'Tracing a Human Trail: Metaphors of the Frontiers' & 'Antecedent Garden' photography & video shows at KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension > 11am-6:30pm on 17th-23rd January 2011

Time : 11:00 am - 6:30 pm

Entry : Free

Place : KHOJ International Artists' Association, S-17, Khirkee Extension, Near Malviya Nagar, New Delhi - 110017

Venue Info : khojworkshop.org | Nearest Metro Station - 'Malviya Nagar'
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Event Details : KHOJ International Artists’ Association presents two simultaneous shows of photographs and videos that capture the stories of individual lives, in two different ways – one abstract and the other real.

The first show is titled Tracing a Human Trail: Metaphors of the Frontiers, an exhibition of photographs and  videos curated by Oindrilla Maity, one of the curators who participated in the curatorial residency programme at Khoj studios in August last year. 

Says Oindrilla Maity: “The exhibition is a curatorial venture based on a community that had migrated to India surviving the ravages of riots in Bangladesh and settled down at a bordering town in the suburbia of Calcutta, called Asoknagar. Its earliest origin can be traced back to Rangoon in Burma, from where its journey had actually begun.  A considerable section of the community later spread out and settled down in an urban metropolis such as Delhi owing to several social and economic factors, the prime one being the uprising of The Naxalite movement at Asoknagar.  As these migrants travelled and settled down in the places where they did, they encountered several ups and downs including politics of spaces and identity crisis which largely shaped the myth which these people carry with them today.”

The show explores several aspects of why a community migrates or disperses from its origin; how it copes with its memory; how myth becomes a weapon in fighting a peculiar amnesia regarding the history of a race and how artists can mediate in reliving that memory. As it addresses these fissures, the project endeavors to search for possibilities of curating the exhibition without the regular White Cube space, therefore touching upon the private and public spaces with visual, textual and aural supports.

The second show is titled “Antecedent Garden”, an exhibition of photographs and videos by Priya Sen.

The longing to be part of a story resembles a blind statue in an arboretum and a floating chair wrapped in plastic. Somebody speaks of measured cadences during music lessons, a revolver is gifted 'out of natural love and affection' and is meant to be nothing more than a blessing.  A clown in a zoetrope slows down and becomes silent.  The Museum of Tea and Coffee exists nowhere but on a signboard, the Lost Note Branch of the Paper Currency Department gets buried under new concrete. A book says something like, “There was a need to always be part of a story, even if it was someone else's.”

 These are all situations - that precede or extend the composition and its event. They present themselves similar to 'satori' (the zen occurrence) - in which the emptying out of language and meaning becomes the thing of writing. It is possible then to proceed from a place on the side of a road that does not claim its event. It does not claim its death or transformation either.

These videos and photographs wish to mimic the precariousness of the moments in which stories start to change, and when we interpret for ourselves our own histories and decide to alter them.

According to Priya Sen who works as an artist and filmmaker in New Delhi: “These are all sites - places from where it is possible to reshape the stories we tell ourselves of our lives, and to tell them again differently. In each work, is the desire to be and a projection of a different story and a different place.”

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