The latest multicultural, multigenre exihibition in Paris, Palais De Tokyo, named City Prince/sses is presented as an ''imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed.''
The five cities meshed up here are Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City, Tehran!Wish these places are as borderless as imagined.Seeing the heavily spent, school-exercise standard curating such massive compilations of magnified magazine pages one might gets overwhelmed but does that mean the show warms one's heart?Is it because India has the nuke that Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata don't fall in the same messy, staggering and creative category as the curated ones?Or is it because of China becoming a super power they excluded Chinese megacities as something clinically immune to political snobbery?
The curators of the exhibition, Fabien Danesi and Hugo Vitrani, introduce the guest creators and the five cities from which they come.
A lot of artists in both developed world and third world having an existential crisis so much so that they would blur border between installations, performance, music and art.Why not then stop painting, drawing, sculpting and do just film making, photography, writing?Do opera if you want this much exageration of genre mix!Why claim yourself as an art curator when the stimuli is coming from the injured sense of not becoming something else!I am sure Da Vinci would venture in all these but first would get his Monalisa done, Michaelangelo wrote remarkable sonnets while doing Sixtine, Fida Hussain indulged in film making but became Fida by perfecting his lines, Frida Cahlo would surely get absorbed in selfies, but her priorities rested on challenging the self-limits!Great artists don't do the Matryoshka nesting dolls.
In a lot of megacities artists nowadays only are in touch with the buyers clubs under the auspices of real estate oriented galleries. Reality checks ends up as soon as gaining the ownership of the air conditioned car .Not demanding that all artists got to pretend like the NGOs and take poverty elimination as their mission.Forms needed to be explored with all the dare both indoor and outdoor.In the whole curating of City Prince/sses I don't get the dare.What I get is a tried and tired dialogue both in form and content.Indian, African, French, German, American rap and techno scenes are presenting much more penetrating dialogues and designs.
The invitations extended to well connected artists are not translated to prejudice free immigration policies from the host sides; the guests are only too happy to be part of the good and gracious.Lot of these artists keep silent on home rulers abuse of human rights in every front.Mind it that my hometown Dhaka in recent years has experienced the serial blogger killings, extra judiciary killings, rampant kidnapping allegedly by law enforcment agencies, promotion of religious victimhood within major art summits and a compromised mass media.Artists nesting there in corporate houses simply to survive and add to their living standard threatened by diabolical inflation.Young artists who hasn't yet landed the nests are crowding around those who have.
An expression of art exported from Dhaka type cities essentially is the byproduct of selective and vetted silence.On this context Dhaka based Shishir Vattacharjee's representational solo show in any European major city is long due.From his early youth in the 80s, Shishir fought and modelled his animated drawings against selective silences imposed by the military juntas and played an influential role to establish Bengali New Years celebration as a secular festival known as Mongol Shova Yatra.A lot of Shishir both from advanced and third world now becomes simply the background of these type of mediocre art mesh. With his strong storylines and artistic virtuosity, Shishir upholds the wider Indian heritage mixed with a very localized Dhaka dry humour.Mixing him with others does injustice to his art and to the futuristic dynamism of subcontinental art as well.
It's so easy to bundle 3rd world artists in the name of mixed installations and art performances.To me art is reclaiming identity, how a person is thinking, expressing and mentally modelling him/herself.I question if that expressed and modelled identity is adulterated by identity politics, dogma, religion, cultural limits.At the same time to be conscious to claim a balanced exclusivity as an individual.The curators old and present alike make jobs out of their new found toys, be it an African mask, a phone booth in London or a tattoo parlour in Manila and want to show it as an exotic find.And we keep watching to forget that a lot of countries and their condescending cultural guardians with all sorts of discriminative mindset doing exactly opposite to what multicultural societies stand for.At the end it's not about the price tags or how much money is spent, it's about the mindset and on that front both artists and their so called international curators have a long way to go!
Choyon Khairul Habib
21/06/19
Brittany
The five cities meshed up here are Dhaka, Lagos, Manila, Mexico City, Tehran!Wish these places are as borderless as imagined.Seeing the heavily spent, school-exercise standard curating such massive compilations of magnified magazine pages one might gets overwhelmed but does that mean the show warms one's heart?Is it because India has the nuke that Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata don't fall in the same messy, staggering and creative category as the curated ones?Or is it because of China becoming a super power they excluded Chinese megacities as something clinically immune to political snobbery?
The curators of the exhibition, Fabien Danesi and Hugo Vitrani, introduce the guest creators and the five cities from which they come.
- Tayeba Begum Lipi tells the story of an alternative platform for experiments and international exchange in the field of visual arts based in Dhaka while academic cartoonist Shishir Bhattacharjee from the same city draws graffity style images directly on wall.
- Ashkan Sepahvand analyses the Iranian artist Mamali Shafahi's film Nature Morte which stages his parents, upsets taboos and brings to life the drawings of his father Reza Shafahi.
- Dorothée Dupuis interviews Fernando Palma Rodríguez about his artistic work and his commitment to the preservation and development of the cultural and natural heritage of his people, the Nahuas of Mexico.
- A history of documentary photography in Iran by the artist-photographer Newsha Tavakolian that mingles family memories, personal experiences and political history.
- Seni Saraki, editor-in-chief of The Native magazine, provides an overview of Nigerian pop music over the last decade.
- Daniel Montero talks with Yoshua Okón, artist and founder of La Panadería, an artist-run space that played a decisive part in the emergence of contemporary art in Mexico City in the 1990s, and the members of the collective Biquini Wax EPS which brings together artists, writers, historians and curators.
- A conversation between Ndidi Dike and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, two women artists living and working in Lagos.
- A history of the alternative musical scenes in Manila in the 1990s and 2000s by Caliph8, Filipino sound and visual artist.
- Kit Hammonds explores the work of Manuel Solano, a Mexico City-based non-binary and nonsighted artist, who plays with the creative resources of his condition with provocation and humour.
- A radiography of the roads of Lagos aboard a danfo, a minibus that offers cheap journeys. The artist Emeka Ogboh considers it as the best place to discover the city in all its polyphony.
- Contemporary Filipino filmmakers Timmy Harn and Raya Martin in conversation.
- A text about Aderemi Adegbite, founder of an artistic space in Iwaya, a precarious district of Lagos, by Sophie Bouillon.
- An interview with Tercerunquinto, a collective of artists from Mexico City that questions urban dynamics in their aesthetic and social dimension, by Daniel Garza Usabiaga.
- As well as special visual contributions by Merhaneh Atashi, Leeroy New, Afshika Rahman and Saturnino Basilla (Allan Balisi & Dina Gadia), and also images of works by the other creators in the exhibition.
The invitations extended to well connected artists are not translated to prejudice free immigration policies from the host sides; the guests are only too happy to be part of the good and gracious.Lot of these artists keep silent on home rulers abuse of human rights in every front.Mind it that my hometown Dhaka in recent years has experienced the serial blogger killings, extra judiciary killings, rampant kidnapping allegedly by law enforcment agencies, promotion of religious victimhood within major art summits and a compromised mass media.Artists nesting there in corporate houses simply to survive and add to their living standard threatened by diabolical inflation.Young artists who hasn't yet landed the nests are crowding around those who have.
An expression of art exported from Dhaka type cities essentially is the byproduct of selective and vetted silence.On this context Dhaka based Shishir Vattacharjee's representational solo show in any European major city is long due.From his early youth in the 80s, Shishir fought and modelled his animated drawings against selective silences imposed by the military juntas and played an influential role to establish Bengali New Years celebration as a secular festival known as Mongol Shova Yatra.A lot of Shishir both from advanced and third world now becomes simply the background of these type of mediocre art mesh. With his strong storylines and artistic virtuosity, Shishir upholds the wider Indian heritage mixed with a very localized Dhaka dry humour.Mixing him with others does injustice to his art and to the futuristic dynamism of subcontinental art as well.
It's so easy to bundle 3rd world artists in the name of mixed installations and art performances.To me art is reclaiming identity, how a person is thinking, expressing and mentally modelling him/herself.I question if that expressed and modelled identity is adulterated by identity politics, dogma, religion, cultural limits.At the same time to be conscious to claim a balanced exclusivity as an individual.The curators old and present alike make jobs out of their new found toys, be it an African mask, a phone booth in London or a tattoo parlour in Manila and want to show it as an exotic find.And we keep watching to forget that a lot of countries and their condescending cultural guardians with all sorts of discriminative mindset doing exactly opposite to what multicultural societies stand for.At the end it's not about the price tags or how much money is spent, it's about the mindset and on that front both artists and their so called international curators have a long way to go!
Choyon Khairul Habib
21/06/19
Brittany
