First Impressions of a Flaneur

Kanika Anand reports on the elusive South Asian presence in the French capital’s art scene. 

“It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere”.

- Henry Miller

In these lines from the Tropic of Cancer, written in the 1930s, Miller was echoing the sentiment of many expatriate artists who longed to live and work in Paris, a city that fostered experimentation and creative endeavour. Although romanticized, Paris still manages to possess that alluring charm.

Having recently completed a ten-month curatorial fellowship at the Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble, I realized that the Indian subcontinent was largely under-represented in the French art world yet attracted a particular interest and fascination. This winter, I decided to seek out Indian artists exhibiting and performing in Paris, leading me to venues and works that surprised and enthralled. I began by preparing a calendar, marking dates, mapping routes and calculating entry fees. The first stop was at an Untitled performance piece by Tino Sehgal that ran for three days, between the 22nd and the 24th of January, at the Centre Pompidou. Although Sehgal is Anglo-German, I, like so many others, am guilty of selfishly including him in my list; he can, of course, be considered an artist of Indian descent for his father is Indian.

A reprise of a 55-minute solo choreographic piece that transported Sehgal from dance into the field of contemporary art in 2000, this performance at the Centre Pompidou was intended as a means of ‘re-viewing’ the work’s transmission through the past 13 years. The piece was essentially a ‘museum of dance’ for which Sehgal had performed nude the dance styles of the 2oth century with neither music nor props, successfully subverting the ‘theatrical’ stage on which the medium is most often presented. Before the lights came on, the title of the performance was unexpectedly announced – Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century, referenced the work’s antecedents. Handicapped without a further introduction or a printed program, the audience eagerly looked on as American dancer Frank Willens began to perform abstracts of dance sequences and movements drawn form the work of over 20 prominent choreographers. There were fragments of conversation that kept the audience engaged: a remark that repetition enables [K1] before dramatically ending with Willens urinating on stage while exclaiming “Je suis Fontaine” (I am Fountain). He returned a few moments later, dressed and with a bucket in hand to mop the puddle. The few giggles and incessant coughing in the dark hall reflected the embarrassment and discomfort of the audience, many of whom assumed the performance to be over and stood up to leave. Others, of course, discussed in hushed whispers the brilliance of the work’s stark reference to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917 before the second solo, involving French choreographer Boris Charmatz performing an almost identical routine, opened. Completely raw and unexpected, this piece’s presentation to an almost completely French audience at the Pompidou establishment remains etched in my memory. 

My second selection of things to see led me back to the Centre Pompidou to Rina Banerjee, Huma Bhabha and Atul Dodiya, whose works were part of the recent donation to the museum’s graphic arts department by the French collector couple Florence and Daniel Guerlain. The show was on view from the 16th of October 2013 to the 7th April 2014. Comprising over 1200 works on paper, the eclectic Guerlain’s contribution widens the scope and depth of the museum’s collection with hitherto unrepresented artists from over 30 countries. While walking through the maze of small rooms and passageways where the works were displayed, I recognized the immediacy of the artist’s gesture and sensitive dimension of the medium that seemed to have attracted the Guerlains to collect paper works. I located a small work by Pakistani sculptor Bhabha, an Untitled ink drawing on photograph from 2007, the year she began to experiment with the photogravure printing process. Here, Bhabha had used a black-and-white landscape as the surface on which she drew two shadowy monoliths, upright trunks that strikingly framed the work. Two watercolours by Atul Dodiya, titled Untitled and Juggler, both executed in 2000, depicted an unborn child in the womb and an acrobat, respectively. The works were placed side by side, suggesting a multitude of metaphors: dependence, stoicism and mobility. Five drawings by New York-based Banerjee confronted notions of the ‘exotic East’ and the ‘modern West’, feminism and eroticism, fairytales and fantasies. Drawn and decorated with acrylic paint, graphite, ink, glue and glitter, in an almost child-like manner, the works were visual feasts which added to the vitality of the diverse collection.

Banerjee’s works were also part of Astralis, a group exhibition exploring configurations of the astral, terrestrial and invisible dimensions in visual art. Held at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton from the 7th of February to the 11th of May, the exhibition was designed as a journey through stages of both self-awareness and scientific exploration of ‘other worlds’. The show was divided into three parts, with each work occupying a dedicated space. The first stage, marked by darkness, was inhabited by installations of light and shadow, an apparent means of guiding the viewer. The second stage comprised large works that probed illusionary visions of outer space wherein existed levitating cradles and machines that could reincarnate souls as trees. However bizarre, these artistic projections tested the limits of our consciousness and the fine line between dream and waking states. Banerjee’s hybrid cosmic creatures were steeped in Indian mythology and mixed cultural moorings of transformation and migration, such as the sculpture of a crawling monkey, reminiscent of Hanuman, installed on the wall, in metaphorical flight between heaven and earth.

My hunt for South Asian art ended at the Halle Saint Pierre’s Raw Vision, an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of the eponymous London-based publication focusing on Outsider Art. Among the works of 81 international artists displayed from the 18th of September 2013 to the 22nd of August 2014, were those by Nek Chand, Pushpa Kumari and Pradeep Kumar. The tableau of sculpted figures by Nek Chand comprised concrete, found tiles and bangles arranged in a quirky mosaic. On its pedestal, the comical assembly of scavenged junk seemed to be glaring back at  the world that once sniggered at it. On another wall, I found three intricate black-and-white drawings by Madhubani artist Pushpa Kumari, titled Shiva & Shukracharya, Prakriti and Purusha, and Linga. Although these maintained conventional religious themes, the subtle exploration of social issues like female infanticide and the need for women’s empowerment, was discernible. Born deaf and partially mute, Kumar’s carved, vividly painted matchstick figures expressing both fragility and deftness that seemed to resonate with his own handicap.

Shortly following the end of my two-month agenda of seeking out Indian artists, Nikhil Chopra’s exhibit, The Black Pearl, opened at the experimental Level One of gb agency, from the 6th of March to the 12th of April. Forthcoming this fall is a rather familiar theme associated with Indian art, The Kama Sutra: Spirituality & Eroticism in Indian Art at La Pinacotheque from the 2nd of October 2014 to the 8th of March 2015). 

My quest for art from South Asia has not been entirely successful. This is partly because it has also raised a personal dilemma. Despite my quest, I often find the regional categorisation of artists and survey exhibitions disturbing, since they often misrepresent the artists as well as their art. Having said this, I was happy to discover works amid places one did not expect and in collections one had limited knowledge of.