For the People
Text: Mehr Javed
Photography: Unum Babar & Mehreen Murtaza
Aiming to activate and explore the dynamics of the public space, VASL Artists Collective in collaboration with the Annemarie-Schimmel-Haus hosted a residency in Lahore, promoting public performance art. Though art and performance in the public sphere is not entirely a new genre here, however indigenous street art forms like Nautanki, Oral traditions, Katputli Tamasha and Ruh Khitch photography have all become exceedingly rare in the contemporary times.
Through this residency program, it was interesting to see how 23 artists temporarily stationed in Lahore, sought out to produce works in relevance to different public centers of the city, open to the general masses.
Resident artists (both international and local) worked together on projects that ranged from performances created for a large audience, to site-specific interventions and installations providing the viewers with a sensory and experiential journey, cutting across domains of the Public and Private.
The opening day on 21st November was a two-part show. Selected works by some artists were displayed at the Alhamra Art Gallery, Mall road. From here buses were scheduled to leave for a tour of the remaining projects on display in one of the busiest commercial centers of Lahore – Shahalami market.
Being used to seeing art on display in gallery spaces or museums, one often becomes accustomed to a very clean, crisp way of presentation, systematized and catalogued for one’s viewing pleasure. But encountering artwork in the midst of everyday hustle bustle, smog and chaotic traffic, is an altogether different experience.
In such surroundings, Ayesha Jatoi (Lahore) displayed a black-on-white text billboard that read, ‘Aap Ko Abhi Kitni Auratein Nazar Aa Rahi Hein?(How Many Women Can You See Right Now?). This minimal billboard was not only a jarring contrast to the pictorial banners and shop signboards all around it, but also seemed to make a rather cheeky comment on the male dominated territory of the market place. Besides a garlanded Benazir on a PPP poster, with her arm raised as an annotation, the odd female seemed only to be present on commercial banners or cinema hoardings.
Next up was Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s (Delhi) ‘Idher Udher’ (Here & There) series comprising of signposts identifying seven locations in Lahore that have a namesake across border, in India as well. Aiming to comment on cultural and historical similarities, these signposts written in three different languages could only be deciphered by someone possessing reading ability in English, Urdu and Hindi, or prior knowledge of the work’s underlying theme. To the general public the content and intent of the work on the whole came across as ambiguous.
A selection of projects featured in the Lahore Residency Show at Shahalami, were exhibited inside a commercial building near the Khalona market. Viewers had to walk through a maze like market place, booming with its distinctive sounds, sights and smells, into a rundown storage building, which had works installed on two floors.
First stop was on the 8th floor where a collaborative work by the German artists (Horst, Lohmann, Einhoff, Sachs, Seiple) was on display. A section of a large empty hall was painted white, in an attempt to recreate a typical Berlin gallery space. Musicians on tabla and harmonium added a local flavor to the gallery like ambiance. In order to make the imitation true, several fabricated beer bottles (resin casts with a hand painted Beck’s logo) were scattered around, along with a Macintosh laptop carved in marble, placed on a table. Assistance was taken from local gravestone carvers to replicate the sleek branded machine, transforming its marble version into a rather comical, archaic artifact on show.
The audience was then escorted a few stories higher, onto the rooftop of the building. Here the general atmosphere became much calmer compared to the commotion and congestion in the streets below. Even though the works displayed on the roof were not approachable by the general public, one could understand the impact of the segregated space on the viewing of these works. Moreover, the projects on display here were documentations of performances, executed earlier in the streets below.
Philip Horst (Germany) presented a video footage of his performance piece.
A large, 4.5 feet square crate with ‘FRAGILE’ stenciled on two sides, confronted the viewers at the entrance of the rooftop area. Through a small window cut out in the crate, a video was projected onto the opposite wall. This four-minute video on loop showed a squad of workers unloading the same crate from a tonga, amidst curious bystanders witnessing these peculiar proceedings. The general intrigue of the crowd heightened as some children began peering into the slit, and even extend their hands inside the crate to discern its contents. Towards the end, artist armed with a video camera suddenly revealed himself from inside the crate in a very jack-in-the-box like fashion, to an applauding, cheering crowd. Apparently Horst had been capturing the entire activity from inside the crate – however shots from this ‘inside’ footage were not edited in with the final video clip that was being projected.
Harry Sachs’s (Germany) public performance comprised of a rented white Mercedes being hauled by a pair of bullocks through the bustling streets of Shahalami, to put it simply. He presented a video footage of this happening, in a rather unique fashion – inside a large inflated form, made of two parachute car covers stitched together. Two viewers were allowed to enter this inflated form via a lateral opening, where a small TV monitor ran a video loop of the bullock-driven-Merc. It was quite obvious to see the general excitement of the mob that collected very quickly to experience and decipher what exactly was going on. Some lucky people from the crowd even got a ride in this German luxury car that made a rare appearance in the narrow streets of the bazaar, pulled by a pair of bullocks.
Local transportation and themes related to ways of commuting seem to have been a point of investigation for most foreign artists. This was also true for Meng Huang, participating artist-in-residence from China.
Intrigued by the uniqueness of the local rickshaws, Huang devised a performance around this vehicle. With a set of loud speakers installed on the top of a rented rickshaw, Huang further amplified its distinct blaring sound. Two cameras installed inside in opposite directions, captured the road ahead and the trail behind, as the rickshaw drove around aimlessly in the Main market area. These two footages were used as separate projections along with the actual sound recordings, installed with the rickshaw at the Alhamra gallery. This installation was a clever simulation of the original performance for the audience viewing the work in the gallery space.
The Ship of Hope was by far the most talked about project that attracted both audience attention and interaction. Taking up on the common theme of ‘vehicles’, Anthony Schrag with the help of other artists at the residency, built a raft from materials collected from junkyards. The hull constructed from fiberglass facades of MRI machines and tire tubing, this raft boasted an ornamental canopy put together with all sorts of fabrics and plastic vines. The raft was completed at the Race Course park within three days, taking on the name Ship of Hope, since there was no guarantee if the structures would float or not. The Ship of Hope made its maiden voyage across the canal waters, on the 19th day of November, cheered by many who had taken part in its construction and had high hopes of its success. After staying afloat for an entire 15 minutes, The Ship of Hope was extracted from the unkind canal waters in a fractured state and installed in the Alhamra gallery, along with photographic documentation of the performance.
Even though the selected performative projects mentioned here seem rather simplistic and even facile in their approach (especially in documented form), a gallery go-er can only but imagine the energy of the artist-audience interaction generated during the actual happening. This interaction, laced with layers of meaning, acted as an agent dispelling/subverting the complexities of the public domain for a brief moment, and transported the audience from the realness of everyday regimen to an experiential journey away from the ordinary.
Photography: Unum Babar & Mehreen Murtaza
Aiming to activate and explore the dynamics of the public space, VASL Artists Collective in collaboration with the Annemarie-Schimmel-Haus hosted a residency in Lahore, promoting public performance art. Though art and performance in the public sphere is not entirely a new genre here, however indigenous street art forms like Nautanki, Oral traditions, Katputli Tamasha and Ruh Khitch photography have all become exceedingly rare in the contemporary times.
Through this residency program, it was interesting to see how 23 artists temporarily stationed in Lahore, sought out to produce works in relevance to different public centers of the city, open to the general masses.
Resident artists (both international and local) worked together on projects that ranged from performances created for a large audience, to site-specific interventions and installations providing the viewers with a sensory and experiential journey, cutting across domains of the Public and Private.
The opening day on 21st November was a two-part show. Selected works by some artists were displayed at the Alhamra Art Gallery, Mall road. From here buses were scheduled to leave for a tour of the remaining projects on display in one of the busiest commercial centers of Lahore – Shahalami market.
Being used to seeing art on display in gallery spaces or museums, one often becomes accustomed to a very clean, crisp way of presentation, systematized and catalogued for one’s viewing pleasure. But encountering artwork in the midst of everyday hustle bustle, smog and chaotic traffic, is an altogether different experience.
In such surroundings, Ayesha Jatoi (Lahore) displayed a black-on-white text billboard that read, ‘Aap Ko Abhi Kitni Auratein Nazar Aa Rahi Hein?(How Many Women Can You See Right Now?). This minimal billboard was not only a jarring contrast to the pictorial banners and shop signboards all around it, but also seemed to make a rather cheeky comment on the male dominated territory of the market place. Besides a garlanded Benazir on a PPP poster, with her arm raised as an annotation, the odd female seemed only to be present on commercial banners or cinema hoardings.
Next up was Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s (Delhi) ‘Idher Udher’ (Here & There) series comprising of signposts identifying seven locations in Lahore that have a namesake across border, in India as well. Aiming to comment on cultural and historical similarities, these signposts written in three different languages could only be deciphered by someone possessing reading ability in English, Urdu and Hindi, or prior knowledge of the work’s underlying theme. To the general public the content and intent of the work on the whole came across as ambiguous.
A selection of projects featured in the Lahore Residency Show at Shahalami, were exhibited inside a commercial building near the Khalona market. Viewers had to walk through a maze like market place, booming with its distinctive sounds, sights and smells, into a rundown storage building, which had works installed on two floors.
First stop was on the 8th floor where a collaborative work by the German artists (Horst, Lohmann, Einhoff, Sachs, Seiple) was on display. A section of a large empty hall was painted white, in an attempt to recreate a typical Berlin gallery space. Musicians on tabla and harmonium added a local flavor to the gallery like ambiance. In order to make the imitation true, several fabricated beer bottles (resin casts with a hand painted Beck’s logo) were scattered around, along with a Macintosh laptop carved in marble, placed on a table. Assistance was taken from local gravestone carvers to replicate the sleek branded machine, transforming its marble version into a rather comical, archaic artifact on show.
The audience was then escorted a few stories higher, onto the rooftop of the building. Here the general atmosphere became much calmer compared to the commotion and congestion in the streets below. Even though the works displayed on the roof were not approachable by the general public, one could understand the impact of the segregated space on the viewing of these works. Moreover, the projects on display here were documentations of performances, executed earlier in the streets below.
Philip Horst (Germany) presented a video footage of his performance piece.
A large, 4.5 feet square crate with ‘FRAGILE’ stenciled on two sides, confronted the viewers at the entrance of the rooftop area. Through a small window cut out in the crate, a video was projected onto the opposite wall. This four-minute video on loop showed a squad of workers unloading the same crate from a tonga, amidst curious bystanders witnessing these peculiar proceedings. The general intrigue of the crowd heightened as some children began peering into the slit, and even extend their hands inside the crate to discern its contents. Towards the end, artist armed with a video camera suddenly revealed himself from inside the crate in a very jack-in-the-box like fashion, to an applauding, cheering crowd. Apparently Horst had been capturing the entire activity from inside the crate – however shots from this ‘inside’ footage were not edited in with the final video clip that was being projected.
Harry Sachs’s (Germany) public performance comprised of a rented white Mercedes being hauled by a pair of bullocks through the bustling streets of Shahalami, to put it simply. He presented a video footage of this happening, in a rather unique fashion – inside a large inflated form, made of two parachute car covers stitched together. Two viewers were allowed to enter this inflated form via a lateral opening, where a small TV monitor ran a video loop of the bullock-driven-Merc. It was quite obvious to see the general excitement of the mob that collected very quickly to experience and decipher what exactly was going on. Some lucky people from the crowd even got a ride in this German luxury car that made a rare appearance in the narrow streets of the bazaar, pulled by a pair of bullocks.
Local transportation and themes related to ways of commuting seem to have been a point of investigation for most foreign artists. This was also true for Meng Huang, participating artist-in-residence from China.
Intrigued by the uniqueness of the local rickshaws, Huang devised a performance around this vehicle. With a set of loud speakers installed on the top of a rented rickshaw, Huang further amplified its distinct blaring sound. Two cameras installed inside in opposite directions, captured the road ahead and the trail behind, as the rickshaw drove around aimlessly in the Main market area. These two footages were used as separate projections along with the actual sound recordings, installed with the rickshaw at the Alhamra gallery. This installation was a clever simulation of the original performance for the audience viewing the work in the gallery space.
The Ship of Hope was by far the most talked about project that attracted both audience attention and interaction. Taking up on the common theme of ‘vehicles’, Anthony Schrag with the help of other artists at the residency, built a raft from materials collected from junkyards. The hull constructed from fiberglass facades of MRI machines and tire tubing, this raft boasted an ornamental canopy put together with all sorts of fabrics and plastic vines. The raft was completed at the Race Course park within three days, taking on the name Ship of Hope, since there was no guarantee if the structures would float or not. The Ship of Hope made its maiden voyage across the canal waters, on the 19th day of November, cheered by many who had taken part in its construction and had high hopes of its success. After staying afloat for an entire 15 minutes, The Ship of Hope was extracted from the unkind canal waters in a fractured state and installed in the Alhamra gallery, along with photographic documentation of the performance.
Even though the selected performative projects mentioned here seem rather simplistic and even facile in their approach (especially in documented form), a gallery go-er can only but imagine the energy of the artist-audience interaction generated during the actual happening. This interaction, laced with layers of meaning, acted as an agent dispelling/subverting the complexities of the public domain for a brief moment, and transported the audience from the realness of everyday regimen to an experiential journey away from the ordinary.
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