Sheela Gowda

launch interview with Sheila Gowda

Sheela Gowda's work occupies the spaces between painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Initially trained as a painter, Gowda underwent a profound transformation in the wake of fundamentalist Hindu violence and the Bombay riots of 1992. It was at this time that she abandoned conventional forms of painting and turned to sculpture and installation. She also made a dramatic shift in her choice of materials, incorporating into her work substances and processes from traditional Indian culture such as cow dung, which has sacred implications but is also used as a domestic cooking fuel and building material, and Kum Kum, a red dye used for body adornment and rituals. Consciously blurring the line between fine art and craft, and between creative, political, and domestic spaces, she makes formal investigations into the possibilities of contemporary art while also questioning the role of female subjectivity in the often volatile mix of religion, nationalism, and violence in contemporary Indian society.

Moving between two- and three-dimensionality, these works offer uniquely conceptual and formal challenges to the architecture of the gallery space while subtly evoking metaphors of loss and healing. Her work And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001), for example, can be read on many levels. Its snaking coils of glued and dyed thread and needles might bring to mind the pain of female domestic life in a patriarchal society, and at the same time it might be seen as a reference to the formal gestures of Jackson Pollock's drips or Eva Hesse's experiments in postminimalist sculptural form.

Indicative of this balancing act between form and content is Gowda's Private Gallery (1999/2000), a freestanding installation composed of two door-sized sheets of Formica attached to make a corner. Although the facade presents an industrially manufactured decorative surface, when one enters the "private gallery" by walking behind it, a completely different world is on view. The reverse side of this clean Formica structure is patterned with thumb-sized pats of cow dung that have been applied over a thin, painterly wash made of the same material. Attached to this surface is a sequence of watercolor renditions of people and places in the artist's home city of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. In this work, as in the history of the hyperdevelopment of Bangalore itself, the urban and the rural come crashing together. Gowda's gallery offers a public and a private face to this onrush of globalization, being sure to humanistically honor (the mark of the hand with cow dung) those who are being displaced in the process.

Gowda has had a number of solo exhibitions since the late 1980s at, among other venues, Venkatappa Art Gallery, Bangalore (1993 and 1987); Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, India (1993) for Anatomy of Sacrilege; and Gallery 7, Mumbai (1989). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions such as Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia at the Asia Society, New York, New York (1996), and the Johannesburg Biennial, South Africa (1995).

--Douglas Fogle

And Tell Him of My Pain
Sheela Gowda

1998/2001
thread, pigment, glue, needles
variable dimensions
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Julie and Babe Davis Acquisition Fund, 2002

And Tell Him of My Pain is a multilayered work that can be read on many levels. Moving between two- and three-dimensionality, its snaking coils of glued and kum kum-dyed threads and needles subtly evoke metaphors of loss and healing. By choosing to leave the needles at the end of the innumerable threads, Gowda hints at the pain of female domestic labor in a patriarchal society, as evinced by the title. Consciously blurring the line between fine art and craft, and between creative, political, and domestic spaces, the artist makes formal investigations into the possibilities of contemporary art while also questioning the role of female subjectivity in the often volatile mix of religion, nationalism, and violence in contemporary Indian society.

Private Gallery
Sheela Gowda

1999/2000
cow dung, board, lamination board, watercolor on paper
78 x 43 x 1-1/2 in.
198.1 x 109.2 x 3.8 cm
Courtesy the artist, Bangalore, India

Indicative of this balancing act between form and content is Gowda's Private Gallery, a free-standing installation composed of two door-sized sheets of lamination board attached to make a corner. Although the facade presents an industrially manufactured decorative surface, when one enters the "private gallery" by walking behind it, a completely different world is on view. The reverse side of this clean structure is patterned with thumb-sized pats of cow dung that have been applied over a thinner, painterly wash made of the same material. Attached to this surface is a sequence of watercolor renditions of people and places in the artist's home city of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. In this work, as in the history of the hyperdevelopment of Bangalore itself, the urban and the rural come crashing together. Gowda's gallery offers a public and a private face to this on rush of globalization, being sure to humanistically honor (through the handprint in dung) those who are being displaced in the process.

Anita Dube

launch interview with Anita Dube

Initially trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube creates works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomeno-logical experience. Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the realms of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), the body (dentures, bone), and the readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a very human concern with both personal and societal loss and regeneration. Dube came to her sculptural practice through her involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of young artists formed in the 1980s in Baroda whose self-styled critical social and political consciousness contrasted with the more established, self-conscious narrative painting of the so-called Baroda School.

In 1997, Dube began working with a new material, the industrially manufactured ceramic eyes that are affixed to Hindu religious statues commonly found in Indian temples. She initially used these variably sized eyes in site-specific ways, attaching them to the spot in a room where the ceiling meets two walls to form a corner, as in Intimations of Mortality (1997). In works such as Disease (River) (1999), the ceramic eyes began to move, branching out across the wall like a virus or a flooding river. Although her work evokes a number of meanings, one can think about these wall pieces in terms of the various modes of human migration in the contemporary world. As Dube suggests, "The eyes are like people for me and this could speak of large migrations in history." In this light, the eyes take on less of a horror-film quality and instead stand in metonymically for the mass of humanity that has been forced to relocate due to political persecution, economic deprivation, or the relentless effects of global development that push people from the countryside into the city. This use of the sculptural fragment to subtly invoke a humanist critical agenda speaks to her uncompromising desire to tangentially address the social through metaphorical means.

Dube's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Nature Morte in New Delhi (2000), and Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, India (1999). Her work has appeared in a number of group exhibitions, including Alchemy at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, England (2002); ARS 01 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2001); the Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2001); and the VII Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2000-2001).

--Douglas Fogle

Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai

2003
mixed media
variable dimensions
Courtesy the artists
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center

". . . for us, the creation of a sarai was to create a 'home for nomads' and a resting place for practices of new media nomadism. Traditionally, sarais were also nodes in the communications system (horse-mail!) and spaces where theatrical entertainments, music, dervish dancing, and philosophical disputes could all be staged. They were hospitable to a wide variety of journeys--physical, cultural, and intellectual. In medieval Central and South Asia, sarais were the typical spaces for a concrete translocality, with their own culture of custodial care, conviviality, and refuge. They also contributed to syncretic languages and ways of being. We would do well to emulate even in part aspects of this tradition in the new media culture of today. . . . This might create oases of locatedness along the global trade routes of new media culture."--Raqs Media Collective

This is precisely the intention of Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai in How Latitudes Become Forms--a place for social intercourse, both onsite and translocally; a place for the investigation of both artists' work and the exhibition context.

The Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, are proponents of what they have named da-me or no-good architecture. Multilayered structures with varied uses (underpass + cinema + bar + barbershop + store, for example), these buildings epitomize, for them, a new creative, adaptive aesthetic.

Walker commissioned Raqs and Bow-Wow to collaborate on a Temporary Autonomous Sarai--something that was physically modest, intended to be temporary, and programmatically could function as a sarai for the exhibition.

In September 2002 they came to Minneapolis for a week-long residency.

Raqs' idea for the TAS is not dissimilar to Dan Graham's video viewing booths--as a platform for multiple projects. This idea of a platform is crucial and nicely stated by Manthos Santorineos regarding the Medi@terra Festival:

"If 'the medium was the message', the platform is the message of the message and the weakening of the medium. 'Platform' is the combination of technology, a new way of thinking about meeting needs, and the vision of a group of people who are preparing a 'space' in which to invite interested persons to develop their own ideas. If the late 20th century was characterized by McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the message,' the beginning of the next one can be characterized as follows: 'We are preparing new platforms for new messages.'"

The cross-disciplinary collaboration and the physical, social space for presenting net art and its context is an exciting experiment, which will inform future practice at the Walker.