HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : The Builders Association/moti roti

Alladeen logo designed by moti roti
Photo courtesy the artists, London, England

The Builders Association/moti roti

The Builders Association/moti roti
lives and works in New York; London

Co-artistic directors Keith Kahn and Ali Zaidi formed London-based moti roti ("fat bread" in Hindi), a design-media-performance collective, in 1991 in an effort to move beyond the polarized East-West divide and to create work that addresses the complexities and contradictions of contemporary global culture. The Builders Association, formed in 1994 in New York City and led by director Marianne Weems, reanimates theater for a contemporary audience by using current tools to interpret old forms, exploring the interface between live performance and media.

Their collaboration resulted in Alladeen, a transglobal exploration of how cultures blur, steal from, and reconfigure one another's myths. With a script cowritten by transcultural travel writer Pico Iyer (The Global Soul) and novelist-journalist Martha Baer, Alladeen features a cast drawn from both companies. The artists are also creating parallel Web-based and music-video projects in an effort to reach audiences "where they live"--in clubs and public spaces, via television, and in heavily trafficked centers for fashion, media, and art. Inspired by early central Asian legends of Alladeen and his various incarnations around the world (for example, Aladdin in the West), Alladeen is a powerful model of cultural interaction, drawing on such influences as the ongoing exchange between Bollywood and Hollywood, the international technology trade, and the influx of Indian computer engineers in the United States. A combination of electronic music, cutting-edge video technology, architectural set design, and live performance, Alladeen resonates with the contemporary concerns of instant gratification, wish fulfillment, and rampant consumerism.

More on moti roti:
Set up in 1991 by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi, moti roti is a London based, artist-led organization, celebrating diversity and pushing the boundaries of artistic and cultural discourse. The name moti roti, hindi/urdu words meaning "fat bread," is an ironic titling that has a resonance with those who recognize either the language or the food. Although the artists straddle three or more cultures (Trinidad, Pakistan, India), they are not interested in the polarized and mythical East/West divide, but more about making work which speaks to many different people about complexities and contradictions of the current times.

The company produces a range of innovative and inspiring yet accessible exhibitions, events, and experience-led installations, which is relevant both to specific communities and the wider public. moti roti combines visual seduction with a sensitivity to space and an eye for transformation. Its work has been seen in New and Old Walsall Museum and Art Gallery to the streets of Notting Hill, from the Dome to the Royal Albert Hall, from Brick Lane to Tate Modern in London.

More on The Builders Association:
The company's productions combine historic and new texts with performance, sound, video, and architectural sets to create a world onstage that reflects the contemporary culture surrounding us. Since 1994, with a growing circle of artists, The Builders Association has collaborated on seven large-scale theater projects, including Master Builder (1994), The White Album (1995), Imperial Motel (Faust) (1996), Jump Cut (Faust) (1997), Jet Lag (1998-1999), and Xtravaganza (2000.) The company has also created two installations. Most recently, it has toured to the Barbican Theater, London; Kaaitheater, Brussels; the Rotterdamse Schouwburg; Marstall Theater, Munich; Maison des Arts, Creteil/Paris; Sommerscene, Copenhagen; Trafo Theater, Budapest; The Kitchen, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, and many other venues..

Related links:
http://www.motiroti.com/
http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/

Alladeen
The Builders Association/moti roti

2002
Performance

Alladeen, a collaboration between the New York-based ensemble The Builders Association and the London-based company moti roti, is inspired by the early central Asian legends of Alladeen, the later South Asian incarnations, and the more recent Anglo-American versions of Aladdin (on page, stage, and screen). Both companies approach this project with a desire to rethink conventional "multicultural" collaborations, and the basic terminology which has grown up around them. Rather than expressing India, Britain, and America as monocultures, they draw from their experiences as citizens of the hybridized, urban landscapes of New York, London, and Bangalore. The interaction of ethnicity and cultures within these sprawling metropolises blurs the line between identities, and reflects how cultures borrow, steal, and reinterpret each other's signs and stories. In Alladeen, the ongoing exchange between Hollywood and Bollywood, and the trade in technology between India and America, all contribute to make this legend a model for cultural interaction. Alladeen attempts to retrace the ancient Silk Route, using contemporary technologies to retell the archetypal "rags-to-riches" story.

Alladeen is a crossmedia performance, a Web project, and an MTV-Asia music video. The performance (between 90 and 110 minutes in length) combines electronic music, new video systems, an architectural set, and live performance. While touching on the fantastical moments in the story of Aladdin, Alladeen also looks at the contemporary phenomenon of international call centers where primarily Indian operators often "pass" as American. In a sense these operators act as cultural impersonators who make the "local" a nostalgic but effective marketing tool. Though phone lines are a very simple technology, they allow one continent to become the "back office" of another. Alladeen will look at this use of technology, as well as other manifestation, for instance, the diaspora of Indian computer engineers to the United States.

For the performance, The Builders Association and moti roti use a video system that increases the interaction between the video and the performers, a computer-controlled system of media technology in which various projections are, in a sense, molded to the bodies of the performers. This approach allows a few performers to play many roles and to enact the seemingly magical transformations of the Alladeen story. This innovative use of video is the logical next step in The Builders Association's aesthetic practices, in that the performers and the video occupy the same space onstage, accommodating a visual and metaphorical layering of live and mediated presence.

Alladeen is directed by Marianne Weems and designed by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi, in collaboration with The Builders Association. It features a cast drawn from both companies. The American team also includes longtime collaborators of The Builders Association: Chris Kondek (video designer); Jennifer Tipton (lighting designer); Dan Dobson (sound designer); Jeff Webster (performer); Heaven Phillips (performer); and dramaturg Norman Frisch, who has collaborated with both companies in the past. The British team includes Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi along with associates drawn from the Indian film industry--both performers and other industry professionals. Nasreen Munni Kabir, (director of both Movie Mahal and the Ambient India series), and the celebrated composer Shrikanth Shriram (whose recordings are distributed internationally as Shri and Badmarsh).

Alladeen addresses people who feel themselves connected to an international youth culture, at the same time considering that culture in a critical light. Through the performance, but also the Web and music video projects, this piece is designed to reach young audiences "where they live"--in clubs, in public spaces, online, on television, and in heavily trafficked centers for new fashion, media, and art. These products function as effectively on MTV-Asia as they do in a museum of contemporary art, or a digital arts festival; and translate as well in Mumbai as they do in New York or London.

Alladeen was co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and MIST Residency Program at The Kitchen, New York, New York. The Walker commissioned the work as a central component of its How Latitudes Become Forms performance activities.

Musings on Globalism and Institutional Change
Vishakha N. Desai, Kathy Halbreich

KH: So what new strategies did you have to put in place to locate those curators?

VND: It comes down to time, money, and resources. If you make that commitment, you have to accept that it's going to be more complicated. It means that each project has to be initiated much earlier because it requires a longer gestation period. It means developing long-term partnerships with some of the curators so the work can continue to develop over time.

I'll use the example of our contemporary-art effort because, in a way, it's parallel to the Walker's global initiative. I'll never forget my introduction to the Galleries' academic advisory committee, the membership of which was in place long before I came to the Asia Society. The first thing we did was to rotate its membership because I felt a multiplicity of voices was necessary; but it meant changing the original structure in order to achieve that. I also remember the head of the committee--Sherman Lee, who was my mentor at the Cleveland Museum of Art--saying, "I understand you want to pursue contemporary art, but where are you going find the curatorial expertise? There are no experts." I said to him, "The fact that we don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist--but I take your point, which is that I first must find them." So before we created a program, I set out to find people in the field, especially in each region, who were doing the work. If you remember, you were part of that very first meeting. It took us a couple of years before we could actually identify the best thinkers because, especially in contemporary Asian art, it was still a relatively nascent field, even in Asia itself. Sherman asked an important question because it momentarily stopped me in my tracks, until I recognized that without giving it time I couldn't get there and neither could the institution. I can tell you that it has taken a full decade to get to a point where it is now an established part of the institutional practice to include contemporary art by Asian and Asian-American artists in what we do. Nobody questions it now.

KH: Have you noticed that your audience has changed as the programs have changed? VND: Absolutely. KH: How would you describe that?

VND: I would say that we have a younger and larger Asian-American audience today, not just in the visual arts but in the performing arts and other programs we do. It has permeated throughout the institution. Even if, in numbers, the contemporary audience is still smaller than our traditional audience, the effort is truly worthwhile.

You also have initiated a lot of changes at your institution. When you begin to contemplate these new programs, do you feel pressure to look out over a long horizon and imagine what the institution will be like ten years from now? With the Walker's global initiative, for example, what would it need to look like in a decade for it to be successful?

KH: When we began the initiative, I don't think I had any tangible idea of what it would feel like or how the texture of the institution might change. It was easier, perhaps, to think about it in quasi-numerical terms, for example, increasing the number of works in our collection from non-Western sources. Ideally, the composition of our curatorial staff will change some. Ideally, the educators who are helping us interpret the programs to an increasingly diverse local community will change some. I guess I realized that it would undermine certain traditional notions of expertise, but I don't think I articulated that. I might have put it in the form of a question. In other words, I knew that, institutionally, we couldn't become the final arbiters--or maybe we were the final arbiters but needed to draw information from our colleagues and experts along the way in order to develop additional criteria to make those final judgments. That was why we put this advisory committee together and that's why part of the role of our advisors is to critique our own programs. Philippe's exhibition Let's Entertain[1] was well under way by the time we began the meetings, and the criticism was pretty severe. But it was extremely

1 Let's Entertain, curated by Philippe Vergne, was presented at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 12-April 30, 2000, and traveled through 2001 to Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; and Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida.

Interactions/Intersections: Cultural Globalism and Educational Practice
Christi Atkinson, Susan Rotilie, Sarah Schultz, Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, Meredith Walters

is very exciting for us because we are able to work with a community that we have not yet worked with in depth. We are fortunate to have an artist of Ethiopian decent who has a good understanding of East African cultures and is committed to providing artistic experiences to this immigrant community. One of the lessons we learned from Julie is that privacy is very important within the East African communities. Originally the project was conceived as a group activity. Now, it's shifting toward individual projects so that the participants will feel more comfortable.

CA: At the heart of Julie's project is the desire to have these new communities be able to take ownership of their new neighborhoods, new routines, and new homes. It's a self-mapping, self-ethnographic project that reflects the stamp they have made on the city. They are not just outsiders here in a new city but rather are in a city that has been distinctly imprinted and changed by their presence.

SR: The idea of mapping is also connected to the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms. The invention of latitudinal measurements in the fifteenth century marked a major advancement in Western mapmaking processes. Of course, now those inventions are associated with issues of exploration and colonialism, and maps have become politically controversial to a certain extent. Consequently, the use of the word latitudes in the title of this exhibition provides an opportunity to thematically connect with place, and also with multiple histories. Mapping can be a metaphor for how we organize knowledge or experience. We are combining these themes in a hands-on class for students in the Walker's art lab, offered in conjunction with tours of the Latitudes exhibition. Students will use maps as place identifiers, pattern work, and collage elements to make artworks both individually and collaboratively in response to the work they see in the galleries.

SS: Mapping is a way to graphically and conceptually understand complex connections, especially between the local and the global. We live in a nomadic world, where the Internet literally creates new networks and associations. Also, people are able to travel and move about more freely. You don't really belong in one place, but in multiple places.

MW: That raises the issue of the museum's role in a nomadic world, both as a civic institution and as one node in a global network of contemporary art institutions. As the institution presents and collects work by artists from around the world, it is important that we present the art on its own terms and interpret it according to its own strategies. This requires us to know the implications of the artist's choice of materials and forms and to recognize the cultural dialogues the pieces are participating in: Is a piece created for an international audience or an internal one? Understanding the art-historical context of some of this work will be a challenge. It's hard enough to talk about contemporary art when you are familiar with its conceptual antecedents. Could it be that art produced for a global audience is the beginning of a new art history--that its antecedents are all of the possible art histories?

SR: One of our responsibilities is to go beyond just looking at a work of art in terms of its elements and to examine the (art)world in which it was made. That includes the world of the artist--his or her local community and historical context. That might sound monocultural, but, in fact, more and more artists today live in and move through many localities. They may be working as artists on several continents. They may have their work shown in many, many different places, in many, many different contexts. Global arts education, for me, means precisely these overlapping circles of (art)worlds that can inform even just one work of art.

SS: I've certainly experienced a shift in practice. I have to say, a few years ago, I would have thought naively that the phrase "global arts education" meant doing a forum on the Web that would have reached out across the world. Now, I have a very different opinion about what working globally might mean, which, for me, probably means working locally in a very different context.

CA: The global and the local have been discussed among the teens for a long time. We're always looking at the most contemporary work in the galleries because that is where we can find artwork from all over the world. Those "global" issues we see in the work relate to the "local" (as well as profoundly personal) issues that are going on in the teen's small communities of friends or at school. I feel my job is to help the teens work in the

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

What really concerns me about using those terms when we work with other cultures is that it's our language, not theirs. I remember the first time I mentioned "multiculturalism" to an Africa Exchange artist. He said, "That is not our term. We do not subscribe to American or European intellectual, aesthetic terminologies, or to your curatorial philosophies. We're doing something else over here." That was a revelation to me. I began to realize that I couldn't go to Africa or other places and use a word like avant-garde because people said to me, "That applies specifically to a European or American aesthetic and has nothing to do with what we're doing."

Most of us in the presenting and producing field don't know the terminologies used in other countries, don't know the aesthetic histories of those countries. So we come with preconceived notions about what contemporary work is. So many times when I thought I was looking at traditional work in Africa, people told me that I was looking at contemporary work. Irène Tassembedo, a choreographer from Burkina Faso, said to us, "You don't even know what traditional work is because Americans have never seen it. Traditional work is sacred. It is a sacred ritual and if I were to put it on a stage, I would drop dead, and you would drop dead from seeing it." She also said, "You don't know what our contemporary practice is. You are still trying to keep us in the eighteenth or nineteenth century and, yes, we treasure that tradition, we build upon that tradition, but we are doing something else now. Our work is informed by contemporary practice and training. I have been trained in all the same modern techniques that American and European artists have been trained in, but that doesn't mean we throw out all the tradition that came before us. It is now something new and different. It is not traditional. But we would also not call it totally contemporary." So we have to start learning what that work is. If we haven't actually seen traditional African work, according to this choreographer, what are we comparing it to? What are we talking about? How do we put some label on this?

PB: Those are key issues that we deal with continually. When we bring an artist to the U.S for the first time, the temptation is, of course, to prefer the prestige of bringing them exclusively to your own city. But don't we have a responsibility to spread the wealth of knowledge, the privilege of access, to our colleagues? Gerald Yoshitomi noted in 1995, "The only way that things will move forward is if these nodes of expertise can be encouraged or even funded to support the spread of that knowledge and the building of those networks around the country."[4] How can we become those "nodes of information," rather than having our programs benefit only the Walker or NJPAC?

BS: One way is by taking on this new role of being in direct relationship with the artist, even though when there is no middleman for me, my work becomes more labor-intensive. I now have to figure out transportation, touring, funding, visas. There's a whole new set of tasks and responsibilities when you function as a producer and not just as a presenter.

PB: It's a huge, huge undertaking. In the past few years we've done it for the God Squad from Berlin and dumb type from Japan, among others. It requires, I would estimate, five times more effort than being part of an existing tour or engaging a project that comes to a single city.

For good or ill, the box office drives so much of our field at large and keeps it, in some ways, susceptible to its worst tendencies. The market does drive certain ways that we position events. There tends to be a sense of selling the exotic, especially when dealing with cultures that are interestingly alien or different from what one's own population knows about. How do you address that issue?

BS: I'm glad you brought this up, because I was hoping we would eventually get to this notion of the exotic. Someone once said to me, "Let's be clear. As soon as you take something out of its home, out of the context in which it was created, you are exoticizing it." To be quite honest, I agree. I know that I am exoticizing almost everything I do because I am in no way presenting it in its original cultural, political, and geographical context. What I hope I'm not doing is exploiting the artists and their work.

PB: What's the line between the two?

4 "International Presenting in the United States," Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Builders Association/moti roti

. . . it has taken a full decade to get to a point where it is now an established part of the institutional practice to include contemporary art by Asian and Asian-American artists in what we do.

That raises the issue of the museum’s role in a nomadic world, both as a civic institution and as one node in a global network of contemporary art institutions.

So many times when I thought I was looking at traditional work in Africa, people told me that I was looking at contemporary work.