April 15 to September 3, 2018
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, momaps1.org

While mysticism likely conjures associations of fog rather than clarity, in the Acts of Appearance series by Indian artist Gauri Gill, a merging of myth and reality results in images that are crystal clear. These photographs, the heart of her exhibition at MoMA PS1, are so palpable in their presentness that a viewer feels they might walk into the scene.

The exhibition is #108 in the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series, established at MoMA in 1971, and comprises 75 photographs, primarily pigmented inkjet prints from her ongoing Acts series (from 2015), along with images from another ongoing series, Notes from the Desert (from 1999). The Acts are colored photos of varying sizes that depict people going about their daily lives while wearing hand-crafted papier-mâché masks. The “actors” are members of the indigenous Kokna community in Maharashtra, India known for their mask-wearing Bahoda festival, in which, over a number of nights, they reenact Hindu and tribal myths through dance and masquerade. Setting out to re-contextualize this tradition within daily life, Gill commissioned local artists Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu (who are also cast members) to create a series of masks of everyday people, animals, and objects (rather than the usual festival animals, gods and demons), to be worn by volunteers going about quotidian tasks. Through this process, Gill interrogates the relationship between the mystic and the mundane.

These images are accompanied by Notes from the Desert: Smaller, predominantly black and white silver gelatin prints that feature various aspects of marginalized rural communities in Western Rajasthan, this series includes a subset, titled “The Marks on the Wall”, of murals on classroom walls decorated with words and images. The Notes act as a kind of support to the Acts in the show’s overall exploration of community and collaboration.

One of the first images visitors encounter, Sumri, daughter of Ismail the shepherd, Barmer, from the Notes series, is a prologue to the rest of the show. In it, a girl and a goat lean into one another, the girl’s arms wrapped around the goat, her face buried in its neck. The goat here acts like the masks in the Acts series, merging human and animal in a profoundly intimate moment. Across from Sumri hangs a seductive selection from the Acts in which women pose in or near their homes in various animal masks. For instance, a cobra-masked woman in a pink sari lounges on a couch beneath a window that diffuses warm daylight. Another room features a photograph of a male shopkeeper in a blue shirt wearing this same mask, carefully weighing some onions. In an image featuring both human and animal masks, an old woman reclines on a table at a doctor’s office and wears a mask of a worried-looking old woman. Behind her, a man in a rat mask (of the type often found in Indian hospitals) attends her head, standing in front of a white board, while a younger lady wearing a mask of a woman with a surprised expression hangs an IV. Other scenes of transformed activity include a trio of mammals playing a game on the floor, a bird joining two people on a motorcycle, and the sun and the moon walking down a dirt path, lighting their way in a soft glow. These images are cinematic and playful, a puppet show come to life. Although specific identities are hidden by the expressive masks, each actor appears as spectacularly individual in Gill’s compassionate staging and interpretation

Distributed among Acts of Appearance, the Notes feel like dream scenes, their black and white coloration reading like concept sketches. Rooms with writing on the walls appear to wait for a cast to arrive. In one from Notes, in fact, a woman with a mask halfway pulled up her face, covering her eyes but revealing her nose and below, sits on the floor, as if taking a break between posing. Although the Notes are discrete from the Acts, in this exhibition their intermingling creates the effect of frames from one jovial and whimsical film – Wes Anderson with a twist.

A cinematic interpretation was reinforced by a lack of traditional labels. In each room there was a small key that numbered each work and gave the series to which it belonged, and occasionally also a title (only for works from the Notes series). This lack of institutional labeling consistency from a MoMA affiliate was initially frustrating. For this viewer, my craving for narrative structure fought the sparse, commercial gallery-style hang. But after some time in the show, the jewel colored walls (painted deep blue, crimson, and saffron – inspired by vegetable dyes, indigo, madder, henna, and turmeric), together with the inherent playfulness of the imagery, actually left me relieved at the lack of labeling. Recalling Gauri Gill’s prompt to her Appearance actors to simply improvise and think about “what happens when we choose to self-reflexively ‘play ourselves’,” organizer Lucy Gallun refreshingly made the exhibition an exploratory space in which to move back and forth free from a linear, curatorially pre-digested interpretation. This made the warm wall colors and vibrant images seem all the more welcoming: Each tableau, with the unique rasas (emotions) portrayed on the masks, and the actors’ organic posing, were both relatable in their humanity and mysterious behind those beautifully crafted masks.

The post Mask Life: The Mystical and the Mundane in Gauri Gill appeared first on artcritical.

NOAH DILLON: You had considered two different paintings: one was a portrait, and although there’s descriptive information there and signifiers that you can read, this other scene has an interior space and an exterior landscape and several people interacting. How would you describe it?

HIBA SCHAHBAZ: This painting is very beautiful and complex and has a rich cultural narrative. It’s an illustration from the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” which is an epic Persian poem consisting of over 50,000 rhyming couplets. It was customary for kings to commission a copy of the Shahnameh which was compiled by the best calligraphers and miniaturists.

What drew you to look at this in particular? There are several miniatures here to choose from, including other moments in this narrative. I wonder if it’s the narrative, the history of the piece, the formal qualities of this particular painting, or something else.

I think it’s a mixture of all those things. The story is interesting and the image is beautiful. When I was looking for a painting to talk about, I wanted to choose one that had all the signifiers of Islamic art and this has pretty much all of them. It has calligraphy, geometry, floral arabesques, figuration; it even has a little horse in there. I also like it because of the way it’s been framed, with a frame within a frame within a frame: you have the outside on the inside and everyone’s kind of on the same plane. And it has a flattened perspective, which is prevalent in miniature painting.

I tend to gravitate toward work that I find visually appealing. The other painting we looked at before, a portrait called Shah Jahan on Horseback (ca. 1628–58), I chose for emotional reasons. I love that painting. It has a sister painting here, in the Met, which is usually on display but isn’t at the moment. It’s a painting of Shah Jahan in a pink tunic, one of the first paintings I copied when training as a miniaturist.

Are there formal qualities in this that you find especially interesting — things you don’t see in the ones nearby? You mentioned the arabesques and the calligraphy, the figures and how they’re arranged in space to convey a sense of movement through time and place, and then there’s the geometric patterning that has flattened out certain areas.

I’m interested in the intricate patterns in this painting, and how these patterns are placed side by side but don’t compete with each other. There are so many colors and varied geometries, yet everything fits together and flows harmoniously. The peripheral figures in the paintings frame the two main figures, Mihrab and Sindukht. And the white wall behind them forms a sort of a halo and emphasizes them at the same time. It’s a very complex and elegant way of framing a domestic dispute.

The narrative is also very intriguing. Mihrab is angry at the woman next to him, his wife, Sindukht, because he found out that his daughter, Rudaba, is in love with Zal, a warrior who was not her chosen husband. I’m really intrigued with the way that Rudaba and Zal met. She had heard about what a great warrior he was, and he had heard about how beautiful she was. When they met, she let down her very long hair in a Rapunzel sort of scene. And then they sat together and they talked.

You are interested in conflict, it seems, and the narrative complexity that comes with it. 

I’m interested in complicated romance and cultural drama. Which is found in a lot of epic stories. There are several paintings in this room telling the tale of Layla and Majnun, which is a story about unrequited love. I would say they have very similar cultural connotations to this painting.

Visually, there’s a lot going on. I wouldn’t necessarily paint this sort of painting anymore myself, but when I was learning to paint, copying images, trying to understand the patterns and arabesques and making the tiny little figures was something I was obsessed with.

One of the things I’m interested in is that you’ve picked out this Iranian painting and the other Mughal portrait — two very different cultures. You’re from Pakistan, but you’re immersed in miniatures’ broad and deep well of stories and iconography, which spans a large geographic area and a lot of time.

Well, both paintings were produced during the height of their respective traditions. They are both categorised here under Islamic Art. I guess I feel drawn to both of them because the training that I received was very broad and encompassed more than merely one school of miniature painting. I feel connected to the height of Mughal and Persian painting, which produced very refined works. I like the polish of these works. And the colors and geometry and the way they flow together to create a strange, harmonious balance.

Are there particular colors here that you find especially attractive or that make their way into your own work?

I’m really attracted to the blues in traditional miniatures and I’m always trying to replicate them in my own work. I love the different ways that gold is used as well. I suppose I use a lot of gold in my work, too.

You’ve also been playing with brown in your work recently, with your use of tea. Yours is much more expressive, but I think there’s a real affinity there.

There are three traditional disciplines in miniature; partial color (which can be tea or sepia), opaque watercolor (full color), and sia kalam (black pen). When I arrived in New York, I got really interested in color. I was trying to be more colorful, not just in painting, but as a person too. It was a challenge and I wanted to work with every color I could think of and make. However, these last couple of years I’ve found myself revisiting the partial color technique and getting very involved in it. Painting with tea comes very naturally to me and I’m really enjoying exploring its possibilities.

Is there something particular about seeing it in this space — surrounded by these other works, and with chairs and the particularities of the Met — do you think that something about that comes into your perception of the painting?

The Islamic wing at the Met re-opened soon after I moved to New York, and it was so exciting for me to visit it. I’ve seen and copied a lot of miniatures from books and I had a master teaching me how to paint, but there was something magical about standing in front of an ancient miniature painting. I think during my first visit to the Met, I also saw a Klimt and started crying because it was my first time seeing his work in real life. So it was very meaningful to see paintings that I had only ever seen before in books.

Is there a way that seeing this in New York, in the context of moving here and going to school, colors the way you experience them, think about them, or the way they come into your own work?

It’s possible. Although I think that when I start looking at a painting I forget about my environment, instead wondering “What is that? How was it made?” When I look at a miniature, I see it as a miniaturist. An abstract painter probably sees an abstract painting in a way that I don’t understand. But when I look at this, I instinctively understand it. I can see how it’s made. I can resolve my own work by looking at it and seeing different things that I can take into my practice. The painting becomes the teacher. The Islamic wing of the Met also feels like a safe haven, like home away from home.

Well, this is from a book, but this is not at all a book: it’s been taken out, a single page, with matting, on display, behind glass, and so on. And I just wonder if that changes things.

When my own work goes from my studio to the gallery, the work is taken out of its context. It’s a small shift, but it’s important. It feels different, is arranged differently, and there’s the continuing possibility that you can keep rearranging it and make a million narratives. As an artist, I can take my own work and turn it into a giant pudding. And anything an artist does can and will be taken out of context, right?

Yeah, probably. I think you release it out into the world and everyone else has to deal with it in ways that are beyond your control. You’re doing something very different from what these artists did. They’re painting kings and illustrating epic stories. My understanding of this art form is extremely limited, but I can’t remember ever seeing a self-portrait, or a seeing a woman self portraitist more specifically.

Well, back in the day miniaturists had patrons. These patrons were often kings who commissioned court paintings. There’s very little self-portraiture, but it’s not unprecedented. Some of the more favored male court painters would include little portraits of themselves, in the border of the painting, for instance. Otherwise there were just portraits of important people. There were portraits of women, but these were not self-portraits. Sometimes portraits of women were specifically commissioned. For instance if X was going to marry Y, they’d send her portrait over so that he could see her.

There’s also more explicit eroticism in your work, and what I read as its feminism. I wonder about this image and its encoding of the social roles of men and women and how they find their way from here to your studio.

There’s a great erotic painting called Pleasures of the Hunt on display right now. It’s part of the “The Royal Hunt” exhibit and it shows a man making love to a woman while hunting a tiger.

This work was an attempt to document the time in which it was made and my work deals with something happening now. Even though I was trained as a traditional miniaturist, I’ve always worked with the female body. My painting process is very intuitive. It’s natural for me to paint whatever I’m feeling or thinking.

Is there any other fundamental aspect of this painting that we’ve missed?

This painting is so tiny, but I feel very vast. It’s multi layered. There’s a foreground, spaces at the sides, a background, views through the windows, of the sky, hints of the clouds. There are nearly a dozen figures in this painting and multiple rugs, calligraphy… There’s so much information here that even though it’s a miniature and it’s small, it’s also, for me, very large. I like that aspect of it. There’s a flattening of perspective and a lot of subtle details and cultural signifiers which come together to tell a story. When I look at it, at first I’m absorbed in all the separate colors and intricate patterns. But when I look into it, I begin to see the interactions between the figures and the figures within the space. And my mind begins to put together all the little details which create this monumental scene.

Hiba Schahbaz is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in the centuries-old art form of miniature painting. She trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York City. In addition to exhibiting her work internationally in galleries and fairs including the Vienna Art Fair and Scope NYC, Schahbaz has curated exhibitions of miniature paintings in Pakistan and India. She was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project and has taught miniature painting as part of the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at the Tang Museum. She is a teaching artist at the Art Students League of New York.

The post Tell Me: with Hiba Schahbaz appeared first on artcritical.

Report from… New Delhi

At first glance, there seems to be no difference between people’s attitude towards the commoditization of fine art and the commoditization of folk art. The geographical fringes are quite prominent yet the art fraternity constantly grapples with contradictory definitions of its rather subjective premise of existence and practice. Looking at three recent art exhibitions in separate spaces in Delhi allowed me to establish multiple focal points through which I could articulate the impulses, semblances, and discord of the contemporary diaspora/ dispersion of the artist and the artisan.

The first show was titled Artisan Design (February 23–27, 2011), organized by Kala Raksha Trust. The Trust is a social enterprise that began in 1993 as a regional artisan initiative in Kutch, Gujarat, dedicated to preserving the traditional arts. The show was supported by a non-profit organization, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH).  The show had an array of beautiful handmade crafts from Kutch—embroidered and block-printed garments, domestic games, jewellery, home décor, and leatherwork—as well as contemporary designs created by graduates of Kala Raksha Vidyalaya (KRV), a school of design for traditional artisans.

The exhibition invited us to: “Check out the exquisite hand arts of Kutch and exciting new designs by Kala Raksha Graduates.” It is intriguing that the organization assembles artisans from the periphery, bringing a marginalized art form to the center to create a new contextual dialogue, yet deliberately avoids the word craft. They emphasize the historical, regional, and ethnic character of the arts, yet at the same time attempt to teach concepts of design to otherwise self-taught artisans. The question is whether such an initiative is building new models of craft, or instead firmly rejecting conventional definitions, which have traditionally drawn clear distinctions between an artisan and an academically trained fine artist.

Another exhibition, titled Vasant [Spring] 2011 (April 7–9, 2011), ran at Agha Khan Hall, New Delhi. The first stall to draw me in was for Indybindi, an initiative hardly five months old, the brainchild of three young siblings, all practicing  commercial artists. The sheer energy of these young entrepreneurs was beaming through the vibrant, kitschy, color-frenzied art objects. Indybindi derives its inspiration from the simplicity of utilitarian objects, and is bonded to the folk arts through its reliance on natural materials, traditional techniques, and self-directed learning. The threads of folk and modernity are interwoven in an attempt to both resolve and blur the conflicts brought up by those that force each into their own defined space. (In addition to its artistic endeavors, the Indybindi enterprise also offers generous support to the NGO Ashiana, which is focused on the betterment of the lives of rural woman and children.)

The idea of plucking regional arts from the periphery and re-instituting its identity is a role reversal – from a commercial artist who holds degrees and is formally trained to an artisan and working on a context that is glossed over and tossed but is not directly engaged with – is analogous with the pulse of the contemporary art market. It is fascinating how folk arts has so far managed to maintain the integrity of a rather singular, self-contained phenomenon, while enjoying unprecedented freedom and avoiding the impulse towards branding.

The third show that deserves mention here is Folk and Tribal Arts of India (April 16–May 7, 2011), presented by Arts of the Earth, a gallery that deals exclusively in folk, tribal, and popular idioms.

It is appreciable that the commercial gallery Art Konsult has branched out into new space with Arts of the Earth, and is striving to gain national exposure for folk and tribal arts. The exhibition had a substantial variety of folk paintings from the likes of Warli, Gond, Patachitra, Kalamkari, Madhubani, as well as other pieces that included handmade masks, terracotta objects, and metal accessories. The gallery occupies a rather quiet space in the otherwise busy and upbeat neighborhood of Lado Sarai, south of Delhi, and provides an environment for stoic observation.

According to the Arts of the Earth: ”The traditional folk & tribal painters are fast embracing other professions for their livelihood and their art slowly dying, Folk & Tribal art/painting/sculpture, Indian miniatures, and their undeniable influences etc. stand under a death threat.”  It is becoming increasingly important to assess whether we are moving towards oblivion in the folk arts tradition or instead integrating it into a multi-polar universe of art, where art is considered as being both what happens in the center and what occurs on the periphery.

Observing these deconstructions and re-contextualizations, I feel that this precarious regional, ethnic difference is transforming the art scene and giving way to new creative contributions to the world. Through these three exhibitions one can assess how conceptually driven contemporary practices are becoming integrated with traditional styles. The confluence of ideology and methodology now demands articulation and critique, in order that the underlying dynamics be parsed and highlighted, without any cultural and social exclusion.

The post Craft Becomes a Bad Word: Indian Folk Art in the Contemporary Wilderness appeared first on artcritical.