The Night Journey and Painting is My Everything Indian Asian Art


HAROON MIRZA


by Karin G Oen and Qamar Adamjee


Tis autumn at the Asian Art Museum,


exhibitions that,


visitors can see two on the surface,


explore the extremes of the contemporary art world. Just beneath the surface, powerful commonalities emerge for the 21st-century art museum’s potential to serve as a platform for


visual and cultural


inquiry, where the canon of art history can be investigated, problematised, and re-worked. At a museum with a historical collection that is heavily weighted toward the materiality of mastery and fine facture,


it is


important to include exhibitions of contemporary work like this pairing that look both at what art is and what art does. Painting is My Everything: Art from


India’s Mithila Region, draws from the museum’s sizable collection of recent paintings from a rural and economically disadvantaged area in the northeastern state of Bihar. Te exuberant and colourful images in these dense pictures include auspicious floral and animal motifs, images of gods and goddesses, and scenes of daily life,


conveying an


aesthetic that might be described as naïve, folk, or the work of outsider artists. Te actual


story is more Mithila Art Institute, founded in


2003 with the support of the US- based Ethnic Arts Foundation. Prior to the establishment of this tuition- free art school, with admission determined by a blind entrance competition,


regional artists had


Radha and Krishna under a kadamba tree (1985) by Karpoori Devi, Mithila region, Bihar state, India, ink and colours on paper © Karpoori Devi


complex. Tis type of painting has served as a means of economic revitalization in an impoverished area, empowerment for artists marginalised by their caste and gender, and as a vehicle for personal expression. Traditionally,


paintings in the


Mithila region adorned the walls and floors of homes, and the practice was taught by mothers to their daughters. In recent decades, Mithila painting as a style and type of work has been formalised through training at the


encountered interlocutors from the affluent urban world at least twice before. In 1966, during a period of extreme drought and famine, the artists who had previously painted on the walls of their homes were offered paper and a means to sell their work by Pupul Jayakar, director of the All India Handicrafts Board. Tree decades prior, this domestic tradition had been ‘discovered’ and publicised by a British civil servant surveying the damage to homes following a major earthquake in 1934. Tese two interventions provided exposure for this regional wall painting tradition and effected a fundamental shift in the artwork’s purpose. Te paintings changed format and function: from walls to paper, and from compositions that enriched personal,


private


domestic spaces to portable, collectible works. In Painting is My Everything, artists present a mixture of regional stylistic conventions, images and themes that are personally resonant for them. While the earning potential of this art remains important for


some artists, others use their


medium to comment on regional, national,


and global social and


political issues. Trough painting, they offer a window into a region that is likely little known to the viewers at home and abroad. Compare this with the multimedia


installation work of the London- based artist Haroon Mirza, an art world


provocateur whose


Prime Minister Modi arriving in a village via helicopter (2015) by Dulari Devi, Mithila region, Bihar State, India, ink and colours on paper © Dulari Devi Asian Art Museum acquisition made possible by the George Hopper Fitch Bequest 2016


incorporations of electronic elements, sound, and light, have garnered global attention and accolades including the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion and the Nam June Paik Art Center prize. His new work Te Night Journey is sited at the museum as a room-sized immersive experience. Te installation is multi-modal and multi-faceted, designed to evoke a somatic sensory experience that needs no explanation. Artworks in the adjacent gallery offer insights into the concepts that underlie this new work and Mirza’s practice as a whole. Te installation, composed of wedges of rebonded acoustical foam, wall-to-wall carpet, and a bespoke media system composed of modified vintage Marshall cabinet speakers fitted with coloured LED lights and a device that translates a two-dimensional image into a choreographed pattern of light paired with the sound of live electricity at varied frequencies. Te artist sees himself as a composer, drawing together elements of visual and aural input as an act of transcription. Te system was originally


commissioned for an installation at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where the artwork that the system translated into light and sound (called the score by the artist) was a concrete poem. When re-siting the installation at the Asian Art Museum, Mirza


was


A C I D G E S T by Haroon Mirza, at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2017-18. Photograph by Oriol Tarridas. All photographs © Asian Art Museum


particularly interested in the sensory interplay between text, image, space, and sound implicit in many objects


Te Hindu deity Ganesha (1983) by Jogmaya Devi, Mithila region, Bihar state, India, ink and colours on paper © Jogmaya Devi


DIFFERENT JOURNEYS IN INDIAN ART THAT EXPLORE THE TRADITIONAL AND ART AS AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE


from the museum’s South Asian and Islamic art collections. Te artwork he selected as the basis for the system’s new score is an early-nineteenth century Indian miniature painting depicting Al Isra’wal Mi’raj, the night journey of the prophet Muhammad on the heavenly creature Buraq. Mirza was drawn to this painting in part because of the contentious position of images of the prophet in Islamic art and culture. While representations of the prophet have been highly controversial at times, the written and spoken manifestations of his name, and the name of God, are integral to Islamic practice and study. For an artist interested in the translation of concepts across different media, specifically between visuality and sound, this censorial impulse was a point of departure for re-coding the system.


Te new score for Te Night


Journey required an act of transcription that became the basis for another new work. Mirza digitally pixelated and reduced the original painting to eight colours and fed that new image into the system to be further dematerialised as light, colour, and the sound of live electricity. Interested in the re-materialization of this digital image, the artist then


TWO EXHIBITIONS, TWO VERY


produced the pixelated image as an inkjet print on wasli, the type of hand-prepared paper used in Mughal painting, and embellished it with a hand-decorated border featuring a design pattern that the artist’s mother, herself a painter, had taught him as a young child. In place of the gold leaf typically applied in border decoration, Mirza employed the copper tape that he uses in LED circuitry for his multimedia


installations, arranged


using triangular waveforms that recur in his work,


creating a further


translation and evidence of his multifaceted approach to creating new work while re-inscribing themes from art history and his own oeuvre. Both


exhibitions display the


enlarged territory of a museum that has always engaged with creating meaningful connections across time and place. Tese exhibitions explore the relationships between concept, material, and reception of art. Tey address not just the objects themselves, but the work that art does to create space for inquiry and dialogue. Each has, at its core, a transformation from one medium to another, and from one cultural context to another. Seen together, these shows explore


mutability of format in favour of a way of thinking,


looking,


the and


experiencing. In an institution with the concepts of Asia and art as the connective tissue between diverse collection areas, these exhibitions are evidence of the beauty embedded in the artworks themselves and the ways that these pieces work to enlarge our own worldviews. • At the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 7 September to 9 December, asianart.org


SEPTEMBER 2018 ASIAN ART


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