Exchanges of Place and Space - Tash Kahn
Exchanges of Place and Space: Research Trips to India and Brazil 2018
By Tash Kahn
My work is predominantly site-specific, using a location's immediate surrounding area and local history as starting points. I am interested in how people relate to art, the conversations it generates and how it makes them feel. I want to know how and why other artists do what they do, and I am always intrigued to know what drives them. Is their struggle the same as mine? What makes them tick? When Charlie Levine invited me first to India in April 2018, and then to Brazil in June, I jumped at the chance. Not only for my own practice, but for wider research. I am a Londoner born and bred, my practice is rooted in concrete and all things urban so I was interested to find out how a new, completely different city, would affect it. How would I frame myself in a new place? How much impact would that new place have on my own practice?
India
I am always interested in a city’s narrative but I had no idea what to expect when we arrived in Mumbai. The humidity hit with force as we left the airport, enveloping me like a warm hug. On the trip from the airport to Colaba we passed cars, rickshaws, trucks, bicycles and mopeds. Pedestrians weaved heroically through the mayhem, oblivious to the near constant blaring of car horns – something that would serve as the soundtrack to our trip. I noticed the trees, big beautiful trees with hanging branches that were all painted at the base with stripes of red and white (red clay to stop termites and white paint to prevent people bumping into them in the dark). I absorbed everything like a sponge.
Our host was artist Vishwa Shroff and on arrival at her beautiful home we began the first of many conversations. These numerous exchanges started at breakfast and continued through until bedtime. Each conversation held a new project and new possibilities sprung up with every word. I found myself constantly questioning my own practice and cooking up new ideas.
We met many artists during our intense, weeklong stay and each brought new thoughts and questions to the table.
Our first trip out was to see Shakuntala Kulkarni’s exhibition, Julus and Other Stories, a theatrical show about procession and the act of marching. In her Q&A during the PV Shakuntala remarked: “I march how I want.” Of her practice she talked of not planning anything: “As long as the purpose is met I don’t need to plan.” Those words struck a chord with me and chimed with my own practice. I find too much thinking can prevent me from physically making and the problems I encounter in my head often stop me putting ideas into action.
On Friday we met artist Sameer Kulavoor at Vishwa’s gallery TARQ and saw his show A Man of the Crowd. He told us that the people in his paintings change, but the setting is always Mumbai. Sameer talked about the city’s inhabitants and their make-do-and-mend approach to life. Bicycles were a case in point – used to transport anything and everything; customised with Bollywood-inspired mudguards; saddles made more comfortable. He talked about Mumbai’s once prolific, but now disappearing Xerox shops and their black and yellow signage. The ever-changing city where gentrification is happening on the same scale as London, and his nostalgia for Gold-Spot caps. I liked the way Sameer noticed these things enough to talk about them and then turn them into projects.
On Saturday we travelled to the island of Alibag and bumped into Vishwa’s friend, artist Amshu Chukki on the boat over. He also talked about noticing things: “You can walk down the same street everyday and you always see something new.” On site-specificity he questioned the vantage point of the audience and noted how that point can change with each person viewing the work. Does the site change when a site-specific work is taken down? What is left?
We also met Sukhdev Rathod who takes his inspiration from things he knows well. He showed us his beautiful ceramic works, each imprinted with the face of a rock. Every night he walks to the beach and sits on a rock in order to get his emails. “We can’t get the internet, so most nights we walk to the beach, sit on these rocks and check our emails using the nearby café’s wifi.” Beautiful, in-the-moment, almost make-do work.
We met Kruti Saraiya on Sunday during Vishwa’s open house. Her sketchbooks are windows into her mind. Beginning as travelling doodles, they became a way of documenting her trips abroad negating the need for a camera. Her notes and the interesting stories she accumulates on her travels are transformed into elaborate drawings that are simple but effective.
On Monday we travelled to north Mumbai to visit Pratap Morey. Pratap lives in a high-rise apartment with a view to infinity out of the studio window. Again the subject of the constantly changing city came up. The organised construction means the skyline of the city changes overnight and its different layers inspire his work.
The impact of day-to-day living on these new buildings means that almost every balcony has been re-appropriated for use as an interior space. And Pratap’s work reflects the altering environment. He views the city as a Tetris game; a jigsaw puzzle, and continually tries to solve it. He said that with each new move he looks at the city in a different way, becoming more ordered in the effort.
Teja Gavankar’s beautiful work had a real affect on me. Again, like so many of the other artists we met, she talked about noticing things others don’t, and how she is ok for her small, public interventions to go unnoticed. Like only the people who are meant to see the work will see it – anti-public art in a way, not in your face, imposing big stuff. She draws with the space and her pieces speak softly, but play with people’s daily actions. She talked of viewing the city in a different way after a long period away from it, and of memory, tracks of tyres in the snow for example. What is there that is not there any more.
On Tuesday we talked to our host, Vishwa Shroff. Vishwa investigates narratives that build up because of inaccessibility and she constantly questions how people use space. An avid collector of stories, she repurposes them into her own projects. Vishwa lives between Mumbai and Tokyo, and during her walks around the latter, has noticed how the lack of interior space mean people re-appropriate windows for use as storage. Vishwa will see 8 white shirts hanging up in someone’s window and conclude that the owner is a stock broker; or the absence of cooking pots mean the owner is a bad cook. This expansive imagination became the project, Postulating Premises, which served as a vehicle to conjure up the answers. Room, a collaboration in book form with her husband Katsushi Goto, imagines the same space changing over time.
Mumbai was a revelation. I met some great people with great ideas. Like London, the city is constantly shifting. Transformation is something several of the artists I met commented on, the fact that Mumbai is always changing its shape and purpose, and in turn, impacting the people who live, visit and work there. Every day history is being made.
There was lots of obsessive behaviour too: the artists and their constant repeating and re-visiting (Sameer’s Xerox shops; Vishwa’s windows), Charlie applying and reapplying mosquito repellent – all made me think of my own love of wheelie bins and how I obsessively photograph them, over and over again. Many artists I meet have an obsessive streak where they play with an idea and then do it to death. I do that too.
What I learnt though, was that a city seeps into the consciousness of its inhabitants. And people who notice will notice the small changes happening every day: shops closing, new ones opening; regular faces on public transport; the angle of guttering; the smell of the fish by Sasson Docks. Artists will go further and make work out of these things. Even subconsciously their environment will seep in like London has done to my own practice. I left Mumbai feeling inspired, my brain full of potential projects and connections for the future.
Brazil
Rio de Janiero was a totally different story – not nearly as hectic as Mumbai but just as beautiful. We landed at night and drove to a colonial guesthouse up a steep cobbled street. There was graffiti everywhere and what seemed like music on every corner.
Our first meeting was with artist Daniel Murgel, who offered to cook us pizza at his studio. Daniel makes installations or ‘think paintings’ using small models, ad-hoc architecture and thoughts of Malevich as starting points. He is exasperated by the state of the politics in Brazil and wants to bring people together with food – the result was a pizza oven he made while on a residency. This socially engaging project serves to build a creative infrastructure within the local community, and building fire in order to break bread and exchange conversation is something that humans have been doing for a long time. Daniel likens the oven to a smoking painting and as the pizzas cook, smoke is literally painting the sculpture.
That same evening we also met Thelma Vilas Boas who runs Bar Delas, a local bar that acts as a community hub. To her the space is ‘Giving Art’, and she views it as a place where people can congregate in the same way they do at a church. There are artists in the same building and Thelma is keen to find ways to support them through workshops and other activating projects.
I was drawn to Daniel and Thelma’s socially engaging practices and the notion of artists as activists. As creative members of a society in flux there is much to say and artists are at the forefront. By exploring new concepts of what art is or what it can be we can (hopefully) help make an impact.
On Thursday Charlie and I travelled to São Paulo, a bigger, busier city full of beautiful Modernist architecture. En route to meet representatives from the São Paulo Bienal, we walked around Ibirapuera Park taking in the lines of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture dotted around its landscape. The park is home to the Bienal Foundation, as well as Niemeyer’s pavilion for the fair. We met Mariana Sesma and Flavia Abbud to discuss the Bienal’s history and talk through future projects. They very kindly gave us a private tour of the pavilion – an expansive aircraft hanger of a space with huge curving ramps and polished concrete floors. My brain spun with artistic possibilities.
Later we met curator Bruno de Almeida and artist João Loureiro at Galeria Jaqueline Martins. Bruno is interested in the public/private space, and the differences between the two. He shows work in both a gallery environment and in the community, so the audience and engagement level change at every turn. Bruno tries to create projects that exist outside the box. “My projects invite the audience to think critically about the city and the processes that shape it.” He wants to engage people but is aware that even if you place art in the public arena, the public still may not look at it. It is only defined as art because there is an artist involved.
João Loureiro talked about his grey ice cream project and the challenges of getting it shown in a museum setting. This grey art needs to be shown in an art gallery but bureaucracy gets in the way; outside the gallery it is just ice cream and not art. The context in which it is shown is important – inside/outside vs public/private. João’s work with Bruno as part of the latter’s 1:1 project was straddled across two spaces – a replica of an Umberto Boccioni piece in polystyrene studded with dead flies at the gallery was juxtaposed with a Henry Moore sculpture made from raw meat in an apocalyptic supermarket a few streets away. João’s work really spoke to me, especially when he talked about Nugget, a gold dental piece placed permanently in the mouth of a monk.
On Saturday artist Flora Leite questioned if artists were still allowed to say what they wanted to say without fear of reproach. She felt that there is no such thing and there will always be some form of negotiation. Flora’s work tackles serious issues but is speckled with humour. It is site specific in nature and heavily politicised. She looks for the ‘odd spaces’ in buildings, and harks back to historical stories in order to re-tell them. A recent project meant she taught herself how to make crystals via YouTube; another one saw her making the Southern Cross constellation in fireworks. Beautiful, thought-provoking work.
All the people we met in Brazil talked about the country’s political climate – past and present – and all were keen to incorporate it into their practice in some way. Thelma and Daniel both give back to the community using their practice as a vehicle. João wanted to give gold back to a church that had been ransacked years before. His solution was putting it into the mouth of a monk. Flora wondered if there was still freedom in art – something we had grappled with in India on finding out that a director of an art college had been sacked as a result of a student’s ‘inappropriate’ work.
Conclusion
These trips were as eye-opening as they were inspirational. I noticed more and more how the immediate environment spoke to many of the artists we met – whether it was the political situation or the physical, ever-changing skyline. Little interventions – be it a subtle architectural piece like Teja’s, or a bar that acts like a community centre in the case of Thelma’s, or a pizza oven in the grounds of a school like Daniel’s – can all serve to change the way we see the city. These projects comment on the political situations, reflect the views of the people, indeed serve as places for the people to share information, and give something back to the community both physically and mentally.
And the skyline is forever shifting. Artists we met in both Mumbai and Rio commented on how fast their cities are being transformed and gentrified, their language constantly changing. Buildings have been knocked down and re-built again and again. They get fixed or changed for purpose in an ad hoc way, with a ‘make do and mend’ attitude. People have responded to the landscape, and adapted their individual habitats to suit their needs. Thus their language is constantly changing.
Many of the artists we met had practices that reflected that.
My practice too has moved away from painting and installation to one that is more socially engaged. It heartens me to know that there are others out there doing the same thing. The further I move forwards in my career as an artist, the more I want to move away from self-indulgence and into activism/participatory work. Meeting new people in other cities and creating new networks and possible collaborations has helped me move my practice towards this as participating in international exchanges and making new connections are a vital part of my process. Exchanges are always fruitful and the conversations in both Brazil and India have caused me to view my practice in a different way. Being seen in an international context and seeing how other artists and curators work has forced me to turn inwards. Returning to London my head was full of questions:
Is it an artist’s right to comment on a political situation?
How do I navigate my own city?
How do artists get others to see what they see? Is that important?
How important is it that people view everything in the same light anyway?
Does all art be seen or is knowing enough (João’s filling a case in point).
By Tash Kahn
My work is predominantly site-specific, using a location's immediate surrounding area and local history as starting points. I am interested in how people relate to art, the conversations it generates and how it makes them feel. I want to know how and why other artists do what they do, and I am always intrigued to know what drives them. Is their struggle the same as mine? What makes them tick? When Charlie Levine invited me first to India in April 2018, and then to Brazil in June, I jumped at the chance. Not only for my own practice, but for wider research. I am a Londoner born and bred, my practice is rooted in concrete and all things urban so I was interested to find out how a new, completely different city, would affect it. How would I frame myself in a new place? How much impact would that new place have on my own practice?
India
I am always interested in a city’s narrative but I had no idea what to expect when we arrived in Mumbai. The humidity hit with force as we left the airport, enveloping me like a warm hug. On the trip from the airport to Colaba we passed cars, rickshaws, trucks, bicycles and mopeds. Pedestrians weaved heroically through the mayhem, oblivious to the near constant blaring of car horns – something that would serve as the soundtrack to our trip. I noticed the trees, big beautiful trees with hanging branches that were all painted at the base with stripes of red and white (red clay to stop termites and white paint to prevent people bumping into them in the dark). I absorbed everything like a sponge.
Our host was artist Vishwa Shroff and on arrival at her beautiful home we began the first of many conversations. These numerous exchanges started at breakfast and continued through until bedtime. Each conversation held a new project and new possibilities sprung up with every word. I found myself constantly questioning my own practice and cooking up new ideas.
We met many artists during our intense, weeklong stay and each brought new thoughts and questions to the table.
Our first trip out was to see Shakuntala Kulkarni’s exhibition, Julus and Other Stories, a theatrical show about procession and the act of marching. In her Q&A during the PV Shakuntala remarked: “I march how I want.” Of her practice she talked of not planning anything: “As long as the purpose is met I don’t need to plan.” Those words struck a chord with me and chimed with my own practice. I find too much thinking can prevent me from physically making and the problems I encounter in my head often stop me putting ideas into action.
On Friday we met artist Sameer Kulavoor at Vishwa’s gallery TARQ and saw his show A Man of the Crowd. He told us that the people in his paintings change, but the setting is always Mumbai. Sameer talked about the city’s inhabitants and their make-do-and-mend approach to life. Bicycles were a case in point – used to transport anything and everything; customised with Bollywood-inspired mudguards; saddles made more comfortable. He talked about Mumbai’s once prolific, but now disappearing Xerox shops and their black and yellow signage. The ever-changing city where gentrification is happening on the same scale as London, and his nostalgia for Gold-Spot caps. I liked the way Sameer noticed these things enough to talk about them and then turn them into projects.
On Saturday we travelled to the island of Alibag and bumped into Vishwa’s friend, artist Amshu Chukki on the boat over. He also talked about noticing things: “You can walk down the same street everyday and you always see something new.” On site-specificity he questioned the vantage point of the audience and noted how that point can change with each person viewing the work. Does the site change when a site-specific work is taken down? What is left?
We also met Sukhdev Rathod who takes his inspiration from things he knows well. He showed us his beautiful ceramic works, each imprinted with the face of a rock. Every night he walks to the beach and sits on a rock in order to get his emails. “We can’t get the internet, so most nights we walk to the beach, sit on these rocks and check our emails using the nearby café’s wifi.” Beautiful, in-the-moment, almost make-do work.
We met Kruti Saraiya on Sunday during Vishwa’s open house. Her sketchbooks are windows into her mind. Beginning as travelling doodles, they became a way of documenting her trips abroad negating the need for a camera. Her notes and the interesting stories she accumulates on her travels are transformed into elaborate drawings that are simple but effective.
On Monday we travelled to north Mumbai to visit Pratap Morey. Pratap lives in a high-rise apartment with a view to infinity out of the studio window. Again the subject of the constantly changing city came up. The organised construction means the skyline of the city changes overnight and its different layers inspire his work.
The impact of day-to-day living on these new buildings means that almost every balcony has been re-appropriated for use as an interior space. And Pratap’s work reflects the altering environment. He views the city as a Tetris game; a jigsaw puzzle, and continually tries to solve it. He said that with each new move he looks at the city in a different way, becoming more ordered in the effort.
Teja Gavankar’s beautiful work had a real affect on me. Again, like so many of the other artists we met, she talked about noticing things others don’t, and how she is ok for her small, public interventions to go unnoticed. Like only the people who are meant to see the work will see it – anti-public art in a way, not in your face, imposing big stuff. She draws with the space and her pieces speak softly, but play with people’s daily actions. She talked of viewing the city in a different way after a long period away from it, and of memory, tracks of tyres in the snow for example. What is there that is not there any more.
On Tuesday we talked to our host, Vishwa Shroff. Vishwa investigates narratives that build up because of inaccessibility and she constantly questions how people use space. An avid collector of stories, she repurposes them into her own projects. Vishwa lives between Mumbai and Tokyo, and during her walks around the latter, has noticed how the lack of interior space mean people re-appropriate windows for use as storage. Vishwa will see 8 white shirts hanging up in someone’s window and conclude that the owner is a stock broker; or the absence of cooking pots mean the owner is a bad cook. This expansive imagination became the project, Postulating Premises, which served as a vehicle to conjure up the answers. Room, a collaboration in book form with her husband Katsushi Goto, imagines the same space changing over time.
Mumbai was a revelation. I met some great people with great ideas. Like London, the city is constantly shifting. Transformation is something several of the artists I met commented on, the fact that Mumbai is always changing its shape and purpose, and in turn, impacting the people who live, visit and work there. Every day history is being made.
There was lots of obsessive behaviour too: the artists and their constant repeating and re-visiting (Sameer’s Xerox shops; Vishwa’s windows), Charlie applying and reapplying mosquito repellent – all made me think of my own love of wheelie bins and how I obsessively photograph them, over and over again. Many artists I meet have an obsessive streak where they play with an idea and then do it to death. I do that too.
What I learnt though, was that a city seeps into the consciousness of its inhabitants. And people who notice will notice the small changes happening every day: shops closing, new ones opening; regular faces on public transport; the angle of guttering; the smell of the fish by Sasson Docks. Artists will go further and make work out of these things. Even subconsciously their environment will seep in like London has done to my own practice. I left Mumbai feeling inspired, my brain full of potential projects and connections for the future.
Brazil
Rio de Janiero was a totally different story – not nearly as hectic as Mumbai but just as beautiful. We landed at night and drove to a colonial guesthouse up a steep cobbled street. There was graffiti everywhere and what seemed like music on every corner.
Our first meeting was with artist Daniel Murgel, who offered to cook us pizza at his studio. Daniel makes installations or ‘think paintings’ using small models, ad-hoc architecture and thoughts of Malevich as starting points. He is exasperated by the state of the politics in Brazil and wants to bring people together with food – the result was a pizza oven he made while on a residency. This socially engaging project serves to build a creative infrastructure within the local community, and building fire in order to break bread and exchange conversation is something that humans have been doing for a long time. Daniel likens the oven to a smoking painting and as the pizzas cook, smoke is literally painting the sculpture.
That same evening we also met Thelma Vilas Boas who runs Bar Delas, a local bar that acts as a community hub. To her the space is ‘Giving Art’, and she views it as a place where people can congregate in the same way they do at a church. There are artists in the same building and Thelma is keen to find ways to support them through workshops and other activating projects.
I was drawn to Daniel and Thelma’s socially engaging practices and the notion of artists as activists. As creative members of a society in flux there is much to say and artists are at the forefront. By exploring new concepts of what art is or what it can be we can (hopefully) help make an impact.
On Thursday Charlie and I travelled to São Paulo, a bigger, busier city full of beautiful Modernist architecture. En route to meet representatives from the São Paulo Bienal, we walked around Ibirapuera Park taking in the lines of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture dotted around its landscape. The park is home to the Bienal Foundation, as well as Niemeyer’s pavilion for the fair. We met Mariana Sesma and Flavia Abbud to discuss the Bienal’s history and talk through future projects. They very kindly gave us a private tour of the pavilion – an expansive aircraft hanger of a space with huge curving ramps and polished concrete floors. My brain spun with artistic possibilities.
Later we met curator Bruno de Almeida and artist João Loureiro at Galeria Jaqueline Martins. Bruno is interested in the public/private space, and the differences between the two. He shows work in both a gallery environment and in the community, so the audience and engagement level change at every turn. Bruno tries to create projects that exist outside the box. “My projects invite the audience to think critically about the city and the processes that shape it.” He wants to engage people but is aware that even if you place art in the public arena, the public still may not look at it. It is only defined as art because there is an artist involved.
João Loureiro talked about his grey ice cream project and the challenges of getting it shown in a museum setting. This grey art needs to be shown in an art gallery but bureaucracy gets in the way; outside the gallery it is just ice cream and not art. The context in which it is shown is important – inside/outside vs public/private. João’s work with Bruno as part of the latter’s 1:1 project was straddled across two spaces – a replica of an Umberto Boccioni piece in polystyrene studded with dead flies at the gallery was juxtaposed with a Henry Moore sculpture made from raw meat in an apocalyptic supermarket a few streets away. João’s work really spoke to me, especially when he talked about Nugget, a gold dental piece placed permanently in the mouth of a monk.
On Saturday artist Flora Leite questioned if artists were still allowed to say what they wanted to say without fear of reproach. She felt that there is no such thing and there will always be some form of negotiation. Flora’s work tackles serious issues but is speckled with humour. It is site specific in nature and heavily politicised. She looks for the ‘odd spaces’ in buildings, and harks back to historical stories in order to re-tell them. A recent project meant she taught herself how to make crystals via YouTube; another one saw her making the Southern Cross constellation in fireworks. Beautiful, thought-provoking work.
All the people we met in Brazil talked about the country’s political climate – past and present – and all were keen to incorporate it into their practice in some way. Thelma and Daniel both give back to the community using their practice as a vehicle. João wanted to give gold back to a church that had been ransacked years before. His solution was putting it into the mouth of a monk. Flora wondered if there was still freedom in art – something we had grappled with in India on finding out that a director of an art college had been sacked as a result of a student’s ‘inappropriate’ work.
Conclusion
These trips were as eye-opening as they were inspirational. I noticed more and more how the immediate environment spoke to many of the artists we met – whether it was the political situation or the physical, ever-changing skyline. Little interventions – be it a subtle architectural piece like Teja’s, or a bar that acts like a community centre in the case of Thelma’s, or a pizza oven in the grounds of a school like Daniel’s – can all serve to change the way we see the city. These projects comment on the political situations, reflect the views of the people, indeed serve as places for the people to share information, and give something back to the community both physically and mentally.
And the skyline is forever shifting. Artists we met in both Mumbai and Rio commented on how fast their cities are being transformed and gentrified, their language constantly changing. Buildings have been knocked down and re-built again and again. They get fixed or changed for purpose in an ad hoc way, with a ‘make do and mend’ attitude. People have responded to the landscape, and adapted their individual habitats to suit their needs. Thus their language is constantly changing.
Many of the artists we met had practices that reflected that.
My practice too has moved away from painting and installation to one that is more socially engaged. It heartens me to know that there are others out there doing the same thing. The further I move forwards in my career as an artist, the more I want to move away from self-indulgence and into activism/participatory work. Meeting new people in other cities and creating new networks and possible collaborations has helped me move my practice towards this as participating in international exchanges and making new connections are a vital part of my process. Exchanges are always fruitful and the conversations in both Brazil and India have caused me to view my practice in a different way. Being seen in an international context and seeing how other artists and curators work has forced me to turn inwards. Returning to London my head was full of questions:
Is it an artist’s right to comment on a political situation?
How do I navigate my own city?
How do artists get others to see what they see? Is that important?
How important is it that people view everything in the same light anyway?
Does all art be seen or is knowing enough (João’s filling a case in point).
