Last year n.e.w.s. (http://northeastwestsouth.net) and Khoj (http://khojworkshop.org/) organised a public lecture and a series of internal group collaborative meetings in order to brainstorm about the issue of ‘Art After Space’. n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from North, East, West and South. Comprised of curatorial perspectives, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, different types of discourse, approaches and methodologies are shown, discussed through online forums, images, text, audio as well as real world gatherings. Khoj is an artist led, alternative space for experimentation and international exchange based in India and sees its role as an incubator for art and ideas, artistic exchange and dialogue in the visual arts. It aims to assist and develop, forms of art such as media art, performance, video, environmental, public and community based art, sound and other experimental modes of cultural production.
In February we (n.e.w.s) started research for our forthcoming book that rethinks the social and economic conditions of art, for which we won the Competition of Ideas prize. (http://northeastwestsouth.net/?q=node/249) We initiated ‘Art After Space’ with Khoj in order to answer some key questions regarding art in the 21st century that kept resurfacing: how is the interface between a global online platform and the local, where is the public sphere and who patrols it, what are the modes of production of art and curatorial activities and which terminology can we either appropriate, imbricate or invent to further the discussion? To put it differently, the research also needed to consider curatorially speaking ‘art after space’, bearing in mind the performative paradox of that formula: art wants space; yet art’s condition today is post-spatial. For one of the great challenges today, both in curatorship and in social practices at large, is to insist upon plural temporalities, rather than conforming to dominant timeframes. This is a crucial political issue and perhaps the deeper meaning of time-based art – and as such, an unavoidable question for curators and artists at large. In our quest we decided that we needed to engage with other temporalities, modes of working that would be collaborative, offering an international exchange of ideas as well as attempting to search for ways to find other, possibly unseen existent practices, to produce something together and share this knowledge production. Khoj and her network became our exchange partners.
During a reconnaissance trip in April 2009 n.e.w.s. contributors Stephen Wright and Renée Ridgway first met with Khoj and her invited guests (Deeksha Nath, Bhooma Padmanabhan, Vidya Shivadas) for two days of meetings. In Bangalore we (Stephen Wright, Renée Ridgway, Prayas Abhinav) presented ‘Art after Space’ at C.I.S. (Centre for Internet and Society) and our research at that time as an ‘Experimental Economy Camp’. We initiated Art after Space in order to gain feedback and to try to come up with a series of seminars/discussions later that could be focused on this conundrum, but not necessarily be of the same name nor reflect our initial thinking. In Delhi, Mumbai and in Bangalore we met with many people, curators, artists and Internet experts alike and conducted a series of internal brainstorming sessions that provided the basis and eventual interlocutors for three presentations in the fall of 2009.
‘Unspeakably More: Naming, Deframing, A Lexicon for contemporary curatorship’, (http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/386) was organised in collaboration with Khoj Periferry in Guwahati, Assam, in cooperation with Desire Machine Collective. (http://www.desiremachinecollective.net/). This intensive yet convivial weekend seminar took place on October 4-7th on the Brahmaputra and was simultaneously live-streamed at n.e.w.s. (http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/398) Periferry (http://periferry.wordpress.com/) is not only the geophysical and geopolitical context – the water, the North East – but the symbolic dimension: the ferry as the meeting place, buoyancy enabling thoughts, the flux of ideas. Participants were Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula from Raqs Media Collective, Siu King Chung & Howard Chan from Community Museum Project, Kaushik Bhaumik, Nancy Adajania, Tushar Joag, Nishant Shah from C.I.S., Vishal Rawley from Khoj, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya from Periferry and Prayas Abhinav, Stephen Wright, Renée Ridgway from n.e.w.s.
The Unspeakably More event was thus “curated” in such a way, through a series a Skype meetings, email correspondence and with such invitees, as to foster the kind of competence-crossing conducive to producing knowledge in suitably slack (i.e. relaxed) conditions. An articulation of our ideas was distributed per email along with an online forum at n.e.w.s. that mapped out what we hoped to address, articulated by the title as well as a desire to sharpen the use of theory in curatorial discourse. Naming: As art making continues to undergo deep changes in terms of its mode of visibility, perhaps the most urgent challenge for curatorship is not so much to expand its repertory of exhibition making than to develop a new lexicon of conceptual vocabulary, better suited to grasping art’s new modes of visibility. ‘Deframing: Unspeakably More’ was less concerned with that branch of language use called theory than with how naming – and renaming, de-naming, ascriptions, assignations and their undoing – takes place and how it can be rethought. Hence the desire to recalibrate our conceptual vocabulary to describe simply and accurately the types of practices that are emerging today and which suffer at the hands of twentieth-century descriptions. Indeed, if we are even to perceive collectively what art practitioners are up to, and where they are investing their creative energies, we need the naming tools to grasp their originality. The point, of course, was not to promote some sort of curatorial newspeak, but, on the contrary, to debunk the oldspeak; to propose an infinitesimal yet decisive shift in our use of terminology to more accurately grasp real practices. We ventured to imagine something more organically integrated, bearing in mind that the presentations, discussion and performative rhetoric that occurred on the boat were focal points in a longer-term project as well as the ‘space’ where knowledge and insights into a renewed conceptual vocabulary were produced. Please see the n.e.w.s. website ‘Easy Listening’ (http://northeastwestsouth.net/content/easy-listening) for documentation and sound recordings. ‘Unspeakably More’ was then a first step toward producing an online lexicon for curatorship on the cusp of a new paradigm, the Lexical Turn. We hope to develop this the coming year.
Khoj@1Shanti Road in Bangalore (http://www.1shanthiroad.com/) and n.e.w.s. organised a public presentation of the ‘Art after Space’ project on November 20, 2009. Attended by a local audience, Pooja Sood from Khoj and Suresh Jayaram from 1Shanthi Road, n.e.w.s. contributors (Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway) discussed the happenings at the Unspeakably More seminar in Guwahati and offered insight into the research for our previously mentioned forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds, (http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/251) that seeks to rethink the social and economic conditions of art. As twenty-first century attention economics maintains its momentum, where an artist's standing in the reputational economy is determined by his or her coefficient of specific visibility, how can shadowy, more poly-vocal initiatives at the edges find ways to surface, or, for that matter, to remain hidden? What are the specific new vocabularies, technologies even, with respect to modes of transmitting knowledge that might be used as deframing devices? n.e.w.s. contributor Stephen Wright cited some key art historical paradigms and showed images of these works. This user-friendly presentation focused on a cross-section of contemporary, incidentally artistic practices, whose coefficient of artistic visibility is deliberately impaired, situating them with regard to earlier conceptual practices of the 1970s, drawing some conclusions about the prospects of art after spectatorship. Feedback from the audience included references to potential local practices and the Indian context and provided a lively discussion. (http://northeastwestsouth.net/content/news-khoj1shanthi-road) We also announced the Shadow Search seminar that was to be held the following weekend in Bangalore at CIS.
n.e.w.s. in collaboration with Khoj also interacted with the dynamic entrepreneurial, academic and scientific community of CIS. (http://www.cis-india.org/) Imagining “new social and economic contexts for art” this open seminar, brainstorming session and prize-awarding event brought together interested students, professionals and motivated institutions in working to solve the following conundrum: Pertaining to the research we are conducting at n.e.w.s. in our forthcoming book and our initial premise of researching ‘Art after Space’ it was very important to be able to find art and artists that reflect the spirit of the query rather than just its literal content. We wanted to explore the use of natural-language search algorithms that are able to find people and activities that embody the self-understanding of the kind of art we are seeking without specifically using the word art or a related vocabulary. In particular this search engine would allow prospectors in the world of information and databases to discover ‘shadow art activities’ that are partially hidden, off-the-radar, stealthy. (http://northeastwestsouth.net/?q=node/395) In order to do so we researched this conundrum the past year and from October 15-November 22, initiated the Shadow Search Open Call (http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/392) with a cash prize of €1000. We received great response from all over the world, many visits to the website and readings of the Open Call. Eventually 5 exceptional proposals were submitted from India and abroad and on November 20, 2009 we organised a public seminar that included the finalists being present or via Skype along with a local audience. This seminar contextualised the Open Call and the possible consequences of discovering and shedding light on artistic shadow practices. After the presentations the jury consisting of Nishant Shah (C.I.S.), Pooja Sood (Khoj), Ayisha Abraham (Srishti), Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway (n.e.w.s.) deliberated for 6 hours that continued then over dinner, and eventually selected a winner: Narcissus Search Engine from Aharon Amir and Phil Jones from the U.K. (http://northeastwestsouth.net/content/shadow-search-winner-announced)
We would like to thank all organisors’ and participants’ time, energy and ideas that made all of the above knowledge exchange possible. Without mutual input and interest we would not have been able to conceive nor carry out these colaborative seminars, presentations and online forums. At the moment we are working being able to continue these projects with many of the same partners and people the coming year.
n.e.w.s. March 2010
