Living, breathing, moving art

There we are: another milestone for South Asian art history. Much has been written and said lately on Rashid Rana as the first artist from Pakistan to represent the country at the Venice Biennale, but there is still so much more to explore in his work, primarily because every viewed experience is unique: it features ‘you’. The ‘viewing, the viewer and the viewed’ acquire an ambiguity. One becomes ‘the other’ interchangeably.

Rashid Rana (Lahore) and Shilpa Gupta (Mumbai) share a pavilion at the Palazzo Benzon on the Grand Canal in Venice, with the Indian Subcontinent presented as one region. This exclusive platform offers artists from Pakistan and India the chance to engage in a multi-layered dialogue, but one that also encompasses an ongoing conversation between the arts from the Subcontinent and the rest of the world, and between Venice and Lahore. Consequently, the series of works produced by Rana (2013–15) and Gupta (2014–15) extend both physically and metaphysically across a matrix of regions – one that is not so much trans-national as much as trans-regional.

The installation does not subscribe to the East-West dichotomy

‘My East is Your West’ is a combined event currently being held at the 56th International Art Exhibition, the La Biennale di Venezia (6 May to 1 October 2015), commissioned by the Gujral Foundation. Natasha Ginwala and Martina Mazzotta are the project’s curatorial advisors. The exhibition aims to re-contextualize the relations between South Asia’s constituent states and refresh their geographical and cultural cartography. However, the holistic installation does not subscribe entirely to the East–West dichotomy or to a nation-state conflict, nor does it seek to sensationalize the long-existing love–hate relation between Pakistan and India.

Both Rana and Gupta have independent art practices, yet their art-making philosophy shares threads and patterns. Gupta’s visual diction captures the nuances of an idea with rigor while Rana deals with similar notions from an overarching, bird’s-eye perspective. In an interview with art critic Madyha Leghari, Rana says, “While Shilpa and I use disparate vocabulary, our concerns overlap often. We are both interested in ideas of location and dislocation, visual perception, transnational belonging and an individual’s transaction with authority… I found it both challenging and exhilarating to be able to bounce ideas off a mind as sharp as Shilpa’s.”

Interpreting Gupta’s work ‘Untitled’ and Rana’s ‘Transpositions’, Ginwala says that, together, the two bodies of work “move away from the ever-accumulating weight of history to recount contemporary aspects of human mobility, location and dislocation, as well as the subjective drives of perception.” The “artists navigate between the individual and the communal realm,” she says, “in relation to the ‘everyday’ experiences of collective consciousness.”

Gupta’s four-year research-based project is an aesthetic account of the India–Bangladesh border and the space surrounding the demarcation. It dwells in the debate around the “world’s longest security barrier” under construction between the two states. This extensive body of work, which includes videos, installations, drawings, photography, text and performance centres on the blurred idea of citizenship and location.

Rana’s work is experiential, interplaying with ideas of place, presence and transition across five rooms. While not deeply concerned about the mediums that define his art practice, he employs interdisciplinary modes of communication, blending digital printmaking, video, time-based media and installation across the five rooms. The act of walking through these interconnected spaces becomes art itself – hence, the narrative around it increases exponentially.

For me, the highlight of the exhibition was ‘Shuhuud-o-Shaahid-o-Mashhuud’ (‘The Viewing, the Viewer and the Viewed). This is a single-channel projection of live-streamed videos displayed across the entire wall of a room in two places simultaneously. The Lahore leg of the project, situated in Liberty Market – the city’s hub of commercial activity – and in collaboration with the Lahore Biennale Foundation, brings together people and their conversations across two cities, Lahore and Venice.

Between Liberty Market (Lahore) and the Palazzo Benzon (Venice) thrives a bond; it is a space we all traverse. This state of being transcends boundary, culture and location. On the day of the opening, the crowd in Lahore eagerly waited to enter the pavilion to view the project; in Venice, the excitement was mutual. The structure in Liberty Market is a replica of one of the 17^th-century rooms at the palazzo, which celebrates the diversity of identities in a shrunk and homogenized global world. It also alludes to dichotomous identities of a place and romanticizes the duality or multiplicity of existence. Ironically, the respective spaces across two culturally distinct zones share the same backdrop – one as an illusion of the other.

Rana says that his “work is a negotiation between the actual and the remote. The actual is close at hand – something one can experience directly with the body as the site of knowing. The remote, on the other hand is knowledge amassed indirectly, from diverse sources scattered across time and space such as the Internet, books, history of collective knowledge. The result is a meditation on location, both in a physical as well as temporal sense.”

What stands out in this year's Venice Biennale is the extensive use of technology and scale

The single-channel wall-sized projection ‘I Do Not Always Feel Immaterial’ (2015) interplays the background and foreground of the individual viewing the work. Much to the surprise of the visitors, their candid interaction with the immediate exhibited space is recorded and broadcast on the projection, almost live (after a 15-second delay). On entering, one feels they are watching a reflection of the room they are in, later realizing that their presence in that time and space is an integral part of the living ‘artwork’ as they begin to appear as part of the live video stream.

‘War Within II’ (2013–14) is a C print (+ DIASEC) photomontage spanning two adjacent walls at a right angle. It re-articulates Oath of the Horatii/Le Serment des Horaces (1786), the neoclassical painting by Jacques Louis-David, and recreates the Roman legend in a vicious and aristocratic environment. The two panels seem to be a reflection of each other but, on scrutiny, offer different pixelated distortions of the same image (or its painted memory).

‘My Sight Stands in the Way of Your Memory’ (2012–15) is an installation comprising two works: ‘Site-uations’ (2015) – a single-channel projection – and ‘Anatomy Lessons I’ (2012) – a nine-channel video on nine monitors. The famous Caravaggio painting, Judith Beheadin Holofernes, (1598/99) is appropriated and reconstructed on a large scale with thousands of small pixel-like video clippings of news reports, film fiction and surveillance footage. In contrast to Rana’s iconic practice (imbued with one ‘image’ consisting of several paradoxical images), this time the small video projections add up to one large image, jointly narrating instances of fear, uncertainly and anxiety.

Responding to the architectonic structure and character of the Palazzo Benzon, Rana creates ‘A Mirror Lies Vacant’, a 3D site-specific installation with latex print on wallpaper. He fabricates the walls of the outer façade of a large cube in the centre of the room with mirror images of the interior (windows, doors) that surround it. This re-engineering of space opens up a discourse around the illusionary and the original, between reality and meta-reality, between the visceral and the physical.

The collateral works are subtly infused with the overarching vision of the Venice Biennale 2015, ‘All the World’s Futures’ (curated by Okwui Enwezor). Both artists deliberate on cultural hybridity, complexity and the convergence of identities. What stands out most in this year’s exhibition is the extensive use of technology, the larger-than-life scale, bizarre projections, inextricable digital interfaces and integrated architecture. Rana thinks that the biennale model is becoming progressively global and homogenized. However, this structural standardization may not necessarily be unquestionable and so, he hopes that, with time, there will be tremendous possibilities for it to evolve and grow. He believes that this kind of a platform allows for a much wider audience to engage with works of art and thus offers multiple vantage points to flourish.

Rana’s work is interactive and immersive; public involvement and content collaboration are at its core. His practice conflates the transient nature of regions, spaces and their geography. Tapping into the fourth dimension and the sensory, Rana fluently creates an agnostic space for us to exist in universally while we pass virtually between two “mind zones” and time zones. The crucial difference in the two is this: to enter the zone in Venice, the prospective viewer has to pay hundreds of dollars; in Lahore, engagement is free – an experience that could give rise to a new, impassioned critique of art, its appreciation within the cultural elite and its egalitarianism. Whatever the case, Rana makes us proud.