as the chief coordinator (“loads of new bk arrivals. Drop in, u’ll lv it”) I made a pronto trip! My recent make away of books right out of the boxes they came in were Alice Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, Maya Angelou’s ‘The Heart of a Woman’, and a Penguin Anthology of Medieval Jain Stories- ‘The Forest of Thieves and The Magic Garden’.
I landed up at the Central library in Mandvi because of my nostalgia for the home away from home that the Central Library in Panjim, Goa was for me during my school and college years. The Central library in Mandvi is a very different story - and here I only speak of the English section, (I was told that the vast Gujarati collection is quite phenomenal, though an added remark was that the librarian’s guard many books like they would fall apart if touched – and perhaps they would because dust pervades everything indiscriminately). The English section has not been seriously updated since the eighties/seventies. The layer of dust everywhere makes it a perfect place for some self-appointed social work. I joined it for the five to ten books that caught my eye and because I like the excitement of not knowing what one will find – a kind of treasure hunt through randomness, and unlike a bookshop, the bare (government subsidized) monetary involvement makes the search even more hopeful.
An added two-pronged problem in this library is- a) the books are all over the place and
b) They are bound and many don’t have titles printed on the spines.
If the ‘reader in English’ ventures into this heritage building the best alternative may be to do a survey of the whole section row by row, make a reading list, and put in your resignation as a member after systematically making the most of it! The English section is not too big so this is a possibility. The books I’ve read from the Central Library so far are the Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media. (which gives you an idea of what I mean by a surprise find! – found because it was unbound!), Vijayan Ottupulakkal Velukutty’s The Legends of Khasak, and quite a few of a number of wonderful books by Nadine Gordimer. ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta’ was excitedly spotted on my first visit, but though I did search, it was never seen again.
Karishma D'souza
Energies often get altered in spaces of sharing and as a collective, we have always held the spirit of openness to accommodate change. The core group of Theen Tamasha has been reshuffled with the rationale of bringing together three friends from the same generation, who have studied together and continue their practice within structures of close interaction. We take delight in welcoming Karishma D'souza as a core group member. Kim Kyoungae will continue to be a part of Theen Tamasha & Friends.
Karishma D'souza was also one of the artists who participated in our recent group exhibition 'Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies' curated by Rekha Rodwittiya. You can read more about her here and in our Open Window section
The Collective Studio will be presenting
The Light within: Paintings of Rabindranath
An illustrated lecture by Indrapramit Roy
on Saturday the 19th of March 2011 at 6 pm
Venue: Surendran Nair's Studio
C-1 Oasis- Behind Essar Petrol Pump – Sama Savli Road - Baroda
RSVP -98240 69767
Synopsis of the presentation
Amongst all the creative fields that Rabindranath ventured in
with his Midas- touch, painting was the last. It is common
knowledge that he got started while graphically playing
with the marks and scratches in his manuscript and gave
them decorative shapes. These ‘doodles’ were a case of making
virtue out of defect.
His first attempts at painting were tentative and
full of self-doubt but very soon he was making
much more ambitious works. They included abstract
shapes, portraits, human figures, figure-groups with
architectural elements, landscapes, flora and fauna both
observed and fantastic. Rabindranath’s maturation from a
‘timorous amateur’ to a confident and sophisticated explorer
of the realm of the visual happened in a surprisingly short span of time.
Despite being an early champion of Raja Ravi Varma
and subsequently the Bengal school in his own works
Tagore kept studiously away from the trappings of both
literary content and the nationalistic concerns of his peers. His technique,
theme and approach were fresh, unsentimental, unorthodox and modern.
The presentation will delve into the specifics of these with the help of
illustrations.
Indrapramit Roy is an artist who currently teaches at the painting department in the Faculty of Fine Arts M.S University of Baroda. He studied printmaking (BFA) at the Visva-Bharati University of Santiniketan and painting (MFA) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University of Baroda, India. Subsequently he was awarded the Inlaks Scholarship to study MA Painting (1990-92) at the Royal College of Art, London, which also included a term each at Cite des Arts, Paris and Hochschule der Kunst, Berlin. He has shown extensively in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore and Chennai. He has 15 solo exhibitions and over 70 group shows to his credit. He also designs books. His illustrations include ‘Antigone’, ‘King Oedipus’, ‘Bacchae’ and ‘Hippolytus’: four retellings of Greek tragedies produced by Tara publishing, Chennai and published by the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. ‘Antigone’ won the best book design award in New York book fair, 2002 and ‘Bacchae’ got the Association of American Museum Publishers’ Award in 2005. ‘Hungry Lion’ published by Annick press, Canada won the Alcuin Award in 1998.
Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies is an intimate space of reflection and consideration that desires to hold dear the personal and the fragile, within an art environment that has increasingly begun to impose the demands for grand and epic proclamations.
Like the weaving of a tapestry, the many different threads that knot and come together are what finally make for a complete picture; and as lives interweave too, these spaces of communion hold exquisite value. Feminine sensibility in art is often from those territories that engage with the politics of gender and which chart a history that is crucial to contextualizing self representations.
The six artists are acutely conscious of the collective histories that that they choose to belong to and which may be viewed as the legacies of feminist discourse. Nuanced and evocative, their works imbibe oral histories of a multicultural social milieu which become the stage of greater elaboration and interventions. Shared associations, conflicts, parallel histories and cultural investigations - all wrapped in the pursuit of a visual language, have distilled to articulate passages of contemporary existence for these six women.
Kim Kyoungae, Lee Hayan and Kim Seola are from South Korea, whilst Karishma D’souza and Sonatina Mendes are from Goa; and Malavika Rajnarayan is from Bangalore- all who now currently reside in Baroda. Coming from multiple locations, Baroda becomes a site of collective journeys converging.
Curator of the exhibition
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