An exhibition where you can see, make and touch

Artist Simryn Gill’s solo at the GoMA allows for interesting audience participation, writes Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi.

For those of us, who call Australia as well as India home, Simryn Gill’s artistic explorations of notions of place and history will have a special resonance. “As an artist who lives between Australia and Malaysia, I think her work has a lot to offer in thinking through our relationship to place – it is very open and generous rather than didactic or descriptive,” says Russell Storer, Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (GoMA) and curator of Simryn Gill: Gathering, a touring solo of Gill’s works from the last five years. The exhibition is showing at the GoMA until October 17, 2010.

The exhibition showcases Gill’s varied practice and use of a range of media—from photographs, to organic and bronze casts as well as paper sculptures. “While Simryn works with a wide range of materials, her methods haven’t changed much over the years – she has always used quite simple techniques such as casting, rubbing, photographing, tearing and collecting,” says Storer. “I felt that there was a line through all of this, which the exhibition title ‘Gathering’ refers to – it is this process of bringing things together (often objects she has found) and submitting them to these processes to try and make some new connections between them.”

For instance, in Throwback (2007), Gill gathered natural materials—termite mound soil, river clay, laterite, seashells, fruit skins, leaves, bark, and flowers—from near her studio in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and used them to create casts of the inner machinery of a 1985 Tata truck, which had spent its working life plying the roads of Malaysia.

She used the casting technique again in Untitled (interiors) (2008)—but using very different materials, and to a very different end. This works consists of bronze cast of the empty spaces created by cracks in dry ground, found near Nyngan in western New South Wales and near Lake George, just outside Canberra. “Simryn’s casts suggest to me a sense of instability and irresolution,” says Storer. “A number of her projects begin with a conceptual proposition – such as, what would the ‘inside’ of a place look like? Her work Dalam, for example, was several hundred photographs of living rooms across Malaysia, to envisage what a collective ‘inside’ defined by nation might be. I see Untitled (interiors) in a similar way, imagining something that is invisible or intangible but loaded with a range of shifting meanings – in this case the negative space of a crack in the earth.”

To add another layer of meaning to the work, Gill worked with Apisit Nongbua, a traditionally trained bronze artist based in Bangkok, whose family has been making Buddhas for temples and the Thai royal family for generations. “By using bronze, a material associated with classical sculpture in Asia and Europe, the work takes on other resonances,” says Storer. Is the bronze sculpting technique in Thailand any lesser than the classical sculptures of Europe, Gill seems to ask.

Similarly, in My Own Private Angkor, a series of black and white photographs, she seems to compare the subliminal beauty of the ruins of an abandoned housing estate in Port Dickson with the tourist magnet Angkor Wat. “The estate was completed but never occupied, and is now being overtaken by plants and animals, like a modern ruin. People have been stealing the aluminium window frames and carefully leaving the glass panes leaning against the walls – they are miraculously all intact. Simryn photographed dozens of these glass panes in situ, in a very formal way, and they resemble strange modernist sculptures in this overgrown, tropical place,” says Storer. “They are very uncanny images but also very beautiful, with the way that light falls across the glass or the tracing of vines and rubber strips along the floor. They also say a lot about shifting fortunes and ambitions in the world. I find them very moving.”

Gill’s work, while involving audience contemplation, also sometimes involves physical participation to unravel meanings. Paper Boats, invites audiences to add their own paper boat to the installation using pages from a 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Paper Boats can appear to be somewhat violent, with the tearing of a page from a book, but it is also very intimate and contemplative, with the invitation to fold the page into a paper boat,” says Storer. “The contribution by the audience is quite open – there is no fixed instruction for the boat, for example.”

The element of audience participation is essential to the practice of the art institution allowing visitors to make their own meanings from art works, rather than be taught didactically through labels. And this approach works to the instititution’s benefit as well: “The participatory works have been very successful during the exhibition tour,” says Storer. “In Sydney, the work 32 Volumes, which required visitors to sit down with a gallery attendant and leaf through a series of erased books, was one of the most popular works in the show, as it generated a range of conversations and encounters.”

Another important part of the exhibition is the ‘blue room’, a space filled with experimental works, studies, out-takes and personal collections that aim to provide insight into Gill’s artistic process. “It’s quite playful and idiosyncratic,” says Storer. The exhibition also provides other ways of engaging with the artworks, rather than merely viewing and appreciating. “There is the process of touch involved in Garland, for example, where people can handle and rearrange objects collected from the beach in Malaysia,” explains Storer. “It is really another way to enter an art work, using other faculties than just looking. There are no clear or determined outcomes, but people really enjoy the chance to be involved in their own way.”

Rummaging through India’s history

Historian and collector, Dr Jim Masselos tells Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi that rummaging through shoe boxes in junk shops is far more exciting than buying off eBay.

Scouring through junk shops in Australia and London, Dr Jim Masselos began his collection of the now large and wonderfully varied Portvale Collection. “I would go through shoe boxes full of photos and other material in shops full of all sorts of old objects . I accumulated by hunting and rummaging. Now you can buy some such materials over ebay—it is far less exciting!”

The Indian Empire: Multiple Realities exhibition currently on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presents a selection of objects from this collection built up over 40 years of travels across India, London and Australia. Dr Masselos is donating a large portion of the items in the exhibition to the Gallery.

Dr. Masselos, an honorary reader in history at the University of Sydney, has visited India over 50 times. His first visit, in 1961 was to Mumbai to do his doctorate at St Xaviers College under the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme funded by the Government of India. His doctorate, about the rise of nationalism in Mumbai and Pune was completed over a 4-year period in Mumbai leading to his book, Towards Nationalism.

“When I came back to Sydney to teach, there were no visuals available, such as those now easily available on the internet,” he recollects. So he, along with a colleague, put together an exhibition of India-related objects at Sydney University in 1967. Included in this exhibition were objects from Sir James Plimsoll’s (a former Australian High Commissioner to India) and some Mohenjodaro objects that had been gifted to Nicholson Museum by the Indian Government. It was with this humble exhibition that Dr Masselos’ interest in using Indian material objects to build up a sense of history began.

One room of the current exhibition is dedicated to beautifully embroidered textiles from Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat. “Lotika Varadarajan, who was also doing her doctorate in St Xaviers at the time, got me interested in textiles,” says Dr. Masselos. “I decided to go to Kutch and look at the folk embroidery to create a sense of what preoccupied the women who wore this embroidery and how they saw the world and depicted it in their embroideries.”

“I could have used French post-colonial theory to analyse their embroidery designs, but instead I decided to ask the women what their designs meant,” says Dr. Masselos. He found that although designs could have several different meanings in different areas of the region, one common image was of women churning curd—but it had become so stylized that one couldn’t see the literal story in the image.

Another common symbol used by these women was that of a scorpion usually embroidered on the left shoulder of the choli. This scorpion directed towards the heart, Dr Masselos found, symbolized the sudden pain of love, the love of Bhakti. Also included in the exhibition are some cholis of the Maharani of Kutch who Masselos befriended over long conversations about her life. “Sometimes I think I got to know her better than I know anyone else!”

Looking through the Indian Empire exhibition though, it becomes apparent through the extensive display of photographs and albums, that Dr. Masselos has a particular interest in this medium. “At the time I was doing my research on Bombay, I had to start collecting maps and drawings to build up a picture of what India was like a century or so earlier,” says Dr. Masselos. “Now you just wouldn’t bother—you would just go on the internet and surf for pictures. The photographs were also visually very interesting, and my interest grew from seeing the photographs as just historical information to aesthetics as well—seeing them as images that are beautiful in their own right.”

One of the albums on display has a panorama of Delhi, containing stunning images of the city in 1858. In a jointly authored book Dr Masselos has written an essay on Beato, the photographer of this album, while Delhi historian Narayani Gupta has written about the same places as they were then and as they are now in a book titled Beato’s Delhi. “We found that between the Old and New Delhis was another Delhi—the Delhi of the 1800s before the uprising of 1857, a Delhi that wasn’t Shahjahanabd nor the Delhi of Lutyens and the British raj but was based around the Ridge and the then civil lines,” says Dr Masselos talking about this project. His other books include Bombay then and Mumbai now, (with Naresh Fernandes) and The city in action: Bombay struggles for power.

“India has been very well portrayed in early photographs. The way India is represented through these photographs and their range, there is nothing like it for 19^th Century Australia. There was great attention paid to the Indian landscape as well as to many different facets of Indian life and living under the British,” says Dr. Masselos. “There is thus the Imperial view of British power that they convey, but also the picturesque.” And it is these multiple visions of India under the British Raj that is brought forth by the new exhibition of his collection.

An afternoon of varieTea, musicaliTea and frivoliTea

Combining outrageous humour, beautiful music and quirky poetry, Oz Asia’s AFTERNOON AbsurdiTea will take audiences on an incredible experience of that wonderfully addictive beverage, Anne Norman aka Camellia Cha tells Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi.

What exactly is a Tea Performance? And what can audiences to AFTERNOON AbsurdiTEA expect?

In AbsurdiTea, rather than focusing on making tea, we are telling the story of tea, and its journey through various countries and cultures, using poetry, narrative and music from the countries where tea is grown and consumed. I have written a poem which challenges those of us who mindlessly partake of tea, to think about where it comes from and who plucked it. Just what is the story behind tea, and how did it get into my teacup? In one poem, rhythmically delivered lyrics will be supported by the Indian rhythms of Jay Dabgar and Josh Bennett.

In each place I give a performance, I usually TEAm up with a local artist or two, and a new way of combining ideas and threading the narrative emerges. OzAsia Festival is a celebration of Asian music, culture and the arts within Australia. The Artistic Director, Jacinta Thomson and I discussed potential artists to showcase at the festival in collaboration with my poetry, narrative and shakuhachi. The Australian Chinese ensemble lead by my old friend Wang Zheng Ting from Melbourne, and Tibetan singer Tenzin Choegyal from Brisbane with two visiting Tibetan monks, and the local Adelaide Indian music duo of Jay and Josh are the remarkably talented and varied line-up we selected to join me on stage. As you may be aware, Jacinta had a focus on tea in the last festival, and once again, this year there will be opportunities for the audience to view and participate in tea related events prior to our AFTERNOON AbsurdiTEA.

One of Josh Bennett’s talents includes Indian Beat Boxing – what exactly is that?

Now you have me quite excited. I can’t wait to start jamming with Josh and see just what he is capable of. From all accounts he is a remarkable musician. Beat boxing is the use of the mouth and vocal sounds to produce a rhythm section, if you will. I presume he will also incorporate a vocalization of the tabla bols. We will find out!

Would you like to share a snippet of the kind of humour and quirky poetry that will be part of this show?

You think tea is British, well of course you’re right, it’s true. Iraqis and Sri Lankans think that too. And if you’re Yank, its what you drank, then you sank it, now you thank it for your country’s liber-TEA teabag sucker sucker TEA! But the Chinese had it first, Japanese then got the thirst, and the Portuguese prayed on their knees til Chinese coffers burst...

Please share some experiences from your previous tea performances—I understand you have previously collaborated on these performances with a tap dancer and cabaret performers?

Yes. And with a cellist, and a recorder player, and a calligrapher, and a shamisen player with Japanese dancer... It has been an interesting learning curve and transition for me to ‘perform’ my book, Curiosi-tea. It is one thing to spend years researching and travelling and writing, and another to memorize parts of what you have written and deliver it with music or other art forms. Because we have such talented musicians on stage in the OzAsia presentation, I will keep my talking to a minimum in order to make time for the music to unfold. And I want to jam with the musicians on my shakuhachi where possible. Until tea took over my life, performing shakuhachi (bamboo flute) has been my primary occupation. Things are shifting a little, but shakuhachi is still my forte.

Please tell us a little bit about your book, Curiosi-tea.

Curiosi-tea is a flippantly presented, but thoroughly researched book on tea: tea’s history, health properties, and cultural associations. It makes use of the strange quirk of the English language, where over 2,000 English words end with the sound tea, such as CuriosiTY, serendipiTY etc. I had initially not envisaged a serious or scholarly book, but rather a bit of fun with puns and cartoon-like illustrations. So of course, the first chapter just had to be “Antiqui-tea” and the last “Infini-tea”, and then I thought I would fill it out with frivoli-tea... And having the naugh-tea, cheeky mind I have, I had to include chapters on promiscui-tea and sexuali-tea as well as topics which didn’t feel like they should really be in a tea book at all, such as radioactivi-tea and insani-tea. However, the more I researched and read, the more I was confronted by the dark side of tea, not just the froth and bubble of a whisked matcha, or the spice of a masala chai. It was when I began to read books like Roy Moxham’s Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, that the chapter entitled Inhumani-tea and Mortali-tea resulted. I tried to avoid including this darker material for quite a while, but the more I read I realised I couldn’t ignore it. The clincher came when I read an article in The Times of India on 1 March 2007 entitled “Tea estate closure results in 100 deaths”. The nature of my book became more weighty from then on.

Which is your favourite Indian tea, if I may ask?

I was very impressed with the organic teas of the Makaibari tea estate in Darjeeling. I came home with samples of their Silver Tips Imperial white tea and their green and oolong teas. However, when I want a kick that is more filling than a cleansing and subtle white or green tea, I sometimes make myself a milky masala chai using ‘black’ Assam tea in a saucepan on the stove at home.

You recently spent 5 weeks in India visiting tea plantations—please share with us, your many adventures.

I confess it was my first trip to India. As India came to the international tea trade late in the history of tea, I hadn’t written as much about India in my book as I had about China and her eastern neighbours. But India was crucial to Britain’s final economic blow to China. Britain had struggled for centuries to pay for her Chinese tea habit, and they had resorted to growing opium in India and creating a crippling dependency within China, raising a great deal of revenue through the sale of opium to finance the vast quantities of tea being shipped back to England. This all lead to what became known as the Opium Wars in the 1840s. Then the British East India Company, while gaining Hong Kong and a foothold in Shanghai and other treaty ports, lost their monopoly on the tea being traded out of China. It was time to grow it in their colonies. I therefore went to Assam to see where the British began their tea plantations.

I first went to Kolkata and met up with a wonderful fellow by the name of Ali Zaman, who gave me leads to his colleagues in the tea industry in Calcutta and Assam. I met with people from the Tea Board of India, the tea auction rooms at NILHAT HOUSE, and the secretary general of the Indian Tea Association. I then travelled to the Experimental Station of the Tocklai Tea Research Association in Jorhat. Their motto is: SustainabiliTEA through research. Now that’s my kind of spelling!

The scientists at Tocklai are brilliant. The facility there is the best tea research facility I have ever encountered. I have been to Japan and China and met scientists and tea experts in those countries, but the state-of-the-art equipment in Tocklai left my head spinning. Seeing this facility gave me a greater appreciation for the red or “black” teas of India. Clearly there is an interest in producing excellent tea in India, but, as with all things in all countries, this is balanced with the need to do it economically with an eye to profit. They had trans-genetic engineers and bio-technicians analysing DNA and making super clones of tea. Impressive work. They were also looking at finding natural ways to avoid the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

I then went to Kaziranga National park and witnessed the Bihar celebrations where young women from a neighbouring tea plantation performed a dance accompanied by men singing and playing drums and a reed instrument. I interviewed the teenage girls afterwards, assuming that they were tea pluckers. They giggled and said their mothers were tea pluckers, they went to school. So I said, “well I guess you will all be tea pluckers one day”, to which they all loudly replied that they would not! They had their sights on the tourist industry and housekeeping in the resort adjoining the Kaziranga National Park. “So who will pick the tea when your mothers get too old?” I asked. “Our brother’s wives” they laughed.

I then went to Dibrugarh and on to the Hollonghabi Tea estate. I stayed with a tea planter and his generous wife, and saw their worker’s facilities... including an embarrassingly ill-equipped school for the workers children, and extremely basic medical facilities. The tea estates have an enormous burden of responsibility to look after a large number of workers and their families, and I began to get an inkling of the planters’ side of the story, and the headaches they face in managing their charges. A manager of a tea garden is not an expert on education and is not cashed up enough to fund a state-of-the-art medical facility.

I also went with my wonderful guide Rajan to meet members of the original tea tribes of upper Assam near the border with Burma. We forded a river in a small canoe to visit a Tangsa Naga family who live in a village made up of stilt bamboo homes in the rain forest. As the rain poured off the roof, we sat at tree level and drank tea made from leaves plucked from wild tea trees in their forest and ate a meal of which all the ingredients (chicken, rice, fruit, vegetables, spices) were grown on their property. Only the salt and onions had been bought at market.

I also had the opportunity to drink green tea in another bamboo stilt house with a bright fellow of the Singpho tribe who makes organic tea commercially. He was a powerhouse of knowledge on the tea history of his tribe and has helped anthropologists from around the world with their research. On the same day I attended a luncheon at the Margarite Club for the annual golf tournament and met several other managers of Tea Estates and their beautiful sari clad wives. Very hospitable folk.

One day I hope to return to upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with Rajan to explore the Chinese border region, and see what we can find in the way of evidence of a branch of the ancient Tea and Horse road that the Chinese scholars write about. Certainly the tea tribes I have visited in Yunnan remind me physically and culturally of the Tangsa Naga.

After Assam, I went to Darjeeling and met several knowledgeable and helpful men who have worked in the tea industry all their lives. One is the grandson of a Bengali Raja and the other came into Darjeeling as a young man on holiday from Gujarat and stayed to become a tea manager. I also spent a week living with a Gorkha family, where the head of the household is the son of a woman who came in from Nepal to pluck tea. He is a Buddhist Lama and local government clerk.

I still haven’t told you of visits to numerous temples; improvising music with the male ‘wives of Shiva’ in a Bhakti monastery on the island of Majuli; wandering around the blindingly white and glorious Taj Mahal; my adventures on trains, planes, rickshaws, an elephant and overly crowded ‘taxis’; or a leisurely day on a river boat in Kerala... It would take a book to tell you all my adventures! I love India and can’t wait to return.

AFTERNOON absurdiTEA, as part of the Oz Asia Festival in Adelaide will show at the Space Theatre on 26 September, 2010, at 2pm. For more information, please visit ozasiafestival.com.au/afternoon-absurditea

Runa Islam questions our ways of seeing

Runa Islam, born in Bangladesh and brought up in London, has been mediating on the nature of visual media like cinema. She has been exploring its history and aesthetics and investigating the way in which time, space and meaning are manipulated by this visual media. Her first solo in Australia opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)in Sydney on August 19 and will run there until November 21, 2010. Her works were also part of the Asia Pacific Triennial held at the Gallery of Modern Art and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane earlier this year.

“Film to me, lends itself as an art form. It is image-based, condenses or stretches time and is a framing device—it has the ability to frame an idea or a concept. Film also has a transformative quality,” Islam said at an artist talk at the MCA on August 20^th.

The solo consists of six film-installation works created since 2003 and a related photographic work. The fourth floor of the MCA is transformed into an immersive space where screens are suspended from the ceiling or images are projected onto the gallery walls—and not a digital projector is to be seen. Islam’s works are film-installations—the spinning, whirring old-fashion film projectors are as much part of the artwork as the projected image itself. This use of projectors itself creates the distance between the viewer and the image—you know what you are watching isn’t reality.

The first work you encounter, Assault (2008) is a small, back-lit screen suspended mid-air in a corridor, where a series of bright, changing colours are projected onto an actor’s face—is it a man or a woman? That question is perhaps irrelevant. The actor squints and frowns as the frequency and persistency of the colour shifts intensifies. The film perhaps articulates the assault of the mass media and its saturated images that we encounter everyday.

In Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot) (2003), two images are projected—one on the back wall, and the second on a smaller suspended screen hung in the middle of the room. Islam uses this literal juxtaposition of images to construct what she calls “a form of architectural wish fulfillment” for an ill-fated concrete building in the provincial English town of Gateshead. Developed as a car park with a rooftop restaurant, the large, concrete building however remained unused. Islam went into the building and filmed three separate narratives—one of the disused building as it stood in reality, one of the original architect model, and a third a temporary restaurant set that Islam created within the building.

“It was an empty shell of a building. So when I was there, I saw it as a persona. I started to imagine what this personality would desire—it would want to be a restaurant. So I call it architectural wish fulfillment,” said Islam.

Soon there were debates about whether this disused building should be listed as a heritage site, or demolished. This dichotomy of notions for the same building is what perplexed Islam. The building is in fact being demolished at the moment.

The 16mm film Be The First To See What You See As You See It (2004), Islam says offers another kind of wish fulfillment. In this large wall-projection, a woman walks into a museum-like space, closely observing the ceramic crockery displayed on plinths. She begins to touch and toy with the artifacts—as many of us are often tempted to do in a museum. Finally, she nonchalantly pushes them off their support, slow motion film capturing their fall and shatter. These shots are interjected by scenes of the woman taking tea and biscuits in another location. “The two different set of images explore the object as it should be used (to drink tea) and as an artifact (on display in a museum),” said Islam.

In Untitled (2008), what at first appears to be a blurred, black-and-white abstract image, can be deciphered as a photograph of a hunting scene only when the camera zooms out to provide context for the image. Here Islam mediates on the framing capacity of film—the filmmaker’s ability to show only what he/she wishes to show.

She takes this concept a step further in her latest work, Magical Consciousness (2010), co-commissioned by the MCA and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The work consists of a large, horizontal wall projection that takes as its subject a Japanese screen from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The film captures not the highly refined landscape scene painted upon its frontal side but the delicate squares of gold leaf applied to its reverse, which viewers would not normally see. Islam suggests there is much that we ignore, or do not see outside the mainstream discourse of the media. She focuses on the unseen or the hidden aspects of the visual world.

Opening the floodgates on a torrent of percussive grooves in Adelaide

Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi finds herself grooving to The Dhol Foundation’s pulsating, thundering grooves.

From the very first beat emanating from Johnny Kalsi’s dhol, it is hard to keep yourself still—the rhythm and pace of this thundering drum from Punjab makes for pulsating, rocking music that gets you on your feet. Add to that his energy and enthusiasm on stage in a live performance, and you have a show of unstoppable masti. “We always feed from the energy of the audience and it’s not very hard to sense this even if you’re new to seeing The Dhol Foundation for the first time. You are made to feel a part of the celebration and projected love!” says Britain-based Kalsi. He, with his band, The Dhol Foundation (TDF), will unleash its signature killer brand of electronic bhangra-infused funk to Adelaide for the closing ceremony of the OZ Asia Festival on October 2, 2010.

Kalsi has previously toured all over Australia with other bands, but TDF was last seen in Australia in 2006 when they performed at WOMAD in Adelaide and then in Melbourne for the Commonwealth Games. “This was a very special time and the reception we had from the huge audience at the Sydney Myer Bowl in Melbourne was quite overwhelming,” recollects Kalsi. “No doubt they will bring the same love with them once again.”

Kalsi who calls himself a dholaholic, is self-taught and has been performing professionally since 1989 when he joined the pioneering bhangra band, Alaap. “When I started learning to play the Dhol, it was very difficult not having a studio or sound proof garage to make 106bd of noise,” recollects Kalsi. “But it took off when I found my footing with the all time bhangra legends, Alaap. This made things much easier and I was able to play very regularly and start to develop as an artist and performer.”

Since 1999, Kalsi has recorded two albums by the Dhol Foundation—both quirkily named—Big Drum Small World and Drumstruck. He has also performed with a range of collaborators such as bands like Fun-Da-Mental, Trans-Global Underground and Afro Celt Sound System featuring Sinead O’Connor. Taking the dhol completely mainstream, he has also worked for Hollywood films including the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Ang Lee’s The Incredible Hulk.

Scorsese used Drummers Reel from Kalsi’s debut album in the scene when Leonardo De Caprio throws the bible into the river from a bridge. “This was a very exciting track and gave (the scene) tension and was appropriate for the movie.” For The Incredible Hulk, Kalsi created a specific score for a section of the film. “This was the first ever internet recording I have been involved in. 11 High Bandwidth Internet Lines were connected from Air Studios in London to a film studio in San Francisco,” he says. “On a huge plasma screen the scene was running, while on a smaller screen we could see the reaction of Ang Lee while he watched us via Web cam. We then ran the sequence where David Banners’ girlfriend double crosses him and the army moves in to take him to a secure location. The music sequence started when the helicopters fly in formation over a desert. The voice of Shaheen Badar was added.”

Kalsi has also played for the 3-D IMAX film, Sea Monsters. “I never thought I would be involved in working on a 3D movie but it came about when I got a call from Richard Evens. When I asked what I should bring they said “everything! I was in shock as I had no idea what they wanted at that stage,” says Kalsi. “The session was over 2 days long and I performed all the percussion on the score thatwas produced by Richard & David Rhodes. Dhol Drumming in 6.0 surround sound wicked!”

So what is it about the dhol that makes it popular across such a wide audience? “The dhol is of course very infectious even to the ones that hear it everyday,” he says Kalsi. As for his abiding love for the dhol, it is the sheer power of decibels that gives Kalsi the kick. “As the Dhol is an outdoor instrument it is naturally very loud. Back in the day this drum was used by town criers to relay messages from one village to another. I have had the opportunity to perform alongside a variety of drums from all over the world. The Dhol was by far the loudest. Djembe came close but has no loud low end and a West African talking drum was also close but only when it was miked up. Also the fact that it is worn over the head like a guitar, makes me completely mobile and I can still cover the whole stage while playing.”

Kalsi plays a variety of other instruments, including keyboards, piano, drum kit, frame drums, tabla, darabuka and dholak. However, his loyalty to the dhol is unwavering. “My body and soul are in this drum. I will take it with me when it's my time to go as the dhol is my life, and anyway, I can't play the Harp!” he laughs.

Johnny Kalsi performs with The Dhol Foundation at the Festival Theatre on October 2, 2010, at 7.30pm. For tickets visit: www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/ozasia-2010/events/the-dhol-foundation/

“Calcutta changed my world”

Claire McCarthy draws up a complex portrait of Calcutta in her debut feature film, writes Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi

“You’d never survive a day in the slums of Calcutta.” This rather random taunt from their mother sent Sydney director Claire McCarthy and her younger sister to the streets of Calcutta in 2003. And it was here that the first ideas for her debut feature film, The Waiting City, germinated.

The city is not only the primary location of the film—making it the first Aussie feature shot entirely in India—but also plays a major role driving and transforming the lives of the two protagonists. An Australian couple, Ben (Joel Edgerton) and Fiona (Radha Mitchell), arrive in Calcutta to collect their adopted baby. Delays with the adoption agency mean that must wait there for days and succumb to the chaos and magic of the city that drives them to confront deeply buried differences as well as their core belief systems.

The ways in which the city transforms the couple is quite close to McCarthy’s own experience. “Calcutta opened my eyes to a lot of things, partially also because of the volunteer work we did with Mother Teresa’s sisters,” she recollects. “That experience cracks you open. You meet people you would never otherwise meet and see things you would never otherwise see. Calcutta changed my world.”

During that first visit, McCarthy made a documentary film about her and her sister’s experience with the Missionaries of Charity sisters and the way that the experience transformed them. “There were so many contradictions in the work we were doing. There was always a great paradox—with great sadness and poverty, there was also great beauty. We saw life and death so openly,” she says.

During this time, McCarthy also became privy to the highly emotional process of adoption and started interviewing couples who had adopted children. “I started to collate those interviews and find threads in those stories. This film is an intersection between truth and fiction.”

To maintain what McCarthy calls the “poetic realism” of the film, she used many non-actors as well as real locations. The film starts off in the generic looking airport and a five star hotel. However, as Fiona and Ben travel around the city and to its rural outskirts to understand the place from which their adopted daughter, Lakshmi comes, the drama and chaos of the city unfolds. “Claire is just so ballsy to even have the idea to come to Calcutta and shoot in the train station, and shoot in the street, take over the airport,” Radha Mitchell says in an interview for the production notes.

In McCarthy’s hands, Calcutta is no mere exotic locale to tell an emotional tale on overdrive mode. Rather, the complex character of Calcutta itself unfolds—through its people, its festivals and the music.

Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti) who acts as a guide to the couple, often unexpectedly throws up very different points of view—especially about motherhood, barren women and adoption, really galvanising Fiona to think about her own life and choices. The Durga Puja—the chaotic street processions and immersion rituals, as well as the potent imagery of the goddess herself all push Fiona to question her atheism.

The high-flying lawyer, who has driven her life by her own choices suddenly finds herself losing control, and in one scene surrenders inexplicably in front of Durga. “I was lucky enough to see a Durga Puja and was interested in the devotion that goes into the making of the Durga. It was an interesting context to push the buttons—to raise the questions in her life that had remained unanswered,” says McCarthy. “For Fiona, there’s an opening; a sense of acceptance and surrender to things she was always trying to control.”

Meanwhile, it is the local music that plays a crucial part in Ben’s transformation. Ben is a one-time musician, suffering from a creative block and works as a music producer, engineering other people’s music rather than create his own. In Calcutta, he discovers local music, which revitalises his own creative spirit. Perhaps it is this portrait of Calcutta through its musical diversity—from Tagore’s melodious songs, to the powerful voices of the Bauls, and the pulsating sounds of young local bands—that really makes The Waiting City an incredible film to watch.

It is due to McCarthy’s integrity—in using real locations, local music, earthy costumes and even a local crew—that gives this film the authenticity that many other western films about India lack. She easily admits her dependence on the local crew particularly. “The logistics of filming on location in Calcutta were extraordinary, but we had an amazing technical crew. There were some very senior crew from India who had a lot of experience. I mean you guys (India) made close to two thousand films last years, while we (Australia) made about 40! So I knew we were in good hands.”

“There is this culture of filmmaking which is really part of India already, so everybody’s very experienced,” said Radha Mitchell. “What I was really impressed by, especially with the Indian crew, was that they could just change hats, and somebody who’s an actor could also be an AD, could also help in wardrobe, everybody could do everything.”

“I love the people, I love how interested and approachable and approaching they are,” Joel Edgerton said about shooting in Calcutta. “It’s been chaotic, but it’s been an incredibly special experience. I love the way you can turn in any direction and open your eyes and see something fascinating.”

Aussie artist portrays Indian landscapes

Nike Savvas captures iconic visages of India’s landscape in a glass installation in Delhi, writes Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi

When Australian artist Nike Savvas visited India for the first time in 2005, she could not sleep for the want of taking in the myriad experiences the country had to offer. “I went to Delhi for the 11th Triennale of India, where I won a Jury Prize for my work Zero to Infinity,” recollects Savvas. “I travelled around and completely fell in love with India. I was so excited with what I experienced and saw that I didn’t sleep very, much not wanting to waste time in absorbing the wonderment of this beautiful and amazing country. I never had a place or a culture affect me in this way before.”

Five years later, those experiences of India have found visual expression in two dreamy, colourful, glass installations that Savvas has created for the Westin Hotel in Delhi

Transfer Abstracts, which is being installed in the main foyer, is a suspension of myriad-coloured, streaming glass panels.

“The concept for Transfer Abstracts is driven by the interlinked notions of passing time, movement and travel,” says Savvas. “I endeavoured to capture a moment of this time through colour and implied movement, a split-second in which the diverse local landscape, both current and historical, is represented. It is as though the viewer of the artwork has travelled through and observed the Yamuna River and floodplains, the Aravalli mountain range and the orange sun that sets behind it, all in a moment. These three iconic visages of the Indian landscape will be blurred into one, resulting in a visual spectacle of movement and colour.”

Savvas’ colour palette for this work also draws extensively from the colours of the Indian landscape at sunrise and sunset. “The vivid reds, oranges and yellows are reminiscent of summer and significant markers of the beginning and end of a day,” explains Savvas. “The warm, saturated colour palette and sense of movement has a curatorial relevance to the clientele of the Westin as it conveys the passing of time and coming and going of people. Select panels of the work are accented with hues of cool blue and flashes of green that reference the Yamuna River and Aravalli mountain range.”

Her second artwork titled Sunstar is in the pre-function room and consists of a series of brilliant yellow glass beads arranged to imply gridlines of perspective.

As the viewer moves around the artwork the beads seem to shift, forming dynamic geometric patterns and optical illusions. The fine patterning of the grids reflects sunlight as well as the fine weaves of textile. Nine veils of intricate pattern are suspended, each adding a further layer of depth and detail.

“Sunstar compliments Transfer Abstracts—the two are interlinked by their connection to movement and motion, but differ wildly in execution and aesthetic,” says Savvas. “In the pre-function zone I have played with vanishing points and lines of perspective and motion, creating a stationary artwork that appears to move and shift with the viewer, encouraging them to travel around the space.”

Sunstar captures the strong visual created by rays, or veils, of sunlight, as well as the use of sundials in India. “As the day passes, light and shadow shift, emphasising or concealing various elements in a space. This movement of sunlight directly communicates the passing of time, harking back to ancient references of sundials and gnomons, such as the Samrat Yantra built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II at Jaipur, India, in 1734.”

Savvas, who was commissioned for these artworks through Urban Art Projects (UAP), a public art & design consultancy, is excited about taking her artworks to India again. “It was wonderful to open my practice up to the Indian culture and location. I am excited to have engaged and influenced my work in this way and I see it as a rewarding development. It is also great to have my work viewed and experienced by an Indian audience,” says Nike.

For those who cannot make it to Delhi any time soon, Savvas’s latest exhibition titled Sliding Ladder is currently showing at the Breenspace Gallery in Sydney.

As an example of the variety of Savvas’ artistic influences, Sliding Ladder is named after an algebraic equation, x2/3 + y2/3 = L2/3, that gave rise to string art in the 1960’s and 70’s. “In this work, I reference optical art to address different perceptual modalities,” says Savvas.

This work looks like a macro version of the sliding ladder used by primary school kids to understand algebraic equations. Coloured strings are meticulously drawn and pinned across an entire room of Breenspace Gallery to translate the equation into geometric patterns and abstract forms. The process of creating the work, as well as experiencing it as a viewer, also has aspects of mysticism, contemplation and meditation.

As with Transfer Abstracts and Sunstar, Sliding Ladder is also an explosion of colour, with an emphasis on how those different colours interact with each other, and the visual stimulus they create. This experimentation of colour in space is very significant in Savvas’ practice. “I experiment with the full range of possibilities of how colour can be applied, investigating its symbolic, physical and psychological ramifications.”

Another continuing aspect in her artworks is the elaborate installation process and The Westin installation is definitely no exception. “The artwork in the main foyer is particularly challenging because of the scale of the glass panels – they are up to 2.7m long, and quite heavy,” explains Savvas. “This length means just handling them becomes more complicated. Several people from the Urban Art Projects install team are needed to hold and attach the cables for every single piece. With such a large quantity of panels hanging so close together and vertically interlinked this is a delicate and time consuming process!”

“Challenges faced for the installation of Sunstar are not quite as complicated. Here it is all about attention to detail and ensuring every glass sphere is very precisely located. If the installation of each sphere isn’t accurate, then the entire aesthetic is thrown out. When the pattern is absolutely dependant on grids, perspective and optical illusion it’s essential all the components are perfectly placed.

Savvas will not be present for the whole installation period, which will take several weeks. “I will be inspecting at a key point close to the completion of the install. This is a far more hands off approach than my usual installations, and is only possible because I have already investigated and resolved the details of the artwork with the UAP team.”

Savvas’ works have previously been criticised for being too simplistic—however, one can hardly call her Indian installations simplistic after understanding the range of sources of Indian landscape, history and culture that she reflects in her work.

One of her most well known Australian works, Atomic: full of love, full of wonder, which consisted of 50,000 coloured, foam balls, showed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2006. This work was criticised for being “popular entertainment”.

Now that is hardly a comment that Savvas would take as a critique, if not a complement. After all, she believes that her work should engage with people outside the confines of an elitist gallery space. “Art should be for everyone and enjoyed by everyone. ‘Art for the People’—I suppose that is my motto.”

Nike Savvas’ Sliding Ladder will show at the Breenspace Gallery in Waterloo, Sydney.

Her installations at the Westin Hotel, Delhi should be installed in the next few weeks.