About ‘Art Karavan International’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The event began on 12th Feb. 2010 and ended on 18th April 2010

Destinations covered : Shantiniketan, Kolkata, Ranchi, Patna, Lucknow, Shimla, Jammu, Srinagar and Delhi.

The event was supported by: Lalit Kala Akademi , Socia-Service Art Group, Ministry of Cultre New Delhi, Kala Bhavana, Shantiniketan, College of Art,Patna, Subodh Gupta, CARDS, Vikas Bharti Ranchi, Minstry of Culture Ranchi, Lucknow University, Sanatkada, Prerna ( orrisa ), Minsitry of Culture Shimla, Hari Tara Trust  Jammu, Amar Mahal Museum Jammu, DaraShouk Foundation, D.P.Dhar Memorial Trust Sringar, JNU ( Arts & Aesthetics ), Sarai, Faculty of Fine Arts, Jamia Milia Islamia University . We are also thankful to friends such as Anil Razdan, Shikha Sinha, D.B.Tato, Shama ji, Naushad , Dinesh Singh, Hiren Thakur, Anju Sahani, Natasha, Anunaya in Patna, Parvez  at Shantinietan, Dr. Sharma ji ( Shimla ),  Mrs. Nishi Pandey Lucknow,, Anunaya Chaubey in Pana, and many other worthy names, without whom this event would have never seen the light of the day.  We are also grateful to the  non-Indian funding agencies who have supported some of European participants for joining this dream event.   Last but not the least

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               ( as circulated before the event by PERIPHERALS ,  

 an organiztion based in Delhi )

                 PROCESS & AIMS OF ART KARAVAN INTERNATIONAL

“Art is the only evolutionary-revolutionary power”

“Every Human Being is an Artist”

“this social organism as a work of art”.

“Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build”

OUR PLACE IS THE WORLD NOT JUST THE ART WORLD.

With the above set of slogans , a group of Artists as Karavan-Artists and Non-Artists as their Artist colleagues will constitute the Art Karavan group starting from ShantiNiketan West Bengal on 12th of Feb. 2010 and culminating at Delhi on 12th of April2010 .

Art-Karavan-Artists will do what ideally fits into the activities of this art-camp-travel event. So, a PERFORMANCE ART based event. Camping for one week at each destination we plan to a night’s stay at a small hamlet for a spontaneous interaction with the rural masses.

A one introductory workshop/presentation regarding Joseph Beuys by some specialist in Germany can be initiated at your gallery space for which can be fitted in our programme.

Since the Karavan by PERIPHERALS is a essentially a PERFORMANCE ART based event, but it is OPEN for all the kind of artists, and so called non-artists, who are free to do their kind of work, or collaborate with participating artists or with the local energies. In short, it will be an event to realize a new intimacy between music, installation art, theatre, performance art, painting, ( both contemporary/folk ), sculpture, Media, poetry, literature, blogging, discourse, etc , in a camp(s) and even while travelling from one destination to another.

 

Some features of the Art Karavan at the Camps

The participants will briefed quickly about the location they are in, enabling them to execute their project ideas effectively.

 

The participants will be requested to engage themselves with local artistic talents and create spaces for collaborative activities.

 

 

Those who participate as a group in the Art Karavan will be producing at least one item during the stay at each destination.

As individual in the Karavan the participants would be doing presentation from their series of project ideas, be it performance based or otherwise.

 

As highlighted in the concept note, this event would be a blend of participants from Folk and contemporary, poets and musicians, visual artists and people from fields who are conventionally not recognized as artists so far, so we wont be segregating the participants on the basis of who is who.

 

 

 

Some features of Karavan event in the Train/Bus:

– Karavan Rail Bogie/Bus to be designed by Participants.- Music ( both folk and contemporary ) Performances during travel

-Individual Performance Art/poetry events in the train, Theatre on stage and on the streets

-Poetry sessions, and Discussion on topic around art ,life, politics, Story Telling, Performance Art etc .

-Some on-the- spot activities at different train stations, besides some interaction with ready-made audience during travel.

Besides camping at different venues ART KARAVAN’s journey itself will become an integral part of entire celebration of this creative endeavour. The interaction with the locals and other floating visitors will only enrich the experience of the participants.

The proposed journey from station to station will be full of expressions, mainly songs and interactions with the locals. We imagine a decorated Indian Railway coach full of Art Karavan participants. A day’s Break Journey while travelling between two destinations can provide an additional opportunity to the Art Karavan troupe in a small town or city to perform with their displayable projections, masks, and other creative motifs in their hands alongwith musicals of different origins.

in the First Phase, this Art, journeying few thousands miles, will eventually reinvigorate hundreds of artists living in this Himalayan Belt of Northern India. A large audience, both rural and urban, we beleive will appreciate the efforts of Karavan performers.

At the Camps ( in six states ) , the Art Karavan will be holding work-shops , and interactive programmes with the local artists, and possible artists from non-artists category. Art Karavan will engage themselves into those aesthetic endeavours which are in tune with the conceptual thought of ‘ peripherals’

For instance, Karavan Participants are likely to undertake the repairing/redesigning of some dilapidated wells, public toilets, women’s toilets ( which are non-existent in India ) and broken stair cases leading to rivulets. Planting of trees, and interactive discussion will be held on to improve living standards with some simpler approaches to life, which can be artistic at the same time.

The Karavan would be a drifting space where ideas can be tested/experimented and attitudes re-questioned, with eclectic mix of works, yet each occupying its own self defining space.

This would be a truly Global meeting point, new ways of seeing, new meaning and ways of being would perhaps emerge and take us into to multi-perspective realm

So, uninhibitedly the Karavan is posited to bring in all the available devices (genres ) to generate a meaning, say radicalize the very meaning that consumes, and liberates to ‘distribute the sensible’ at the same time. The genre of PERFORMANCE ART would perhaps get something to add…

The seemingly emphasized word PERFORMANCES in this event is not intended to impose some sort of hierarchy over other known genres, since we aim for an open-ended bold participation from Artist/non-Artists who think differently about Art and Life

We beleive, that every human being is an Artist, as popularized by Joseph Beuys , and in earlier times propounded by poet-saint Abhinavgupta in 9th Century AD, which roughly contributes to formalize the concept that no culture is worth celebrating if it is based on the hierarchy of one over the other, and that every individual is existentially fecund to grapple with deeper realms of truth and reality beyond mundane.

So, the event would be a crucible for melting all the conventionally known way of doing art to produce what is unknown, beautiful and true to the needs of our times. In that sense, it will be a performance art event

 

 

Dates and Destinations: Feb. 12^th 2010: Shanti Niketan

15^th Feb. to 22^nd Feb. :Kolkata.

23^rd Feb. to 2^nd March : Ranchi.

3^rd March to 10^th March: Patna ( Bihar).

11^th March to 23rd March:Lucknow

25th to 31st March Shimla.

^Ist April to 3rd^th of April: Jammu

4th April to 11th April Srinagar kashmir

11th Arpil to 18^th April: Delhi

 

 

CONCEPT NOTE

 

Perhaps, there are constantly shifting ‘interiors’ revolving around our collapsing ‘peripheries’. At the face of it ‘the core’, ‘the central’, or ‘the nucleus’ seems spreading its tentacles to appropriate the unmarked. At the face of it ‘ the fringe’, ‘the outskirt’ dream to metamorphose into the privileged, the marked. And since there are deep cross currents occurring underneath; it often becomes difficult to locate ‘the body’,’ the being’ in the present of us. The universal of this ‘us’ on our earth is already like a Karavan, inwardly moving from one end of the globe to another, and from one individual to another at micro level. Art is another exercise to realize this very Karavan, in reality, and in thought simultaneously.

So, if these two: ‘the Periphery’ and ‘the Core’, are adequately defining our respective presents , then almost involuntarily, most of us would see themselves located within the vicissitudes of peripherals, and not in the imagined cores.

So, the genesis of ‘this Periphery’ and ‘this Centre’ of ‘us’ is, perhaps, pregnant with a deep past inside its womb: a core which delivers ‘a periphery’ in continuum. This continuum as alloy of Art, Culture and Life can be experienced if we move through the corridors of ‘the other’. The possibilities to experience that are manifolds at the ‘outer edges’ than within the condensed ‘cores’. And if we yearn to “disseminate the sensible”, perhaps, we need to move from one edge to another, physically and even in thought.

At the Periphery, there are some earthy scents, some casually drawn boarder lines, some innocence which keeps on lingering between the lush foliage and the roofs made of baked tiles, or pieces of wood, or few bamboo sticks, or simply some soil and grass. The seemingly ‘concrete’ at the peripheries is tangible but passionate enough to keep itself oscillating between the old and the new. So, numerous peripherals are brimming with drives which manifest the order-disorder of our Karavan, inwardly.

The ever morphing of Periphery brings into its fold a fresh lot of unmarked, who are hastily churning their stocks of sensibilities with those which are easy to grasp. Their intervention only reinvigorates the nerve which programmes a fecund continuum.

Aesthetic praxis at PERIPHERY involves ethnic and gender bending, cultural intermarriages and constants, atypical and surprising power invasions. May be then, it is safer to say that the stagnant core is even worse than death. In short, we need a Karavan, of different ideas and of strangers moving on wheels of our time, camping and moving on, camping and moving on.

In our world, cultural borders have moved to centre stage while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins, treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience member/viewer in the position of a “foreigner” or a “minority”. It sounds “heavy” but it is actually a lot of fun.

I quote Marcel Duchamp “Art is a game played by all the periods of all the times” In opposition to a Centre, various types of games , both ordinary and intensely profound, are already in vogue at the Periphery.

The inclusiveness of The Karavan of cultural activists and artists are likely to pump the excluded vital back into the veins of ‘the centre’, But that can happens if we move through the Ourskirts as Karavan. We can always return to our core, but with a new outlook, with a new politics.

Peripherals are conglomerations of layered discursive spaces, which are potent enough to transform identities of the subjects which happen to be of any kind of inhabitants of our age old cultural practices. Peripherals is the name of a grease applied to the wheels of our thought to mobilises our obfuscated realities.

Peripherals are about the legacy of the fear of the other. Ad nauseam within peripherals is the gaze of the hub, the core, the interior, the walled, the nucleus, the privileged, the central. But the spongy nature of the peripherals tends to absorb all, all that we call all. And what it reflects back coherently, aesthetically and ritually, is perhaps, what our respective existential selves are all about.

Layered profoundly, the life at Peripherals is full of sounds, both heard and unheard, and therefore, capable of generating unpredictable overtures, here, different genres coalescing to produce what might help us to swim through the ravines of mind’s unpredictable.

Present day ruins were hubs of the past, and so the possible future ruins are perhaps, our very cherished and sought after cores. But margins, limits, boundaries, precincts, restrictions , confines, grounds, endings, sidelines, fringes, tassels, extremes, perimeter, outsides, outskirts, one times, outer reaches, suburbs, environs and villages might enable us to realize the essential of what we often dismiss as non-vital and illusory.

project Director : INDER SALIM , president PERIPHERALS org. based in Delhi  email peripherals10@gmail.com,

phone 91 9968075965, 91 011 22119525