Placemaking without Borders (Part 1)

Published on 12.06.2023

Gathering of artists at the studio in Malleswaram in 2001, including Surekha, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Umesh Madanahalli, H.A. Anil Kumar, and N.S. Harsha. Image courtesy: Wenzel A. Haller

The 1990s in India is often signposted as the decade that began to host a notable influx of foreign individuals—some artists, some entrepreneurs, and some investors, who founded galleries and art spaces as they leveraged the new openings offered by economic liberalization. American artist Peter Nagy and his setting up of the gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi in 1997, for instance, stands as an iconic testament of that period. While the intersection of internationalism and Indian art is not a new phenomenon, the period of economic liberalization in India becomes important for having brought into regular discussion the dominance of nation-centrism in the context of both art worlds and artmaking. This prompted a re-evaluation of the relevance of nation-centrism in the new globalized art world, when the very nomadic movement of artists across the globe became apposite to the cross-fertilizing of new pathways. While individuals continue to navigate nation-imposed identities such as gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural background, the mobility of artists facilitated the exchange of ideas, presenting possibilities to challenge and reshape prevailing notions of identity. It is against this backdrop that the year 1997 also saw a group of artists in Bangalore^[1] entering into an exchange program with Aarau, a small town and the capital of Switzerland’s northern canton of Aargau, that took two forms. First, artists from Bangalore traveled to Aarau for six-month residencies, and later a residency was established in Malleswaram, Bangalore, hosting artists from Palestine and Switzerland. Written in two parts, this article aims to contextualize this exchange within the broader global phenomenon of the post-90s “art worlds” and the new internationalism that marked India’s post-liberalization era. 

Gathering of artists in the studio at Kronengasse, Aarau in 2005, on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Arbeitsgruppe Gästeatelier Krone’s (GAK) artist-in-residence programme. From the archives of Gästatelier Krone 2005. The photograph appeared in Isabel Zürcher, ‘Gästeatelier Krone — Willkommenskultur Seit 25 Jahren’, Kunstbulletin 12 (2020).

The first part lays the framework to situate the Aarau–Bangalore exchange, beginning with an exploration of the complex dynamics of internationalism in the landscape of Indian art post independence. It then argues that the factors driving the emergence of new internationalism extend beyond economic liberalization and should be considered from a broader perspective. To do this, the essay examines the transformative period of the “long 1980s,” focusing on specific moments in the histories of Bangalore and Aarau, as it seeks to imagine possibilities for cultural coevalness between these historically distinct regions. It concludes by discussing the idea of contemporary art and its pivotal role in fostering cultural exchange. The second part of the article builds upon this foundation and presents a detailed account of the Aarau–Bangalore exchange program, delving into its origin, development, and impact.

Together, the two articles highlight the significance of the Aarau–Bangalore artistic exchange within the critical history of global art, emphasizing how artist-led placemaking played a role in overcoming cultural barriers in the post-90s art world. It thus aims to offer insights into the complex interplay of ideologies, self-organization, and the making of a global art space.

HISTORICIZING INTERNATIONALISM IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA

GLOBAL CONVERGENCES: PLACEMAKING AND THE LONG 1980s

Poster for the book Kleinstadt Rebellion at Ochsengässli, Aarau, as one among a series of the same poster appearing at various public spaces in the city. Photo: Wenzel A. Haller

The exchange between Aarau and Bangalore began as an artist-in-residence (AiR) program held out of a studio apartment in Aarau in 1997. On the Swiss side, the development was more incidental than programmatic. Wenzel A. Haller, practicing as a ceramist in Aarau for two decades through the 1970s and 1980s, ideated the need for an AiR program in Aarau. It was Christoph Storz, fellow artist and former resident of Aarau, who informed Haller about artists actively involved in producing contemporary art in Bangalore. In fact, these artists did not enjoy visibility in the art scene in India, which was then being recognized as an emerging global market for art. As cities became art centers and signaled a specific art market with their booming galleries, the art scene of Bangalore did not truly partake of this economy. This is when Mumbai and Delhi were presenting globally recognized and highly developed art markets, such that, from time to time, they were susceptible to criticism for promoting artworks deemed “alternative,” while “being tailor-made for transaction as peripatetic objects with signature value in the ‘big top’ of the art fair.”^[13] In the late 1990s, Storz’s knowledge of Bangalore’s art scene came from having recently relocated to the city, joining his partner and artist Sheela Gowda, whom he had met at a residency in Paris. Haller’s readiness to connect with artists from Bangalore was, therefore, not driven by a desire to bank on readily available cultural and symbolic capital; it rather speaks of relying on pure happenstance, motivated merely by a curiosity about what contemporary art from this city in India could look like.

At the same time, the cultural placement of this exchange, happening in the late 1990s, should not be seen exclusively against the background of the great economic changes brought in by economic liberalization. It is also in line with the period that is being understood more and more as the long 1980s, witnessing “changing relationship between ideologies, governments, and their publics, the effects of which have come to shape the contemporary condition.”^[14] With a rough timeline drawn from 1975 to 1995, a hallmark of this period is the existence of individual desires for alternative forms of self-organization and staging art as activism, taking it to the streets, but also through “words, images, objects, and actions.”^[15] In this regard, the histories of Aarau, Bangalore, and its young artists, meet at a shared synchrony. Throughout the 1980s, Haller was a prominent figure in Aarau, involved as a subversive thinker and organizer of social spaces that interrupted the town’s gentrification drive. He began several initiatives such as shared housing spaces and co-founded cultural alternatives with fellow anarchist Wolfgang Bortlik.^[16] This included the   Alpenzeigernewspaper, which reported on Aarau’s counterculture movements and served as a counterbalance to mainstream media, and Das goldene Kalb, a bookstore-cum-art gallery.^[17] All this was part of the youth revolt that had gripped Aarau in the form of a “Kleinstadt Rebellion,” translating roughly as “small-town rebellion,” coinciding with anti-nuclear protests, the rise of punk culture, and the squatter movement.^[18] It ran parallel to the larger cultural landscape of Switzerland in the 1980s, when youth rebellions challenged the existing institutional fabric of the city by demanding spaces that then became “politicised places(s) for counter culture.”^[19]

Pages from the periodical “Alpenzeiger,” started by Wenzel A. Haller, Wolfgang Bortlik, Emanuel and Mary Claire Martinoli among others, running between the years 1975-1999. Image courtesy: Wolfgang Bortlik


Newspaper clipping of Wolfgang Bortlik (center) and Wenzel A. Haller (right) at a May Day demonstration in Aarau, Freie Aargauer, 1977. Image courtesy: Wolfgang Bortlik

India, on the other hand, was reeling from the effects of the Emergency (1975-77) in the 1970s, when the threat to democracy saw widespread student protests and autonomous women’s movements voicing resistance against state-sanctioned inequalities. In this political landscape, Bangalore emerged as a focal point for counter-institutional developments, birthing collectives that framed themselves as “alternative” institutes—“those not entrenched in an institutionalized and universal notion of equality.”^[20] Beginning with the Center for Informal Education and Development Studies (CIEDS) in 1975, the scene proliferated with others such as the Bangalore Film Society coming up in 1977, and the feminist collective Vimochana Forum for Human Rights in 1979. In Bangalore, specifically, the 1980s saw the migration of (chiefly) men from Iran, Jordan, Palestine, and other West Asian regions, as they were “fleeing repressive regimes in their own countries or seeking moments of respite from military duty, war, or marriage.”^[21] There was also an influx of refugees from Bangladesh following the Bangla liberation war of 1971. This came at a time when the Indian state recognized only political victims as “refugees” and excluded gendered violence, making it difficult for others such as Bangladeshi women, who were pregnant after rape during the Bangla liberation war of 1971, to seek refugee status.^[22] Vimochana, thus, responded by setting up a public forum to address the issue of “human rights violation of women within the home and outside,” in the context of larger structures of violence and power.^[23] On the other hand, CIEDS, a multifarious collective, was involved with “environment and ecology, housing rights, film and communications, art and culture, peace and militarisation,”^[24] while also birthing offshoots through personal initiatives by its members.^[25] Both Vimochana and the Bangalore Film Society (BFS) had emerged out of CIEDS, initiated by human rights and women’s rights activist Corinne Kumar. The BFS was formed during the film society movement in Bengaluru, to create an open space for “vigorous political debate and provocative convenings” as they screened feature films and documentaries, while not shying away from other experimental
formats.^[26] Each were committed as being spaces critiquing exclusionist policies of the state, either by providing legal and social infrastructure for those marginalized by the state, or by being spaces for dialogue and debate, thereby involving themselves in the continuous process of expanding the idea of culture.

Both the Swiss countercultural scene and the rise of autonomous collectives in Bangalore trace an itinerary of movements evolving out of the disillusionment in classical politics,^[27] when local politics emerged as alternatives to state authority. Thus, as the trajectory of Aarau intersects with that of Bangalore in the late 1990s, this cultural backdrop of the long 1980s arrives as a moment of global entanglement, presenting possibilities of cultural coevalness through their shared encounters with crisis in the urban space. Placemaking, then, resulting out of this dynamic, can be seen to emerge from thinking beyond the border, where the border had been impeding the evolution of culture—be it local or global.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW INTERNATIONALISM: TRANSFORMING CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Returning to the 1990s, much has been said about the correlation between the decade being a time of rising fundamentalist forces in India and also the rise of installation and video art. Cited in this narrative is the emergence of a networked space of the “secular” in the cultural sphere, cross-fertilized by critical collectives of artists and activists. Here, the Delhi-based SAHMAT collective had been at the helm, with visual art practitioners having taken up interdisciplinary approaches to question traditional modes of spectatorship. The best-remembered example is Vivan Sundaram’s Memorial, exhibited at the gallery of All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in December of 1993, which Geeta Kapur often cites as being the first work of installation art in India. In Bangalore, too, an art installation was realized collaboratively earlier in 1993. Titled “Cultural Spiral,” this project was initiated when Saraswathy Ganapathy, a cultural activist and partner of the late Kannada playwright Girish Karnad, contacted Bangalore-based artist C.F. John to help mount a show arranged by SAHMAT. John was already working with Visthaar, another autonomous collective, and had created artworks in response to communal tensions that had gripped the city in 1992; he then involved Sheela Gowda to discuss collaborative possibilities for the show. She brought in Hyderabad-based art critic Rasna Bhushan and two young artists, Raghavendra Rao and Surekha, to help execute the work.^[28] This was a time when presumed ideas of culture and tradition were being debated and discussed in literary circles, as artists were becoming increasingly suspicious of the iconic efficacy of visuals and how they lend easily to a statist idea of culture. In artmaking, a self-reflective paradigm could be achieved by allowing the integration of the position of the viewer within the artwork, posing them as “witness” to the crisis in democracy. This took shape best in the form of installation and site-specific art. It was also the chosen mode to exhibit “Cultural Spiral,” as it became a spiral maze featuring painted visuals on makeshift walls of plastic sheet, allowing audiences to physically immerse themselves in the experience. Through the 1990s, Bangalore emerged as a hub for art that resisted the monopolization of cultural thinking, engaging with the complex realities of contemporary urban life. A notable example of an artist from the time is Umesh Madanahalli, whose site-specific Earth Works in 1996 tackled issues of urbanization, globalization, and environmental degradation at a time when Bangalore was undergoing rapid transformation into India’s Silicon Valley, attracting large volumes of migration and causing a shift in the city’s socioeconomic fabric. Later, in 1997, Raghavendra Rao became the first artist from Bangalore to participate in the Aarau exchange, followed by Surekha in 1999.

Das Goldene Kalb, or The Golden Calf, a small store started by Wenzel A. Haller and Wolfgang Bortlik, running between the years 1982 and 1984 in Schlossplatz (Aarau), and operating as a meeting place for youth while also hosting exhibitions, readings, film screenings, and small concerts. Following its demolition, the store relocated to Ziegelrain 4 (Aarau) in 1985, functioning as a bookstore and art gallery, with a new collective overseeing its operations from 1992 to 2012. Image courtesy: Wolfgang Bortlik

Artists installing the work Cultural Spiral at Ravindra Kalakshetra, Bangalore, April 1993. Participating Artists: Sheila Gowda, Rasna Bushan, Raghavendra Rao, Om Prakash, Ravishankar Rao, P.C. Stephan, Surekha, Sudharsan, Somasekara, Dhanaraj Keezhara, and C.F. John. Image courtesy: C.F. John

Audience interacting with the installation Cultural Spiral at Ravindra Kalakshetra, Bangalore, April 1993. A 40ft x 40ft x 6ft installation was arranged as a spiral maze with transparent plastic sheets, bamboo poles, and centrally placed parallel mirrors at the heart of the maze. The plastic sheets featured visuals and text from historical counter-cultural movements in India, reproduced in English and Kannada in printing ink. Image courtesy: C.F. John

Participating artists at the installation Cultural Spiral, Ravindra Kalakshetra, Bangalore, April 1993. In the image at the center, artist Ramesh Kalkur. Image courtesy: C.F. John

The Arbeitesgruppe Gästeatelier Krone (GAK, or Working Group Guest Studio Krone) occasionally hosted artists from various parts of Europe in the Krone studio space, but their main program, for which they raised most of their funds, involved engaging in cultural exchange with countries in the Global South; this included artists from Palestine, Egypt, India, and other parts of Africa such as Jordan, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and the Republic of Congo. India had come to be mapped into the GAK network with Storz’s recommendation of Bangalore in 1997, with an exigent reason being hosting Indian artists practicing contemporary art. In Aarau, the dominant understanding of India was that of a crafts producer, and its visual culture was received primarily through its cheaply available artefacts. By inviting artists from Bangalore, the GAK aimed to shift this narrative and recognize India’s contemporary art practices within the global context.  

The idea of “contemporary art” active in the practice of cultural exchange here is perchance in tune with an art discourse alerted to the “global turn” in art production and its reception since 1989. “Global art” had emerged as the corrective principle to world art, championing the critique of Eurocentric museum practices, as it shed focus on biennales and art fairs as the new centers displaying cultures of the other and giving them discursive equality.^[29] These centers became hubs for alternative cosmopolitanism and new internationalism, as Third World contemporary art evolved in a new direction, to being recognized as art from the Global South.^[30] Parallel to this was the growing discontent with multiculturalism, while artistic production faced the challenge of cultural specificity;^[31] the oft-used binary of local/global was the double-edged sword that could take away from the more complicated picture of global migration and its critical possibilities. Thus, the understanding of “site” came to be expanded to not simply signal a location, or a specific locality or region producing a specific culture.^[32] Instead, site was thought to be discursively produced; it gestured to a field of knowledge, the site of intellectual exchange or cultural debate. In artistic thinking, much of this converges with Minimalism, the 1960s, and the development of conceptual art, when artists began visibilizing how site is a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art, thereby dislodging its simplification either as a location or as the locus of authentic culture. Thus, what is arrived at here is not just a process-based understanding of art, but also its bleeding into cultural exchange. The practice of artists such as Raghavendra Rao and Surekha were shaped by participating in Bangalore’s spaces of artistic resistance, coming at a time when installation art in the city was often realized through artistic collaboration. It emerged not only as an aesthetic, but also as the preferred form of organizing radically in a post-Fordist economy amid rising jingoistic nationalism and its protectionist attitude toward culture. Thus, in conclusion, such an understanding of contemporary art from India, where the site is repositioned as the location of cultural debate and not as a producer of a readily recognizable national culture, could take forward GAK’s vision to destabilize Aarau’s usual perception of India as a producer of cheap materials.