Report on the Delhi Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi:

Report on the Delhi Burqa Projection Workshop (background to the performance)- The Delhi Burqa Projection workshop was conceived and led by Sophie Ernst, video artist and Assistant Professor, SVA, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She centered the performance on six young Muslim women students of Jamia Milia Islamia University (Nazia, Padma Renu Sonowal, Heena Yusuf, Sana Jafri, Bushra Hassan, Rukshana) who were the participants in the two-day workshop conducted. The workshop was centered on issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ in the context of young Muslim women, embracing, political and religious and aesthetic concerns.

A part of the process of the workshop was to make the participants shoot short videos, which were later, edited by Sophie. The process of the workshop itself included elements of drawing and certain other forms of communication like debates on ‘freedom’ for Muslim women in the public sphere and more specifically in public spaces, and ending with sessions on training the participants to video shoot and eventually leading up to the participants shooting short video footages.. Sophie later edited the video footages, and these footages became a key medium (as imagery to be projected) in Thursday’s performance. (I have not attended the...details picked up through fragmented conversations with the workshop coordinator)

Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi: The event was framed, as a ‘Performance’ Students of Jamia Milia Islamia would be presenting their work done during workshop. After the workshop the Sophie along with the participants, choose a location for presentation. The goal was to present the work in a public space and open up the dialectics of the workshop to a wider audience. The sites chosen were lodged in the narrow lanes behind Turkuman Gate...a mosque outside Al Noor Hotel, and Chitli Gali. The young students presented six short video pieces, as they negotiated their way through the chaotic crowds and their unfamiliarity with equipment.

The participants took turns playing an actor, wearing a white burqa, walking through the space, while the one of them playing the operator would be tracing her movements with a video beam. The white burqua became the screen where the video clips where projected. The bright shaft of light coming from the projectors acted as a device which flattened the three dimensional volume of the actors transforming them into images on which the video clippings were super imposed.

However if one has to frame the Burqa projections at Turkman Gate as a Performance then it is imperative that one will intereogate the ‘performative’ aspect of the event and negotiate deeper into its contextual value. Sophie Ernst’s workshop and the Performance leading out of it, cannot be viewed in isolation and needs to be seen as a carry forward of a similar project she did with students of Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, leading to a ‘Performance’ at Delhi gate, Lahore. I have not witnessed the Lahore performance, but video footage of the ‘performance’ has been edited and presented by the Sophie as almost as an independent product. The video filters out the entire locational ambience and showcases the ‘walks’ in fleeting cuts (re) presenting the performers almost as if they are icons sleek and fleeting across a ramp.

Sophie lets her instincts of a video artist take over at two crucial junctures of the process...first as the editor of the video clippings shot by the participants, and most importantly as the agency who shoots and edits the final ‘performance’. As a video artist who exercises near complete agency over these two key areas (determining the look of the projections and determining how the ‘performance is re-presented), Sophie’s authorial instincts overtake the spirit of a workshop and cast it as an site of art production over which she exercises a dominant agency.

However, what I find most disturbing about Sophie Ernst’s intervention is the ideological formulations informing its foray into the ‘politics of representation’. The burqua has become a universal symbol of ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’; it has emerged as an easy trope enabling artists to comment on issues of Islamic patriarchy and repression of women in the public sphere. However, in both the Lahore and Delhi workshops, Sophie ‘casts’ college going young Muslim women, who do not wear burquas in their day-to-day lives and drapes them with burquas.

Though the act of projecting video footages developed in a workshop around issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ on the burqua, and acting it out in (Muslim) male dominated public space can be subversive, the subversive potential is undermined by Sophie predetermining the suppression in their lives and superimposing a outsider’s notion of ‘freedom’ onto them. Moreover at a formal level, the manner in which the bodies are reduced to a flat screen, which enacts a role predetermined by Sophie, allowing them to be completely objectified, very problematically raises the very questions of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ which the workshop and ‘performance’ were allegedly seeking to address.

It is true that certain ‘poetic’ moments emerged, that evening and the ‘performance’ did generate a lot of local curiosity. However the moments were nearly too fleeting to register, and the crowd that had gathered did not get to interact with either Sophie nor with the workshop participants, thereby weakening its impact as an intervention in the public sphere...in the sub continent it is way to easy to draw crowds, the real test is what one does with them.

latest happenings

Burqa projection workshop conducted by Sophie Ernst

date for workshop: Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd of April from 10:30 -17:00
Date for Performance:Thursday 20 April (decided after the workshop)

project note:

During the workshop we discuss political, religious and aesthetic
concerns and develop the imagery to be projected during the
performance. Once the video clips are produced we choose a location
for presentation. The goal is to present the work in a public space
and open up the discussions of the workshop to a wider audience.

The initial Burqa projection was performed at Delhi gate, Lahore. An
actor, wearing a white burqa, walked through the bazaar. The projector
operator was tracing her movements with a video beam. The superimposed
images were video clips prepared by students from the art school of
Lahore.

The clips were short comments the students inserted into the streets
of the city. At times funny, serious, violent, poetic, the videos
commented on the notion of identity, stereotyping, absence and spatial
constraint.

Workshop will be lead by , Sophie Ernst video artist and Assistant
Professor, SVA, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore

The project is set up in two stages, workshop and performance.

Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi

Students of Jamia are presenting their work done during workshop last weekend

6 short video pieces, projections will happen arround the Al Noor Hotel

from Turkman gate take the first right, follow the road untill the mosque, right oposite of the mosque you will find Al Noor Hotel. tOP fLOOR.

Shaina's project in khirkee..

by shaina anand

Khirkeeyaan (khirkee-window/yaan-vehicle n, hindi)

To be realized in Khirkee village/Extn, during an associate residency at Khoj Studio.

Concept.

To employ stealthy surveillance technology in the exploration and production of automatic and networked site-specific media. To do this with and for Khirki village, and its people.

Outline.

The device consists of 4 cameras at a distance of 25-100 mts from each other, within walking proximity but not necessarily within line of site. The images from all 4 cameras (as well as sound) appears on one screen in a quadrant. At the site and axis of each camera is also a TV wherein the viewer/actor/audience can see this quadrant of action/image/sound from all 4 sites.

Abstract.

To use security apparatus, used otherwise for surveillance and secret use. (recent spy and sting camera operations and exploitations) These will be embedded or rather implanted visibly and interactively for the knowledge and ‘use’ of the community-at-large. More importantly the feedback access to the images real-time on-site becomes a setting for various experiments in community networking and creative performance; automated story-telling and filmmaking.

The conceptual and creative use of such a device in process oriented art is promising. Unlike my prior media interventions, which have employed DIY video and editing skills to produce on-site televised media, this project pushes the envelope of that ‘site’ and ‘community’ based media. Here, the filmmaking is in a sense automatic, made largely through the potential and possibility of multiple views, realtime feedback and the absence of the ‘cameraman’ and video editor.

What will begin as a series of modules (each with a defined ‘end product’), will hopefully lead to a substantial exploration at creative ‘faction’ - a location and people specific fictive movie.

Gear

4 cheap security cameras

4 cheap dynamic mics

4 14” TV’s

Video Quad processor

4 mic sound mixer

RF modulator

Mini dv camera with AV/in.

90 mts RCA-BNC cables

90 mts xlr cables

90 mts RF (coax) cables

power at 4 sources for camera + tv

power at one of these sources for ‘control’ rack.

Techincal note: 4 cameras go to video multiplexer- split into 4 screen video-out. Video-out from tv goes back into 4 tvs on site. 4 mic sound goes to 4-channel mixer. Audio-out from mixer into TV. Out from TV into the 4 tv’s on site and into one master tape via dv deck or camera.

towards a concept note

In democratic practices ‘public’ stands for all that is ‘good’; embracing the semiotic spaces of ‘democracy’, ‘accessibility’, ‘participation’ and ‘egality’. The political tradition also eulogies the ‘private’ as a site of ‘seclusion’, ‘intimacy’, ‘individual reflection’ and most importantly as a site of resistance against cohesive majoritarian power groups.

However, from the location of ‘Public art’ practices the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is one of hierarchical binaries. ‘Public Art’ is acted out in the realm of the public, any engagement in/with it necessarily extends to a series of overlapping issues ranging from the diversity of publics and cultures, the engendering of such spaces, the operations of power…including assertions of culture and political hierarchies. It is only through such engagements can public art transcend being an authoritarian populist agenda and evolve as a site of struggle over the meaning of ‘free space’.

Art is traveling a long journey transversing terrains of the public and the private. In our times ‘Public Art’ has emerged as a project oriented towards making ‘art’ (re)claimable to the public sphere. Definitely ‘Public Art’ is also a project fro the artist to be able to (re)claim the public sphere......a sphere that was denied to her during the hey days of the bourgeois orthodoxy.

There is also a question of being able to critically engage with the questions of ‘aesthetic value’ of ‘public art’. These questions are caught up in the ‘contextual’ versus ‘formal’ debate that is bringing about some kind of a crisis in critical theory. It also needs to negotiate key questions around (e)vauling ‘authorship’ and ‘intentionality’ in public art projects.

An intended Concept note (in process) for April work shop on ‘Art in/and Alternative Spaces’ (physical Virtual and Intellectual)

It has been a cliché to state the ‘the alternative always exists in the context of the mainstream’. If one enters alternative through this premise, there is a chance to lapse in to believing that the ‘alternative’ cannot define it self. There is a post-Marxist acknowledgement of hierarchy between the mainstream and the alternative and the saga/lament of constant appropriation. However there is also a celebration of subversion and resistance that have been driving critical theory. In the era of ‘late capitalism’ when all over Euro America art spaces historically considered to be alternative are shutting down due to escalating financial over heads and the drying up of traditional funding re-sources, and as the lament for the alternative cultures which are declared ‘appropriated’ begin to register... the position of the third word suddenly begins to appear to be a position of the privileged...a position, which can yet allow for learning of lessons and restructuring of institutional objectives.

KHOJ began in 1997 as an Artist lead initiative giving an annual workshop platform to Indian and international artists. Though the decades, KHOJ has emerged as a platform which celebrates the ‘process of art production rather than the object hood of Art. If the ‘mainstream’ in the context of visual arts is defined/occupied by the gallery space and its celebration of the Art object; the ‘workshop’ as a model is ‘naturally’ resistant to it, and this resistance has been enriched with the ‘learning by exchange’ concept metaphor which over the years has become integral to the KHOJ motto. At a time when the conception of art and ideas in India was split between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘western’ and possibilities defining/redefining possibilities of artistic practice dominated by euro-american frameworks, Since its inception, its direction has been towards the empowerment of so called third world artists and their cross cultural bonding outside racial biases and for an exchange of flow of information along alternative lines.

Over the last three years the core programming at Khoj has emerged as a conscious theme based curatorial practice. The 2004 (Aug Sep) residency on Art and Environment has been pivotal in the programming of the KHOJ residencies. Since then KHOJ has hosted theme based residencies on Performance Art, Public Art, Photography, Sound Art, and our current residency is curated towards revisiting Performance Art .If one looks at the thematic structure of KHOJ’s programming there is a definitive move towards alternative media and self consciously promoting mediums and approaches that have been considered peripheral in the mainstream narratives on Contemporary Indian Art and those which do not find space inside mainstream curatorial practices.

Since 2004 October, KHOJ has had an ongoing Community Arts project in its efforts towards strengthening its relationship with its neighbors in Khirkee village. Trough a number of young artists KHOJ initiated series of art projects in an attempt to build up a “meaningful relationship”. Over the last year and a half Khoj’s ‘community art project’ has endeavored towards the actual shaping of information and ideas, images and feelings, for and with a known audience..

It is transparent that over the years KHOJ’s engagement with the concept metaphor ‘alternative’ has primarily been through viewing ‘alternative’ as the other of mainstream, and has been at odds to be define the ‘self’ of the alternative spaces and alternative practices. This practice of privileging praxis, which is left out by the mainstream, is effective but (nonetheless) retroactive. We would like to engage with other understandings of ‘alternative’ (and maybe subversive) spaces and develop a proactive take on the concept and practice of building and engaging with alternative spaces.

In an attempt to enrich the understanding of ‘alternative spaces’ and to be broaden horizons about the possibilities of such spaces; also keeping in focus our recent efforts towards building communities online using open source technology and KHOJ’s long term pedagogical structure of learning by exchange, we intend to host a ...day workshop on the ...and..... of April around the theme of ‘Art in/and Alternative Spaces’ (physical Virtual and Intellectual).

Open call:

Dilli Dur Ast

A lens based artists’ workshop in the walled city of Old Delhi

This to inform you that we got a space in the walled city- Hotel Al Noor, Pahari Bhojla, near Bazaar Chitli Qabar, Turkman Gate. We moved in on 28^th March, and have set up a temporary studio space for the participants. We will live and work here till our open day on the 28^th of April. We have already started work upon our workshop. We would like to invite interested observers, artists and viewers to view our processes and interact with the s participants.

Anybody who is interested to visit us during the workshop please feel free to call us at-

Gigi Scaria- 9350831504

Atul Bhalla—9350510770