Artistic interpretations of Goa’s transoceanic associations

Goa’s
multi-layered history, particularly its status as a significant port
of travel and trade in the past,
creates a unique cosmopolitan archive from which various aspects of
its past emerge. Shaped by over four centuries of Portuguese rule
superceded by three centuries of a medieval Kadamba era, these
occupations have invariably been reflected in
Goa’s
culture, customs, cuisines, music, architecture and more importantly,
its morphing identities.
It
is this deep cosmopolitanism in the internal and external landscape
of Goa that is reflected in the ‘Morphology of Archive’.

“It’s
a multimedia artistic engagement
with the archive of transoceanic interconnected histories of Goa,”
explains curator Sabitha T P of the exhibition that
encapsulates
the artistic interpretations
of 32 artists,
international as well as Indian.
“We are looking very specifically at the idea of migration and what
one can calls
‘translocation’ and how objects and people travelled and what
happens with the coalition of cultures and living traditions while
this translocation takes place.
What
emerges is both a coalition and collusion. The whole exhibition is
focussed on connected histories of Goa –
one that happens through living documents, monuments and people’s
personal memories,
be it diaries or photographs.
This
exhibition dips into that archive. What we are looking at is the
morphing of time of the record and the individual, where in some
sense the past and present coexist like Kedar Dhondu’s ‘Dark
Dawn’ which focuses on the slave ships,
or Barbara Ash’s interpretation of the present Goan diaspora in
Swindon, UK.
Each
artist brings their individual interpretation to the topics they have
carefully chosen,” she elaborates of the
multimedia
exhibition which includes installations, sculptures, drawings,
photographs, videos, graphite, pencil sketches and embroidery,
among others.

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Boxes:

Some representative works:

Garcia
de Orta

A
16th
century
Portuguese traveller’s encyclopaedia/catalogue of plants – ‘Hortus
Malabaricus’
interpreted
in very individuated ways by three artists – Bess Frimodig (Sweden),
Renée
Ridgway
(netherlands) and Rashmi Mala Devi (India).

Renée
has created a video which uses the pages of the book. Rashmi’s
drawings imitate the illustrated ideas of the book and Bess has
turned some of the pictures
into
memento postcards.

Mosaic
of Portuguese Calçadas

This
8 metres
tall constructed art reflects the intrinsic Portuguese calçadas
(paved roads with stones – used by King Manuel’s royalty, sporting
royal symbols).
Artists
Silvia Cavelti
(Portugal)
and Kerstin Wagner (Germany)
have added their own language/symbols to the imperial
symbolic language, interspersing it with squares of bright Holi
colours.

Long timers in Goa

Photographic
portraits of hippies who came to Goa in the ‘70s,
but with their current day portraits. Thailand artist/photographer
Waswox Waswo created a fantastical studio landscape like stage set
and photographed them against this background. A sense of nostalgia
was the inclusion of old objects like the Murphy
radio, Harley Davidson and Hercules bicycles which these old hippies
posed with.

The
Odyssey

Subrat
Kumar Behra’s series of 10 panels like a scroll
evokes a particular period of Goa’s history. A clear graphic
narration which combines the mythological with the real,
these
include Parshuram-like
figures and
Vasco da Gama.

Memory
Minus Me

Narendra
Yadav takes a black and white portrait of an anonymous Goan of yore
and places it in a typical chai glass.
Next
to the glass is a shredder.
Visitors
are invited to pick a photograph and place it in the shredder. These
pieces are then projected on the wall in a kaleidoscopic
form.
It’s
an erasing of an archive
and reconfiguring relationship between memory, archive and self.

(Morphology
of Archive is on display at the Museum of Goa, Pilerne and will be
open till May 2, 2016)