19/8 – At the end of the first week I have retreated to a swanky hotel for peace and coffee. One of the dominant themes of this first week has been the search for a bed, which proved to be an exhausting but illuminating test of the infrastructure, both Delhi’s and that of KHOJ, the art organisation that is hosting this residency. I’m sharing an apartment in the South Extension area of Delhi with two of the other artists participating in this Art Science program. Joanna is Polish, living in Berlin, and Abishek divides his time between Calcutta and Bangalore. For all of us the first week has been a bit sink or swim, as the briefing and induction process has been haphazard. This area is liberally equipped with expensive clothes boutiques, though it’s hardly what you’d call a posh neighbourhood, but apparently lacks any shops providing for more basic domestic needs, such as food. Any shopping trip becomes an epic quest, involving hours spent on massively congested roads, in one of Delhi’s thousands of jolting, farting, beeping, suicidal auto-rickshaws. Car ownership is soaring exponentially, with the result that most drivers have probably only been driving for six months or so, with predictable results. All of this is taking place in temperatures of about 35 degrees and relative humidity of 80%.
Sleeping on a foam slab on the floor in these conditions is particularly sweaty. Abishek and Joanna, being younger and perhaps poorer, seem willing to endure it. After three sleepless nights, and a journey that went from haggling in tiny market stalls while cows snacked on rubbish piled up outside, to resisting high pressure brylcreamed salesmen in multi-storey emporiums of middle class gold brocade chic, I have ended up with an £80 assembly of sprung mattress and folding ‘charpoy’ frame, which I like to think demonstrates the combination of tenacity and adaptability required to operate as an artist on a residency like this. If only I had filmed the whole operation I would have a very entertaining piece of work, but as it is, the only audience for this performance was Arun, the tireless KHOJ assistant who accompanied me.
It’s eleven years since I last came to India, but it has lost none of its power to perplex and surprise. At a petrol station I watched open-mouthed as a family of eleven people slowly unfolded themselves and emerged from the back of an auto-rickshaw. On our first day at the KHOJ building that houses the studios, the office was invaded by two very assertive women, one tall and plump, the other short and skinny, who kept clapping their hands insistently. The response from the KHOJ staff was a curious mixture of irritation and embarrassment. It turned out that our visitors were ‘hijeera’, a trans-gender community that specialise in extortion, appearing unannounced at weddings, house-warmings and other inaugural events, to demand money with threats of curses. Despite being as agnostic a bunch of arts administrators as you could hope to meet, the KHOJ staff seemed reluctant to offend this ill matched duo. Eventually Manoj, the accounts manager, lured them out of the office by holding a fistful of cash and, after a hushed discussion, they were paid an unspecified amount to go away. Afterwards, everyone was pleased to tell us that this was a very auspicious start to our residency.
When daily life is this zany, it is extremely hard to focus on and believe in the stated purpose of this residency, namely to develop collaborations between artists and scientists. Although this kind of practice is well established in Western countries, and despite a booming art market in India, there is apparently no support or precedent for this kind of activity here. With very limited funding, and meeting a lot of suspicion from Delhi’s scientific institutions, KHOJ are trying to get things going. I’m here thanks to an Arts Council International Fellowship, administered by Gasworks from the Triangle Arts Trust. It’s a generous scheme, intended to allow artists to reflect on and refresh their practice in a stimulating environment, without the pressure of any final outcome or show. In reality, of course, there’s an Open Day at the end of the residency, and an expectation from KHOJ that there will be something to see, particularly on this pilot program.
When I accepted the invitation it seemed like a perfect slow time of year to do something like this. Within weeks, I had landed a £95k sculpture commission, destined for the lobby of an office building that is now under construction. Alterations to the building are needed to accommodate my piece, so right up until I left I was frantically producing the necessary technical drawings. I’m hoping I’ve provided all the information they need before I return, but until I’d managed to sort out mobile phone and email connections here, I was getting pretty twitchy. Abishek and Joanna were, as media artists, demonstrating even worse withdrawal symptoms. It’s alarming to realise how totally dependent one is on an invisible technology over which one has no control at all. Work such as this commission, an array of very large lenses involving several sub-contractors, would be totally impossible without this infrastructure.
Yet somehow, in the chaos of Delhi, world class science is being carried out. Professor Ramaswamy, a genial physicist whom we met yesterday at JNU, said that because it is possible, just, to make things work, using patience, rusty nails and elastoplast, the incentive is removed to seek more permanent solutions. Something in this conundrum suggests how to marry art and science in a way that engages with this specifically Indian context. Ramaswamy’s work involves fractal dynamics, and specifically the emergence of synchronization between aperiodic oscillating systems. This could be fireflies in a tree, prices on the stock exchange, or weather patterns, and the scope of his thinking reflects his interdisciplinary background, though he operates largely in the realm of mathematics. During the meeting an idea began to take shape, of a machine that would manifest hidden relationships, for example taking the din of the streets from different locations, and transforming this into interference patterns of light. On Tuesday we’re getting taken round the hardware markets, so now I have a shopping list.
