STAIN CANON: Presenting works of Anikesa Dhing, liactuallee and Priyanka Paul
The only prerequisite for learning about the creation of any space, time, or land is to be aware of its origins. Origin that often goes back to the meanings emerging from different histories, many genesis, diverse myths. Genesis which comes from Greek gignesthai, which means to be born. Origin, a word which comes from Latin oriri which means to rise. Rise from old English risan which means to attack. Attack from English attach which means to fasten: from French tacca which means to stain.
This exhibition finds its root in the creation of an origin in the context of a land once referred to as the Golden Bird. It is 1835. Macaulay’s Minute on Education (British historian T.B. Macaulay played a role in India’s education Policy with this minute and emphasized on the usage of English language) describes inhabitants of the Golden Bird as uncouth savages who need to get educated and civilized through emanation of words such as culture, civilisation, origin, genesis.
The coming of this language, that one now reads, was once new to dwellers and natives of a land. It was formed by reversing the order of the creation myth. First came temptation, deflowering, exile fueled by looting, and then began usage of words that now lay bare in front, to make a universe for the survival of language and culture that intended to make origin myths as canons.
The design of it, however in the context of the natives using it – always looked upon as a copycat. Not an origin. If not publicly, then in secrecy. And the case of this imitation, extending in similar ways to the wide brown land, to the mother continent, to herland, and utopias imagined by those who were not seen and heard.
In order to stain the genesis of the word origin, and with that what is perceived as an imitator, in a land known for its diversity, what propositions for the origin of an unknown space-time might emerge?
Stain: from Old French desteindre which means ‘tinge with a color different from the “natural” one’
Canon: from Greek kanōn which means ‘rule’
STAIN CANON attempts to prod into reasons behind the breaking down of categories in the age of network as no set of rules seem to suit contemporaneity due to access to a deluge of information, STAIN CANON suggests that no movement now congeals and rises to the prominence of a canon. As questions on our varying relationship with different histories are evoked, any origin story here is in a state of flux. In this change, at the stroke of fantastical, psychological and historical time, as the world sleeps, many moments intersect. And with that the meanings of origin, its connotations and attached values dilates to put forth three stories of new origins which unlike most myths are not written by men.
One, a primordial soup – a solution rich in organic compounds in the primitive oceans of the earth, from which life is thought to have originated. This primordial soup, now re-imagined in a fantastical space-time as diverse forms of cellular structures and inanimate materials are crocheted together by liactuallee. These structures find a moment to come together through different characters of ragdoll-like homunculus (fully formed miniature human) robots animated by a cognitive fragment of a human's soul. They are brought to life and awakened by means of a transformative performance via the Talisman, an object of magical powers. This talisman – created out of placing a slip-knot loop on the hook, pulling another loop through the first loop, and repeating this process to create a chain of a suitable length – holds truths that are written by those who hold up half the sky. Herein lay the coming together of the stitch and the punk. Stitch: an act, a gesture, a loop; to make, to mend, to join; the singular unit of a gesture, repetition resulting in the sum total of its parts. Punk: about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonisation and enthusiasm.
Two, the origin of objects of fondness. In the looming sense of the presence of bodies that are not present in a space. A journey back to childhood through Anikesa Dhing’s canvases and objects, where psychological time pendulates from remembrance and recollection to laughter and forgetting, and in between that persist several objects in image and form. Even though the tangible connection is severed as time passes, the bridge that endures a tender link and relation with them is memory. Memory that serves as a residue of people, places and things that exist in consciousness. As the transactional values attached to objects are exposed with humor and vibrancy, the everyday items are blotted by a riot of colors that transform commodities into sensorial journeys – of love, nostalgia, pain. In this journey with bodies that are absent – an impersonalisation of items that makes anyone feel at home – steers towards origins of novel personal experiences, individual selves, and materials that enable us to cope, escape, and find a moment of respite.
Three, a network of lands which unearth alternate histories – pushing the margins to be seen, heard and felt like never before in order to catalyze the creation of a belonging that could be seen as posthuman, and is intersectional in the realities that define it. Priyanka Paul’s holographic prints, digital images, oil pastels on chalkboard and puzzle herein present images of those tangible corporeal experiences that were never a part of history, but now in contemporaneity exist with their eccentricities – reclaiming what defined their origins and exposing those who claimed particular identities as subjects. Through the striking of a historical time that uncovers the interconnected nature of social categorizations – color, class, gender, caste, sexuality – as they apply to an individual or a group, an overlapping interdependent systems of discriminations surface through a critique of those who form any canon. For history, for language, for land – to begin the decolonisation, in a play of colors and mediums within and with the network culture.
As these three stories of origins permeate and traverse through one another, the canons get discolored through a stain which is interactive and invites the viewers within the confines of Gallery XXL, to witness how urbanity is now used as a tool to topple many origins, and envisage new origins that are plural yet personal, resilient and vulnerable, historic as well as futuristic.
