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PERIFERRY@ARTCONCERNS

The Residents in the Presidency
Artists’ Residencies as Cultural High Commissions

Artist residencies have been gaining significance in India in the recent times. John Xaviers takes a look at the various major artist residencies in the country and how the artist-led initiatives can take on the role of peace talks and friendship in the current national and global scenario.

Periferry Jam

Venue – Periferry, M.V.Chandardinga, off Sukreswar Ghat, Guwahati, Assam, India.
Date – Saturday 13, Sunday 14 and Monday 15 of February
Time – 10 a.m. till dusk

During the 3 ‘Most Welcome’ days view and further develop the work of Christina Stadlbauer (Austria/Belgium) and Bartaku (Belgium), at the end of a residency program hosted by Periferry from December ‘09 till February ‘10.

Body Water - opening the archives - Christina Stadlbauer
A wrap up of investigations in kitchens, gardens, buses and paths of Assam crystallizes in a periferal archive of Assamese knowledge compiled from everyday medicine in everyday life; Body Water is accessible via tea-talking, singing the plants and interactive cooking, aided by flowerpots, gamuchas and water visuals.

A Slow Flow - Bartaku
Micro-interventions, workshops cum experiments fused by the exposure to The Periferry, icon of the petrol era, The Zoo cum hidden Botanical Garden, The Misrepresentation of the Gandhi Mandap, The Wild Edible Power Plants from Assam, North-and South-Bank Knowledge and The Brahmaputra with the strongest –well hidden- flow.
Part of the artistic research project PhoEf: The Undisclosed Poésis of the Photovoltaic Effect.

A Slow Flow

Body Water

Sanchayan Ghosh

Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist and Head of Painting Department at Kala Bhavana, Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India.

Artists' Statement

This project is about exploring the transforming relationship of a river and a city in relationship to Brahmaputra and Guwahati.This is a research and documentation based interactive project will try to locate the different forms of economic and cultural transactions that happen with the river Brahmaputra as a host, and in the floating space between labour and economy, migration and identity, industry and culture in relation to the stranded ferries of Brahmaputra and the life on the river bank.

In this respect a LIVE CAMP called THE ANCHOR HOUSE will be set up on the ferry to host interactive tea ADDA to participate on the everyday life on the ferry and the river bank and reflect upon the different layers in which the river exists in the everyday life of the people of Assam in general and Guwahati in particular. Moreover the Anchor House will be extended as a possible web page in the form of an ANCHOR which will be comprised of photographs of anchors from the different ferry that are functioning or stranded on the bank of Brahmaputra. These photographs can be replaced by private documents of memories of the transforming cityscape of Guwahati and the river Brahmaputra.

The Anchor House can become the site for a possible interactive space in future for hosting memories of different kinds of human applications both social, cultural, and technological that is in the state of transition.

This residency has been organized by Periferry in collaboration with Lalit Kala Akademi Regional Centre Kolkata, India.

Isabelle Rouquette

The climate is one of the components that create and environment and the moment when we get a sense of this is when the blue and yellow become green, but also indigo, turquoise, emerald green and saffron. In the project 'Tidal Bore' I intend to create a framework that mixes acoustic qualities recorded in India with visual ones registered in Finland in order to pose the problem of the author. This work allows me to study the right of the author and to raise the question of authorship in the globalization of industrial societies, that has as a consequence a new hostility in our environment of life.

Technicolour Dreams2 is a Musical play sketching contemporary Nagaland on stage addressing identical questions of the people living in that particular geographical terrain. Approaching to tell the tale of contemporary Nagaland, Technicolour Dreams2 weaves few personnel history along with documents and informations of civil uprisings, movements, underground identical movements yarning for self determination. The personnel histories about up bringing, at academic institutions, friends and families, generations, ethnic connections and lost will be juxtaposed with it.

Open day of a three week internship
“Everything in this world has got an interesting facet to be explored. Sometimes, though mysterious or nonsense they are, visually pleasing.”
It is interesting!
But I haven’t noticed it!
What it means?
First, it is a surprise to see something new, if it was not observed or recognised it becomes a question. Second comes reasoning Why, Where, When and How. This had been tried through an expression, as a gesture to preserve the past.

Participant artists:
•    Tribeni Devi, born in 1986, had done her BFA in Graphics Art and presently pursuing MFA in Kala Bhavana, Viswa-Bharati University.
•    Shravan Kumar Pendyala, born in 1987, had done her BFA in History of Art and presently pursuing MFA in Kala Bhavana, Viswa-Bharati University.

Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist and reader working in the department of painting at Kala Bhavana, an acclaimed and distinguished centre for visual arts practice and research founded by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at the Visva Bharati University in West Bengal, India.

Sanchayan’s work currently focuses on exploring methods of participation in multiple public sites and evolving site-specific community based art activities. This approach has afforded Sanchayan the opportunity to work with and reach a wide variety of people including three generations of Asian communities in Bristol, the weavers of the Bodo communities of Assam in eastern India and a number of migratory communities in Calcutta and wider India. In collaboration with Periferry, Sanchayan plans to develop an interaction with different cultural and ethnic communities living on the banks of river Brahamaputra, with reference to their evolving memories in relation to the city.

“Unspeakably More": Naming, Deframing: a lexicon for contemporary curatorship

Periferry co-organizes this seminar in association with n.e.w.s and Khoj Delhi

Participants: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Kaushik Bhaumik, Sanjay Bangar, Sharmila Samant, Siu King Chung, Nancy Adajania, Tushar Joag, Howard Chan, Nishant Shah, Pooja Sood, Sonal Jain, Mriganka Madhukaillya, Prayas Abhinav, Stephen Wright, Renée Ridgway

‘Unspeakably More depends on what things are called than on what they are. (...) Let us not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and plausibilities in order to create new "things".’

In the course of thinking through our symposium on curatorship under the broad title Art after Space, our original concept has morphed into something else. The above statement is Stephen’s premise about how to incite a discussion, actually focus on having that discussion as the event, not as a secondary action to an exhibition or what has been termed the “pedagogical turn” in contemporary art.