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Contemporary Indian art has often suffered from a Procrustean treatment, with commentators attempting to confine it within the rhetoric of a national culture or a limiting construct like identity. In this essay, I shall approach the subject through the diverse processes and activities by which contemporary Indian artists make their art, often in difficult if not outright critical conditions. We will attend, therefore, to the shuttle spaces between alternative photography and film, to the retrieval of archives in the gap between documentary and fiction and to the space between recording and performance. But we shall also examine the future of a representation of the sphere between morphing and realism, the interplay between the economies of making and reception, and the turbulent recovery of the sacred as a legitimate, long unacknowledged aspect of the contemporary self, often in defiance of a narrow and politicised religiosity. Indian artists have been working in such shuttle spaces: intermediate zones between genres, media, audiences, and different economies of production. Their work is sustained by a renewed quest for autonomy in a historical period characterised by heavily increased yet largely imperceptible controls on individual choice and movement, restrictions on access and passage, surveillance and militarization, as well as the constrictions of an often violent politics of identity based on religion, ethnicity and regional affiliation.Many of these artists seek to locate their being and their practice in alternative sites that are neither state nor market, neither art gallery nor political party. The question, often, is: How to pursue a politics that is not compromised by the political? How to make cultural productions that are not neutralised by the art market? Thus, new kinds of convergences of interest and coalitions of desire have come into being: between the environmental activist and the documentary filmmaker, the photographer and the archivist, the animation specialist and the storyteller. Many of them are committed to democratising the resources of this epoch, the same resources that the controllers would like to use for domination: communications and imaging technologies, networks, access codes, and so forth.Borders and archives have been substantial metaphorical resources for the Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) and for Shilpa Gupta. Myth has served artists like Anant Joshi and Justin Ponmany, not merely as ‘fossil fuel’ for the imagination, but as an open-ended storyline for the self that may assume the form of present-day fairytale, urban folklore, off-anime and self-dramatisation. These artistic projects mediate aesthetic production into political expression; they speak the truth to power at various levels; they expose to view the secret mechanisms of coercion, consent and manipulation. The concept of authorship has also been transformed for artists such as Raqs or Shilpa Gupta shown here. The nature of their work brings them into situations of collaboration with technical specialists, other artists, and representatives of other disciplines. They have thus moved towards an expanded understanding of authorship, with the process of production being distributed over multiple contributors or emerging from dialogues across practices. In this way, artists now re-world themselves, entering spaces that they may not formerly have explored, using hypertext-like connections to pass from one setting to another, crafting fresh lifeworlds and operational contexts for themselves.

Open Platform

Thus, we have seen the emergence of communities of practice based on shared concerns for freedom and democratisation; for instance, the free-software collaboration of Raqs with the Sarai Media Lab, which has produced OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), 2002, whose users can download media objects such as text, images, video and audio, modify the material and upload it. This project is inspired by the principle of recension: the modification of source code so that it yields a harvest of takes and versions, none singularly authoritative, all stimulating in different ways. Raqs stages its interventions in the digital commons as well as in the contested public space of fast-consumerised metropolitan India. With its openness to the conceptions of multiple authorship, the sharing of intellectual property and the proliferation of versions of a narrative, it is not surprising that Raqs should turn its attention to the ancient Indian epics. These, particularly the Mahabharata, are propagated through a constant interplay between the master versions of Sanskrit high literary culture and numerous subaltern and regional versions, versions improvised in performance and in oral accounts. From this engagement emerges The K D Vyas Correspondence: Vol. 1, 2006, in which Raqs translates the hypertextual structure of the epic into epistolary form. Viewers are greeted by a tree of messages, both visual and auditory; we move, among others, from ‘The letter found in a dead letter office’, through ‘The letter of bitter peacetime’, to ‘The letter incriminating the reader’. Shifting among the surreal and the sombre, the magical and the messianic, this is one of Raqs’ most accomplished works; it is charged with a metaphysical poetics of duration, resonance and melancholia.Another successful intervention made in the public sphere, in the interstices between art and activism, is the Cybermohalla (Cyber Neighbourhood) Project which has been collaboratively produced and developed at media labs located in Delhi’s working-class areas by the new media initiative, Sarai (a programme of CSDS, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) and Ankur (Society for Alternatives in Education). Entering the Cybermohalla Project’s multi-media installation, the viewer asks herself the question that gives the work its title: Before coming here, had you thought of a place like this? (2003).This ‘place’ is a meta-site, invisible to the Indian art world and also to the quick-fix NGOs working on issues related to the digital divide. At media labs in the working-class areas of Delhi, a community of young adults from different social and educational backgrounds have been exploring the phenomenology of the technological act, as performed in the interstices between pedagogy and creativity. Their various expressions – computer animations, digital photography, sound recordings, online discussion lists and texts – examine the web of everyday life in urban neighbourhoods, creating an architecture of the colloquial, rich in detail. Their online and offline conversations are presented here, not as neutral information representing urban Indian reality, but as literary and artistic production that is inventive and idiosyncratic. Consider for instance, their digital photographs of mirrored reflections, portraits and inanimate objects. By zooming deep into the image, the boundaries of legibility are pushed until the pixellated squares of differing tones create a definitional blur, an abstraction. This dodge in representation holds a parable for the viewer: by moving closer into an image or a life-world, we do not necessarily comprehend it better. Distance and discernment are equally important tools towards understanding.

Shadow Play

Catastrophe recurs as a theme for several of these artists, revealing an obsessive need to consecrate contested sites, to ward off the forces of conflict and chaos. For instance, Shilpa Gupta works between the extremes of politicised religiosity and aggressive secularisation. She indicates her willingness to implicate herself in an examination of the sacred within a contemporary context. In her recent interactive installations, Gupta works with a spectral but strangely substantial play of shadows and certainties. In this scintillating play of phantoms, the viewers become participants by default, as their shadows, captured by a live camera, interact with the shadow figures generated by a video projection. Is this insistent act of interactivity a cover-up for unabashed surveillance on the artist’s part, a hijacking of the viewer for some serious play? Stripped to their shadows, the participants follow the artist in the fulfilment of their basic, their baser instincts. Gupta mulls over what the viewer may feel in such a situation: “I am part of the shadow! But they didn’t ask my permission, was I born into it? Am I born into my country, into my society, into a religion? But I can step out of it…” Gupta treats the notion of belonging to a religion or a country as a faith that can be transcended; it is not something that one should necessarily be subsumed by.The retrieval of the shadow for contemporary symbolism also fascinates Anant Joshi, who sets up toys on tabletops or in dioramas and simulations of shop-window displays in his multimedia installations. He then projects their shadows on walls, as ominous presences: a brooding urban skyline or an army of demons comes into umbral view. Or we follow the winking of bright lights through a curtain of blades, to find a witch’s oven in which skewered toys are being turned painfully in a sadistic barbeque. Joshi guides us through an inferno of wild animations, infernal machines, toys possessed by evil spells, manic doodles: is this a Hansel and Gretel scenario, or are we being offered a glimpse of the Guantanamo Bay syndrome? The ludic element in Joshi’s work is associated with three different sources in theatre: first, traditional shadow puppetry; secondly, the magic lantern and the zoetrope; and thirdly, the makeshift world economy in which Chinese toys are cheaply available on Bombay streets. Joshi alludes, also, to the consumerist hysteria that has seized urban India, with its emphasis on trashy use-and-throw commodities and the wasteful celebration of an illusory surplus, which creates a superficial sense of abundance.

Transnationalism

Justin Ponmany shares a consciousness that was framed by the burgeoning early-1990s ethos of cable television and cyberspace. Ponmany began to use hologram surfaces to propose urban landscapes and elements of contemporary heraldry that could be seen in various resolutions, as they emerged to meet the eye from the specially treated surface. In his recent works, Ponmany explodes the very idea of a photographic panaroma by producing 360-degree panoramic close-ups, expanded portraits of subaltern Indians. Ponmany depicts the absurdity of mapping and surveillance when he opens out a man’s head like a flattened globe, a vulnerable stretched map of skin and hair that parodies the generously invasive satellite photographs of Google Earth or the punitive forensics of the Identikit.And lastly, artists like Sonia Khurana prove that privacy as a mode of representation need not be defined as an escape from the public domain; instead, privacy becomes a politicised space (I have in mind Khurana’s use of nakedness as a provocation). This helps us reflect on the collision between the secret self and public codes of conduct, and the eruption of the Other or Others within the self, even if implied rather than direct. Khurana’s naked encounter with her own body in the video performance Bird (1999) plays on questions related to gender in an insensitive patriarchal society. At the outset, ‘Bird’ is about the failed attempts of a woman who is trying to fly, to take off from a room without doors. But Khurana’s performance breaks the spell of lyrical beauty that is associated with such themes. She turns the performance into a tragi-comic play. While some of her movements border on Chaplinesque slapstick, the rolling of the body on the ground and the quick abstract montage of body parts turns the artist’s body into a weapon against the beauty-contest economy. Her performance, a private act of the self set in friction with the social physicality of the body, interrogates the myth of the slim female body propagated by the beauty pageant industry. For Khurana, her body’s nakedness is, paradoxically, her body’s shield. Even in this early work, we realise that while Bird can be read as a questioning of stereotypical representation of the female body, Khurana is imaging a language of loss, homelessness and abandonment. In her performance of the mad woman in the Flower Carrier, when she finds ‘ugliness unbearable’ (a reference to Kundera’s Immortality), she makes a walking pilgrimage through a city with a single forget-me-not, passing through crowds and braving the stares of children, focusing on the one symbol of beauty and redemption in her hands to the exclusion of the world and its violence and corruption.As is evident from this account, all these artists are simultaneously focused on the regional as well as on the transnational: they benchmark themselves in relation to fellow practitioners in other countries and similar situations; they have their own stories to tell and images to project, but are attentive to what their counterparts elsewhere are preoccupied with. This attitude marks a striking move away from the diffidence/ aggressiveness syndrome of earlier generations, and points us towards a future in which Indian artists will take their place