KHOJ Residency, India

For Google Earth addicts, here is the location of KHOJ studios.

26/8 – At the end of this second week I feel I’ve started to get a studio habit established, helped in no small part by having taken on a car and driver. Since this costs about the same as a London travelcard, it doesn’t seem wildly extravagant. Ashok is a slim, bright young man from a farming family in Himachal Pradesh, and his car is a lovingly polished Hindustani Ambassador, lined and upholstered in Indian fabric. Crucially, it is also air-conditioned. This, together with his calm, assertive driving style and cat-like spatial sense, has transformed the experience of getting around the city, and it is a pleasure to assent to his proposal of “Go to Studio?”. Before this, every journey involved tedious negotiations over price, and multiple stops for the driver to ask directions. As a result, perhaps, I’ve been venturing further afield, and have been exposed to the full range of contradictory extremes that Delhi offers.

At one end of this spectrum was Nizzamuddin’s shrine, which Joanna and I visited on Thursday night, when we had heard there was a regular session of quawali music, the trance inducing rhythms that are part of the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. Approaching the shrine was like jumping into a river of people, gathering pace and intensity as the dusk streets narrowed and then turned into a twisting covered alleyway, no longer lined by pleading, disfigured amputees but by stalls selling rose petals, interspersed with dealers in religious trinkets, the whole enveloped in a miasma of sweat and grilling meat. At every turn now, we were commanded to remove our shoes, but ignored this as long as we could see shod devotees returning in the opposite direction. Finally we exchanged our footwear for a token with a man whose beard was dyed that carroty shade of red that seems to be the only available option for Indian men who have tired of black.

Pressing on in sticky socks, the river disgorged us into a blue tiled courtyard, where a huge stretched awning surrounded the shrine, a tiny, ornate and gilded building lit with fairy lights. Men, women and children thronged the space, eddying here and there. A couple of barbeques were in operation, and the atmosphere was something between an emergency and a party, with none of that hushed reverence adopted by Westerners in the presence of the divine. We were approached by an intense young man with the most luminously beautiful skin and eyes, the face of an El Greco saint. He pulled out a printed invoice book, and clearly wanted money, though the only word of English he could produce was “Mosque”, but before this could develop, he was ushered away by two older men.

Without any announcements or marshalling that we could recognise, the faithful arranged themselves for prayer, calling to mind Prof. Ramaswamy’s ideas about synchronization and the emergence of global order from local interactions. We saw him again on Wednesday night, when he came to the presentations that we gave about our interests and previous work. A pretty good crowd turned up at the studios for this, mostly other artists, though little resulted in the way of questions or discussion. Perhaps they were simply there for the free beer. I was somehow elected to go first, and took the opportunity to announce that we had been here for ten days, still hadn’t been invited to any parties, and were open to any offers. Zero result, though KHOJ’s director, Pooja, has invited us all for dinner next week.

But we haven’t just been sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. Last night (Saturday) we went to an opening over in Noida, at the Anant Art Gallery. A ten-lane expressway took us over the river, a vivid red from the setting sun, into a sprawling market full of towering racks of clothes, all lit by kerosene lamps. Improbably, around the corner from this, we entered a four storey, veritable palace of contemporary art, a newly built, white, modernist stronghold worthy of Saatchi, with uniformed staff handing out cold glasses of wine. The money and brains behind this are a really charming couple, Mumta Singhania and her husband. Three artists, all of whom had originally trained at Baroda in the South of India, had been given a floor each. Vinod Patel was showing a series of assemblages made mostly from refurbished motorcycle parts, absurdist micro-narratives that referenced everything from Picabia to Koons, via Kafka, killer androids and gym equipment. Upstairs, dreamlike large canvases by Alok Bal depicted the repetitive, shoddy boxes of the contemporary city in a palette of dirty greys. A ceramic artist, Vinod Daroz, occupied the basement, grafting elements of temples onto vessels that made explicit the links between sacred architecture and the body. The language barrier made discussions with the artists a little bit frustrating, but at the dinner afterwards we were joined by Hemant, the long-haired, motorcycle riding, somewhat punky rebel amongst the KHOJ crew, and a lively roundtable session ensued.

As promised, Hemant took us to the Chadni Chowk markets on Tuesday, and I ended up returning twice more this week. Another Delhi experience that is compelling and a bit scary in its intensity. The main street is lined with shops, some of them no more than 5 feet wide, crammed with goods, often spilling out onto the pavement where this is not blocked by food sellers, necessitating perilous detours into the seething mass of rickshaws and scooters filling the street, while overhead a forest of signs competes for your attention, strung through with crazily knotted tangles of cables looping in every direction. Extreme specialisation is the rule, grouped into zones, so for several minutes one passes nothing but taps and plumbing fittings, before that gives way to dealers of aluminium bars and tubes of every possible dimension. Dark, narrow, and thankfully pedestrian, alleys lead off the main drag. We plunged into one of these somewhere in the middle of an area devoted to stationery, and were immediately surrounded by electronics components. It was still necessary to flatten oneself against the wall regularly, as convoys of porters steamed through, balancing enormous loads on their heads, both arms strung with thick coils of wire.

For a total cost of around £2, I assembled a collection of small speakers and electric motors, which will induce vibrations in a blob of mercury, obtained by breaking open a boxful of thermometers. I brought with me from England a ludicrously powerful pocket laser obtained on ebay, and plan to bounce the beam from this off the vibrating mercury. I’ve got a rough idea what will happen, and if it does, then I can set about a more careful selection and tuning of the input signals.

Trips to more local markets produced the foam, plywood, glass and other bits needed, but the saw from the Khoj toolbox proved about as useful as a butterknife, so on Saturday I ended up in Chadni Chowk Bazaar again. Finding, amazingly, a shop that advertised carpentry hand tools, I asked for a saw. No reaction. Vigorous miming accompanied by sound effects. After a pause that seemed to last about 30 seconds, the salesman shambled off into the recesses of the shop and disappeared. I began to wonder if they were operating in a different time dimension. Perhaps I’d stumbled on a portal to the Calabi-Yau spaces that I’ve been reading about. These contain the hidden dimensions required by superstring theory, which explains the properties of the smallest sub-atomic particles so far discovered or theorised (quarks, neutrinos and even weirder shit) by proposing that all of them consist of Planck scale (v. v. small) one-dimensional loops of energy vibrating in various modes and frequencies. Very elegant, but the only problem is that they are required to vibrate in more than the 3+1 dimensions of everyday space-time if the sums are to add up properly. One solution is that these extra dimensions (six originally, but the number seems to be growing) are curled into convoluted little balls at every point of our normal space-time, and the particular configuration of these convolutions is what is known as a Calabi-Yau space. But there are also those who believe that these extra dimensions are inconceivably larger than the scale on which our observable universe is arranged. I think this involves Brane or M-theory, or both, on which I hope to report next week.

Anyway, the reason this was on my mind was because I had been swotting up in anticipation of a meeting on Friday with Professor Ranjit Nair, who heads the Centre for the Foundations and Philosophy of Science. He proved also to be a man who seemed to march to a different drummer, though unlike the merchants of Chadni Chowk, who I eventually realised were simply stoned off their faces as a way to deal with the heat, in the professors case I suspect it was the lofty realms of thought that he inhabited. I was completely out of my depth, though it wasn’t made easy by his obeying to the letter the printed sign on the table, which ordered one to “Kindly Speak Softly”, as well as the fact that half the time he seemed to be addressing someone seated either to the right or to the left of me.

Many are the philosophers I have not read, and nearly all of them seemed to come up in our conversation. It made me feel I was bluffing my way through a first term encounter with a tutor at University, an impression no doubt fostered by the dated, institutional comforts of the India International Centre, in whose somewhat joyless bar we were meeting. As you can tell, I have been rather taken by the sculptural qualities of Calabi-Yau space. This idea was swiftly kicked into the long grass, and I realised that there was fairly implacable opposition to the notion that arts’ relationship to science could be anything other than metaphor. Furthermore, in the most erudite possible way, Prof. Nair let me know that from the Pre-Socratics onwards, metaphor had generally stood in the way of a more profound scientific understanding. It’s not that the professor had no interest in the arts, though like many scientists that only seemed to include work made prior to about 1960, nor did he deny that elegance and beauty were criteria used by scientists in evaluating scientific theories, but after two hours it was clear that art science collaborations were never going to be a priority for him. Still, he paid for the drinks and told me a joke about George Bush, so I hope I haven’t treated him unfairly here.

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.