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PCA#1
an installation by Peter Callas and
Yuri Kawanabe
This installation is the result of the first
collaborative work between Yuri Kawanabe and Peter Callas, two artists who have worked
side by side in very different media for many years. Kawanabe, an object maker originally
from Japan, most of whose work has been in contemporary jewellery, and Callas, an
Australian new media artist who works in video, installation and more recently with
digital imaging, have used their time as Asialink artists-in-residence at Sanskriti
Kendra in New Delhi to explore a variety of ways of working together.
Their final collaboration took form in two ways. Firstly, Callas’ knowledge of digital
imaging was used to help visualise a number of different structures within the proposed
exhibition space at Sanskriti Kendra, combining Kawanabe’s models, made at a scale
familiar to her in her jewellery making, with images of the Sanskriti contemporary
art gallery taken with a panoramic digital camera. Secondly they worked together
on the content and realisation of the installation, contributing ideas and insights.
Part of Kawanabe’s working process involved collecting and arranging natural debris
she found on the grounds of Sanskriti Kendra. Callas documented these arrangements
and also included detritus gathered from his own peregrinations around Sanskriti
in his digital wall images.
Kawanabe came to India intending to research ephemeral forms. She expected to find
them in daily offerings, but these are not as evident in Delhi as they are in places
like Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In Delhi, she found the use of ephemeral materials more
in toys and handicrafts made out of recycled materials and in temporary structures
like building scaffolding, and transient and collapsible confabulations used for
weddings, temple festivals and musical performances. She was also fascinated with
the Rajasthani compulsion to fill empty spaces with auspicious patterns. She combined
these ideas in the resultant structure.
The matchbox image at the centre of the construction is redolent of the type of images
used within temporary celebratory frameworks. The brightly coloured box imaged once
contained matches, ephemeral items, and has been reused to contain tobacco, or perhaps
some small edible items, that can be extracted from the box through the small hole
that has been punched through its top. The image on its cover celebrates “Export
Quality” Delhi, but the Mughal gateway (perhaps Delhi Gate) that originally functioned
as a symbol of the city has been obliterated, its symbolic passage substituted by
a far more literal, purely functional, void. Here the extraordinary is no more and
the ordinary is enshrined.
The title “PCA” is an acronym for Paranoid Critical Activity, a term coined by Salvador
Dali to describe the process by which he arrived at his eccentric pictorial inventions.
Acronyms, ever popular in Delhi – who remembers what GB Road, DLF2 (Delhi Leasing
and Finance Corp. Part 2 – a new development area in Haryana, near Delhi) or INA
(Indian National Airport) Market, stand for? Like many things in Delhi, they are
redacted and compressed, and only in that state do they become operational – meaningful
in their apparent meaninglessness. Like digital images, they are infinitely compressible.
The images on the walls are derived from a particular type of ambiguous anthropomorphic
imagery of monstrous imaginary faces used in early Hindu temple decoration. They
are variously described as “monster masks”, gargoyles (for like their European counterparts
they spout water from their mouths, figuratively, if not literally) or merely as
decorative items on pilasters and columns. Callas and Kawanabe saw them in their
travels all over India – from Chittogarh to Mahabalipuram, but they first came to
their attention in Qtab Minar, nearby Sanskriti Kendra, where they were provocatively
reused to form the columns of the Quwwatul Islam Masjid (1192-1198), and as abandoned
debris near Tugluk’s tomb in Delhi. Where other more recognisable figuration, particularly
facial features, has been willfully deformed in the Qtab mosque and the Tuglukabad
tomb, these flowery faces still peer out at us, flouting iconoclastic injunctions
against depiction of the human form. Like the matchbox, they have been reused again…
and again.
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