Favourites from 5th Paper-Made Art Biennial

"Papermade" is the biennial art exhibition focusing on paper-art held in Schio (VI) in the Veneto region of Italy. The 5th Papermade is going on now and can be visited on weekends and holidays till the end of February 2022. I love the idea of paper-art and I think that this years' exhibition has managed to bring together some great art works and is probably the best Papermade Art Exhibition so far! The exhibition is being held at Palazzo Fogazzaro in the city centre of Schio.

Different Italian cities hold art biennales, the most famous being the Venice biennale. Other art biennales are held in Florence, Milan, Rome and Salerno. Compared to those bigger cities, the biennale of Schio is smaller with about 80-100 art works but it is also unique in this region as it focuses only on paper art. Some other well known Paper-Art Biennales include the ones in Lucca (Italy), Shanghai (China) and Nantou (Taiwan).

I had started this post thinking that I will choose my favourite 10 art-works but there were just too many that I did not wish to leave out of this post. So in the end, I have chosen 20 (but I could have easily added another 10). Therefore, it is a long post with a lot of pictures. If you are one of the artists in the exhibition and you wish to get some pictures of your artwork, do let me know and I will be happy to send them to you.

Let me start with the work which is shown above. It combines drawing with collage, is titled "Girls eat the air with silver spoon" and is by an American artist of Cuban origins called Lisyanet Rodriguez. She wants her art to be "beautiful and disturbing simultaneously" and uses old dresses to cover "creatures that have several deformities, mutations, and hybrid bodies". Looking at Lisyanet's work in this exhibition, I thought that it beautifully captures the pressure on people, especially on women, to have thin bodies. Perhaps the title of the work also refers to other food-fads, ranging from keto and paleo-diets to vegans and no-glutens - I am not sure. This work was used on the banner of the Biennale.

I want to start my favourite artworks list with Anita Gratzer from Austria, who has an installation with 8 sculptures of paper-clothes in the central hall of Palazzo Fogazzaro. It is a very striking installation, using the papers of old texts to represent people and events. The image below shows the close-up of the sculpture called "Mantis Shogakai" and has a worship dress made from an old text about Kabuki and the inventory records of a sake factory in Onishi on the Japanese Washi-Paper. It represents the art and calligraphy gatherings of artists which were called Shagokai. She made this work when she was in Mantta in Finland. Thus, the title of the art-work bring together the spirit of Mantta and a 19th century Japanese tradition in this sculpture. Anita defines them as "wearables" which "function as mobile shelters of the fragile memory."

Sculptures by Carlo Pasini & Thomas Ashley

Papermade-5 has a few works of Thomas Ashley. In one exhibit his work on Linocut print forms the background to a very striking wounded tiger in cardboard and mixed materials by Carlo Pasini, which occupies a place of pride in the entrance hall of the exhibition. Pasini's tiger lies with its tummy up, in a vulnerable position, over an intricate linocut by Ashley. The tiger has pieces of glass embedded in its body as if it had tried to jump over a wall lined with broken glass, and thus had got hurt. It also has numerous needles sticking out of its body, as if someone wanted to use it as a kind of voodoo doll. The tiger sculpture is titled "Scoprimi tutta" (Discover or uncover me completely) but I prefer to call it The Wounded Tiger. For me it symbolised the climate and the nature crisis.

Paper Saloon by Alicia Olaya Rodriguez

The art-work by the Spanish artist is a big installation composed of different pieces of furniture, lamp, bracelets and the bust of a woman covered with curly hair, all made from folded paper. This installation is spread over 2 rooms in the exhibition. It is striking because it represents a huge amount of work and an inventive use of paper for the expression of beauty. It seems to show the riches of a noble family and the use of the paper seems to represent the transient nature of fame and wealth.

Lost Keys of Claudio Onorato

Italian artist Claudio Onorato, based in Milan, also has a few very complex works in the exhibition. The image below shows part of an art work called "I have lost the keys to my house". It is made from black-paper with pencil design and a humungous amount of detailed paper-cutting. I think that it is an example of taking paper-cutting as an extreme art-form. The impact is very striking and fascinating. Claudio expresses his resistance to inequalities and cruelties in the world through creating works in which empty spaces, air and light are as important as the paper.

Wallflowers by Linda Rademan

Linda Rademan is an artist from South Africa. Her art work in Papermade-5 is very special - it is made on a large number of tea-bags, which have been sewn together to form the surface on which she has used dry-point and embroidery to show old images of girls. The image below has a close-up of a part of this work. She is based in Johannesburg and she likes to explore Afrikaner female identity through her works.

I must confess that I have some prejudices against the "Afrikaner identity", which date back to the apartheid regime period. However, the apartheid finished almost 30 years ago and today Afrikaners are as much a part of South African identity as anyone else.

Thinking about this subject made me reflect about so many other factors which influence our perceptions about art and artists, which do not have much to do with the artistic worth of the individuals. I remember similar considerations while choosing the awards for documentary films when I was part of a jury for a film festival in Italy some years ago. We make a great show of objectivity and fair-play but it is not easy to avoid our prejudices. I can imagine that it may not be easy for Rademan to be known as an artist focusing on the Afrikaner female identity.

Protection Suit by Alexio Berto

Italian artist Alexio Berto's sculpture of a man wrapped in a white partially transparent tissue protection suit filled with recycled papers is one of the most explicit references to the on-going Covid-19 pandemic in this exhibition. Most of us must have seen figures dressed in those clothes in the hospitals or at least on the TV screens.

Technique by Giorgio Tentolini

The installation by the Italian artist Giorgio Tentolini has paper-cuttings of huge digital prints of faces. The long stripes of papers in multiple layers move up and down and the faces can be seen only from a distance. I thought that this work expressed the enormity of cosmos and the huge distances between the particles in the atomic world - the closer we go, the lesser we can see and the patterns become clear only from the right distance. The faces disappearing in the stripes also reminded of faces hidden behind veils and how veils can splinter us in pieces, hiding us, protecting us but also killing us in a way, or at least stopping us from living fully by interfering in our interactions with others. I am not sure how Giorgio Tentolini would feel about my interpretations about the significance of this work.

The Happiness I Can't Say by Maikel Domingues

This giant art installation by the American artist of Cuban origins, Maikel Dominguez, occupied a large part of the central hall of Palazzo Fogazzaro. It included a white crystal/resin bunny statue (it did not look like made from paper) placed at the end of a long beautiful carpet, as well as pink tiles with paper figures of more bunnies riding deer on one of the walls. The central bunny sculpture made of numerous white flowers, reminded me of some of the works of the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. At the same time, Maikel's the choice of the bunny-figures riding on the deer on the wall-tiles, also reminded me of the Tele-Tubbies, a children's TV programme.

I felt that there were some deeper hidden meanings in this art-work though I am not sure of them. Each tile was designed individually and beautifully, once again reminding me of Ai Wei Wei's works. The bunnies were like astronauts, hiding faces of people, and some of them looked sick or dead. Were these people in protection suits? Were all these references linked to Covid-19 pandemic?

Atlas of Fear by Krisimaria Toronen

Finnish artist Krisimaria Toronen had a site specific installation in the toilet of Palazzo Fogazzaro. The art-work included strips of paper and hand-written chains of words growing like a creeper along the walls of the different rooms. The words could have been the DNA of the Corona virus. The most obvious meaning of the installation was the fear of the pandemic, highlighted by locating it in a toilet, which is often seen as the origin of diseases. Normally, modern toilets are all gleaming and clean tiles and seeing them covered with the ants like words was disturbing.

The Adults by Silvia Mei

Silvia is an Italian artist and her work in the exhibition had a brightly coloured painting of people with disturbing faces. I guess she was showing the masks which we carry in the world for hiding our real feelings. The painting was very striking, and while I could appreciate it, I don't think that I would like it in my bedroom.

Psuedobombax Grandiflorum by Margherita Leoni

Italian artist Margherita Leoni had a water-colour painting in this exhibition. Though very simple, I liked the hyper-realism of the flowers and leaves in it. She is known for her beautiful botanical water-colours and she also runs training courses on this theme. If she was based in Schio, I would have loved to join Leoni's water-colours learning classes.

The Night Before The Arrival Of The Barbarians by Kristina Pirkovic

Serbian artist Kristina Pirkovic had a big painting covering one wall of the exhibition rooms. Divided into panels, it probably represented rooms or houses with the parallel lives of people living inside them. Though, the title of the painting was "before the arrival of the barbarians", the people it showed were not particularly happy - actually most of them looked anguished, some seemed to be sick while others had their heads cut-off. There were some animals scattered between them and a sad-looking church with a graveyard in one of the panels. If this was their condition before the barbarians had arrived, what happened after their arrival? A massacre? It was again a very striking and disturbing art work, which I could appreciate but would not like to have it in my bedroom.

Mare Nostrum by Gianfranco Gentile

Gianfranco Gentile is known for his artworks infused with social consciousness. He often uses waste materials like card-board boxes used for packaging, in his art. For Papermade-5, he has a site-specific installation covering one of the pillars in the entrance of Palazzo Fogazzaro. The pillar was covered with cardboard and had collages of fishes, waves, boats and immigrants, trying to cross "Mare Nostrum" (our sea), clearly referring to the immigrant boats from Africa which try to reach Italy and Europe. Unfortunately, the image below does not give a good idea of this work.

Oversight by Art Werger

This artwork by the American artist Art Werger had etching with aquatint prints. It showed an image as if seen through a drone with black eagles flying above the houses. It had hyper-realism with a 3D like effect, which was very nice. Werger is a professor of Printmaking at the University of Ohio and has received a lot of awards for his works.

I wondered if Art is his real name? If yes, his parents must have been artist or at least art lovers, who had wanted their child to become an artist. That makes me thinks of Nietzsche's famous poem about children being the arrows that God launches through us, and I wonder if Art had not wished to be an artist and instead, wanted to be an accountant or an astronomer, how would he have felt about his name?

On his website, Art Werger has explained the ideas behind his work: "My recent work continues to explore themes of time/space and the nature of representation as shared experience. Through the media of etching and mezzotint, these pieces attempt to place the viewer into an active relationship with the subject through various forms of narrative engagement. My subjects are drawn in a realistic manner but are often observed from an unusual angle. I present imagery from an aerial vantage point, or overlapping other layers of reality, taking on the role of the omniscient narrator in a work of fiction."

ZidArta by Suzana Fantanariu

Romania is a special country for this edition of Papermade-5 and it has artworks of different Romanian artists. Among them, I liked the works of Suzana Fantanariu. The one I have chosen to show here is a collage work. I loved its rough textures. I also liked the works of Ana Golici, another Romanian artist in this exhibition.

Fragility of Life by Agniezska Cieslinska

The Polish artist Agniezska Cielinska also uses etching with aquatint for print-making. There are 3 of her works in the exhibition. I have chosen the one with a red background and an intricately designed face made of two cups which fit into each other. Artist and graphic designer Cielinska is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Infinite Paths by Johny Hycinte Ngbwa

Johny Ngbwa is an Italian artist of Cameroun origins. His big linocut work full of intricate black and white lines occupies one whole wall of a room in the exhibition. Looking at it from close gave me a sense of vertigo. The lines seemed to create sand dunes of a desert spreading like snakes over a black lake. It was a beautiful work, something I could look at for a long time and continue to find inspiration for Zen meditations. Young looking Johny, also known as Johny Stecchino (from a film-title of Roberto Begnini), is considered to be an emerging talent in incisions-art.

ST/110 by Sandro Battaglia

Italian artist Sandro Battaglia has a set of artistic B/W photographs of the common moka, used for making coffee in the old fashioned way in Italy, against a blue background. By focusing on the different parts of a moka (moca) and looking at them from different angles, Battaglia has created a kind of geometric poem with the composition of the photographs. I found it lyrical and beautiful. Battaglia has collaborated with a number of well-known Italian film-directors including Sergio Leone and Pasolini, and is a big name in photo-journalism.

My Dream by Sopap Petcharaporn

Sopap Petcharaporn from Thailand has a big woodcut print in Papermade-5. It is very intricately designed piece of art. Its subject reminded me of the lock-down photographs and videos from last year (2020) when the absence of humans on the roads and parks had brought out some wild animals in the cities and urban areas. It shows a deer and some birds in an apartment overrun with plants and creepers, while in the open space you can see sky-scrappers. Petcharaporn specialises in creating intricate woodcut work.

Boundaries by Damiano Azzizia

Let me conclude this post with one of my favourite artworks from Papermade-5 - a simple and unassuming work, which had absolutely marvellous texture. It was called Confini (Boundaries) and was by a young Italian artist called Damiano Azzizia. It had the painting of a room, probably on card-board used for packages. I loved the kind of leathery look he had achieved, with an amazing texture. It looked really simple, almost minimalist, and I really liked it.

Conclusions

I had started this post with the idea of selecting 10 artworks, in the end I have chosen 20 and there were still so many others that I had liked, which are not there in this list. For this post, I have chosen images which show close-ups and details of the art-works. Many of the works in this exhibition are actually immense, so these pictures can only give you an idea and you need to fully experience them by visiting the exhibition.

The last image of this post is of an artwork by the Romanian artist Ana Golici. I hope that these images will inspire you to visit the Papermade-5 exhibition.

Epochal Mutations - Contemporary Art Exhibition

Finally the Covid-19 lockdowns are easing and cultural events are being organised. Recently, our city organised a contemporary art exhibition called "Epochal Mutations" (MutAzioni Epocali). When I read the name of the exhibition, I thought that it would be totally influenced by the Covid-19 lockdown and would have a lot of works expressing anguish and fear. So I was not so sure if I wanted to look at it. Fortunately, I changed my mind and visited it - it had a lot of works which I liked. It also introduced me to the works of many new local artists and a few outside artists.

"Mutation" Art Exhibitions have been held in Schio since 2017, but its focus changes every year. For example, in 2019, it was "MutAzioni Spaziali" (Space Mutations). Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, it was not held in 2020.

This year the exhibition was held at Palazzo Fogazzaro, a historical building in the city centre from 1810. In the courtyard there was a work of our Schio sculptor Mario Converio, who works with iron and metals. He is famous for his voluptuous female forms and I had written a post about him. His work for this exhibition is a globe with a storm of birds rising up from it. After this exhibition, this sculpture will be placed in the Schio railway station and will become a public art installation.

In this post I am presenting some of the artists from MotAzioni Epocali exhibition whose works I liked - they are not in any particular order.

During the exhibition, I met one of the artists - her name is Maria Grazia Martina - I will start with her. Her background is in history of art and she teaches in a school. She creates art with mixed materials. I asked her if her background in the history of art influences her as an artist? She said that it was more of a hindrance because she tends to compare of her works with those of well-known artists that she had studied and this makes her feel very self-critical. I could empathise with her feelings because self-criticism is a big challenge for a lot of artists and it is great that in spite of it, she can express her creativity. You can see her with some of her works in the image below.

The next image again shows the details of one of the works of Maria Grazia Martina, which I liked because of the vibrant colours of the fibres which express for me the confusion, interconnections and vitality of life.

The artist Claudio Brunello from Bassano had two works in the exhibition, one on the women of Afghanistan and another on languages and technology - I liked both of them. In the second work, he had used a lot of 3-D printed miniature human figures to express ideas about native languages while computer motherboards expressed use of the increasing use of English coupled with technology - I thought that that it was ironic that he expressed traditions part of this work through 3D printed figures. You can see details from this work in the image below.

Marco Zanrosso's installation "Ecological Equilibrium" had six semi-transparent circles, one in front of the other, moving up and down, creating ever-changing dynamic forms was very beautiful even if the ideas it expressed were too abstract. A large part of its beauty came from the constant movement of the circles and their translucent materials - both these aspects are difficult to appreciate in the image below.

There were many digital works in the exhibition. I understand that artistic expression can not be limited by the materials used by the artists and thus digital art is one such legitimate expression of creativity. However, I feel that having the skills of computer graphics is a different kind of artistic skill and needs to have its own separate art-world, it can't be mixed with art created by persons, using their hands in the the old- fashioned way. Like the works of Claudio Brunello above, I can also see that setting the boundaries between digital and non-digital would anyway be a difficult exercise. Among the artists presenting digital prints, I liked the work of Valeria Cassol, which was titled "When you look up and see the Universe", shown in the image below.

I also liked the digital prints of Slovenian artist Bogdan Soban - with their delicate colours and complex abstract forms, they invited you to look at them and get lost in their details. In fact, I spent a long time looking at his work presented in the image below.

Simone Ricciardello from Vicenza had 2 installations about climate change. One was called "Alone no one will be saved", which was more explicit about its theme. It had an old table fan which started moving when someone came or passed in front of it and then automatically stopped. Another of his installation, "The time of non-return" had a baby angel setup against green tiles and it expressed the time running out to save the planet.

The installations of the Schio artist Elisa Pedron expressed ideas of reincarnation, mutation and evolving through the mythical fire-bird Phoenix and a cosmic egg. You can see her cosmic egg in the banner of this post above while the image below shows the metal circles and the phoenix.

I especially loved the works of Luca Vallortigara, who had used abstract figures in wood to express its different natural colours and textures, which had the power to draw me into introspection and wondering about the meanings of life and nature.

I also liked the multi-material works of Paolo Guglielmo Giorio like the one in the image below that was supposed to express the virus of Covid-19 together with the sea-life suffocated by petrol-spill from a big ship. I think that this was the only work in the whole exhibition which directly mentioned the Covid-19 pandemic. I liked the way the fish-net and the red virus came together against the grey background and the rotting skull (in the image below).

The work of Schio artist Elena Ester Accardo, "After the floods" was supposed to express a recurrent dream which has had. With delicate gold and greens, it had a very pleasing impact, the kind of art you can look at when you are feeling low and feel uplifted by it! While it had an immediate pleasing impact, it also had a complex mix of symbols, which kept me gazing at it and trying to discern their meanings.

The installation of the Schio artist Rosa Paola Astrid represented the countdown clock on the climate change which was put up in Rome in June this year on the World Environment Day. It had paintings of the earth seen from space in changing colours, again giving an expression to the time running out.

The next image shows one of the works of Martina Dalla Stella - it was called "No fear" and it expressed migrations, changing technology, role of police and big corporations and the courage of ordinary people to face them and to fight for rights.

I want to close with the work I liked most in this exhibition - I absolutely loved the mosaic like works of Eva Trentin from Marano Vicentino, with each piece of the mosaic expressing nature, places and moments of life. I felt that I could look at them for hours, find new points of reflection and at the same time, feel an emotional connection with them. Below I have an image from her work "289", made of 289 pieces of mosaic.

Conclusions

As you can see, there were many interesting works in this exhibition. The most common theme chosen by the artists was about the climate change. My favourite works in this exhibition were by Eva Trentin and Elena Ester Accardo. Regarding the installations, I liked most the works of Marco Zanrosso and Claudio Brunello.

As I came out of the exhibition, I saw the sculptor Mario Converio at the gate. He had come to take measurements of his work in the courtyard as it has to be strengthened for its placement in the railway station. We went to a nearby bar to have a beer and to talk about his art and about life.

May be one day I will also write about that conversation with Mario Converio. In the mean time, I hope that you have liked this virtual walk-through at the MutAzioni Epocali exhibition. Even if Schio is a tiny little town, I think that in terms of culture, it is full of wonderful opportunities.

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Venice the City of Water

Chiara Carminati is an Italian poet, translator and author of children's books. On 21st March, it was the World Poetry Day. To celebrate it, our city Schio promoted "Poetry gifts" by sharing poems through some WhatsApp groups. I am part of a local reading group called Lettori in Circolo (Readers in a Circle), which took part in this initiative. Thus, I received some poems, which included one of Carminati's poems called, "A Venezia" (In Venice).

This brief post is about Carminati's poem. I share my translation of this poem and a few thoughts about the feelings it evoked in me. This year (2021) is 1600th anniversary of the foundation of Venice in 421 CE. Thus, this post is dedicated to this beautiful floating town which I love to visit and which is not very far from Schio.

"A Venezia" - A Poem by Chiara Carminati

Nella città d’acqua, in lontananza
paiono pennelli sottili
le punte dei campanili.
Così ciotole di un pittore
rovesciate con eleganza
sono le cupole delle chiese
nella città d’acqua, in lontananza.

Meaning of the Poem:

It is a short and sweet poem. I am not a poet and not a proper translator, however I wanted to share it:

"In the city of water, in the distance
looking like thin brushes
the tips of the bell-towers.
As the painter's bowls
overturned elegantly
are the domes of churches
in the city of water, in the distance."

Feelings Evoked by This Poem

Venice is usually full of tourists. There are times when the crowds are so thick that it is difficult to find a quiet place where you can soak in the quiet atmosphere of this magical town. To experience the quiet and the almost surreal beauty of Venice you need to visit it in autumn or winter. I liked this poem because it captures that special feeling of Venice on a quiet foggy morning.

Venice is full of artists and painters - people who sit on the banks of canals with their sketch books and easels, intent on drawing and painting, while others, holding stacks of paintings look for tourists to sell them. This poem alludes to all of them by looking at the floating city as the working instruments of a water-colour painter - its bell-towers as brushes and its church-domes reflected in the waters as overturned bowls of colours.

Conclusions

I love reading in Italian but I usually avoid reading Italian poems - I have difficulties in appreciating them most of the time, probably because reading and feeling the emotions of poems requires a different kind of relationship with the language. For the same reason, I have difficulties in appreciating English poems. I can appreciate them intellectually but I don't have the emotional connection with them - for that, I need my poems to be in Hindi or Urdu. However, occasionally I come across poems like this one by Chiara Carminati which connects with something deeper inside me and creates magic. (I think that I like this poem so much, also because I love water-colour paintings). 

If you understand Italian and want to read more poems which were shared during our "Poetry Gifts" initiative, you can find them at the Leggere a Schio blog managed by our local library.

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River to River - Festival 2020

River to River (RtoR) film festival was started by Selvaggia Velo in Florence (Italy) in 2001. It was the first festival entirely dedicated to Indian films held outside India. For many years, while living in Bologna, which is not far from Florence, I regularly visited this festival. Some years ago, we shifted to Schio, about 350 km to the north of Florence, so participating in this festival became difficult for me. However, the December 2020 edition of RtoR was held online due to the on-going Covid-19 pandemic. This gave me an opportunity watch some of the festival films. (Below a still from "Berlin to Bombay", one of the films in the festival)

My main interest was in watching documentary and short films in the festival. Thus, I watched only one full-length feature film - Kadakh. This post is to share a few impressions about some of the films which I liked in this festival.

Kadakh

Kadakh was the opening film of the festival, directed by Rajat Kapoor. It is a black comedy centred around a dead body in an upper-middle class drawing room in Mumbai, which is full of guests for a Diwali party.

Sunil (Ranvir Shorey) is the owner of the house while the dead guy is Raghav, husband of his office colleague Chhaya, with whom he is having an affair. Raghav has discovered their affair and comes to talk to Sunil. He is trying to be mature about it, but continues to get too angry to control himself and during one such loss-of-control moments, shoots himself. Soon Sunil's wife (Manasi Multani) comes back home and finds her husband with Raghav's corpse in their drawing room. He confesses his affair but there is no time to deal with the marital infidelity as they know that soon their guests for the Diwali party are going to arrive. So the husband and wife hide the dead body in a box, cover it with tapestry and get ready to welcome the guests.

The guests include Chayya, the wife of the dead man. You can imagine the comic-horror kind of mixed tension which drives this film. The last part of the movie is its most cynical and damning part, with the whole gang of friends (except Chaya, who has left) helping Sunil in getting rid of the dead body. When the film was ending, I almost expected it to show the whole lot going to the chautha (funeral) ceremony of the poor guy and express condolences to the widow.

I do not like the genre of dark comedy, but the film is well made and well-acted. All the actors are good. I especially liked Manasi Multani, who plays Sunil's wife Malti and Palomi Ghosh, who plays Chhaya. I also thought the guy playing Raghav (Chandrachoor Rai) was good in his brief role.

The Newly Weds, short film (5 min.) by Prataya Saha

You can watch this short film on YouTube. The film has a young man (Mahesh Gowda) and his wife (Suvin Valson) and it looks at the way they relate to each other, mediated by technology. When together, they hardly talk to each other and their eyes are constantly on their mobile phones and laptop screens. At night, a laptop stays in the bed between them. However, they expresses their love in the messages they write to each other, in which they open their hearts.

The tiny film presents the role of tech in a young couple's life as a kind of caricature. I felt that it could have been more relatable as a depiction of a long-married couple who does not have much left to say to each other. It felt a bit unrealistic for a young newly married couple, because it seemed to ignore their need for physical touch and sex. Their messages express a yearning, which is inexplicably missing from their real lives.

Berlin to Bombay, documentary film, 51 min. by Marco Hulser

For me, Berlin to Bombay was the most enjoyable film of the festival. It is the story of an Indian origin boy Abu Chaka Khan, raised in Berlin (Germany) and his fascination for the world of Bollywood. Abu works in a restaurant but his dream is to go and act in Bollywood. He does not want to work in German films where he can only play Indian or Pakistani roles - he prefers the idea of Bollywood heroes with their songs and dances.

He makes and sends his videos for auditions to India but when they do not get him any offers, he goes to Mumbai. The film shows him trying to negotiate his way through the barriers surrounding its film world, full of people who are waiting for bakras like him, selling them dreams and taking their money. Abu pays but finds himself playing an extra in a film. After his dreams crash against the hard realities of the Bollywood, Abu comes back to Berlin and to his restaurant.

Though film's storyline is an old theme, Abu has an expressive face and he comes across very well with his ingenuity, hope and dreams.

While the film ended, I was thinking of today's YouTube and TikTok stars. Now, people with dreams of making it in Bollywood, have some alternative pathways to become famous, even if that fame does not last very long. I think that I would like to watch a similar documentary exploring the worlds of the YouTube-TikTok stars.

The GesheMa is Born, Documentary, 56 min., by Malati Rao

Geshe Ma is the title of a learned Buddhist nun who has reached the highest level of religious knowledge. Rao's documentary is a glimpse into the hidden world of Buddhist nuns. I liked it because it showed a world which was unfamiliar to me.

Though ancient Buddhism spoke of nuns, modern Buddhism did not have nuns. It was Dalai Lama who had established the first nuns' order some 40 years ago. He had also proposed allowing the nuns to study religious books. This idea was discussed in the international council of Buddhist leaders from different countries, but some countries were against the changes. Finally in 2012, it was accepted that the nuns could study to become the learned teachers (Geshe).

The film follows a group of nuns in a monastery in Nepal who became the first group of women admitted to the Buddhist theological studies. The film focuses on the story of Namdol Phuntsok, who had earned the top marks in these studies and received the title of Geshe Ma in 2016.

The film moves forward and backward in time, with some interviews and unobtrusive observation of the lives of the Buddhist nuns. They talk about the setting up of the first nunnery. It looks at their celibate lives, their shaving of heads and their determined animation during theological discussions, where a raised leg-movement and clapping of hands in stereotypical gestures, looked like a dance to me.

GesheMa Namdol talks about her childhood and her family's opposition to her idea of becoming a nun, her desire for studying the Buddhist religious texts and how they must argue and debate their ideas and defend them against questions. The film concludes with the group of the nuns holding the coveted yellow head-dresses in their hands, which are a visible sign of their learning, walking in the room full of monks. They all don those yellow head-dresses, signifying a new beginning of the role of the women leadership in Buddhism.

Buddha of the Chadar, 28 Min. by Jean Whitaker

This film can also be watched on internet. It is about a father and son from Ladakh making a long winter journey on the frozen Zanskar River - a route known as the Chadar. They carry a heavy gold-plated statue of Buddha, which they plan to offer to a Buddhist monastery located at the top of the hill near their village.

The film brings out the solitude and difficulties of the long journey on the frozen river surrounded by beautiful snow-covered mountains. It also shows the on-going construction of a new road by the Indian Border Road Organisation, so that in future, the Zanskar valley will also be connected through a road and it should be possible to complete that same journey in a vehicle.

The film has beautiful photography and makes you reflect on the human urge to choose a tough journey as a part of a spiritual quest.

Silence in the Wind, 13 min. by Gautam Baruah and Ballav Prajnyan

This short film is about a father remembering his son, his desire to see him married and his initial rejection when he discovers that his son is gay. His initial reaction is of rejection. Then he remembers the day when his young son had risked drowning in the river and his desperation. The memory of that desperation helps him to say to his son that he does not understand but he will accept.

It is a beautiful film.

The Ashram Children, 67 min., by Jonathan Ofek

India is seen as the land of spirituality. It has many famous gurus with their ashrams, and followers coming from all over the world to seek their guidance. This film shows a hidden aspect of this spiritual quest - the feelings of the expat children about those Gurus.

The director of this film, Jonathan is from Israel and he feels scarred by his childhood experiences in an ashram in India. He feels that it was a cult which had gripped his parents. His parents, especially his mother, do not take his complaints very seriously - for her, it was not a cult and she was only going to the ashram for some months every year.

She tells him that he could have told her that he did not want to go and she would not have forced him. However, Jonathan feels that saying no was not easy for him, because he had grown up inside that experience from early childhood. The whole issue of obedience to the Guru in the ashram was experienced by him as something absolute, he had learned to not question anything and was afraid to express himself.

During the film, Jonathan goes to look for other expatriate children that he had met and known in the ashram during his childhood. Most of them agree with him that their childhood experiences of the ashram were negative for them. Most of them, now grown-ups, try to hide this part of their past lives and do not talk about it. One of these guys also talks about the hypocrisy of the Guru, who taught the lessons of detachment and spirituality to his followers, but also loved wearing gold, luxury watches, and using costly perfumes.

This film forced me to see how the spirituality-and-guru industry of India can be perceived by young children who are pulled in to this experience by their parents. I had never thought about it before in these terms. For me, many of the ashrams and their jet setting Gurus, who run their spirituality businesses like money-making exercises, are persons who profit from human frailties. At the same time, I believe that some of the non-commercial persons can be great spiritual teachers.

Conclusions

There were some other short and documentary films from the festival which I had watched but they were similar in terms of themes and treatment to others that I had seen earlier, so I am not writing about those.

In the past RtoR festival had been an opportunity for me to meet and talk to persons from the world of Indian films - persons like Onir, Rahul Bose, Aparna Sen and even Amitabh Bachchan. That was no longer possible with an online festival. I hope that in future, after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, River to River festival will continue to offer the possibility of online participation.

Making (Some) Sense of Concept Art

My first encounter with Conceptual Art was in the Kochi Biennale of Art, and it left me a little confused. Since then I have been to some other art biennales and I continue to be surprised by the popularity and apparent little-sense of this art.

Contemporary art, as displayed in the Biennales, has many works related to digital elaboration, photography, sound and video, which leave me perplexed - not because they are not art but because each of them has their own festivals and events, so I am not sure why would art biennales devote so much space to them. However, it is concept art which often leaves me feeling as a kind of idiot who can't get its point. For example, the image below has one of the works from a Kochi Biennale, which left me pulling on my fragile white hairs.

However, I am not the only one who feels confused by such art. For example, the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith in his recent book The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, has one of the characters talking about the Turner Prize (a prestigious British award for contemporary art, which has been often given to works of concept art), which expresses my feelings very eloquently:

Angus was unrepentant. “I have little time for the Turner Prize,” he said. “I have no taste for its pretentiousness. I dislike the way it is awarded to people who cannot paint, draw, nor sculpt.” His eyes widened; he became slightly red, his breathing shallow - all fairly typical reactions provoked by the Turner Prize in those of sound artistic judgment. “You are not an artist if you merely make a video about paint drying or pile a few objets trouvés in a heap. You just aren’t.”Domenica shrugged. “Calm down,” she said. “Installations make us look at the world in a different way. They must have some artistic merit. They challenge us. ...”

Recently I read a book on contemporary art by Will Gompertz, which gave me some understanding about the origins of concept art and why it leaves me cold.

Origins of Concept Art

Will Gompertz in his book "What are you looking at - Strange Story of 15o Years of Modern Art" (2012) explains the origins of Concept Art with a story about Marcel DuChamp, whom he calls the father of "Concept Art" and who had pioneered the concept art movement with his work "The Fountain" in 1917 (which was a urinal he had bought in a shop):

After buying the urinal Duchamp takes it to his studio. He lays the heavy porcelain object on its back and turns it around, so it appears to be upside down. He then signs and dates it in black paint on the left-hand side of its outer rim, with the pseudonym “R. Mutt 1917.” His work is nearly done. There is only one more job remaining: he needs to give his urinal a name. He chooses Fountain. What had been, just a few hours beforehand, a nondescript, ubiquitous urinal has, by dint of Duchamp’s actions, become a work of art.At least it had in Duchamp’s mind. He believed he had invented a new form of sculpture: one where an artist could select any pre-existing mass-produced object with no obvious aesthetic merit, and by freeing it from its functional purpose—in other words making it useless—and by giving it a name and changing the context and angle from which it would normally be seen, turn it into a de facto artwork. He called this new form of art-making a “readymade”: a sculpture that was already made.Marcel Duchamp caused the decisive rupture from tradition and forced a re-evaluation of what could and should be considered art. Before Duchamp’s provocative intervention, art was something man-made, typically of aesthetic, technical and intellectual merit, which had been mounted in a frame and hung on a wall, or presented on a plinth to look splendid. ...

Some Examples of Modern Art

Let me start with my top-10 list of some examples of concept art, which perplex me. I will start with the ones which I felt were very different from the classical canons of art but which I accepted as a kind of art. The first was an installation by Bob Gransma from a Kochi Biennale - in this, the artist had made a gigantic slab of concrete to be placed inside a dug up area. I think that it expressed the ideas of disruption, destruction, and the fragility of life.

The next image has a work of Yuko Mori from a Kochi Biennale. It had metal rings on a metal stand with wires going down. I think that it was accompanied by a sound and video installation. It expressed the influence of mechanised world on the human life and people who spend their lives in factories repeating same gestures the whole day, every day.

The next image is of a work by Hassan Sharif from a Venice Biennale. It had a collection of bent aluminium spoons amidst a jumble of black plastic cords. It made me think of all the waste that we produce in our daily lives. It also reminded me of people hoarding stuff like wires, cords and bags in their cupboards because they might need them one day.

To conclude this part, I have another image from a Kochi Biennale which had a toilet by Dia Mehta Bhupal. It was also about urinals, like Du Champ's famous urinal which had started the Concept Art movement. However, the colours and designs used by the artist in this work changed the space into art and was the one which I liked most in this group.

Borderline Art

Next are 2 examples of concept art, which I felt were more borderline - I am still able to see them as a work of art but I am really not convinced about it. The first image is of a work by Takahiro Iwasaki and has some books arranged on a table, along with some coloured wires coming out of some of them.

The second one is an installation of B. V. Suresh from a Kochi Biennale, which was accompanied by sound and video effects.

The Lazy Artist?

The final 2 examples of Concept Art are the ones which I found most problematic. The first was a work by an Indian artist from the Kochi Biennale - it had the trash from a building construction arranged in the centre of a room.

The second example below was in the Israel pavillion in a Venice Biennale - I won't even try to describe it.

Conclusions

I agree that all the works presented above, can make us reflect and may be, see the world in a different way but I am not always sure if there was some art in them. If the art is just in a concept in the artist's head, then how do we decide who is an artist and who is not? All of us have concepts in our heads, who gets to decide if my concept is artistic? The guy who made the art by sticking a banana on a board? Or is it art, because some guy with more money than brain, bought that banana-board for a million dollars? It somehow reminds me of the story about the king's invisible clothes.

In his book, Gompertz asks "Such works are often entertaining, even thought-provoking, but are they art?" His answer is "Yes. They are. Because that is their intention, their sole purpose, and the grounds upon which we are being asked to judge them. The difference being that they are operating in an area of modern art that is first and foremost about ideas, not so much the creation of a physical object: hence conceptual art. But that doesn’t give artists the right to serve up any old rubbish."

Perhaps I lack certain qualities for proper art appreciation, but I wish that the biennale curators do not dedicate so much space to Concept Art. While we areat it, I would like that the space given to video and digital art installations should also be limited.

The last image of this post (above) is an installation by Kaushik Mukhopadhayay from a Kochi Biennale - he has used old thrown away stuff to make a delightful mechanical installation - it means that art can come out of garbage, but there is a difference between making art from rubbish and serving up rubbish as art.

Let me conclude this post with another quote from Gompertz -

In my opinion the best place to start when it comes to appreciating and enjoying modern and contemporary art is not to decide whether it’s any good or not, but to understand how it evolved from Leonardo’s classicism to today’s pickled sharks and unmade beds. As with most seemingly impenetrable subjects, art is like a game; all you really need to know is the basic rules and regulations for the once baffling to start making some sense.

This last quote from Gompertz does not really convince me - I don't think that art should be about learning the rules of some game. However, if you want to understand some of the most important art movements of late 19th and 20th century, read this Gompertz book - it is one of the best that I have read on this theme.

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Religions For The 21st Century

Some weeks ago, I had a discussion with a friend about differences between Shamanism and Buddhism. I think that analysing religions to look for their differences is not such a useful approach in today's world. In the eastern traditions, usually the different religious philosophies are seen as different streams of the same river, and there is not a strong focus on analysing their differences. I think this way of looking at religions answers better the religious-spiritual needs of today.

While humanity needs a spiritual dimension, the practical ways in which this need is expressed through religions depends upon the social, cultural, economic and technological context of the societies. Thus, it is inevitable that in the new millennium, along with our changing societies, our religions will also change.

This post is a speculation about what humanity needs from religions in the 21st century.

Religious Harmony

Like the different human species, the religious beliefs are also in continuous evolution. In the recent history, our different religions, especially the more orthodox religious ideas, have been one of the root causes of conflicts. In the medieval period, there were some attempts to come up with universal religions, which proposed unification of the different religious ideas. Baha'i religion in Persia and Deen-e-Ilahi by the Mughal king Akbar in India were examples of these unifying religions, but they had a limited impact because they were adopted by few persons, though Baha'i religion continues to thrive even today in a few countries.

Today, while we have some large radical and orthodox religious groups, many more persons identify themselves as "Atheists" or non-believers. A large number of persons, who formally belonged to a religion, define themselves as "spiritual and not religious". Many others, while belonging to one religious tradition, pick and adopt specific ideas of other religions.

The pace of changes in the last one century and in the first decades of the present century, related to the technology and our understanding of the universe, has been unprecedented. When technology can give us the answers we need, we don't need to rely on the benevolence of Gods. So, some believe that in today's world we do not need any religions, because technology can provide all the answers. However, the mysteries of life, consciousness and death remain and every new child-birth and a death forces us to think about these mysteries, thus humanity's search for spirituality also persists.

Science and Spirituality

I grew up in a family in India which was sceptical about our religion (Hinduism) and about the claims of different Gurus. Many persons in our extended family and among our friends share this view of Hinduism. However, I have met many persons who do not share this sceptical view of religion, they have no doubts about their faith. I recognise that faith does not need any scientific proof but personally for me, finding some kind of scientific rationale for the spirituality is important.

There are 2 kinds of technological developments, knowledge and understandings, which influence my spiritual beliefs:

(1) The first is our knowledge about the place of humanity in the Cosmos: We live on a tiny planet surrounded by billions of stars of our galaxy, and there are millions of other galaxies, each with billions of stars. The Cosmos is so big that even if we could travel at the speed of the light, hundreds of our life-times will not be enough to see even a tiny proportion of those worlds. This vastness of the universe is almost impossible to comprehend for me.

Even if among the billions of stars in each galaxy there can be only one planet which has life, there must be millions of planets with some life in the Cosmos. To believe that there is a human-like deity or an elderly father-like God looking after this unimaginably enormous universe made of trillions of stars and planets in millions of galaxies, who is observing each of us human beings living on our tiny planet and is keeping an account of the good or the bad things we do in our tiny lives, seems implausible to me. I can't imagine a God who has to look after millions of galaxies, worrying about things like if the people are going to the churches or mosques or temples to pray to him regularly or if women on earth are modest and covering their heads and bodies - these seem like ideas of men to control the others.

This understanding of the vastness of the universe leads me to believe that there is no personal God and instead the spirituality is something different. I think that prophets and all our ideas about the different Gods and Goddesses are metaphorical representations of the divine. Their stories and their teachings cannot be taken literally or in absolute terms, they need to be seen in their historical contexts, as answers to the human need for understanding the mysteries of birth, consciousness and death.

(2) The second development is our increasing understanding of the micro-cosmos through quantum physics: we still do not have a proper understanding of the quantum world which focuses on the laws governing the microscopic Cosmos hidden inside each particle of the universe. In that Cosmos also there are billions of sub-atomic particles circling other particles in an infinite number of galaxies of atoms and molecules. In this quantum world, the laws of the ordinary physics do not work, so that the sub-atomic particles can be at more than one place at the same time and the act of observation changes the nature of the observed sub-atomic particles.

To be honest, I don't understand most of it. At the same time, whatever I do understand, reminds of some of the concepts and discussions in the Hindu Upanishads about the nature of reality, probably because I am more familiar with those concepts and ideas. This world of quantum physics leads me to an understanding of God as the universal energy or a universal consciousness that underlies our atoms and molecules of all organic and inorganic worlds.

I like this idea of the divine as the universal energy with different levels of consciousness that moves the sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules of billions of stars spread out over millions of galaxies. It unites all our universe and at the same time, leaves us free to use our intelligence to live our lives filled with a significance and meanings that we want to give to it. In this sense, I believe that God is the universal energy inside each of us and in everything surrounding us.

Religions for the 21st Century

In this world of increasing scientific understanding and technological progress, our religious beliefs face the challenges of reconciling science and technology with the ideas of spirituality. Different people deal with this challenge differently. While many individuals born in families with strong religious beliefs might share those beliefs, but many of those will question those beliefs as they grow up and as they find those beliefs limiting their life-choices. Many of us would form our own beliefs about the sacred.

The social media innovations allow us to find groups of people who share our niche beliefs and we can become part of their communities. Thus I think that the fragmentation of religious beliefs will increase exponentially over the next decades and the trend of picking and adopting aspects of different religions which resonate with us would become stronger with time.

This does not mean that persons believing in traditional religions are going to disappear. There is a subgroup of population, which finds a sense of security in specific and even rigid religious norms, and I don't think that subgroup is going to disappear anytime soon - probably with greater religious choices, these orthodox subgroups will also become stronger.

Among the leaders of traditional religions, those persons who can break-off from religious orthodoxy and can speak to the whole humanity, such as Pope Francis and Dalai Lama, will probably find even greater prominence in future.

The technical progress is increasing our sense of individual rights. Therefore, I think that the ideas of human rights are going to play an important role in our acceptance of religions in the 21st century. I think that issues such as equality of genders, rights of persons to choose their sexual orientations, the right to join or leave a religion, the right to live together with the person of our choice with or without marriage, the right to have a family of our choice and the right to die with dignity are all going to be basic starting points for the acceptance of religions of future.

Conclusions

These are my speculations about the future of religions in the world. I am sure that my views are influenced by my biases - those of growing up in a family sceptical about religions, those of being a part of a multi-religious family, those of reading Upanishads and those of my work-experience in the field of human rights.

However, I am aware that history does not move in straight lines. It goes up and down, sometimes it takes two steps back before moving ahead. Looking at the conditions of specific religions might make us feel that instead of the changes I have speculated above, some religions are going in the inverse direction - towards rigidity, greater orthodoxy and a substantial denial of human rights. However, I believe that overall direction of history is different and sooner or later, all religions will join that direction, where the rights of individuals will be stronger than the rights of collective religious groups.

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