Essay

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Encountering of Cultures

Gallery Soul Flower, Bangkok recently presented a show of eight artists from India and Thailand. Titled ‘The Ethics of Encounter’, the show is curated by Dr.Pandit Chanrochanakit and Dr.Brian Curtin. Cultural interfaces are a necessity of our times to reiterate identity and difference in affiliation, says JohnyML in this essay.

Encounter of two cultures primarily facilitates the production and recognition of difference than the assimilation of familiarities. The strangeness invoked by cultural encounters, in fact functions as the foundation for building up linkages between two apparently dissimilar cultures through comparison, validation and assimilation. When the aspects of comparison and validation are overlooked and a demand for assimilation is placed at the forefront, encounters end up in violence; violence of homogenization. The process of globalization, through its vested interests, tries to erase differences between cultures and places the human race into a unified identity; identity as a consumer of a generic tastes. There is only one ethics in this ironing out of differences, exercising of a hegemonic power over the majority of world population. This ethics of encounter considers culture as a challenge and a thing to be erased. The multiplicity of identities involved in the production of culture constantly challenges these forces of homogenization in order to survive in the continuum of history. Hence, cultural interfaces are a necessity of our times to reiterate identity and difference in affiliation. Encounter then becomes an ideological survival kit for the human beings.

When creatively placed face to face, how do the artists hailing from two cultures, which have cultural affinities and pronounced differences, negotiate this aspect of encounter and what kind of ethics they would follow in such encounters are the questions raised in the show titled ‘The Ethics of Encounter’ at the Soul Flower, Bangkok. Curated by Pandit Chanrochanakit, a Thai national with an ‘Indian’ name and Brian Curtin, an Irish national settled in Bangkok, this show is an aesthetic interface between four Thai artists and four Indian artists. While Navin Rawanchaikul, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pinaree Sanpitak, Sudsiri Pui-Ock represent Thailand Ranbir Kaleka, Vidya Kamat, Chintan Upadhyay and Manjunath Kamath represent India in this show. According to Pandit Chanrochanakit, any kind of cultural encounter should ‘undo the entire precondition of one’s culture’. He also formulates that the cultural encounters happen when there is a possibility to ‘translate, transfer and transform’ the peculiarities of the encountering cultures.

How do we perceive this process of mutating and diverging, when, despite our wishful thinking for undoing the preconditions of cultures? The curators have an answer for this: Tolerance. Chanrochanakit reiterates the fact that in the cultural encounters one culture, whatever dominant role that it plays in the international scene and history, should not demand compliance from the other culture. Though, the primary condition is to have no preconditions in encounters, this tolerance for the ‘other culture’ should be a pre-condition for generating an ethical encounter. The suggestions are quite clear: India being a dominant culture, when it encounters the Thai culture, should not be asking for it to play up ‘India’s history’ and its affinities. Nor should the Thai culture demand India to wonder at the materialistic and spiritual achievements that it has gained over the centuries of cultural permutations and unique identity production.

Navin Rawanchaikul’s video essentially captures the ethics of tolerance in encounters. Titled ‘Khaek Welcome’ this single channel video is seen in ‘drawing room’ ambience. On the wall one could see a small portrait painting of Navin as a young boy. On the other opposite wall, there is a painting that shows a young boy on his rocking horse in front of a building, which almost looks a place of arrival (a railway station or a port). The video has the interviews of people of Indian origin who speak of their days of arrival in Thailand, their survival plights, ability to integrate while keeping their religious and racial identities intact, progress in business and life, their unquestionable love and loyalty for the King of Thailand, their disinclination to go back to India (even though some of them still hold an Indian passport) and their perennial wish to be buried in the soil of Thailand.

Khaek is a word used for ‘guests’ who are to be welcomed. After Indian partition in 1947, when many Indians (also Pakistanis and Bangladesis) reached the shores of Thailand, they were received with open hands by the then King. They were guests then and the difference was underlined in the status of being guests. However, the word Khaek started having negative connotations as the ‘guests’ became major players in the economics of the host country. Khaek became derogatory in due course of time till it regained its lost status of dignity thanks to the acts of integration and loyalty performed by the ‘guests’. Through these interviews and the etymological aspects of the word Khaek and also through the context of its presentation (a drawing room, where the guests are entertained) Navin aesthetically unpacks the tensions of initial encounter, its translatability, capacity to transfer and transform the identity. This video highlights the essence of the show.

Interestingly, Chintan Upadhyay also deals with the aspect of ‘welcome’ and ‘rejection’ in his two paintings titled ‘Welcome’ and ‘Visarjan’ respectively. Perhaps, this is an unconscious encounter between two artists like Chintan and Navin (interestingly both of them believe in art as factory production and love the flamboyance of art and artistic personality). In ‘Welcome’, Chintan paints the image of his smart alec baby with folded hands; a traditional Indian way (also Thai way) of welcoming guests home and showing respect to them. ‘Visarjan’ shows a baby body helplessly floating in void with raised hands. In both the paintings (triptychs) shadows are seen lingering around. In a global scenario, Chintan suggests in his works, any encounter is seen with mutual suspicion. It starts in a welcoming process and finally renders the other (culture) in a helpless state. He indirectly comments on the ways through imperialist forces work in a global scenario. Chintan raises the same issue of compliance and rejection as the curators do and places his works as two ends of the same discourse; as counter forces nullifying the demand for tolerance.

Pinaree Sanpitak uses the metaphors of food and breasts in a performative piece called ‘Breaking the Ice’. Though literal it is, she asks the viewers to make their own kind of ‘ice candies’ using grated Thai ice and Indian condiments. Pinaree provides the viewers with breast like moulds in which they can fill ice and condiments to produce ice snacks of their liking and eat it there itself. In this act, she brings the religious and social memories of two cultures as if they were connected by a single mother’s milk. While the act of making food, the real encounter, remains a material fact, the linkages and affinities are left to memories as the taste of food (a combination of Indian and Thai tastes) is temporal and flimsy. It has to be remembered consciously in order to translate and transform into cultural give and take between two countries.

Food metaphor has been a strong point of departure for the internationally acclaimed artist Rirkrit Tiravanija too. However, in this show, Rirkrit does not bring in this fact. On the contrary he performs a remote ‘performative act’ using his duplicate. He places the photographs of a model/girl wearing a T-Shirt with an inscription saying, ‘I been to India and what I bought is this T-shirt’. One T-shirt shows it in Thai and other shows in Hindi. During the opening, Rirkrit, who is settled in New York, employs his look alike to sit at a desk and sign the T-shirts for the viewers who queues up for watching the performance. The look-alike (accompanied by a goggle and suit wearing body guard) signs the T-shirts and smiles at the viewer. It is a remote communion between reality and illusion. For the artist, the cultural encounter could be as ephemeral as a T-Shirt. At the same time, it is an offering from the artist to the people who believes in the act of sharing and transforming.

Manjunath Kamath, who has visited Thailand before the show idea was born, looks at the ethics of encounter through three different means- sharing of a religion, social surveillance and philosophical reflection of self in multiplicities. His installation titled ‘Eyes’ shows a thousand eyes showing a pagoda like formation (with edges falling off) in one corner of the gallery. These eyes (the eyes of Buddha) are painted on gold leaf paper are encountered by a thousand human eyes intermittently played in a small LCD monitor placed on a velvet cushion. Manjunath, in his ‘Eyes’ speaks of a religion that originated in India and found a home elsewhere. Also he aesthetically says how the very same religion deteriorates into a decoration and spectacle when culture becomes a ritual in our times. The ‘Eyes’ get an added connotation when the modern societies are watched over by the eyes of surveillance. Any meaningful encounter between cultures becomes impossible when the ‘other’ is perpetually watched over by hegemonic forces. The benevolent eyes of Buddha suddenly look the eyes of the Big Brother who control the cultural integrations, affinities and accentuations on difference. In an interesting twist, Manjunath’s work reflects the notion of ‘Jewel Net of Indra’ where the one jewel not only reflect what is before it but all the constituent jewels of the net in infinite reflections. The ‘Eyes’ of Manjunath in this sense, reflects not only of the individuals caught in encounter but also the very context of encounter in their multiplicities. Interestingly, Chintan’s two box installations also work in the same line of multiple reflections of identities and culture.

Sudsiri Pui-Ock and Ranbir Kaleka present their videos that exemplify the encounter between contextual realities. Sudsiri in her video is seen obstructing the smooth flow of traffic in Thai streets and trying to etch the design of the manhole covers on the road. The cultural symbolism embossed on the manhole cover, the individual’s effort to capture it in real time by obstructing another counter flow of traffic, though do not directly link up with the curatorial thoughts, in a stretched sense of looking connotes the encounters of different (cultural) flows. Ranbir Kaleka’s video titled ‘Man with Cockerel 2’ also captures the encounter between reality and illusion. There are several points of merger and levels of viewing in Ranbir’s work. These images function between almost indecipherable solidities and fluidities. Even when the real image goes away from the ken, its reflection lingers on for a while, leaving the viewer to negotiate between the reality of the real image and the reflected image. In cultural encounters too, it happens, often one cannot discern where the reality ends and the illusion starts.

Vidya Kamat’s ‘Birthmark Series’, though done in another context and selected intelligently by the curators for the purpose of the show, quite aptly registers the tensions of encounter. Vidya uses the exterior limits of her own body (ie skin) as a field of ideological contentions. Skin, for the artist, is a surface for socio-cultural and political inscriptions. Race, class and power are inscribed on the individual body either as attribution or as negation. At times, attributions of culture on the individual body become a burden and a limitation to make fruitful social engagements. Skin not only interprets but also misinterprets contexts and possibilities of the individual. Vidya’s self portraits with manipulated skin ornamentations tell the viewer not only of the individual’s personal confrontations with her own context but also with other cultural contexts. Ornamentation, which should otherwise be lauded, becomes an ironic reminder of tensions that cultural encounters could cause. Birthmarks, when aesthetically mediated become critique of a particular symbolism attached to the skin tones. Vidya’s work moves from the personal realm to address a wider issue of cultural encounters, when read within the given context.