Visual artist C.F. John, choreographer Tripura Kashyap and photographer/visual artist T.M. Azis will conceptualize two site-specific exhibitions/performances around an open well and a quilt. Through an intricate intermeshing of space, artist and work, the collaborators will attempt to enlarge the formal parameters of visual art and dance.

While Kashyap is interested in liberating the performing body from artificially imposed styles and forms and relocating it within ‘natural organic structures’, John’s ennui with conventional art practices compels him to explore alternative spaces as context and substance for art. For Azis, however, the substitution of the canvas with open space is not an act of replacement. It helps him see the empty canvas as a site.

Through interactive sessions, the artists hope to associate local communities living around the well with the creative process. Poems, stories, folklore, songs and incidents related to the site will be documented and reinterpreted with the active involvement of the community. The artists will have the opportunity to share the ideas, skills, resources and dynamics of their respective mediums amongst themselves as well as with the community at large. They see the quilt as both a metaphorical weaving together of earlier artistic initiatives in Bangalore, as well as a real quilt with associations of home, comfort and warmth.

One of the central concerns of the project is to take art out of the clinical spaces of the gallery and proscenium, provoking the viewer to see art outside conventional contexts. While the artists acknowledge that these alternative spaces are limiting in terms of available resources like lighting, this in itself is a challenge for them to create a different kind of art, art as a fresh physical entity or an extension of landscape. A site, they emphasize, is not ‘a passive medium’ like the canvas, on which one adds paint or paper. It is a part of the work. The site demands ‘a creative weaving between itself, the artists and the work of art.’

March 2001