Kunst Kiosk, a long-term project by the Goethe-Institut Kolkata, aims to give art lovers access to relevant approaches and trends in contemporary art from Germany and India. In a series of regularly changing presentations, exemplary artistic works displayed in a concentrated space offer viewers the opportunity to explore the varied thematic and formal aspects of the broad spectrum of artistic creation that has taken place in both countries since the 1960s. The focus is on works featuring moving images that can be viewed on screens in their original form.
These presentations are shown in a specially developed, site-specific artistic installation titled “Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles”, created by the renowned artist and art mediator Sanchayan Ghosh. Its sphere-like structure in the foyer of the Goethe-Institut Kolkata offers space for two to three viewers at the same time. Up to ten works of art are presented alternately on three screens and a monitor; however, visitors can also select and view them individually, like in a temporary mini archive.
Astrid Wege
Director, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata
GROUNDED GRID: ENCOUNTER OF CIRCLES
“Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles” is a multimedia architectural installation placed in the reception area of the Goethe-Institut Kolkata. It is an interdisciplinary and pedagogical site consisting of multiple converging and diverging circles made of both natural and industrial materials, tracing a material encounter between the rural and the industrial in the last century. This installation is also an attempt to map the encounter between different traditions of visual culture in the post-World War II era and trace it into the post-industrial era as a collage and collapse of ideas and events that constitute the characteristics of contemporary art from both a local and global perspective. Exploring image culture in the age of mechanical reproduction and live performative practices, this installation is a durational exhibition site that explores both the Indian and German evolution of mediatic impact on visual art practice.
Sanchayan Ghosh
Artist and Curator
Exhibition #1
With works by:
Bettina Gruber/Maria Vedder, Ratnabali Kant, Sonia Khurana, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Katharina Sieverding, Surekha, Wolf Vostell, Ursula Wevers
Excursion: VIDEO ART FROM GERMANY
In “Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles”, a spatial installation conceived by Sanchayan Ghosh, the presentation of film works from India is accompanied by a selection of exemplary video works from Germany that were mostly created in the 1960s and 1970s. This selection – the first chapter of a two-year programme – is based on the two-part extensive research project “40 Jahre Videokunst” (40 Years of Video Art, 2006) and “Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst, Teil 2” (40 Years of Video Art, Part 2, 2010), which analysed the history of the moving image in Germany and made it accessible to audiences in the form of DVD archive editions. “Excursion: Video Art from Germany” features distinctive, often short works by several pioneering representatives of video art, including Bettina Gruber/Maria Vedder, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Katharina Sieverding, Wolf Vostell and Ursula Wevers.
At the end of the 1960s, the video tape was a new technology that was already being used intensively by women artists in particular. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of the works shown here were produced by women artists. However, the generic term “moving image” – which does not refer to a specific medium – is actually more accurate, as a variety of media (television images, 16 mm film, digital post-processing, and so on) are used and converge in some of the works. Alongside this technological diversity, the selection is also intended to represent the broadest possible aesthetic and thematic spectrum of artistic approaches: elements that are narrative and analytical, poetic and political, and that critique both media and society all occupy different spaces in the works and are often combined with each other. What unites all of the works is the fact that verbal language plays a subordinate role within them: their primary focus is the communicative possibilities of different visual languages – and therefore transnational modes of interpretation, too.
Dr. Barbara Hess
Curator
PEDAGOGY OF FREE EXPRESSION: RECLAIMING THE PERSONAL AS THE POLITICAL
As a transformative public space, Kunst Kiosk aims to be a critical site of contemporary discourse on emerging trends in art practice in India and Germany. The first phase of Kunst Kiosk from an Indian perspective will trace the various experiments and explorations of video as a tool in visual art practice and share some of these projects as a live experience. This is an attempt to critically contextualise the artistic ventures to engage with the changing realities and tools of a mediatic era and its impact on individual identity, and to archive the trends from an Indian perspective. Phase #1 includes works by artists like Ratnabali Kant, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Surekha, Sonia Khurana who have used the video camera as a direct tool to intervene in notions of performance, the ritualistic, gaze and public engagement as a direct concern in their practice. There will also be a documentary on Badal Sircar by Suman Mukhopadhyay, that sets the body as a core concern in the 1970s. Finally, it will include digital prints of recordings of works by Nalini Malini, Rumana Hussain, Vivan Sundaram, who were pioneers in initiating the above-mentioned trends in contemporary Indian art.
Sanchayan Ghosh
Artist and Curator
ARTWORKS – KUNST KIOSK #1
GERMANY
1963, 5' 15'', b/w, mono
Wolf Vostell’s (1932–1998) “Sun in your head” (1963) is based on manipulated, deliberately distorted and rapidly edited television images, which the cameraman Edo Jansen filmed from the screen under the artist’s instructions: shots of the then American President John F. Kennedy, television announcers, a military parade, meetings between politicians, moments from feature films, and abstract, almost painterly blurs. According to the closing credits, the footage was shot in Cologne in 1963; the work was subsequently re-edited and copied onto video in 1967.
One of the protagonists of the international Fluxus movement since the early 1960s, Vostell applied his artistic process of “dé-coll/age” to the mass medium television for the first time here. The term “dé-coll/age” was partly inspired by the Nouveaux Réalistes, a French artistic movement that transformed torn advertising posters from public urban spaces into panel paintings at the end of the 1950s. However, Vostell was also playing with the ambiguity of the word “décollage”, which can refer to an aeroplane taking off, too.
The briefly inserted, self-deprecating note in English, “Silence please! You are in the presence of a Genius at work”, is counteracted by the continuous siren sound that accompanies the entire film. In terms of the work’s content, this warning tone corresponds to footage of a U.S. Air Force aeroplane that dominates the second half of the film’s duration. Vostell juxtaposed the technological optimism and the repression of the crimes of National Socialism that prevailed in post-war West German society with complex images that were difficult to comprehend. Last but not least, “Sun in your head” raises the question of the extent to which the mass medium of public television in Germany in the early 1960s actually fulfilled its state mandate to entertain, inform and educate.
1969, 35', 16mm film transferred to digital video
In collaboration with: Stephan Runge
Sound: Kraftwerk
Performers: Katharina Sieverding, Stephan Runge, Holger Bombusch, Othello
Katharina Sieverding (b. 1941 in Prague) achieved international recognition with her iconic close-ups of her face and her large format photographs, which she was one of the first to introduce into the visual arts in the mid-1970s. Her early film work “Life-Death” (1969) marked a turning point in her career. Sieverding initially began studying stage design under Teo Otto at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964, before transferring to Joseph Beuys’s class in 1967. This was triggered by a pivotal event in German post-war history: during a Berlin demonstration against a state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on 2 June 1967, a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman. This led to the nationwide spread of the student movement; as a protest against the police violence in Berlin, Beuys founded the pacifist German Student Party (DSP).
The footage for “Life-Death” was recorded in Berlin in 1969. At the time, the western part of the city was an experimental enclave for alternative lifestyles due to its insular location, surrounded by the territory of the former East Germany. A sense of experimentation also characterises the scenes in Life-Death, which were filmed without a script. The camera lingers for a long time on the – often heavily made-up – faces of the four actors and on flamboyant props such as a cardinal-red coat. The shiny metallic make-up is equally reminiscent of masks and the golden backgrounds of icon paintings. Just as the title of the work links the opposites of life and death, the scenes and motifs of the film also celebrate connections between opposites and fluid transitions – between night and day, between the genders. “Life-Death” not only anticipates some elements of the glam aesthetic of the 1970s; the soundtrack by the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk, who were pioneers of electronic music, is also groundbreaking. The 16mm footage of the original film recordings was later transferred to digital video and subsequently edited by the artist – a transformation process that is characteristic of Katharina Sieverding’s artistic practice.
1974, 8', b/w, mono
As a leading representative of performance and video art in the 1970s, Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth) critically examined societal stereotypes relating to “femininity”. In the mid-1970s, she founded the Schule des kreativen Feminismus” (School of Creative Feminism).
The starting point for “Tanz für eine Frau” (Dance for a Woman) is the waltz – a partner dance that involves constant turning. For the soundtrack, Rosenbach chose a popular composition by Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (1905–1980); its title, “Ich tanze mit dir in den Himmel hinein” (I’ll Dance to Heaven with You), already reveals a great deal about conventional gender roles and (female) fantasies of escape in the German post-war period.
In the video, Rosenbach performs a solo instead of a partner dance. The artist begins by standing in the centre of a circular surface. She is seen from above: a round, lightly swaying mirror has been installed above her. Her reflection was filmed with a video camera, with the mirror evoking the image of a spinning turntable. When the music starts, the artist begins to spin on her own axis. The long tulle skirt of her formal, off-the-shoulder ball gown, studded with small mirrors, swirls around her body as she moves in circles and fills the image field. While the music is repeated in an exact, continuous loop, the dancer’s movements become increasingly out of control after a few minutes. Dizziness and exhaustion seem to cause her to sink to the floor, where she remains motionless. What began as an act of emancipation and self-empowerment appears to come to a standstill at the end – at least temporarily – but can also be read as a much-needed exit from an endless loop and the “prison” of female gender roles (Lucy Lippard).
1978, 3' 40'', b/w, mono, Half-inch open Reel PAL
Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953 in Cologne) has been one of the most internationally renowned pioneers of video art since the mid-1970s. In 1978, he acquired one of the first portable open-reel recorders and used it to produce “Gespräch zwischen Ost und West” (Conversation between East and West). The protagonists are the Hungarian experimental filmmaker, screenwriter and theorist Gábor Bódy (1946–1985) and the artist himself. Both sit at an improvised podium with handwritten name tags and a Pernod jug between them – a reference to the filming location of Paris, where Odenbach was in receipt of a scholarship from the Franco-German Youth Office at the time. Filming took place in the flat of the actor Udo Kier (b. 1944).
The setting alludes to a popular West German television programme at that time, the political talk show “Der internationale Frühschoppen”. “Frühschoppen” refers to the once widespread German and Austrian ritual of going to the pub in the morning, usually on Sundays after church. Starting in 1952 – initially on the radio and then televised from August 1953 – “Der internationale Frühschoppen” brought together “six journalists from five countries” (female journalists were rare) on Sundays; the presenter was Werner Höfer. Wine and cigarettes were actually consumed during the live programme. Foreign policy issues were debated, with “government by discussion” as the guiding principle; in other words, democratic governance based on argument and debate in contrast to the authoritarian rule of National Socialism.
In their performance, however, Odenbach and Bódy ironically interrogate this ideal of communication in political culture. Instead of constructive talks between East and West – between the “Eastern bloc” under Soviet domination and the “Western powers” led by the USA – the two actors produce nothing but bubbles of spit. They symbolise the deadlocked negotiations during the Cold War, which only ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Odenbach set the video to music by the Hungarian composer Béla Bártok (1881–1945), who emigrated to the USA in 1940. With countless new crises around the world, the almost uncanny speechlessness between the performers on the podium still seems highly relevant today.
1979, 12' 29'', Colour, sound, Two-channel video installation
Horizontal/Vertical Jumping is a two-channel video installation filmed with a static camera for two side-by-side monitors; a filmed installation view of this work is being shown in the presentation at the Goethe-Institut Kolkata. On both monitors, the legs and torso of a person can be seen jumping through the image field, sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically, in front of a light-coloured background. Although the two figures never act in parallel, the work cannot be viewed without focusing on the relationship between the two images/monitors.
The sound of the work reveals that the figures are jumping on a trampoline. The viewer can also hear excerpts from the fantasy film “Duelle” (1976), part of the series “Scènes de la vie parallèle” (Scenes from a Parallel Life) by French director Jacques Rivette (1928–2016). In this work by the leading representative of the innovative French New Wave movement, the daughter of the moon, Leni, and the daughter of the sun, Viva, are locked in a battle to remain on earth. “Horizontales/Vertikales Springen” is therefore not only a formally sophisticated experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of two-channel videos, but also a discreet homage to avant-garde cinema. The visual element of the work satisfies one of Jacques Rivette’s criteria for good music: that the next beat must be surprising yet logical at the same time.
Ursula Wevers (b. 1943 in Hamelin/Weser) is an artist known primarily for her work at the intersection of photography and the moving image. She helped shape the beginnings of video art in several different ways: at the beginning of her career, she collaborated on the avant-garde media art project Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (1968–1970), which produced exhibitions of film artworks that were specifically conceived for television, and she was also a co-founder of videogalerie schum (1971–1973) in Düsseldorf, which produced and distributed early works of video art. In 1972, Wevers opened a gallery named Projection in Cologne, where she presented film and video productions, books, records and photographic works by visual artists until 1976. In 1976, she founded the video department of the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
1988, 4' 57'', Colour, stereo, U-matic Low-band
Performers: Fritz Heubach, Flikki
Music: Bettina Gruber, Igor Tillmann, Uwe Wiesemann, Gerhard Zilligen
Scenography: Fritz Heubach, Achim Mantscheff, Christian Toelke
The collaboration between the artists Bettina Gruber (b. 1947 in Minden) and Maria Vedder (b. 1948 in Cologne) from 1978 to 1988 not only resulted in a series of video works, but also in the publication of two books that have since become reference works on video art: DuMont’s “Handbuch der Video-Praxis: Technik, Theorie und Tips” (DuMont’s Video Praxis Manual: Techniques, Theory and Tips, Cologne, 1982); and “Kunst und Video: Theorie und Geschichte des Mediums” (Art and Video: Theory and History of the Medium, Cologne, 1983).
“Der Herzschlag des Anubis” (The Heartbeat of Anubis, 1988) turns the box-shaped television set of the era into part of the artwork itself, transforming it into a kind of peep box stage on which a narrative about the transition from life to death is staged in several tableaux. A key point of reference for this work is ancient Egyptian mythology, in which Anubis, the god of funeral rites and mummification, is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal. The first tableau depicts him in a rowing boat mounted on a rotating plinth. His task is to bring the souls of the dead to the afterlife. This is interspersed with another tableau featuring a man lying down, as if in a state of death, blowing into a carnivalesque party horn with two black feathers on either side. This shot is interrupted by cuts to the next scene, the “Horus tableau”. Its ‘protagonists’ are four pencil sharpeners in the shape of falcons, a reference to the deity Horus, who had many significances in ancient Egyptian mythology, including an association with the passage of the soul into the afterlife. In the subsequent “Flikki-Cerberus tableau”, the head of a dog (Flikki) serves as a projection surface for a film scene in which a cheetah kills an antelope; in Greek mythology, Cerberus is the dog that guards the entrance to the underworld. Finally, the “Anubis tableau” reappears. With deliberately simple and straightforward methods, “Der Herzschlag des Anubis” tells a story about death and suggests that imaginative and visual storytelling serves a vital function.
India
1996, Ritual Installation Performance, Kamani Auditorium, “No Parking” area, in the open air, 4pm–6pm; on the occasion of Uday Sankar Kala Utsav, organized by Sahitya Kala Parishad, Delhi.
Materials used are: readymades, threads, nails, hammer, iron sticks, terracotta pots, red powder, acrylic colours, papier-mâché mask
“In the performance “Death of Desire” which was named “Ritual Installation Performance”, I performed almost like a ritualistic act in a new configuration with my own statement.
My idea was to make use of ritualistic acts to portray the death of desire, and that is what I performed in ritually decorating the ‘gharas’ (terracotta pots), and then breaking them into pieces to symbolize the demise of what had been desired. In this performance, the participating child is the authentic artist of spontaneous vision and imagination.
The Performance Art “Death of Desire” brings to the fore the important issues of detachment, alienation and separation from pure representation, which therefore demands moving through several layers or multiple levels of understanding simultaneously.
“Death of Desire” was an installation constructed and deconstructed through destruction in a performance, which was unique and path-breaking in contemporary art of India.
I uttered a few poetic lines from Novel laureate Greek poet George Seferis’ poetry during the performance which I relate to my daring step into my difficult art practice, and with the ‘Installation performance’ form of art.”
– Ratnabali Kant
2005, Road Performance, Vithalbhai Patel House, Rafi Marg, New Delhi
“’The Last Performance’ was performed on January 1, 2005, on the open lawn of Vithalbhai Patel House, Rafi Marg, New Delhi, completing twenty years of my exploration of this art form. This presentation was conceived and dedicated to the memory of Safdar Hashmi and many other creative persons who had worked for the people and given joy to the millions yet suffered heavily for the daring expression of their creative genius.
Concept: Fury and brute force, and orgies of violence and bloodshed cannot wash away an artist’s creative expression, nor muzzle his or her daring, creative voice. Out of the looming black clouds will emerge everywhere and every day a hundred rainbows, mirroring the glint of the artist’s creative genius.
I uttered a few memorable lines from Pablo Neruda’s poetry during the performance.”
– Ratnabali Kant
When and why I started performance art practice
“In the mid-1980s I started Body-Art Performance using my own body as a medium/site for art practice in Greece, while I was engaged with my Doctoral Research in Athens University, Greece, on a Greek Govt. Scholarship. There I had spent several years. Later after my return to India, I combined Performance with Installation and named the art form Installation Performance under which I had introduced and developed a performative visual art for the first time in India. I began to disseminate this form of art widely through live and videos of performances in various universities art institutions in India. My efforts in this direction have been later followed by other artists in the fields of visual and performing arts and thus it has created an art movement on the contemporary Indian art scene.”
– Ratnabali Kant
“Sonia Khurana is part of the lineage of women working through the body into a space of erotic efflorescence recognized/shown to be (almost definitively) blocked, thwarted, problematized, and therefore won, if ever, by searing forms of self-exposure. Can she, with controlled states of neurosis, turn irony into gravitas? I refer to her performance video ‘Bird’, in which the artist as dancer, awkwardly naked, rolls, jumps, beats her arms, and tries to take off, holding the camera close to her flesh. As a dancer she fails to fly, but as the artist—modulating the speed, editing the choreography into staccato-style balletic parody—she, Chaplin-like, succeeds. The brief black-and-white video provides a kind of autographical trace of self-propelled liberation, but through a teasing travesty of formulaic autonomy. ‘Bird’ is ironical for being embarrassing, and, being so classically anti sublime, it is paradoxically iconic.”
- Dr Geeta Kapur, 2007, excerpts from her essay in the book “Global feminisms”, for the exhibition with the same title at Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Part I
1997−1999
Excerpts from early key works made at R.C.A. Video, photo, moving image, kinetic objects, installation
Breath
Anhad
I’m tied to my mother’s womb
Big sleep
Waters, forgotten of the foot
Lone women don’t lie
Bird
Zoetrope
1999−2000
Early works made in Delhi, and Modi Nagar, at Khoj International artists’ workshop
The Thing
Closet
Wailing well
Flower carrier I
2001−2004
Selected works produced between Delhi, Amsterdam, Cameroon while at Residency, at the Rijksakademie
Meat
The world
Part II
2001−2004
Selected works produced between Delhi, Amsterdam, Cameroon while at Residency, at the Rijksakademie [continued]
Mona’s song
Tantra
Head hand
Skin
2005−2007
Select works made between Delhi and other cities and residencies
Laura’s song
Sleep
tramping
Flower Carrier III
Logic of birds
Four full length short films
Bird
The world
Head hand
Flower carrier III
2001, 2' 5'', Sound, Captured on MiniDV in 2001 and digitised later. Video camera/Concept: Surekha
In “Line of Control”, a mere marker-pen marks a random boundary. An ant is caught within this drawn frame, unable to get out and it imagines the drawn line as a boundary. It hesitates to cross the line but never stops walking towards and away from it simultaneously, in anticipation of the unpredictable. Finally, by choice or chance, it comes out or crosses the boundary, at the end of the video. In this one-shot spontaneous work, the artist contemplates on a beings’ behaviour when confronted with boundaries – real, imagined and metaphoric.
Boundaries are set by human conditions, are often imposed, assumed, accepted and acknowledged. The video addresses several such issues of the notion of ‘boundary’ that act as an agency of control, power and bifurcation – be it that of geography, gender, colour or otherwise. It plays on the ambiguity of our choice to be “in” or “out,” our indecisiveness, and our euphoric awareness against something which we have been deeply conditioned into. Through the discourse and practice of art, one becomes aware that a boundary is a construct, like the pen line is to the ant.
2006/7, 5', Sound, Triptych
The video installation addresses an indoor activity that occurs within a kitchen space. The mundane act of cooking metamorphoses into an evocative game: it ironically repeats yet changes within the domestic routine, as though it follows a given scheme of meandering. The simple, casual and mundane act traverses into an over-life size event, over the stretch of video time. The simple act of mixing and kneading of the dough in the due process ‘remind’ of a mountainscape and various body organs. In the end they metamorphose into appearances that lie between the body organs and flowers.
“Confinement” is about the endless struggle of the protagonist to break free from a confined and restricted space. The film is about the experience of hope and despair. The news of the atrocities on women during the Gujarat riots triggered off the performance in the film. The artist has used the body as a site of contestation where fear, alienation, claustrophobia and a sense of helplessness is addressed. The tight spacing, minimum lighting, the colour and the repeated sound are created to intensify the experience further. This is her first attempt at shooting a video film using Hi8 camera. She has used dark and light, sound and silence and a tight indoor space to convey the desperate situation.
