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Unravelling interpretations
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The Visual Art Gallery, Delhi, recently played host to a different kind of show. ALKA PANDE explores how the Kashmiri shawl formed a part of the theme of Jonathan Faiers' `video art'.
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New art ... Jonathan Faiers and his wife Del.
TWO video monitors and a large screen projecting films changed the white cube of the Visual Arts Gallery into a new media gallery ... the site of cross-cultural congruence on the evening of October 8 to October 12, 2002.
And three films "Shawl", "Tulip Time" and a show reel with "Wedding", "Dissolves", "The Story of Irene and Vernon Castle" and "Do you really want it that much? More!" were shown simultaneously ... all resulting from the artistic practice of Dr. Jonathan Faiers, a lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Faiers had put together an extraordinary display ... the premiere of "Shawl" was especially produced for the gallery, where employing the visual metaphor of the Kashmiri shawl, it expressed the desire of the West for a specific Indian artefact.
Faiers showed himself to be absorbed with popular cinema, using found footage to express ideas and notions of his own engagement and then producing video works. In fact while submitting his doctoral thesis — "Thieves in a Temple" — he used film footage to show the representation of museum sites.
This was his first visit to India, he said. Prior to this visit, his comprehension and perception of India, had, to an appreciable degree, been fashioned by Western readings by way of film and television. Both his thesis and artwork have explored the potential of film and television as sources of "unofficial knowledge" and their role in the dissemination of knowledge have resulted in the foundation and evolution of what he termed "a shared, genuinely popular, collective knowledge that every one of us, consciously or unconsciously, brings to our understanding of the socio-cultural, political, historical, etc, fabric of our lives".
Weaving history ... A work in detail.
He then went on to talk about "Shawl". It brings together composed and assembled images of shawls from footage of the collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and more specifically the archive of Kashmiri shawls. This was then edited with material from Indian and Western cinema and television, resulting in a seamless montage; a montage that provided both observations on the assembly of cross-cultural histories via the shared language of cinema, and a historical background to the fascination with "Bollywood" currently sweeping Britain. Sound played a key role in the unfolding of the narrative as the images and music were interplayed, he said. "In the same way that the Kashmiri shawl is now embedded in the foundations of a major British institution as a result of distancing via temporal displacement, I employed a range of images extracted and appropriated from film both Indian and British. This technique is employed to reinforce and revisit the process of representation viewed by the audience who may or may not use these Indian cultural signifiers. From a Western perspective, these edited images, not unlike the remnants of shawls I've captured, are viewed as objects of desire, whether they be film stars, locations, rituals, myths, etc, via a range of films from `Diamond Queen' to `Lagaan', `The Jungle Book' to a documentary about `Bombay Dreams'."
Opening with shots of the Indian study collection of shawls at the V&A, the video was structured in four parts. They were:
Hundreds of catalogued Kashmiri shawls; fragments and complete examples that form part of a complex and intricate medley, serving as a catalyst for the body of similarly fragmented collage of images and formations that follow. The historical fascination surrounding India and the subsequent British films set in the 18th and 19th Centuries were then exploited to illustrate the historical trendiness of Indian artefacts and historicity to the contemporaneity of India for the West. Following this were sections that described the early history of the British in India with references to the economic rationale for the British presence in India, further exploring the incessant nature of commodification.
The final part along with some of the seminal images that re-occured throughout the composition, concluded with a revisiting of the V&A, and thus returning the viewer to the beginning this time interpreted and re-read within the classical tradition of the raga.
The video juxtaposed against Faiers earlier video pieces "Tulip Time", and the described show reel displayed a continuity in the theme, its treatment and its impact on the viewer.
The possibilities presented by manipulating a single object within a collection were explored in "Dissolves" where all the cross-fades from one film had been isolated and re-edited together to construct narratives of transition, demonstrating the potential in contemporary archival practice. Art aficionados were thus exposed to the fascinating medium of video, relatively unexplored in Indian art circles ... and a new experience altogether.
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