"Word. Sound. Power." a group exhibition at KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension > 11am-7pm on 15th January to 8th February 2014
Time : 11:00 am - 7:00 pm (Saturdays closed)
Entry : Free
Event Description : Khoj International Artists’ Association in a landmark collaboration with Tate Modern, London present 'Word. Sound. Power.' a group exhibition.
This one is yet another landmark achievement for New Delhi’s Khoj International Artists’ Association, an alternative art space known for promoting and supporting some of the most cutting edge and experimental art practices since 1997. Beginning on January 15th, Khoj Studios in Khirkee will be home to a group exhibition - titled Word. Sound. Power. - that has been conceptualised as a curatorial collaboration with Tate Modern, London Britain’s most influential art gallery. This is the first time that Tate Modern will make its presence felt in India, while having hosted the same show at its Project Space Gallery from July to November 2013.
It is now Khoj’s turn to play host to the show – earmarked as a collateral event of India Art Fair 2014 – which has been jointly curated by Khoj’s resident curator Andi-Asmita Rangari and the Tate’s Loren Hansi Momudu.
The artists whose works will be on view include Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, French-Norweigian artist Caroline Bergvall, Danish artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen and five Indian artists including Amar Kanwar, Anjali Monteiro & KP Jayasankar, Pallavi Paul and Mithu Sen.
Pooja Sood, Director, Khoj says, “We are thrilled that Tate’s first Indian collaboration in India is with Khoj! Different works from the exhibition engage with digital art forms such as sound and the moving image, an area that Khoj has been exploring for some time. This collaboration also points towards an interest shared by both the Tate and Khoj in socio political issues of migration, political expression and its articulation through voice and silence.”
Say the exhibition’s co-curators: “From a single utterance, to the pronunciation of a name and the declaration of an idea, the voice is a tool through which we assert our presence in the world. The use of the voice as a means of protest, and as a metaphor for self-representation is central to this exhibition. Each of the artists presented elaborate on the dynamic created by the use of words in speech or text, sound as voice and sound as song, power as given and power as taken away.”
By bringing together a range of artists working across different creative disciplines, including audio documentary, video, performance, text and sound this exhibition takes a moment to listen to the harmony, and dissonance, of voices rising.
Developed through the continued curatorial exchange between places, artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen presents a newly commissioned work in two parts, Arise & KEST (Keep Evans Safe Today) 2013, which traverses between forms of poetic narratives, personal histories and essayistic portraits. The work subtly weaves together the life stories and aspirations of four youths experiencing marginalisation at multiple levels across their geographical locations neighbouring Tate, London and Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. In this gesture, there is a desire to hear the voices that surround us and attune to a generation who, continents apart, are negotiating their position and finding ways to be heard.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s ongoing research project draws our attention to the legislation of the voice and the politics of listening. His audio documentary The Whole Truth, 2012 and set of voice maps entitled Conflicted Phonemes, 2012, act to subtly undermine the complex analysis of the voice supporting current immigration policies and question the possibility of spontaneity and uniqueness of voice.
Using both text and sound Caroline Bergvall’s work often inhabits liminal spaces, between the practices of visual art and poetry, amidst multiple languages, and as presented here, at the threshold of physical spaces. In creating philosophical mobile narratives and forms that move across walls as text and fill up spaces as sound, a deeply sensuous engagement with the poetic form is arrived at. Using British company Feonic’s ‘invisible speaker’ technology, the gallery’s atrium window is transformed into a speaker; Voice 2007 emanates directly through the glass recalling varied and familiar experiences of the human voice and acting as an aural subtitle for the exhibition. The visual presence of the poem - reproduced on the back cover - prompts an encounter with Bergvall’s word play and her use of patterning and repetition. In Crop 2010, the artist combines text and sound to focus on the relationship between language and the body, here she likens the power we have over the languages we speak to the power we hold over our own bodies. In this plurilingual piece, languages are ‘disappeared’, as bodies are.
In her new work I Am a Poet 2013, Mithu Sen reclaims her ownership of language by levelling the playing field in a world dominated by the English language. Reading from a book of asemic text, Sen makes public performances which invite visitors to record their own readings from the text, throwing into focus the void between utterance and meaning. An acclaimed poet in her native language of Bengali, Sen has experienced a sense of disconnection with language since relocating to the largely Anglophone city of Delhi. In this work she invites us to share in a language that mutually excludes and therefore includes us all.
Poetry and song are also central to this exhibition and works by a number of documentary and experimental filmmakers focus our attention to the inherent privilege in being allowed to voice dissent, reflected in cultural echoes—through art, music and poetry.
An early work by radical filmmaker Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy, 2002, allows us to witness the momentum with which the turmoil of political oppression or injustice is articulated through the music, poetry and songs across India.
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s work features excerpts taken from their documentary film Saacha (The Loom) 2001. The selected excerpts highlight the poetry of the critically acclaimed Dalit poet Narayan Surve, as he recounts personal memories of the city of Mumbai, the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both political activist and poet, Surve was at the forefront of the left wing cultural movement in the city and his poetry provided an alternative mode of political representation.
Films titled Nayi Kheti 2013 and Shabdkosh 2013 by Pallavi Paul bring together poetry, notions of time travel and the possibilities of metaphysical conversations between the ghosts of poets living throughout different epochs of history. Taken from the fascinating anarchic text ‘After Lorca’, in which American poet Jack Spicer writes to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca nearly twenty years after his death, Paul creates a lucid, dreamlike sequence of found, fictional and documentary images, through which Lorca writes back, positing words as keepers of legacy, record and knowledge production.
The exhibition is supported with the following collateral events happening at Khoj Studios:
• Performance by Caroline Bergvall (7 pm)
• Performance by Mithu Sen (7.30 pm)
• Film Screening: Nusrat Has Left the Building But When? (1997) (Farjad Nabi)
No Dialogue, 20 min, Pakistan
Related Events : Exhibitions
Entry : Free
Place : KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi - 110017
Area : SaketEvent Description : Khoj International Artists’ Association in a landmark collaboration with Tate Modern, London present 'Word. Sound. Power.' a group exhibition.
This one is yet another landmark achievement for New Delhi’s Khoj International Artists’ Association, an alternative art space known for promoting and supporting some of the most cutting edge and experimental art practices since 1997. Beginning on January 15th, Khoj Studios in Khirkee will be home to a group exhibition - titled Word. Sound. Power. - that has been conceptualised as a curatorial collaboration with Tate Modern, London Britain’s most influential art gallery. This is the first time that Tate Modern will make its presence felt in India, while having hosted the same show at its Project Space Gallery from July to November 2013.
It is now Khoj’s turn to play host to the show – earmarked as a collateral event of India Art Fair 2014 – which has been jointly curated by Khoj’s resident curator Andi-Asmita Rangari and the Tate’s Loren Hansi Momudu.
The artists whose works will be on view include Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, French-Norweigian artist Caroline Bergvall, Danish artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen and five Indian artists including Amar Kanwar, Anjali Monteiro & KP Jayasankar, Pallavi Paul and Mithu Sen.
Pooja Sood, Director, Khoj says, “We are thrilled that Tate’s first Indian collaboration in India is with Khoj! Different works from the exhibition engage with digital art forms such as sound and the moving image, an area that Khoj has been exploring for some time. This collaboration also points towards an interest shared by both the Tate and Khoj in socio political issues of migration, political expression and its articulation through voice and silence.”
Say the exhibition’s co-curators: “From a single utterance, to the pronunciation of a name and the declaration of an idea, the voice is a tool through which we assert our presence in the world. The use of the voice as a means of protest, and as a metaphor for self-representation is central to this exhibition. Each of the artists presented elaborate on the dynamic created by the use of words in speech or text, sound as voice and sound as song, power as given and power as taken away.”
By bringing together a range of artists working across different creative disciplines, including audio documentary, video, performance, text and sound this exhibition takes a moment to listen to the harmony, and dissonance, of voices rising.
Developed through the continued curatorial exchange between places, artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen presents a newly commissioned work in two parts, Arise & KEST (Keep Evans Safe Today) 2013, which traverses between forms of poetic narratives, personal histories and essayistic portraits. The work subtly weaves together the life stories and aspirations of four youths experiencing marginalisation at multiple levels across their geographical locations neighbouring Tate, London and Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. In this gesture, there is a desire to hear the voices that surround us and attune to a generation who, continents apart, are negotiating their position and finding ways to be heard.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s ongoing research project draws our attention to the legislation of the voice and the politics of listening. His audio documentary The Whole Truth, 2012 and set of voice maps entitled Conflicted Phonemes, 2012, act to subtly undermine the complex analysis of the voice supporting current immigration policies and question the possibility of spontaneity and uniqueness of voice.
Using both text and sound Caroline Bergvall’s work often inhabits liminal spaces, between the practices of visual art and poetry, amidst multiple languages, and as presented here, at the threshold of physical spaces. In creating philosophical mobile narratives and forms that move across walls as text and fill up spaces as sound, a deeply sensuous engagement with the poetic form is arrived at. Using British company Feonic’s ‘invisible speaker’ technology, the gallery’s atrium window is transformed into a speaker; Voice 2007 emanates directly through the glass recalling varied and familiar experiences of the human voice and acting as an aural subtitle for the exhibition. The visual presence of the poem - reproduced on the back cover - prompts an encounter with Bergvall’s word play and her use of patterning and repetition. In Crop 2010, the artist combines text and sound to focus on the relationship between language and the body, here she likens the power we have over the languages we speak to the power we hold over our own bodies. In this plurilingual piece, languages are ‘disappeared’, as bodies are.
In her new work I Am a Poet 2013, Mithu Sen reclaims her ownership of language by levelling the playing field in a world dominated by the English language. Reading from a book of asemic text, Sen makes public performances which invite visitors to record their own readings from the text, throwing into focus the void between utterance and meaning. An acclaimed poet in her native language of Bengali, Sen has experienced a sense of disconnection with language since relocating to the largely Anglophone city of Delhi. In this work she invites us to share in a language that mutually excludes and therefore includes us all.
Poetry and song are also central to this exhibition and works by a number of documentary and experimental filmmakers focus our attention to the inherent privilege in being allowed to voice dissent, reflected in cultural echoes—through art, music and poetry.
An early work by radical filmmaker Amar Kanwar, A Night of Prophecy, 2002, allows us to witness the momentum with which the turmoil of political oppression or injustice is articulated through the music, poetry and songs across India.
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s work features excerpts taken from their documentary film Saacha (The Loom) 2001. The selected excerpts highlight the poetry of the critically acclaimed Dalit poet Narayan Surve, as he recounts personal memories of the city of Mumbai, the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both political activist and poet, Surve was at the forefront of the left wing cultural movement in the city and his poetry provided an alternative mode of political representation.
Films titled Nayi Kheti 2013 and Shabdkosh 2013 by Pallavi Paul bring together poetry, notions of time travel and the possibilities of metaphysical conversations between the ghosts of poets living throughout different epochs of history. Taken from the fascinating anarchic text ‘After Lorca’, in which American poet Jack Spicer writes to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca nearly twenty years after his death, Paul creates a lucid, dreamlike sequence of found, fictional and documentary images, through which Lorca writes back, positing words as keepers of legacy, record and knowledge production.
The exhibition is supported with the following collateral events happening at Khoj Studios:
• Performance by Caroline Bergvall (7 pm)
• Performance by Mithu Sen (7.30 pm)
• Film Screening: Nusrat Has Left the Building But When? (1997) (Farjad Nabi)
No Dialogue, 20 min, Pakistan
Related Events : Exhibitions
"Word. Sound. Power." a group exhibition at KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension > 11am-7pm on 15th January to 8th February 2014
!["Word. Sound. Power." a group exhibition at KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension > 11am-7pm on 15th January to 8th February 2014]()
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Saturday, February 08, 2014
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