NEW MEDIA ART ON THE INDIAN SUB-CONTINENT

: : Johan Pijnappel

: : printable version  

In spring 2002, an artist in the cyber-city, Bangalore, asked me ‘Why have Indian artists started making video art? Do they want to exhibit abroad?’

It is true that older artists from India, like Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, who began to use video in the 1990s, have gained prominent international exposure through their video installations. However, to state that Indian artists are using video as a means to gain international exposure is to simplify their practice and to minimize the opportunities that video offers the contemporary artist as a means to explore the tensions of contemporary culture and society. Until recently the conditions for showing new media art in the urban centres of India were very bleak on two counts: there was no financial support to set up exhibitions with the requisite hardware, and the gallery going public was very wary of it.

Interest in video art in India has emerged against the complex and turbulent backdrop of increased economic engagement with the global economy and the growth of Hindu nationalism. As India expressed an increased desire to compete with more powerful nations on the economic stage, the right-wing Hindu political movement, Hindutva, began to wield power and muscle. When bomb explosions and riots ripped Bombay/Mumbai apart in 1992 and 1993, civil society seemed almost to break out of its hinges. It was in this atmosphere of turmoil and change that the first video artworks were made by artists for whom freedom of speech and freedom to make the art they wanted was under threat. For them it seemed that video combined with installation and performance was the appropriate way to collapse the frame, to shake things up. Apart from going on protest marches this was another means of cultural resistance. In addition, it provided access to new audiences and not only those accustomed to entering the white cube.

Since the mid 1990s, an increasing number of artists from the younger generation have begun to pick up video cameras and other new media. Artists like Subba Ghosh, Sonia Khurana, Sharmila Samant, Tejal Shah, Surekha, Eleena Banik and Umesh Maddanahalli all come from the main urban conglomerates of Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata. The majority of them are female, which is congruent with the general situation of cutting-edge experimental arts in India.

Indian art has never had a close relationship with ‘new’ technology. This is in contrast to the fact that India has an enormous international impact on software development. Contemporary art remains largely segregated from the wider cultural community, like so many other new phenomena on this sub-continent, where tradition continues to wield an overwhelming power. Moreover the government has not started initiatives or foundations for art projects that might give a new kind of impetus. The provenance of the funding and support for non-commercial and experimental art is largely from foreign agencies that pass on “guilt” money through a few foundations started by collective initiatives by artists. A mere handful of artists are able to access this support structure.

Most of the artists from the younger generation using new media have been educated abroad, in Australia, Europe or the USA, and this is where they first encountered the art form. Within India itself the situation is in most cases still hopeless in terms of acceptance of the medium. Valay Shende, a final year student at JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, was bounced on a wall even as recently as 2004 by his professors for using video as a medium for his art work. For the artists who went abroad each had her/his own process of discovery and reason for choosing video as a tool. It has become a favoured medium because it can deal with the speed of change that the Indian milieu and its cities are nowadays experiencing. Also, certain time-based subjects can only be explored with video. The flowing image is capable of quickly grasping the viewer’s attention to tell even a complicated, layered story.

Video art is emerging in an Indian society where video technology is nowadays very much integrated. Besides its use in the gigantic film industry, it is used as an information carrier by non-government organizations (NGOs), documentary makers and the wedding/event industry. Returning from the western world, the artists mentioned above somehow found ways and means to make independent video art works. If there is no budget, the artists can still do computer editing and picture manipulating courtesy of small obscure companies on street corners, which hire out machines for less than 10 dollars per day.

For video art there is no market in India and little opportunity for exhibiting outside specialized galleries such as Sakshi and Chemould art galleries in Mumbai and Apeejay Media Gallery in New Delhi. Quite impressive, however, are the growing possibilities of showing abroad at the numerous festivals and Indian-oriented exhibitions across the globe. Internationally a focus solely on Indian video art is still rare: ‘SELF’ at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane 2002, and ‘Indian Video Art: History in Motion’ at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in 2004 have been the only two events so far.

Artists in India are using video to explore a range of subjects, including the tensions between tradition and change, the inequality of women in society, and globalisation, as well as the anxieties and dislocations of the socio-political situation. The exigencies of extreme situations like the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 propelled at least ten artists into making thought-provoking new media work on this black page in the history of a secular country. These videos are a perceptive mirror of society.

Interestingly, besides these artists’ natural linkage to the Indian situation, there is often in their works a contextual link with the West, as if their historical colonial past combined with their study period in the West has led to cross-fertilization between their experiences over continents. This can be noticed with various artists in many different ways. Nalini Malani works with a Brecht story that is adapted to an Indian context. Umesh Maddanahalli combines the Indian orientation towards myth with the western one towards history. Surekha explores the theme of the nudity of the female in different cultural contexts.

The artists do not concentrate solely on Indian culture as such. In these fast-changing times their research acquires a pre-eminently global consciousness. The question is not one of historical provenance, but rather of what is finally achieved in their artwork. The possibility of bridging a national and international public is intrinsic in the choice of media and the way they deal with the subjects. In certain examples artists have exercised self-censorship, cutting out in advance the possibility of showing works in India by choosing controversial issues.

Within the field of video there are some experiments of how old or even supposedly obsolete technologies are being reinvented in the context of new media practices. Nalini Malani has used video and shadow play to create a number of works that combine old and new technologies. In the experimental theatre work The Job (1997), Malani used Mylar cylinders to create rotating shadow plays. More recently, she has used the light source of video to project shadows on to the wall, merging images of contemporary life with rich Hindu mythology (see www.nalinimalani.com).

Besides video art there are other elements in the Indian landscape of new media art. On one hand there are experiments by senior artists who have combined new technology with their painting traditions. In 2001, Art Underground, a digital gallery based in Baroda, provided workshop facilities for artists hitherto working in conventional media to try their hand on the computer. It gave artists like Gulam Muhammed Sjeikh and Bhupen Khakkar inspiration to make a new genre of work. But all too often this can lead to a cloning of the usual imagery translated into the new medium. In India it looks like digital prints (with a touch of original paint) form a good solution for the demands of the art market. Far more original are the works from the senior artist Vivan Sundaram with digital photography on his Sher-Gil family photo archive. His ‘post-photography’, as he calls his digital photomontages, gives him the chance to relive and reinterpret his family history in an inspiring way. The easy oriental-looking pictures have a complex pattern of connections.

On the other hand, there are the more unusual works by younger artists such as Baiju Parthan from Mumbai, who makes use of web-based technologies in his interactive installations, as in his work A Diary of the Inner Cyborg, which deals with the subject of philosophical questions on identity. Or there is Kiran Subbaiah from Bangalore, who made a series of user-friendly computer viruses. More internationally known is Shilpa Gupta for her fake web worlds that simulate the culture of her Indian environment, while simultaneously standing this culture on its head. In a number of these websites she provides a humanistic approach to art and media with a dose of humour and irony. She takes a critical swipe at the cruel working conditions in the rich exploitative diamond industry, the cyber coolies in the IT industry, the illegal human organ trade or the trend towards religious fundamentalism (www.tate.org.uk/netart/blessedbandwidth). In a conversation, she suggested to me her reasons for bringing net.art into her practice: 'It is about default properties, default politics. Net.art is non-consumable. It is familiar, interactive, friendly and time based. It can't match your curtains, and comes built in with a challenge to the lopsided hierarchical relationship between the artist and the patron.' Apart from this, net.art hardly exists in India, despite the profile of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta - www.sanjitdas.com/vivan/raqs-bio.html) made famous in the art world by Documenta XI. Their off- and online work is so well known now in the world of net.art that in this short article they need no further introduction. One could only add that their use of software, as in their Opus Commons, is so typical that it can be seen as part of the new genre of Software Art.

For all these works of Indian new media art, what counts is that they are not made out of an attraction for new technology. Technology is only the means, a new way that provides possibilities of addressing the public. Or as Nalini Malani said: ‘I do believe in a more progressive society, and I do not refer here to technological progress. It has to do with human beings and tolerance and understanding.’

Johan Pijnappel is a Dutch Art Historian/Curator living in India. His latest curatorial exhibitions are ‘Indian Video Art; History in Motion-Fukuoka Asian Art Museum’, ‘CC: Crossing Currents-Video Art and Cultural Identity- Lalit Kala Akademi New Delhi www.crossingcurrents.com and the upcoming Media_City Seoul 2004.