This year at Artel 2018 we will work with eight Artists-in-Residence towards investigating the curatorial framework “To Participate In The Archive”. The Archive is proposed as the site and trope for inquiry and arts production. Participants will be exploring both public and private collections, documenting new histories and social maps, working with performative recreations, and also probe the internet. The project looks at the role of the artist as a participant, their socio-political ecology as a collaborator, and other participatory processes as collective labour.

The order of an archive is defined in a certain way; how can the inquiry within it, or production of new archives bring to surface the politics of archiving and archives? How do we acknowledge the shortcomings, or the stakes of exhibited archives? What does constant appropriation of proposed positions of the archive do to the original archive in itself? How do we attach social memory and oral histories within the archive, what is then the role of an artist and stakes of participating in the archive?

ASSEMBLY OF ACCESS | Vidisha Saini

Body, Space & The Archive

to participate you need to access

access is created when there is participation

access only for those whose body offers itself as data

does the body choose to perform

or the body has no choice

how does a phantom body access

is the access also offered when the archive wants to exhibit itself

is this space for the body or the phantom

how does one create a public

how does the public know it is curious about the archive

when the public is curious about itsstory

how is orality considered in this archive

can the witness change their story

can my scan be my body

is the scan held accountable

not the speech to the jury

bodies amend the access when they employ an occupation

if you assemble you secure

the archive is the assemblage

it has a structure

it doesn't have a structure it only has control

there are only matters of concern

not solid

how does either side of the river measure

how wide is the water

LETTERS TO MY FATHER | Sandip Kuriakose

Letters to my father is inspired by the story of my father’s four-year study at the Papal Seminary (Pontifical Athanaeum) situated on Ramvadi, Nagar Road, Pune in the late sixties (1965-69). This program for priests in training, that continues to be offered, runs for eight years and is divided into two batches of four years each: one of Philosophy and the other of Theology. Due to a complex set of motivations, my father decided to leave his training incomplete to come to Delhi and pursue his education outside of the Church. Looking at those years, the institution, its curriculum, my father’s navigation of that space and its teachings, and his motivations to leave; I have tried to question the explore the understandings of the archive at various levels, the state, the church and the personal.

REDRAWING PUNE |  Vidhya Mohankumar

Spatial archives of cities are seldom created by its people. Our reading of cities is largely through maps that are created by the use of land survey techniques or texts written from the author’s standpoint or images that frame a specific perspective. As a contrast to these practices, this work is about redrawing Pune through a narrative of preferences of its residents, these preferences collated through 215 interactive surveys conducted at various locations in the city [including Camp, Peth, etc.] to understand the live-work-play-avoid dynamics of Pune residents. These survey responses are then spatially mapped to form a series of diagrams representing an alternate atlas of Pune as perceived by its residents. The representations are also presented as a critique of the limitations of such surveys as a tool for assimilating data and presenting them as an insipid and incomplete representation of the whole.

CYBORG  ARCHIVE | Ali Akbar Mehta

We live in a networked world where we no longer just shape the communication technology around us, but are shaped by it in return. We are already Cyborgs, not the sci-fi amalgamations of flesh and flesh and wires, but in a more profound sense – a human/technology symbiont; and so are our archives.

Every body is an archive, and every archive is an embodiment of knowledge.

The series of performance installations replace the familiar technology we depend upon, with human cognition and brain power, to explore how archives function, what can they do, and what are their limits.

PSYCHIC DISTURBANCES: AIRPORT SERIES | Parsa Sanjana Sajid

Airports evoke progress, the idea of arriving, finally, at some glittering destination, what’s commonly known as “development” in the global south. Building an airport in and around a city is an investment of herculean proportions and often also seen as an investment in that oft-repeated, yet amorphous and even empty expression, future. After all, what future are we talking about and whose future?

In Pune, an airport proposal has been brewing for some time, an international airport that many of the city’s residents also want. An airport, that for some would satiate their practical as well as psychic needs. One of course wonders why the idea of progress is so tied with the idea of an airport. And the same questions, what kind of progress and for whom? After facing resistance and administrative hurdles, the proposed airport site was moved from Chakan to Purandar.

Seven villages in Purandar have been marked for the Pune international airport. Seven villages, their residents, community, livelihood to be supplanted by an airport that for the residents, as they say, has no use. The villagers rightly ask who then is it for. Why should they be the collateral in the construction of a future in which they have no stake.

[The materials in the exhibition, interviews, statements, texts, should be seen as part of an ongoing conversation.]

Various components:

• Measuring tape x-rayed

• Villager interviews on stamp paper (first hand interviews conducted in January 2018 at Purandar)

• Chief Minister’s statements collected from media sources stamped with found texts

• Airport protest banner reproduced (the banner was used in a protest against the airport on and around Diwali 2017)

• Marathi supplement of “Dudiyora Horaata”

• Small cards with found texts rubber stamped

• Display of bulbs that don’t shine

FICTITIOUS FACTS | Katrin Winkler

The video installation »fictitious facts« approaches the space of the National Film Archive of India/ NFAI and the Prabhat Studio at the Film and Television Institute of India/ FTII through cinematic means: showing fragments of its architectural space, traces of everyday use and selected archival material of film history by employees of the NFAI: Mrs Arti V. Karkhanis, Mrs Veena and Mr. P. A. Salam.

The dialogues, as a collage of different subtitles of various films, are found on https://indiancine.ma, a project by Pad.ma Public Access Digital Media Archive, initiated by CAMP. The search keywords are:

Pune, language, archive, see, translation, listen, narrate, film, colonial, power, knowledge, state, national, access, move…The dialogues do not follow a stringent rule- so sometimes even the continuing conversation without the keyword is used.

»fictitious facts« attempts to activate the space of the archive through a personal approach as I experienced the building itself as magical.- film memories and film dialogues of different films and time periods are communicating with each other on the hallway…

[… Katrin has documented the site of the Archive, the building as a repository itself. The building and the administration also perform for her camera, to showcase its sincerity to its legacy. The appearances of nationally awarded films posters, and other documents, make us realise the importance of such an archive, and imagine the possibilities if it were to have open access. The juxtaposed subtitles are the narrator to us walking through these building, almost as if it were echoes or ghosts in those spaces.]

Special Thanks to:

NFAI: P.A. Salam, Mrs Arti V. Karkanis, Mrs Veena Librarian at NFAI, Director of NFAI, Sumit and Krisna of NFAI,

FTII: Shrenik Mutha, Trishla, Anagha, Karan, Vidisha, Ali, Kaushal, Sandip, Himanshu, Dito, Parsa, Vidhya,

CAMP, Ashok Sukumaran, https://indiancine.ma

REAL  PARTICIPATION  PIECE | Himanshu S

Work number one : real participation  piece, through the span of the  residency, emails were sent to 600 people inviting them to participate  in the making of a space for independent publications and a travelling independent publications show. All the people whom emails were sent were people who at some point of time shown  liking and interest in participating, for this kind of work. The space would be an ever evolving site for independent publications, the travels would further this cause. What we see here is the request that was sent, further explaining the need for such a space and the responses received, the negative, the positive and the ambiguous.  

Work number two: jaane bhi do yaaro, a song/dialogue book based  on re-visiting six films, with the state of mind me has been in January  2018, the films were, ‘gaman’ (1978), ‘albert pinto ko gussa kyon ata  hai’ (1980), ‘jaane bhi do yaaro’ (1983), ‘ardh satya’ (1983), ‘aghaat’ (1985), ‘salim langde pe mat ro’ (1989).

Work number three: real participation piece (live), through the two  days of the open studio, will approach everyone above the age of  fifteen, to participate in the making of a space for independent publications and a travelling independent publications show. The  responses will be added to the already existing real participation  piece. 

AJJICHI FACTORY | Kaushal Sapre

(GRANDMOTHER'S FACTORY) 

To archive is to remember. In this work I have tried to explore the differences and the politics of two technologies of remembering. The first concerns the very bodily act of remembering a lived experience -  as articulated by my grandmother describing a typical workday at the Hindustan Antibiotics Limited, Pimpri - a penicillin factory where she worked for more than forty years of her life.

The second is the omnipresent, post-industrial surveillance apparatus of the Google Earth database-- a military born consumer program that renders a 3D representation of the earth using satellite imagery.

While the initial engagement with Google Earth began as a mnemonic device to help my grandparents navigate through the factory, the process of working led me to intervene within the fabric of the satellite imagery obtained from the program itself.

A MAP DRAWN FROM THE MEMORY | Dito Yuwono

[Dito Yuwono has engaged with the group of staff at Hotel Shalimar, he presents some maps of their mobility in the city across the river, and the role of time in the mapping of their geography. He also works with some of their personal photographs, and other oral narratives, looking at the questions around urbanism, migration and culture.]

Press

http://www.sakaltimes.com/art-culture/not-your-regular-archive-11900