Curatorial Culture
“It was important to me, at least in this book, that violence remain independent from any character’s self-worth, rendering it inert, terrible, and felt—but not a means of “development.” Through Kishōtenketsu, violence becomes fact and not a vehicle towards a climax. Having been a student mainly of Western literature, it became clear to me that the most perennial protagonist is not necessarily the main character, but conflict-driven plot. In Western narratology, the plot is the dominant mode to which all characters are subordinate. But I wanted a novel to hold these characters thoroughly and, most importantly, on their own terms, free from a system of governance, even one of my own making. I could not employ the plot-heavy strategy because I needed these people to exist as they are, full of stories but not for a story.”1
https://lithub.com/ocean-vuong-the-10-books-i-needed-to-write-my-novel
We all engage with questions related to the forms and premises of the “system of govern-ance” that introduces into a work multiple subjectivities and stories, which then proceed to interlace and collide. In exhibition-making, through the curatorial act, such questions run through an exhibition — either explicitly or implicitly — from the first announcement to the last review.
As a writer, Vuong expresses sentiments that seem to be at the core of the discomfort shared by practitioners of the curatorial mode:
Are we implicitly trapped within an already assumed intellectual and cultural narratology?
And: Are we continuously crafting ways of doing things that keep certain tendencies at bay and
working out modalities that can bring in different kinds of co-habitation?
And: What is the mechanism — and how do we seek it — of “freeing” the weights of habitual narrative entrapments?
Every exhibitionary frame works within a milieu. But it also creates a milieu, in which it streams the diverse currents that it encounters, and from which it amplifies. This is how exhibitions partake in the making of populous milieux through their practices. Formed of stratified sediments, hibernating worlds and immediate urgencies, all complexities also contain multiple milieux. This marks the relevance and critical force of this mode of thinking.
About time horizons, a minor detour.
If you are in CERN in Geneva (as we were, recently), walking through accelerator tunnels and staring at solenoids in detectors, it is commonplace to hear of human beings’ limited perception of space-time as an obstacle to a radical comprehension of the universe: Here time horizons bend to an incomprehensibility, that fraction, that millionth of the moment at the beginning, when matter and time emerged.
Or if you were in silent meditation session (which we step into sometimes), or under an influence of a psychotropic substance (which we step into sometimes), then to feel a loos-ening of the grip over your mind’s ability to coherently formulate reality is commonplace. These are demanding experiments and experiences.
All of this to leads us back to the curatorial: it is an engagement with both the question of the milieu and the multiplicity of time-horizons.
Let us begin with a Scroll of Sources for an exhibition. We shared this scroll with the artists we were in conversation with for the exhibition “In the Open or in Stealth” at MACBA, Barcelona last year.2
https://experimenter.in/2018-conversation-with-jeebesh-bagchi.html
- A juggler’s ability to make appear new images appear, a kind of afterimage, (early 20th century)
- An erotic print portraying the embrace of an octopus, (1814)
- Harry Houdini’s techniques of escape from confinement, (1930)
- The laws of courtly love in early medieval Europe, (1500)
- The emergence of suicidal tendencies in Robots, (2017)
- Our own delineation of a mathematical equation for forms of anacoustic reasons, (2006)
- A notion of the unfolding of contiguous infinity in the performance of a raga, or mode, in Hindustani classical music (1997)
- And a glimmer of a radiance emanating from a reading of the gaps in the transition from human to automated labour in worker’s newspaper in a north Indian Factory town. (2017)
This gathering of seemingly unrelated fragments constitutes and gestures to the making of a milieu. An archipelago of meanings and resonances ties them together — dexterity, liberation, limit, longing, utterance, love, fear, infinity and radiance all come together in a way that makes sense in the now, in the present.
By themselves, each of these particular moments would be considered insignificant or mi-nor or peripheral. But in their re-alignment and re-drawing through each other, they sus-pend a frame that acts as a riddle and an enigma, which further demands a sustained ex-amination, elaboration and extension. An exhibition, then, becomes a specific rendering among many other possible renderings. It is one option among many options. It is not a unity that is searched for and consolidated, but a plurality of complexities, each drawing from each other and yet diverging from each other.
We quote from a text, “Upon the Fabricatory, In the Open or in Stealth, a Viewer Braids a Verse”, by Shveta Sarda, published in the online journal Quaderns Portatils (or QP for short) of the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA).3
https://img.macba.cat/public/uploads/publicacions/quaderns_portatils/QP_36_InTheOpen_F4.pdf
Confidence is tested; arguments for a retake on lost time unfold everywhere, at all times. These warrant an awareness of the present moment. Every new generation has to rethink its own ways out of the psychotropic force and nature of our attachment to this world. It has a grip that is both ingenious and cruel; it has to be re-crafted, re-viewed and asked questions of. Its hold loosens, then grips, loosens again and grips again. And again. (a source) ‘And then a robot, scanning 360 degrees, hearing with its sensitive microphones, checking the air with its sensors, reviewing the images it has gathered, walked into a fountain. It let go, in solidarity with everything around it.’
A state change is possible because we have innumerable states within us. Being overpowered and forced from one state to another is what leaves us feeling ambushed, blindsided, dispossessed, and thus keeps not just us from ours, but also our worlds from their potential. And yet, we all also have uncountable moments when that tiny fraction within – which cannot be absorbed and which keeps up its whirling and its tending towards unintelligibility and illegibility, between remaining unfixed and becoming unplaceable – gathers force.
For Glissant, the slave leaves a shore but returns as someone else—a free entity. She returns multiplied. The unity of enslaving wills gives way to the multiplicity of liberating will. The itinerary of the former slave changes the source from which the slave arose. That orbit—which produced some of the greatest poetry and music in the world—shows how the future transforms the way we see the past.
A profusion of sources, of seven billion people, could be discovered—some of these fictionally invented, and some activated as they lie hibernating, in wait. Just as the forest floor does not parcel out the benefits of its layers of compost according to the decomposition of individual fallen autumn leaves, so too, we recognize that the fertility of our time is a distributed milieu, made of many milieux.
To be within the “curatorial” is to witness within and around ourselves the collision of ar-tistic forms and the diverse sources of world-making. There are head-on collisions, un-foreseen accidents, jolts born of contact, eerie afterimages, and quiet readings that go against the grain of accepted interpretations.
At present, we are engaged in a yearlong process in Delhi, the city in which we live, and Kolkata, which lies a few hundred miles to the east, in conjunction with the Goethe Insti-tutes. It is a project that we call “Five Million Incidents”5 , and in it, instead of being “curators” or “artistic directors”, we call ourselves “catalysts” of an unfolding situation and work with a collegium of mentors and custodians. We have set a process in motion, and now remain attentive to its chemistry as it unfolds.
https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf183/2nd-call-for-proposals_fmi.pdf
For More Information on Five Million Incidents at the Goethe Institut – Delhi & Kolkata
https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/kul/sup/fmi.html
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/61969/why-not-ask-again-arguments-counter-arguments-and-stories/
Five Million Incidents are underway. This undertaking is a thickening of space by time. This is why we foreground the idea of an incident, or an episode.
An incident is a fold in time: an occurrence, an encounter, a sighting, an event in time and in memory; a quickened heartbeat, an epiphany, a flash of insight, an outbreak of goose-bumps, a moment of excitement, an encounter with a person or an object that transforms the way you live or think, a conversation that carries a wake with it, an event that makes you rethink everything. An hour can be crowded with incidents, and years may pass without incident. Incidents depend on recognition, experience, sensory quickening, and alertness. They may also rely on slowing down, reflection, thoughtfulness, and ripeness. Thinking and interacting with incidents is a mode of conscious engagement with time.
Each artist produces her own interpretation of what an incident can be – sometimes it lasts an afternoon, sometimes a few months. Looked at another way, contact and confrontation, in art as in life, are occasions for the multiplication of generative misunderstandings, or a sort of generative collision. The “trans” in trans-disciplinarity (a term used in the title of the original invitation which prompted us to give this talk) is suggestive, for us, of a fluid state of plasma between different modes of practice, thinking, and becoming. It asserts a non-assertion of primacy, even as it prioritizes different modes of doing, acting, thinking for different purposes, in a way that is always alert both to the specificity of a hosting context as well as the desire for a plurality of planetary horizons.
This form of curatorial “trans-action” is to know and hold an egalitarian, non-rivalrous stance between divergent, and occasionally even contrary, arcs of making, vision and ut-terance. We could think of these too as “sources”; they act like the water sources of a nat-ural ecosystem—sometimes linked to each other through subterranean channels, some-times isolated from each other, but at all times they act as nodes of sustenance, refresh-ment, and nourishment. Thus we allow them to be contagious and contiguous with each other.7
https://www.on-curating.org/issue-35-reader/sources-itineraries-and-the-making-of-a-thicket.html#.XmDczxMzZPM
In the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, which we curated with the title “Why Not Ask Again”,8 we drew from the histories of cinema and science fiction to generate a conversation around the importance of precise historical moments within the second half of the 20th century. By asking questions of these sources, we were able to move into specific sub-jectivities and embark upon a philosophical quest. This was nested within a dance of ide-as, memories, prophecies and images.
http://www.shanghaibiennale.org/en/exhibition/year_topic/92.html
One of the ways in which an oppressive sense of historicity deprives us of agency is through a conscious or unconscious limitation on the kind of “sources” that can be ac-cessed in the course of a contemporary practice or conversation. To us, the contemporary is a space in which we can all join the ridiculed and halted and mythopoeic marriage pro-cession of Shiva, or Bhole ki baraat. 9 The god Shiva went to his wedding in a raucous procession. The wedding party included wild animals, outcasts of all kinds, ghosts, and goblins; these marchers had distorted, im-perfect bodies, unresolved consciousnesses, and were in delirious moods and states of be-ing. The story of Shiva’s wedding ends with Shiva being insulted by his in-laws for the character of his companions. Enraged, the god danced a dance of destruction, tandava, in response. Shiva could well have been Nietzsche’s favorite god.
http://utkarshspeak.blogspot.com/2011/03/lord-shivas-wedding-procession.html
For more on Siva’s wedding procession in Classical Indian Sculpture see also The Presence of Siva, by Stella Kramrisch, Motilal Banarasidass, 1988
Such processions will always find it difficult to enter the historical record, and by exten-sion the museum. Rather, these unruly energies are detours. They take paths and seek connections that do not yet exist; they play with instruments whose sound has yet to find an amplifier. Biennales sit on that cusp that Hannah Arendt marked as the present––the indistinct zone between the “no longer” and the “not yet”.10 It is a tight rope dance, as in the Paul Klee’s painting.11
Upon our original sources of cinema and science fiction, we added the scaffolding of a “sensation of thought”. This further allowed the exhibition to become a creature that could argue and listen, speak with eloquence, tell riddles, express complexities, and be playful or taxing. Unhindered by immutable affirmations, the experience of the exhibition could be either personal or distant, depending on the trajectories of these discourses through the world of an individual mind.
Here we would like to go back to one of our own projects, which has fertilized a great deal of our thinking on sources today. The project was called “OPUS” (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification)12, at this point we think it interesting to share our memories of it.
http://www.ocopy.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/raqs-media-collective_a-concise-lexicon-of-for-the-digital-commons.pdf
“OPUS”, a do-it-yourself online platform, made a claim to the creation and sustenance of a potentially global digital commons. Just as the urban pioneers who squatted in unoccu-pied spaces created new zones of habitation in Delhi by extending the city’s commons, and as in accordance with the principles of free software––the freedom to download, modify, and redistribute––so too, OPUS users could create, extend, and maintain their corner of a digital commons by uploading, downloading, sharing, and transforming con-tent in different media. A “ball” of cultural material could be “passed” and “tackled” by different players in a never-ending session of digital ginga.13
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/brazil/ginga-the-soul-of-brazilian-football-23805/
Each act of transforming or tagging a ‘source’ media file contributed to the creation of what the OPUS system, borrowing a term from philology, called Rescensions.14 Rescensions are non-rivalrous-iterations of clusters of signs which are related to each other through the acknowledgement of descent from a common sources. This means that the system could draw visualizations of relationships between different objects, based on word frequency distributions in the metatags.
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/sg_sea/Opus.html
If anything, the operational protocols of OPUS demonstrated that a source could never be viewed as a mere resource. A source does not simply lie inert like a seam of raw materials in the ground waiting to be mined and extracted. When we invoke a source, it is with an awareness of its already thickened life as well as of its potential efflorescence. A particular instance of rescension does not preclude or exclude the existence of other instances. When a plurality of rescensions derive themselves from more than one set of sources, the paths of their iterations collide and entangle with each other, creating thickets of meaning as they grow.
In time, even rescensions become new sources. When even one of these source-recensions miscegnates with another, it imbues “source-ness” with multiplicity, producing invented and inventive fraternities and sororities of affiliation. The paths of different recensions are inflected by their fealties and their magnetic attractions towards different sources and their emanations.
This leads to curving, eccentric orbits, as recensions travel in the space between different acts of creation and transformation. The tracing of these curving paths leads to the mark-ing of a whole new set of relationships between widely dispersed actions. These relation-ships are constantly on the move – one can speak of them as having itineraries. A source, when it emits a rescension, also reveals an itinerary. Itineraries circulate and transport memes, images, and ideas with great energy, unimpeded by any blockages, since nothing stops them from entering into new combinations or finding new paths. As such, no partic-ular source or recension ever gets to dominate a system of linked meanings, affects or in-formation.
The recently released Sourcebook15 of the forthcoming Yokohama Triennale, which we are currently curating, is a gathering of sources, which embrace the formation of a milieu with ideas of care, toxicity, auto-didacticism, friendship, luminosity, persistence and radiance — all of which come together in a way that helps make sense of the now, in the now. The Sourcebook registers this atti-tude and records it as the curatorial framework’s awareness of itself. One source opens the door to another, and then another, and another.
https://raqsmediacollective.net/sourcebook_en.pdf
This Sourcebook learns from Nishikawa Kimitsu, a Yokohama day laborer16, who em-bodies what it means to be a curious sojourner, an autodidact adrift in the universe. Else-where, it gleans from two historical itineraries on caring for the self and others. In 16th century Southern India, heavenly bodies, plants, minerals, animals, and angels fill the Deccani book Nujum al ’ulum (Stars of the Sciences)17, which was written as a “medi-cine to care for the lives of friends”. And then, a hundred odd years ago, Hariprabha Mal-lik18 departed a town in what is now Bangladesh to travel to Japan for the love of a stranger, Takeda Uemon. Her memoir dives into the creation of a farm and a kitchen as she traverses a foreign world.
Nishikawa’s connection of the street to the cosmos, the “friendships” between the many forms of life and matter in the 16th century Deccani manuscript, and Hariprabha Takeda’s journey all illuminate different corners of consciousness. They point to energies that irradiate co-existing and complex forms of life. The biologist Shimomura Osamu19 has spent a lifetime researching the phenomenon of bio-luminescence. The theorist and writer Svetlana Boym seeks the luminosity of friendship in her essay, “The Scenography of Friendship.”20
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/36/ boym.php
To quote from our essay in the Sourcebook, where we speak of flickering light,
A friend, the artist and philosopher Svetlana Boym, wrote about a kind of light in her essay “Scenography of Friendship”.
“In circumstances of extremity… illuminations do not come from philosophical concepts but from the ‘uncertain, flickering and often weak light’ that men and women kindle and shed over the lifespan given to them. This luminous space where ‘men and women come out of their origins and reflect each other’s sparks’ is the space of humaneness and friendship that sheds light on the world of appearances we inhabit. In other words, friendship is not about having everything illuminated or obscured, but about conspiring and playing with shadows. Its goal is not enlightenment but luminosity, not a quest for the blinding truth but only for occasional lucidity and honesty.”
“One by one many people came to meet us. Young or old, they took off their caps, sat on folded knees and bowed to each other in greetings. They introduced themselves, greeted each other, asked about our health, gave thanks and expressed their joy at meeting us. At each exchange of question and answer, it was expected to bow three or four times to each other.
Since I knew no Japanese, I bowed silently.”
If you do not know how to say something to a stranger, you can still glow, as one does sweating after a day’s labour. Or you may simply share your shadow with them, creating an outline of light in the narrow space where your shadow shies away from meeting theirs. A form of knowledge grows out of the jostling of untranslatable experi-ences.
https://lithub.com/ocean-vuong-the-10-books-i-needed-to-write-my-novel/
https://experimenter.in/2018-conversation-with-jeebesh-bagchi.html
https://img.macba.cat/public/uploads/publicacions/quaderns_portatils/QP_36_InTheOpen_F4.pdf
https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf183/2nd-call-for-proposals_fmi.pdf
For More Information on Five Million Incidents at the Goethe Institut – Delhi & Kolkata
https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/kul/sup/fmi.html
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/61969/why-not-ask-again-arguments-counter-arguments-and-stories/
https://www.on-curating.org/issue-35-reader/sources-itineraries-and-the-making-of-a-thicket.html#.XmDczxMzZPM
http://www.shanghaibiennale.org/en/exhibition/year_topic/92.html
http://utkarshspeak.blogspot.com/2011/03/lord-shivas-wedding-procession.html
For more on Siva’s wedding procession in Classical Indian Sculpture see also The Presence of Siva, by Stella Kramrisch, Motilal Banarasidass, 1988
http://www.ocopy.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/raqs-media-collective_a-concise-lexicon-of-for-the-digital-commons.pdf
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/brazil/ginga-the-soul-of-brazilian-football-23805/
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/sg_sea/Opus.html
https://raqsmediacollective.net/sourcebook_en.pdf
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/36/ boym.php