Killer Beasts

From the North of England, Fiona Banner was born in 1966, and attended Kingston University in the late 1980’s, before going onto Goldsmiths College, London in 1990. She had her first solo show at City Racing; (1994), an artist run space in South London. And in 1995 was included in General Release: Young British Artists, at the XLVI Venice Biennale. Following solo shows at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany, (2002) and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, (2002) Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize in the same year. Renowned for her visual fascination with military aircraft, her rendering of macho American war films in text based installations; she is intentionally engaged to a milieu of cultural contradictions. And as a publisher and artist Banner explains of her ‘interest in the voice of language, and the mistakes of language. Yes the high points of it, but also in the hopelessness of it; and how we always come back to it.’ Banner has exhibited extensively internationally, and has a forth-coming solo show WP WP WP, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, (2014).

Rajesh Punj: Is the Chinook helicopter still operational?

Fiona Banner: Yes it is hyper active, they came out in the 1960’s, and is the longest serving helicopter. When you talk to people in the military, they talk about this helicopter with some kind of mythological status. And for me it’s the way the blades always look like they are going to crash into each other. Because they actually go in opposite directions and cross over.

RP: So is that relative to the installation you have planned for Yorkshire Sculpture Park this year?

FB: It is yes, so the installation at YSP is something I have wanted to make for a long time. It is sort of a sculpture without a centre, because there is no body of the aircraft on display, it is just the helicopter blades rotating in the space between zero and 45 rpm; so at times quite fast. And they will be choreographed; so there will be a structure to the pace.

RP: And is that comfortable for an audience, entering into the space for the first time?

FB: ‘Comfortable’ is an interesting term. I don’t think it will be comfortable, but I don’t think it will be totally intimidating either – disquieting perhaps. It will have a strong performative element. For me I am used to relating to these aircrafts from a distance; and often through some mediated form, in movies, newspapers, you tube, images generally; or way off in the distance flying over London. So just to be there up against the functionality of the aircraft – the blades in action presents a weird proximity, it’s a strangely emotional encounter

Chinook helicopters are not available, there are not very many of them in the world, and when they are, they are stripped of all their high value assets and cannibalised. So maybe to focus on the function of the blades comes out of that, as a sort of sculpture in absentia – also for me it is the part of the helicopter that speaks most eloquently of contradiction. In the way that they work; the way that they go against each other in opposite directions, it’s ‘a push me, pull you’. The blades appear to collide, because they cross over, so there is an incredible power in how they work, and how they appear but there is also great vulnerability. And I am interested in the image of the helicopter as well, because it is so animal like, it is so inelegant, dinosaur like, and yet it performs an incredible dynamic function, and is technically very advanced.  Something primitive, something sophisticated – something that pulls you in opposite directions, it is associated with super serious stuff, but is almost comic.

RP: The Chinook recalls the other modern aircraft you have used as artworks, including the ‘Harrier’ and the ‘Jaguar’; why have you selected those particular combat aircraft?

FB: With the Harrier and the Jaguar (Tate Britain, 2010), I really wanted to work with aircraft that were still in service; so both those models when I displayed them were still functioning in the military, and were of a type and still had a currency in their field of conflict. It was important for me that as viewers we were implicated or inevitably part of these objects, if only through the fact of being contemporary, or of having contributed to them as tax payers… So an old aircraft, a retro imperial war museum type thing is of no interest to me. Somehow that would seem romantic, and I am not really interested in being romantic. Though I am interested in the seductive qualities of these airplanes. 

RP: How did you determine the compositional layout for works of such magnitude? 

FB: Those pieces were quite specific to that neo-classical end of empire space of display at Tate Britain. The museum was never designed to accommodate major industrial scale military hardware; it was designed for sculpture and painting. Specifically sculpture I think for those outer spaces, but of a very different scale. The planes only just fitted the space. Someone describes them as looking ‘exactly wrong’. The Harrier looked captured, it had the sense of it being a trophy. Like a hunter might hang a dead bird. Again they were anthropomorphic and had association with the primitive and nature, through their names for one. But I was also really interested in pushing our voyeuristic tendency to those aircraft.

RP: How did your large scale text pieces come about, referencing films like Top Gun, and Apocalypse Now?

FB: Well Top Gun (an intricate blow by blow account of that film in words) (1994), and Nam (1997), (which is a book encompassing six well known Nam movies, written in my own language); those early verbal works did come out of a particular engagement with main stream movies, and how they try to, and often do, reflect, and in turn affect how we see things. So to take Top Gun, I got really into that film, and I was intrigued by it being such a basic film. It comes across if you like as a trite piece of fiction, mainstream Hollywood, and as an unreflective bit of entertainment. But what interested me in it, was the really euphoric, almost splendid display of flying, how they displayed the kudos and muscle of the fighter planes. And how it came out right at the end of the Cold War, so it was a way of displaying these aircraft that hadn’t had a run for their money, using them as active elements of ideological conquest but imbedded in this dump text, which is in many ways just a courier for displaying the military hardware – but one that pulled certain emotional triggers.

I was making paintings of the film, and of the aircraft in it – they weren’t terribly good paintings, because I was very messed up about what to keep in, and where the frame was – so I ended up in an editorial malaise, and finally ended up making these paintings where the aircraft left the frame, they were virtually monochromes. And at that point I thought I have just edited everything out of this painting. And at the same time I recall I was reading a lot about photography, and the stories about how photography is manipulated. I suppose it was (Susan) Sontag, (Paul) Virilio and all that sort of thing, which questioned the validity of the visual as we known it.

RP: Which brings us back to the intended contradiction in your work; because these works are so labour intensive. You are scrutinising a film that the majority of us have seen as teenagers and handsomely forgotten about. Why labour over such ‘low level’ culture?

FB: For one low culture is the dominant culture. Also I wouldn’t say ‘intended contradiction’, but ‘active’, yes – because I’m working with a personal contradiction too – I was seduced by those films. Using words was a way of working with them without using the image directly. As for the process, there is something immersive about making that work and that went also with the process of looking and reading, of duration. As a practitioner that engagement is a positive thing, as an artist you have to somehow engage with a medium, in this case it is written language, you have to hinge your thought to something tangible, however ephemeral, or physical.

RP: Your works appear ‘wonderfully complex’; is that your intention?

FB: No. But I don’t want to simplify complex things either, and finding a way to do that is often what directs things.

RP: Should there be an introduction to the work Mirror; it is one of several other films works at Yorkshire Sculpture Park that kind of comes out of the blue?

FB: The film (Mirror, 2007 (in which the actress Samantha Morton performs a description I made of her naked) could be a traditional life-drawing turned on its head, and it’s incredibly simple in many ways. Though it is odd because she had not read the description before you can see her encountering her own image as she reads it, and it becomes kind of overwhelming for her – you can see a struggle there. But through a series of situations I ended up with a work that said something about the absurd, unrequited sometimes desperate need we have to understand our own image, whether it is looking at images of other people or trying to make images of other people – and how we are somehow held to that. And the nude is perhaps looking at the human in a raw state, our obsession with the nude also reveals vulnerability in how the sexes relate to each other, and how we pre-empt how we will be related to, therefore it motivates a reaction that may create a further reaction. I don’t want to end up trying to satisfy your original question, and say something I don’t really think, but I suppose there is a narrative of complexity and contradiction around the work. Is it leading to any conclusion?

No. Is it asking some questions and then looking at those questions in another way? Peeling down the layers of expectations, so maybe you end up at a point where you are down to the bone. So something is sort of raw, and laid oddly vulnerable, or bare. But it’s not like I am formulating a position, as a practitioner, and intellectually nothing is conclusive. An idea develops, and it can take a very long time to turn into something – sometimes too long, and it never materializes. But I do often come back to things that I thought maybe had gone, I mean the themes do circulate.

Having studied fine art at the Hanzehogeschool, Groningen, (one of the northern provinces of the Netherlands), Smilde settled in the capital Amsterdam. Establishing his practice and conceiving of artworks that have a delicate demeanour about them. Almost transparent in their simplicity, the artist’s calculated cloud photographs and inventive sculptures appear determined by more ephemeral belief systems; that settle upon society like intangible nuances that shape the weather. Likened to a magician conjuring ideas out of the sky, Smilde is enchanted by the elemental atmosphere that shapes everything, and the allure of the ideal delivers the basis for what he attempts to capture in his work. As an artist Smilde has expressed an interest in the ‘construction and deconstruction – of materials and architectural elements’; as an examination of the permanence and impermanence of the uncertain states of being. And also eludes to what is behind the curtain with his work, with the idea that ‘the prospect is often just a facade in my work dealing with questions about perfection and the ideal’. Exhibiting at Ronchini Gallery, (2014), previously at the Process Room, Irish Museum of Modern Art, (2008), and Bunker Project, Galerie West, The Hague, (2010). And with group shows at Galerie Boven de Bank, Groningen, (2001), Nofound Photo Fair, Paris, (2012), Art 13, London, (2013), Saatchi Gallery, London, (2012), and Somarts, San Francisco, (2013); Smilde has successfully turned ideas into inventive works for an international audience.

Interview

Rajesh Punj: For an audience less familiar with your work can you initially introduce us to your approach and practice?

Berndnaut Smilde: My work consists of installations, sculptures and photographs. I often work corresponding to the site; reacting to the architecture or history of a given location. A lot of my work centers on aspects of duality, the landscape, and one’s position as a viewer. Just as my cloud works (Nimbus) build up and fall apart at the same time, my installations and sculptures question construction and deconstruction, size, temporality, function of materials and architectural elements.
RP: Your artificial cloud images have become your signature works; what are you intending by these works?

BS: I see them as temporary sculptures, made of almost nothing, balancing on the edge of materiality, an image of prospect in an empty (exhibition) space. For me the work is about the idea of a cloud inside a space and what people project onto it. You can see them as a sign of misfortune or an element from a classical painting. There is something ungraspable about clouds: it might explain why people have been projecting so many meanings and myths upon clouds for centuries.

RP: And how important are the locations, or ‘the siting’ of your artificial clouds for you?

BS: The spaces you could say function as a plinth for the work and provide a scenario. They are all used as exhibition spaces in some way and therefore relate to the artwork, and to the history and tradition of that location. I am chasing representations of an ‘ideal’ space, and the cloud works are also a way for me of questioning this. You could ask yourself which one is more important; is the work about the cloud or the space it inhabits? And which is more significant? I like to ask myself whether the works are able to change a space, or the way we look at that space after the cloud has evaporated. And there is only the document of something that happened.

RP: There is something almost metaphysically about your conjuring clouds in interior spaces? Are you intentionally wanting to address notions of the abstracted coming into contact with the real?

BS: It is an image of the seemingly impossible. Placing a natural phenomenon in an unnatural context can appear threatening in itself; as an unknown message. I was curious to find out what it would be like to encounter a cloud inside a space. I imagined walking in an empty museum hall and there was nothing to see except for a cloud hovering in the corner of the room. Initially I wanted to create an image of ultimate disappointment as a counterbalance to what we would expect to find in a classic museum hall.

RP: Why do you think the images become so appealing to an audience?

BS: Maybe there is something universal and timeless about the works which is perhaps why so many different viewers have engaged with them.

RP: The version of the work that proves so successful, are Nimbus 2010, Cloud in Room, Nimbus II 2012, and Nimbus Dumont, 2014; essentially because of the weight and density of the ephemeral object. Are you conscious of such details, in relation to your placing them in interior spaces?

BS: Sure, the density, size, shape and height is something I carefully consider and adjust. They have to have a certain weight and dominance. In order to be able to relate to the work (mentally and physically), and the proportions between the cloud, and the space have to be right. In a way it is like how classic landscape painters used their clouds as a tool for creating the right atmosphere. The light, reflections and shadows are all part of it.

RP: And what of last year’s commissioned Iconoclouds 2013 works for Harper’s Bazaar. In which you picture Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace beside your cloud works; were you entirely happy with the introduction of figures into those spaces; challenging the existing aesthetic?

BS: It was a successful experiment and a challenge to incorporate another (iconic) character into the work. I was curious to see if the work could function as a portrait.

RP: You have expressed your interest in capturing ‘hope’ and ‘fragility’ in your work; what draws you to such evanescent conditions; especially in relation to the permanence of some of your other works?

BS: Many of my works seem to be functioning but are often determined to fail. Just as that cloud is building up and falling apart at the same time. Whether it is material based, physics, or based on our perspective as a viewer. The prospect is often just a facade in my work dealing with questions about perfection and the ideal. It is either denying itself (as the ‘Kammerspiele’ works) or is so delicate that it will break. It falls short and shows its impermanence. There is always a limit to the work and then it falls apart. The ideal and transience are connected in that sense.

RP: You appear to apply such a considered sensitivity to everything you do; are you conscious of that?

BS: An in between state appeals to me as it doesn’t have a function yet, and is therefore open for interpretation. There is not yet a finished outcome we can relate to. Transition shows traces of history and a future vision.

RP: Can you explain some of your other key works?

BS: In 2009, I participated in a residency in Askeaton, one of Ireland’s oldest communities, and discovered that in the 1840’s many of the town’s residents immigrated to Wisconsin and set up a new town Askeaton. The first image of Askeaton, WI, on Google Street View was of a lone red barn by the side of a road, while Askeaton, Ireland had not been captured by Google for Street View yet. I constructed a copy of the façade of the red barn in Askeaton, WI and placed this ‘prop’ along the main road in Askeaton, Ireland. I was hoping that if the Google photocar would come by to capture the original town, this image would be picked up and the street view of both towns would then depict the same barn. In 2012 Google completed this work by depicting the barn facade in Askeaton, Ireland on Street View. I like the idea of transition by taking an object from online and placing this in the ‘real world’ where it would be captured and eventually placed back on the web. It questions reality.

RP: You have talked previously and very eloquently of the origins of works like Gamut 2014, in which you exaggerate the visual significance of passé postcards. What are those images alluding to for you?

BS: With the permission of the US in the early 1900’s to print the word ‘Postcard’ on the backside of the card, it was allowed that we could write on this side, leaving the front just for the image. This image started to function as a souvenir from a ‘different world’ the exotic, the ideal. It became a projection of our cultural way of looking at the landscape. A cut-out perfect landscape without disorders. I like this idea of desire in a postcard even though they are almost extinct in this age. They are a mediator between our expectations and reality. 

RP: What is the relationship of the Gamut works to the Kammerspiele 2013 installation?

BS: Both are based on the imagery of postcards which represent landscapes, but used in a way as panoramic images or wall murals functioned in old houses. Kammerspiele deals with the suggestion of an interior or the parts of it. White tiles are blocking the idealistic views represented, creating a friction between the ideal and the functional. Gamut consist of printed wooden pillars. The prints of landscapes seem to dissolve almost into the wood leaving the grains visible. The pillars are carrier and referring to construction.

RP: You appear to have a ‘mastery of scale’ about your works aswell; as you efficiently go from works like Sarcophagus Americanus 2006, to the miniatured precision of When the world is green 2007. How do you determine the visual weight of a work?

BS: A model is straight forward and represents a larger idea we could mentally relate to. Other works require an almost human size to be able to relate to the work, as with the clouds for instance. It’s all about proportions.

RP: Are the majority of your works ideas lead, or is what you do determined more by ‘scale’ and ‘materials’?

BS: Both I guess. A location often determines the scale already. I am also a material freak and I love to build things.

RP: Is there such thing as a ‘coded’ nostalgia about your works; with your use of postcards and large scale photographic prints? 

BS: Definitely. You could even say there is something picturesque about them. I am interested in how we perceive and represent the ideal and give meaning to this.

RP: With your conjuring of clouds and your constructing of illusionistic landmarks, are you more magician than artist? 

BS: I don’t have any magic to give I just put things in a different order, I think that is what artists do.

RP: Are your influences entirely visual?

BS: Associations start visually most of the time. I also like what Bruno Latour described as an Iconoclash. It’s about the duality that occurs, interpreting a certain situation or image. In these circumstances it is impossible to determine what exactly is going on. There is a moment of friction, a clash between different value and truths that brings uncertainty. You cannot really tell if you should interpret the situation as negative or positive.

RP: What are you working on now?

BS: I am working on a proposal for public artwork and I want to make a book.

Invited to the Lisson gallery, artist Liu Xiaodong and his young prodigy and translator arrive after me, and purposefully settle into chairs around a meetings table in order we can commence our choreographed conversation for print. At first glance Xiaodong appears more academic than artist, with his turtle shaped glasses rolling over his nose, and an inquisitive squint. As I look to his translator for appreciative communications, it all proves a little more subdued than I had anticipated as the artist stays well within himself. Diligently replying and providing answers to a series of questions I pose with reassuring ease. And while Xiaodong and his translator engage in moments of discursive conversation, I almost feel short changed with a dozen words in summary. Which leads to an awkwardness on my part; wanting to know so much more about this accomplished painter of ‘international stature’, (as he has been described), than he is willing to give.

Tellingly it always proves more difficult to interview someone who has already been probed by the press several times already. Between us we agree that for the here and now our translated conversation be all together less difficult, in order we can arrive at something mutually engaging and less exhaustive. In context Xiaodong’s lorded reputation comes as a consequence of his enveloping himself in his individual projects. Having large scale canvases delivered in a truck to a location, where once erect, they are likely to encroach upon his entire field of vision, in order he is able to create vast panoramic paintings that appear as homages to the sites of devastation and damage that he occupies for weeks and months at a time. Xiaodong’s laboured approach has him described as a ‘modern painter of the emerging world’, as he engages very directly with some of the most damning issues of our time. Xiaodong seeks to visually diagnose his subject’s experiences of ‘displacement’, ‘environmental crisis’ and ‘economic upheaval’ in China. And it is as if Xiaodong’s humanitarian methodology proves ever more relevant today, with the sizable shifts of people across the planet. Induced by man-made conflicts and natural disasters alike.

Coined as one of a new breed of ‘neo-realist’ painter, and belonging to a brand of ‘new-realism’ that emerged from the 1990’s in China; Xiaodong has always had great faith in figurative painting capturing the modern experience, as it presents itself. Tellingly in conversation Xiaodong would want it known that he is as much a neo-realist as he is a documentary film-maker, or a diarist. Because for him everything is determined by what he is able to do and the circumstances that allow for that to happen; and much less by linguistic jargon. And what he does when painting these vast panoramic canvases is akin to generating a visual symbol of optimism in the most unlikely of places.

Tellingly Xiaodong’s work proves hugely engaging, as the locations that he is invited to and decides upon, read like recent disaster zones the world over.

Yet unlike the original visionaries of ‘plein air’ painting, (the French impressionists), who sought to capture the elemental atmosphere of a more beautiful moment; as a realist Xiaodong is interested in painting ‘en plein air’ in order to draw attention to more decisive moments of change in places outside of our reach. As the artist’s work visualises the acres of time that proceed that moment, as his people filled landscapes appear to want to sink from beneath his feet. Principally in Xiaodong’s paintings and pencil drawings beauty is reshaped by the ills of cataclysmic catastrophe, as he seeks to capture the visceral unease of people recovering from earthquakes and corrosive pollutants. Initially entering hamlets as a stranger, Xiaodong befriends individuals, shares their daily routine, and determinedly begins to record the lives of the people rooted to these troubled epicentres well after the world has collapsed around them. And unlike the media that arrives and leaves as tourists after a disaster is sufficiently covered for newspaper and television alike; Xiaodong appropriates himself as one of them, in order he can capture something of the upheaval that such ruin brings to bear on people disconnected from the major cities of the extended world. And as a consequence what Xiaodong conceives of is much more ethnographic styled documentation of individual lives; as they are either invited to dutifully sit for him at these points of catastrophe, or otherwise become one of his many new acquaintances that he chooses to indirectly immortalise in one of his make-shift diaries.

Using film, his camera, sketching and scribbling paragraphs of initial information down; Xiaodong employs very playful possibilities as points of entry into the lives of the people reconditioned by their geography. Notably Xiaodong has in the past used film as a medium; working with Wang Xiaoshuai in the highly acclaimed The Days, 1993, and Xiaodong readily refers to major independent films that have been recognised in previous years at the Venice film festival.

Located as he is at the epicentres of both ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ disasters, Xiaodong begins such substantial projects by employing a procedure and practice that is as practical as it might appear if he were entering a studio to paint a small canvas of a seated figure; though the scale and materials differ greatly. As firstly the size of the canvas and the accompanying crate are considered; measured and constructed in Beijing. Delivered by a large truck to the site, where a make-shift shelter has to be constructed, temporary easels built, containers of oil paints, diaries, drawings delivered, and where reams of photographs and video recording give the project a documentary styled narrative.

As they have all become part of the required apparatus for an artist who will encamp himself on a site for many weeks and months in order to source a complicated diary’s worth of visual information as the beginning of a painting. And once the composition is dutifully decided upon, the project and painting completed; everything is very efficiently deconstructed and packed away for a truck to make the return journey. The canvas is then rehoused into its original wooden crate to be returned to his studio for exhibition.

Xiaodong’s translator describes how “Xiaodong likes to paint a place that has a troubled background, and this kind of background will give him the inspiration to paint.” For Xiaodong his temporary relationships with the inhabitants begin as “strangers in discussion, and then they become good friends, and it is always like this”, in order he can arrive at a work that serves everyone well. And when asked if he ever seeks to return to a location he has earmarked for an artwork, he confirms he will, “if the opportunity presents itself”. Xiaodong is as much preoccupied with new locations and their prevailing circumstances, as he is interested in nostalgia, and his feelings for the familiar. In 2010 Xiaodong returned home to Jincheng, in the north-eastern province of Liaoning. Settling there for over four months, whilst adopting something of his signature ethnographic approach, in order to cultivate the necessary visual and visceral information for a new body of works. Employing a scribbled diary in the first instance, as a method narrative for what he wanted to record and go on to depict.

Xiaodong declares something of a self-interest in what had drawn him back to his place of birth. Saying, “as soon as you begin to talk about your homeland, something starts to happen inside you, something like homesickness. I think in my innermost self, I do not want anything to change in my hometown. You just want your old home to stay as it always used to be. Only if it stays that way can it remain a refuse for us, however much reality is different.” Adding “Urbanisation is spreading much too quickly, destroying everything that we loved or did not love; forming a new city out of everything.” Xiaodong’s scepticism of the indiscriminatory upheaval of modernity goes some way to explain why he is less inclined to engage with any of China’s modern cities, and more interested in the wider agricultural landscape. In Taihu, on the boarder of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in Eastern China, and Beichuan in Central China, as seen through the eyes of its workers and peasant farmers. For Xiaodong then there is much more of China’s history, imbued in people and in the intertwining tapestry of regional provinces, than there is in the industrial cities determined by modern interests.

When asked to divulge something of the strategy for his selecting certain locations over others, having since encamped in cities on sites outside of China. Xiaodong is as reticent to explain what leads him to travel to a new part of the world, as he is to explain the necessity of settling there for such long periods of time. Likened to a peace negotiator on marked earth, the artist absorbs all of the circumstantial evidence as it is laid bare.

Resigned to not knowing, Xiaodong eventually throws anecdotal sound bites my way, before returning to being tight lipped. Explaining that ‘he’ selects his locations, and that he has no predetermined plan for where he will go next; as his pervasive approach to painting translates onto the global stage. For the artist ‘projects’, as he describes them, come one after the other, the specifics of which he is reluctant to explain fully, and the next location outside of China is a tightly guided ‘secret.’ There is a sense then in conversation with Xiaodong, that for the artist the remit for what he does and the manner in which he goes about it, is so incredibly meticulous that he should be allowed to offer very little to a conversation, returning to very simple answers that are like teaspoons of still water, when you feel you deserve a glass. But it still makes for an engaging exchange, in which Xiaodong divulges as much by what he omits from the conversation, as what he carefully chooses to divulge through his more animated translator.

Surprisingly as much as a masterly approach appears to facilitate Xiaodong’s will for making new work; he equally professes to profiting from the ungovernable elements of a project; of which engaging with new communities, eating, drinking, and becoming immersed in their lives, becomes his artistic sustenance and the substance for his work. For the artist when given to considering the properties of location painting, it can be initially about physically building as big a canvas as possible. Discussing scale, he declares an interest in “life-size”; but if the space proves insufficient, he will reduce the scale of the work to fit the revised dimensions. Xiaodong amusingly and very tellingly concludes our time together by saying that when painting, he is little interrupted by any kind of potential audience watching over him paint, because he sees himself “as the tiger scrutinising the rabbit, and able to ignore the trees”.

Clever, capable and spirited, Sahej Rahal belongs to a new generation of Indian artists who have seen the potential success available to them, as it has been attributed to their contemporaries and wish for more of the same. In context Rahal is as articulate as he is well-informed, for his kaleidoscopic knowledge and ability to acquire ideas from recent history with intellectual ease; and for his audience his works are intended to be as complex and uncomfortable as they might first appear. Blemishing one’s imagination as much as they infiltrate our psyche. Therefore it proves positively gratifying to make contact with Rahal now at this point in his career, as it might well have been to have first met Indian art’s contemporary father figure, Subodh Gupta in the early 1990’s; and as much as Gupta developed his reputation with due-diligence, you can appreciate the maturity and like-minded temperament with which Rahal applies himself to his works, and of the direction he is favourably taking. Engagingly the artist’s ideas come as much from the wider world; film, the internet, the international media, literature, and social history, as they do from the immediate detritus of his place of birth, Mumbai. A Sprawling metropolis of slum-dwellers and the very successful, the city reflects Rahal’s intrinsic affirmation for influences and ideas that are bound by religion, science, mythology, story-telling, and history. And as the city’s blueprint continues to absorb its multiple narratives, so Rahal’s works are born of his interest in re-reading and re-interpreting history, whilst investing his own.

Like a societal thread that draws his audience in, in order they are better conditioned to inhale the morose melancholia in his works. Rahal’s practice can be regarded as other-worldly; borrowing from science-fiction, spirituality and the sizable history of modern religion, as his absorbing performative works and unsettling sculptures positively infect their neutral spaces, introducing a darkened atmosphere that overshadows the gallery space. Describing himself as self-confessed ‘Star Wars Nerd’, there is a darker literature that could well serve a new audience scrutinising Rahal’s work. Homer’s Odyssey, the sequel to the Iliad, an extraordinary fable of gods and monsters engaging in ‘the giving and receiving of trouble’. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, The Lord of the Rings series, where giant spiders, violent orcs, wild wolves, and the dungeons of the wood elves, are the odious characters that plague middle-earth; and of a more modern era, American Evangeline Walton with her fantasy fiction, in which she was ‘able to humanise historical and mythological subjects with eloquence, humour and compassion’; all epitomise something of the attractive and traumatic beauty of Rahal’s works.

He himself focuses on specific influences, choosing ‘one book and one film, I’d go with Gravity’s Rainbow and Blade Runner, I think both allow themselves to be read and viewed over and over again, every time throwing out something new.’ Gravity’s Rainbow, written in 1973 by American writer Thomas Pynchon, is a dreadfully difficult book that deals with a whole cast of tormented characters in Europe at the end of the Second World War preoccupied by the Schwarzgerӓt or a ‘black device’ being installed into a rocket marked serial number ‘0000’. And more famously Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian science fiction thriller, Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 American novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which organic robots or ‘replicants’ occupy Los Angeles in November 2019. There is also in Rahal’s works a devilish sensibility that is equally recalled in early film works that include John Barrymore’s, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, and William Cameron’s adaptation of H. G. Wells, Things to Come, that for all their gratifying charm embody a dizzying spirit that hypnotised the cinematic atmosphere as it infects reality. As a modern dictum good and evil have become a by-word for ‘life’, ‘love’ and ‘justice’, as a struggle over deliberate ‘wrong-doing’, ‘torment’ and intended ‘violence’. Yet such polarities are never stable, never regarded as fixed points of reference; as rooted in the ambiguity, between the corruption of good and the prevalence of evil, that Sahej Rahal’s works appear to manifest themselves.

As interested in mythology and religious rites, as he appears to be in history and social circumstance, Rahal’s work appears to hover very effectively between our stable sense of reality and its underlying metamorphosis; as modernity and history effectively become one and the same.

The inventiveness of works like Forerunner, 2013, is palpable, as Rahal’s narrator Rehaan Engineer diligently orchestrates a complex fable of the keeper, who remains unidentified throughout, and his interest in a by-gone age of ‘geometry’, ’symmetry’, and calculated precision. Comprising of a twelve and a half minute video work that begins by spanning the outer atmosphere of earth from space, and then becomes equally as rooted to a depilated building that has succumbed to the forces of natures; and as the visual imagery for Forerunner develops, Engineer becomes more specific in his choreographed narrative, referring to ‘a man’, ‘who vanishes from the apartment room of the first floor’. Whilst the camera pans the enclosed space of the derelict building that appears to have had all of its concrete floors punctured out. And in a moment of rest-bite, as a substantial bolder swings precariously from the floor above, Engineer breaks into more well versed dialogue. Referring to ‘cartographical veracity’, and ‘how the map falls into disrepair’, as a mythical ‘empire’ and dystopian ‘universe’ have dissolved to dust. And further, under the rudimentary lighting of the exhibition space, Engineer hypnotically reels off a whole series of causal effects for the downfall of man. Both man-made and natural, they are seen as the collected evils of history; as word for word, ‘the electric chair’, ‘the gallows’, ‘the guillotine’, ‘the gas chamber’, and ‘stoning’, heighten the ruinous rotation of earth. It proves to be a challenging work, on several levels, though it does require of the audience an intellectual resourcefulness to keep up with such a number of accumulated ideas. Where Forerunner is possibly most dynamic, and visually gratifying (for the residual photographic prints that are available), is Rahal’s choreographed impersonation of Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker grasping a two pronged lightsaber. Which when turned and twisted vigiously in the night sky, reveals an intense creature of light. The immediacy of what the artist attempts to do, in an otherwise stage managed and calculated film, is invigorating in and of itself.

Sculptural works include Helmet, 2013, (wood, coated iron, condensed PVC, and acrylic paint), that Rahal uses as part of the performative piece Bhramana III, 2013. In detail the magnificent coated iron head mask draws attention to itself, as its textural unease is magnified by the theatrical gallery setting. Another is Knuckle, 2013, (brass, condensed PVC, and acrylic paint), which is a discarded knuckle duster, with its characteristic elongated ‘eight’ shaped handle, from which gold coloured biomorphic forms sprout from the handle irregularly. For Rahal ‘Knuckle was actually made using a real knuckle duster that (he) found’, and as he explains he was ‘trying to play with these violent things, make toys of them in some sense.’ There is, as with so many of Rahal’s works, an endearing beauty to the physical form that manifests itself as sculpture. Another Hammer 2012, (Found wooden furniture, plastic, coated iron, condensed PVC, acrylic paint), could well be miscast as a religious ‘implement’ for its biblical appearance. Most engaging of all are the triptych floor sculptures, Walker I, Walker II and Walker III, 2013, (wood, plastic, coated iron, polyester fur, condensed PVC, acrylic paint), that recall something of the apocalyptic premonitions of the Italian 15^th century Fresco, The Triumph of Death. For Rahul ‘The Walkers are definitely (his) love letter to sci-fi. They were made using found objects like coat hangers, a broken ab roller, polyester fur, and polyurethane. They are almost like these little mutations trotting out on this absurd exodus from under the city’s debris.’

As a forerunner for new works, with reality daily compromised by the conditions of ‘rape’, ‘suicide’, ‘torture’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘mass killing’, Rahal clearly has a long way to go before he runs the risk of creative block.

Interview

Rajesh Punj: For an audience unfamiliar with your work can you introduce us to your practice?

Sahej Rahal: I see my work as an expanding metanarrative of that draws from history, myth and pop-culture; and plays out in the context of the city. It’s almost like trying to trace this fictional civilization of absurd beings performing indecipherable rituals in our everyday, and leaving behind this fragmented residues of their tools and toys, before they flee into the cracks in the concrete.

RP: Do you define yourself as a sculptor, video artist, photographer or performance artist?

SR: Star Wars Nerd

RP: You graduated from a fine arts academy in 2011 and then had a solo exhibition at the Kunst Haus, Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland in 2011, how did that come about?

SR: I was selected by Heidi Ernst from the FUTUR Foundation based on my work in art school.

RP: You were then was included in a group show at Chatterjee & Lal; had you already signed to the gallery by then?

SR: I was actually part of two group shows with Chatterjee & Lal in late 2012 which was a year after the FUTUR residency.

RP: Do you think you are an exception to the rule or were many of your contemporaries able to exhibit straight out of art college?

SR: There’s a lot of really interesting work coming from not just art school graduates but people from other art historical and theory based backgrounds as well, right now, a really good example of this is the Sarai Reader 9 exhibition.

RP: Everything appears to have come very quickly for you, do you consider that so? Or do you consider art college good preparation for where you are now?

SR: The art school I went to, Rachana Sansad, was a really great place to learn, especially because we had some really cool people in the faculty who were really pushing for a lot of experimentation, and there were a lot of artists coming in to conduct workshops on new media practices. That said, did feel that there were a lot of gaps in my education in terms of engaging with art history, I’d taken up courses at Jnanapravah and the Bhau Daji Lad Museum which really helped bridge those gaps, and also gave me a chance to engage with people who were engaging with art practice with a lot more critical rigor.

RP: How was your residency in March of this year at Gasworks? Were you performing there?

SR: It was a huge honour to be selected for the Creative India Gasworks Residency, and London itself was an amazing place to work in. I performed the third leg of the Bhramana performances there, at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a Cultural Bastion of the Rococo Period. I found a wooden Didgeridoo in a dumpster in Brixton and made this crusted metallic object out of it that looked like an alien telescope. I was playing the instrument at the gardens during the performance.

RP: Your Bhramana II performance at Chatterjee & Lal, in which you appear to bandage yourself head to toe in cotton, exaggerating your head entirely. What is the purpose of the costume, and what of the instrument or pipe you have propped up and protruding from you horizontally, what should we make of that?

SR: While putting the costume together I had this ethereal warrior-bard figure in my head, bellowing on his otherworldly instrument as he wandered the innards of the Dhobi Talao subway, that said I think of these characters embodying vectors that point towards a range of references across pop-culture, myth and history, they become patchworks that are being pieced together by bits of subjective experience, and the spaces they fleetingly occupy, become sites for a ritual of meaning making.

RP: Are you mocking spirituality or suggesting we have greater need for it?

SR: I’m constantly looking for opposing ways of understanding our everyday, and getting them to collide against each other, but I’m definitely sure I don’t know enough to mock or preach.

RP: Your gallerist describes that your work ‘can be viewed as a growing narrative that draws upon mythical beings from different cultures, and brings them into a dialogue with the present’. How do you envisage our audience to understand these multiple references? And are they likely to lose sight of what you are setting out to do?

SR: I’m not interested in getting an audience to catch every reference, firstly because, that is two steps away from taking on a kind of didactic approach, which I’m uncomfortable with. I’m more interested in setting up these arenas of probability where the past and present can come into flux and can be played with and built upon by the viewer. In effect this narrative is made manifest by everyone engaging with it.

RP: Once you had fully taken on your persona, (as it is referred to), walking through a designated area of the city, in that time were you inviting audience interaction? And were you performing a pre-determined routine or responding to a situation?

SR: Though I go through a rigorous preparation cycle before performing my instinct is to go against it, this allows for the performance to take on its own ephemeral contours.

RP: How many times have you performed Bhramana II?

SR: Bhramana is a series of on-going performances, and each performance is different from the previous one, and performed in different spaces. Bhramana II was the second performance of the series.

RP: It is impossible not to think of Nikhil Chopra and his practice when considering your performative work, what is different about what you do? And was he a major influence?

SR: I learnt a lot from Nikhil, especially while studying under him in art school, what particularly drew me to Nikhil’s practice initially was how he is able to conjure up this vivid and cohesive sense of history almost alchemically. I think of my furry beasts and turbaned bards inhabiting a more shifting and entropic space. 

RP: Did you also have a residency at KHOJ this year, as part of ‘The Arena, the Imagination and the Body’ exhibition?

SR: Yes, I was invited by KHOJ for a month long residency this year. I was working on a film; Forerunner, based on Pir Ghaib, an observatory-slash-hunting lodge, built by Feroz Shah Tughlaq and named after a saint who vanished there.

RP: Can you explain more about the FORERUNNER exhibition that has just opened at Chatterjee & Lal? Besides a new performance for that you have included photographs and sculpture, are these all new works?

SR: Forerunner brings together a lot of the things I have been working on for the last three years, documentation from the Bhramana performances, sculptures that I’ve been working on in my studio in Bombay, and from Gasworks in London, and a film I made at Khoj this year which shares its title with the show.

RP: There appears to be something utterly morose, grotesque even about your work, is beauty something you fear or have much less interest in?

SR: I’m interested in things that fit into the idea of beauty with a measure of awkwardness.

RP: The Groom (2011), what is that work about? And was it part of a performance or entirely a photo-work?

SR: The Groom is a photo-work; I was thinking of this man in waiting, whose grassy mane has grown thick with ennui.

RP: Bhramana I (2012), is another work that is almost impossible to look at for your personas brutish qualities? Are you making reference to the city’s destitute as well as to notions of mythology? How do you understand mythology in a modern setting?

SR: The idea behind taking on the series of Bhramana performances was exactly this, to test the potential for mythmaking within the city, especially in its spaces of commute where narrative of the city, rife with its tensions, plays itself out in real-time.

RP: Included in the FORERUNNER exhibition are Walker I & II (2013), again hideous sculptural monsters that appear to have come from a science fiction film than an art studio, what are they representative for you?

SR: The walkers are definitely my love letter to sci-fi. They were made using found objects like coat hangers, a broken ab roller, polyester fur, and polyurethane. They are almost like these little mutations trotting out on this absurd exodus from under the city’s debris. 

RP: Knuckle (2013), is another that is as troubling as Walker I & II, because there appears to be nothing amiable about the piece, it is utterly damning. Do you see it like that? Do you think we are troubled with ideas and images of the morose and the grotesque, because we are so used to notions of beauty?

SR: Knuckle was actually made using a real knuckle duster that I found, I’m trying to play with these violent things, make toys of them in some sense.

RP: There is something incredibly powerful about the image and the work Tandav III (2012), how did that come about? And is this the closest thing you have to something ‘beautiful’?

SR: Tandav was a video work I made where a figure shrouded in ornate table mats is swinging a pair of tube-lights, the photograph was achieved through a slow shutter shot of the entire ‘blade dance’

RP: What are you working on currently? When do you plan to perform again?

SR: I’m getting ready for my residency in Rome, which begins on August 30^th of this year, and I have been toying around with a little helicopter drone that I’ve got a hold of recently.

RP: Finally can I ask what you are reading right now? And what in Mumbai of many things is a source of inspiration for you? 

SR: I’m reading Wobblies and Zapatistas, a dialogue between Andrej Grubacic and Staughton Lynd on Anarchist and Marxist traditions. Bombay has a weird sense of being able to hold itself together even though it’s always two seconds from bedlam, I think a bit of that bleeds into what I do.