press release
Sunil Gupta Pictures From Here
27 May–26 July 2003
This summer, the John Hansard Gallery unveils new works by
London based artist, Sunil Gupta. The culmination of a three
year AHRB Creative and Performing Arts Research Fellowship conducted
at the University of Southampton, Pictures From Here
(named after the artist's new Autograph book published by Chris
Boot) is a solo exhibition showcasing Gupta’s latest issue
based work about HIV and place.
The work featured in this exhibition makes a personal exploration
of ‘homeland’ as experienced by the artist who has
lived in London, Northern India and the Eastern part of Canada.
The photo-text, photo-document and photo-juxtaposition-cum-montage
pieces — specially made for this exhibition during a residency
at Light Work, Syracuse University — act as an individual,
cultural geography. They narrate Gupta’s personal journey
— from his birthplace in India, through his adopted homes
in Canada and England — and his multifarious identity
as a gay man of colour with HIV. They further convey the photographic
struggle to visualise the complex relationships and identities
that belie the Eastern landscape Gupta has inherited and the
Western landscape he inhabits. His journey between them and
their juxtaposition in the photographic diptych, not only depicts
the artist’s dislocated relationship to ‘homeland’
but also the spreading of the HIV virus. Developing this theme,
the new video work (A World Without) Pity, 2002, documents
the stories of HIV positive people and the professionals managing
their treatment. Made during the artist’s return to India,
the accounts featured reflect Gupta’s search for a mirroring
of his British HIV experience in India.
Trained at the Royal College of Art, Sunil Gupta has worked
as a video maker, photographer, curator, writer and academic,
and shown throughout North America, India and the UK. His 2001
exhibition, Homelands, toured to London and Admit One
Gallery, New York, while works from the solo exhibition
From Here to Eternity (2000) were shown at Gallery Sepulchar,
Manila and Admit One Gallery, New York. One of his earlier works,
Exiles, was recently included in the Tate Britain exhibition
Self Evident (October 2002–5 January 2003).
Pictures from Here by Sunil Gupta, is an Autograph
book published by Chris Boot in September 2003 priced at £19.95.
It provides an overview of the majority of Gupta's past work.
Advance copies will be available through the John Hansard Gallery.
The exhibition tours to New Delhi, Toronto and the California
Museum of Photography in 2004.
Sunil Gupta’s work is represented by Sepia International,
New York.
artist interview
SG: Sunil Gupta
BB: Bernadette Buckley (John Hansard Gallery)
Interview conducted, April 2003
BB: Could we begin, Sunil, by describing the
project you are currently involved in at the John Hansard Gallery
– tell me something about how you came to it, where it
comes from, what you’re looking to achieve by it?
SG: Well I guess it started with a grant
application. (I’ve just finished 3 years of the AHRB at
the English Department where I had one of the Creative and Performing
Arts Fellowships.) It was a new scheme then and I was in the
first round of applications. It was for 3 years and I had to
frame something in writing that I would be doing artistically
– to show how I would use the time. I had just finished
making a piece of work in London – about myself being
HIV positive and where I was living, in South London. And so
that was on the top of my mind. In retrospect, the origins of
the work are relatively casual – because I live in a world
where there are a myriad possibilities and very few actually
materialise. You are always applying to talk, to have conversations
in different places. And all different places have their own
special needs, so you just try and formulate strategies where
you can do what you want to do, given all these other people’s
constraints. So basically, an academic friend came along and
said there was an AHRB Fund. I’m really outside the academic
world as such, so I’d never heard of this, but he said
to formulate a proposal of some kind of artistic work. So I
did and what I formulated at that moment was to think about
HIV and to think about place – but then maybe to transpose
it into a wider context. So I chose (seen as there was a lot
more time in this situation) I chose to look at India –
partly because I’m Indian-born, and partly because, I
feel there’s a lot of media attention on the terrible
situation in Africa, but there’s very little on Asia and
hardly any on India. When I’ve been there as a visitor,
I can sense that there’s an enormous underlying situation
that’s not being spoken about. And the not speaking about
it is driven by the Indian side – they don’t want
it spoken about. And India’s a very powerful third world
voice in the international community. It’s hard to criticise
India in the UN and the WHO. They’re very good at English
and so they produce reams of reports. So it can be quite scary.
So basically I said, well here is this widespread situation.
In India – it’s like China – everything is
in huge numbers. So in Africa, it’s really awful, but
in Asia, the numbers are going to be very big. It also seemed
like no-one particularly was worried about it. The whole HIV
thing now has disappeared for a while – though it kind
of re-surfaced because of the African situation…. So this
grant was set up so that I was in an academic department. I’ve
had meetings with fellow recipients of the award (there’s
about 50 or so) and most people I know are in their field –
so if they’re musicians they’re in music departments,
if they’re writers, they’re in literature departments.
But my connection was to this person in the French Department
in Southampton University. I couldn’t go to French, so
he introduced me to English – to Cora Kaplan who was then
Head of Department and we decided there was some correlation.
University of Southampton has a south Asian interest, so the
geography was right and then a postcolonial interest, so that
worked for them. And Cora herself is well known for her work
on gender etc. And I was also interested in an underlying discussion
about HIV – coming from a sexuality perspective. One of
the reasons why it’s so difficult in India is because
the culture doesn’t allow an open discussion. So then
there I was suddenly in English…
BB: When you were in Essex, you had a strong
connection with the place – the connection between the
port and the slave trade was something that interested you…
did you ever consider investigating this connection in Southampton?
SG: No I didn’t feel geographically
attached to Southampton. I became one of those commuters from
London, I’m afraid. I’ve had minor contact with
this periphery. Though I had my first art education in Farnham
and I remember going to the John Hansard Gallery to have a discussion.
So I’d been there before, I was aware of the place and
obviously, I’d been a few times to see shows here. And
for many years, I’ve gone out with somebody who came from
there and so I’d heard a lot of stories about what it
was like some years ago. His entire family then moved out into
the hinterland – you know how the south coast has become
built up from one end to the other. So the town itself didn’t
seem to hold many things of interest for me. But also, it was
to do with the geography of going to Southampton. I’d
drive there and of course, the University comes first so I’d
stop there, and then I’d just turn around and go back.
BB: Nevertheless, the geography of Southampton
seems strangely consistent with some of the themes of your work
though. For example, the themes of trespass, and of going places
where one isn’t wanted…the geography of Southampton
seems to reiterate this – there’s no access to the
sea for example…
SG: Well it’s been sporadic in the
past. I remember being to the port once, specifically to go
on board the Oriana, because again, a friend of mine had decorated
the bars of it with artworks and that was it. I must say that
throughout this period, I didn’t actually consider Southampton,
the place at all. Although I was thinking of places, I was thinking
more of a very personal journey that skirted Southampton. I
mean, primarily my initial thought was just to have it in India,
to set the work in India – which is how I formulated it.
BB: Why did you change your mind about that?
SG: Well after my first visit, it dawned
on me that India’s very big, so even in three years, you
can’t do India. It’s just too big and it’s
very multifaceted. Because, although America’s also very
big, culturally, it’s quite mono…but India’s
got languages and traditions that are very variable. So then,
it seemed to make more sense to make it more personal. But I
was also limited by my own capacity to get around the place.
Because it’s big, and quite daunting by climate, and it’s
full of viruses. And I’m a bit restricted because being
immune-suppressed the way I am, everybody was very concerned
that I shouldn’t just wander around India…that I
would become very ill. And in fact I did wander around a little
bit the first time and I did become ill. I became quite critically
ill on my return. I came back ill and then it got worse.
BB: So a very difficult journey by all accounts
– physically, emotionally and in every way, extremely
demanding.
SG: Yes, my plans had to be adapted again.
For half of one of the years (of the fellowship) I was unable
to leave London and take this position. I came back with one
of my lungs full of something and they thought it was TB or
something. They took it out and then it reappeared in my heart
and after that, they said, well we’ll only let you home
if you promise never to leave it for a while. So I couldn’t
even go to Southampton, it got quite serious. And of course
then going to India became difficult. And because they never
got to the bottom of it – they still haven’t –
I’m carrying the residue of it.
BB: There’s a very strange dynamic then
between this desire for a journey and, at the same time, your
being highly restricted.
SG: Yes, so what I did was…I had already
begun to try to shoot. The first time I tried video and stills
separately. I’d begun to formulate a visual plan, which
was, in a sense, to retrace my childhood journey. So I revisited
the school I went to. Annually, my father took me back to his
village area, which is in the North. So then I re-made that
kind of journey – it’s an overnight train journey
to the interior.
BB: I was wondering if that was a journey
that reinforced for you, the same kind of dichotomy of travel/restricted
access or perhaps of insider/outsider? Or was it something that
gave you a stronger sense of connectedness… to something
beyond yourself? I’m reminded for example here, of Trinh-t-Minh-ha’s
story and in particular the passage in Bold Omissions in which
she describes a casual conversation with writers from Guadeloupe
and Martinique about the question of migration. The writers
comment on how “they” (meaning “liberal westerners”)
“all talk about identity and marginality”. In the
essay, Trinh describes how grateful she is to be treated as
an “outsider to the passing trends of discursive thought
in North America”. But at the same time, she recalls being
“hit by a sharp feeling of confusion”, because she
also feels deeply implied by the “they”. I remember
how she talks about being caught “between two closures”
– American and Asian – and how she describes the
sense of always being between cultures – with the “bitter
taste of surprise” at her sense of disenfranchisement.
Was that the effect this journey home had on you? Did it further
dislocate you, or did it enlarge your connection to something?
SG: Well these last few trips during this
project to India, it made me feel close to that place, because
the trips were more frequent. I find that if you have big breaks,
then you loose continuity with a place and people talk to you
differently. You don’t know enough about the political
situation and ordinary conversations can be conducted like a
tourist.
BB: Yes you’re all the time trying to
catch up…
SG: Yes, so I’ve been able to be more
current. And because I grew up there, the language is kind of
embedded in me. But if I don’t use it, it’s out
of date and I loose vocabulary. So the more I go, the more I
speak, the more I begin to feel at home – a little bit.
But there have been different kinds of that feeling of belonging.
On one level, there’s this formal legality. I come from
this very feudal rural patriarchal set-up which kind of still
exists in the sense that my father’s younger brother is
still alive and still lives off this land and on it.
BB: So in this journey, are you travelling
through time as well as through geographical space?
SG: I suppose – my grandfather had children,
and at my level, there’s four men including me who are
left, who I suppose jointly share some kind of responsibility
and ownership of this place. So that is odd, to go to a place
where you’ve got a very formal position and hundreds of
people know who you are in the scheme of things. And especially
so, coming from here, where we are completely anonymous and
have no connection…no formal connection… to the
place. But where I feel more psychologically at home in that
country is not there, but in Delhi – in the urban centre,
where I found, if you like, people like me – a peer group
that I could live with, much like the people I know here…a
broad range of social activists and academics and people engaged
in that kind of work.
BB: In some ways I’m interested that
you use the term ‘home’ at all though. It’s
such an embattled word isn’t it? And yet it’s very
hard to avoid using it. Partly I wonder if ‘home’
is an ideal – something that never really exists for anyone?
SG: ‘Home’ for me changes all
the time. I used to be very off-hand, say, with my immigrant
parent’s generations – who, as they retired, longed
to go home. Mine did. And I used to laugh, because you could
see that, whenever they went, after a couple of weeks they would
be longing to get back! But now that I’m approaching that
kind of age myself. And especially at extreme moments like when
I was very ill and in a hospital ward unable to sleep and looking
out (I had a great view in St Thomas’ – the same
as from the London Eye)... without wanting to be too melodramatic
here but – I had a feeling that I would die in this place
sooner or later. Simply because I have this condition of which
I may not die actually, but I want to fantasise things. It’s
a little strange, but I would rather die, geographically, at
‘home’ which would be over there. I think it was
more to do with coming to an end. But while I’m actually
doing things, no I don’t think of it in this way.
BB: But what is this ‘home’ then?
Is it rootedness? Is it belonging? Is it origin?
SG: Well I suppose it’s – for
me and I guess for some other people - it’s in my head.
I guess it travels with you. That was where this title Homelands
came from. Home just kind of goes with you. But sometimes there
are extreme times, when you are required to take some kind of
stand. Actually we are going through one at the moment aren’t
we? You see, technically, I’m a Canadian citizen still
– which is where my parents went. We’re all technically
Canadian, and the Indians, when we went, they said they’d
renew our passports. They’ve since changed their mind
about this. Usually they’re keen for you to get it, because
they want you to engage with them and especially to send money
back, invest. I’ve never bothered to regain Indian citizenship.
Because from a practical point of view, you just can’t
go anywhere with an Indian passport anyway. So I guess, in a
sense, the longest period and the current home I have, is in
London. But I feel like I’m in London but not England.
I haven’t got much sympathy for England as a country.
But London is about something else to me. So I’m not about
to become British. Though I had a visit from the Home Office
who wanted to know why I hadn’t bothered to apply when
I’d been here for so long. They were quite persistent
and they came with a form – I first thought they’d
come to eject me, because this guy arrived at my front door
out of the blue. So I was filling in this form and I got to
the end and it said, £500 for administration fee and I
said to him, I can’t pay you £500 – it’s
too much – I was just being mean, rather than very theoretical.
But now, at a time like this when we’re all going to war,
I think, well actually, Canada’s not so bad, I’ll
stick with it. Because it doesn’t have pretensions of
wanting to be an important power in the world.
BB: This raises another issue I wanted to
ask you about…your work uses photographic images of course,
and is so much to do with considering how those images might
be used and juxtaposed in different ways. What do you think
about the way in which photographic images are being used now
to represent the war in Iraq?
SG: It's very frustrating…we’re
getting a very one-sided, very censored view which is very frustrating
because I would have thought that we now, we’re a lot
smarter than that, so why are they doing this, because it’s
not like the second world war or something. And there’s
the internet and someone just emailed me internet access to
Iraqi TV. And you know that there are obviously some very distressing
pictures on the ground where the bombs are falling, but all
they show you is the thing being fired, which looks like a boy’s
game. They don’t show you what’s happening at the
arriving end. I was at the Royal College and I wrote my thesis
on how the northern media describes the south, just in terms
of death basically – such they’re either dying of
war, starvation or disease. And that was in 1980 and I think
that’s true today. If you think of Africa, for instance,
it’s all either really nasty civil war like Sierra Leone.
Meanwhile on the other hand though in that same period from
1980 to now, something else has been going on at the same time.
When I went to art school, things were divided by art form and
except in the case of photography. It arrived very late and
it was seen as a technical adjunct. It spent several years trying
to establish itself and it kind of failed. Although there’s
a lot of photography now used in the art world, it’s not
photography – the medium per se – if you see what
I mean. But if you’re a photographer, a practitioner,
where you place yourself is very crucial. Where the work gets
seen and so on and so forth. One of the first causalities of
this all was documentary photography. First of all, it commercially
disappeared because those picture magazines have gone. And we
only really use it now for nostalgia, so that we’re interested
in older stuff. But for news now, it’s television. So
it was really strange that last month there were reportage pictures
from Magnum, or Magnum guys from Paris, on sale in art galleries
in New York. And they were fetching very large sums of money
like $25,000 – being bought by museums. And the content
of the pictures were dead Afghan soldiers, the Taliban soldiers.
But the pictures were dead straight documentary pictures. But
because of the way they arrived in the market…And I have
this history of going from out of the Fine Art School into local
politics and GLC type community area, where I was confronted
by a lot of, if you like, disenfranchised people – black
people and Asian people who were feeling like they had no access
to the medium at all. So, foolishly we put ourselves in between
them and offered our services. I think in retrospect, that was
politically a mistake, because we took on this enormous burden,
which then meant that the Arts Council and the schools and all
that, just shrugged their shoulders and pointed to them –
I mean to us. We set up Autograph so anything to do with black
or Asian, they just pointed to them. What we should have done
was to have forced the RCA, the London College of Printing etc.,
to take more local black students, because they had no access.
And to go to the LCP now, you need a lot of money. Very few
Brits can even afford to go because you have to have a job,
you have to pay for the fees. So it’s even less likely
that the locals, the ones living around here are going to be
able to go. They’re full of foreigners. Meanwhile, we
had stupidly put ourselves into this position – oh well
they can come to us – so then we had suddenly this crazy
group. Autograph in its early years had 120 people who wanted
training and access and all that. But we had no resources, we
were being funded like an Arts Council little thing for a few
thousand pounds a year. How were we going to meet this big demand
with no resources, no dark room, no facilities, nothing –
and no salary money to pay anybody to do anything? But we didn’t
see it like that then. So we rushed into this. I guess we were
young and they outfoxed us. We thought we were being very radical
and in fact, we ended up being very poor. And in fact, the situation
hasn’t changed. Still we thought we were going to have
a big change…But I think what’s very interesting
is this ‘medium’ issue. Because it manifests in
a variety of ways. For example, I get a feeling – I haven’t
done a survey, this is my gut feeling – I get the feeling
that if I were a photographer with big aspirations, I wouldn’t
want to be collected by the V&A. I’d want to be collected
by the Tate, because it’s the difference of £300,000.
One’s art and one’s kind of like craft. The main
gallery is called the Photographer’s Gallery and that
stopped a lot of people from wanting to show there, because
it’s defined by its medium. This is what’s happening
all the time.
So then, my peer group at the time, was anti-art and anti-all
that and things like the Tate were the enemy at the time. From
top to bottom, from its name to its staff, and its history and
the whole idea that it represented economic power in that they
had money to collect everybody. So one wasn’t trying to
be independent. We were trying to live off what we felt was
our equal, fair demand, politically, to the Arts Council for
taxpayer’s money. But I didn’t feel like the people
who came after – the nineties as it were – weren’t
like that. I don’t teach, but I go in and give lectures
sometimes and in the colleges anyway, everybody just wanted
to be successful. And they meant economically successful, regardless
of their race or anything. They would assume any political position
and it was all very short-lived.
BB: Are we talking about the failure of the
postcolonial project here, do you think?
SG: I think we took to fighting with the wrong
people at the time and I think this is becoming more evident
now. And I sense that maybe things like this war are going to
spark a lot more protest and interest. But now, people are a
bit wiser, so I think they might raise the argument at the level
it needed to be done – which is more at a senior management,
trustee level. You see we were having out-and-out rows with
curators for example. But curators are just employees –
ultimately, it’s the trustees who are responsible and
they are slightly an invisible group of people. That’s
why no-one thought to take it up with them, because they’re
not paraded in front of you in magazines and articles and at
openings. I mean, who are the trustees of these places? You’d
have to research that wouldn’t you?
Because I did at the time in the mid-nineties get quite a lot
of support in the end – obviously through Autograph and
all that, we got support from the Arts Council, but some of
those individuals then moved on to say the Tate. People like
Sandy Nairne. And then through him I met and talked to some
the …he might still be there…curators of contemporary
art at the old Tate. And they said, the policies are decided
by the trustees and it takes about 20 years for the Tate’s
trustees to change anything. It’s a very slow thing. And
then meanwhile, we’d allowed ourselves to be segregated
out. Because one of the things about England that was particularly
appealing at the time, compared to the US – which was
where we were always going to and comparing notes about all
these liberation struggles of different kinds – was that
America was getting more and more and was always very segregated.
There were very separate struggles, based on race and gender
and what not. When we worked together, because there weren’t
many of us so I guess we had to be, but when we worked together
it seemed more party oriented and in fact the first black show
was part of a larger GLT sponsored festival called The Black
Experience – which encompassed – well it was about
Postcolonialism in terms of, well literally the British Empire.
So it began with the Irish, but then it all got whittled down
to colour – very specifically.
BB: And to return to what you were saying
about the differences between Britain and America, do you still
think it is like this?
SG: I think America is very segregated. Whenever
I go to somewhere like NY, LA or Washington, I’m amazed.
For example, African Amercians, black Americans – cultural
people will come over here – whether they’re artists
or theorists or whatever and we will go out. Here it’s
an invariably mixed crowd…I’m just saying very informally,
socially – it might include you and so on. But over there
you go to a party and it’s all black completely. Or you
go out with the white theorists and everybody’s white.
They don’t mix.
BB: But it’s interesting isn’t
it how America tries to manipulate this segregation? For example,
Colin Powell and Lisa Condor Wright are constantly being used
to project an image of successfully integrated black Americans
into positions of social and political power.
SG: No I find it very segregated and until
recently there were really extreme things that used to go on.
I have a friend in Philadelphia and we would go and eat in the
Italian neighbourhood and it’s a vast spread out area
and people don’t go there if they’re not Italian,
because they’re not welcome. Even if you look like them
or are Catholic like them, or whatever…and I met this
critic in San Francisco whose parents had to flee Boston, because
one was Irish and one was Italian. But they were made to leave
the city. They couldn’t live in the same city, because
they had come from different communities, from different ethnic
groupings – although they were both European and Catholic.
Unlike the dominant Anglo-Saxon protestant lot, so they had
to go to the West Coast.
BB: Do you think that Postcolonial Studies
– particularly as played out in Britain and America is
too dominated by issues of black and white, at the cost of,
say, exploring other ethnic or sectarian differences? For example,
in our last show at the Hansard Gallery, Breda Beban spoke about
her interest in the mixture of East and West, European and Eastern,
in the ex-Yugoslavian or (as she called them) Balkan cultures.
SG: It has something, I think, to do with
the use of the English language. I feel guilty of it myself.
I’ve done some curatorial research in South Africa and
in Australia and Canada and with English people and there’s
an incredible sympathy and communality in these places –
through the language. They’ve all read everything you’ve
read. And so, this is an enormous facility – and even
in India for that matter. India has an enormous output of publishing
in English. But I find the continent – and not just Eastern
Europe but Western Europe – kind of difficult and kind
of foreign and they don’t understand…they don’t
sort of get what you’re saying. And I don’t get
what they’re saying. They certainly don’t get what
you’re saying about race. That’s a very touchy thing.
I think the discourse on identity and race, cultures, is just
taking place in the English language all over the world, but
not in Spanish or French to quite that extent.
BB: Does this mean that postcolonial discourse
is occurring in a predominantly western context and that it
might again signify a western sense of identity imposing itself
on the Third World?
SG: I would not venture a theoretical answer
here, but on the practice side, I’ve been to many art
shows in Delhi lately…and its really struck me that they’ve
got, well certainly since the last Documenta, they are presenting
– how shall I put it – a kind of international style.
So if you go and see a contemporary art show in Delhi, it will
be video projections – it looks like a third year show
at Goldsmiths. And why not? Because the people have been to
Goldsmiths or somewhere like it. I think the reason that, for
many years up until now, art practices in the third world felt
backwards, is because all their teachers were in the Royal College
in the 50s. They’re really big honchos now in Malaysia
and wherever, and so, they are interested in monumental sculpture
and abstract painting. So I thought that was slightly depressing
because it didn’t seem very indigenous to me. I saw this
guy’s work – I won’t name him – and
he was wandering through a space – and it was somewhat
devoid of – how shall I put it – cultural references
let’s say? It was like anywhere – it could have
been Argentina. But I met these people, and went to speak to
them – you know they want to be in the Biennales. They
don’t want to have residencies in Holland or whatever
and they want to stay here. Not all the time, but they want
to participate in this international artworld. They don’t
want to be just very ethnic and local.
BB: Is this as a result of a kind of optimism
about globalism, do you think? I read recently of the “NY-Lons”
for example – a name which came about because the frequency
of jet-setting ‘international’ artists travelling
between London and New York. Or is this, to use your word, a
“depressing” phenomenon? In which, just at the very
moment in which cultural difference might be articulated by
such artists – it can also be undermined by the way in
which it is absorbed into the Artworld. Is there a new homogeneity
of work, in which there seems to be no reason as to why this
work is produced in one place rather than in another? Or perhaps
the sense of depression over the loss of place is a good thing
that removes the vestiges of notions of origin and authenticity?
SG: What’s lacking I think, is critique
– there wasn’t any in India until recently. I had
this strange experience in ’95 – to do with the
first Johannesburg Biennale. I got roped into it because one
of the organizers – Emma Dexter at the ICA – called
and said, “why doesn’t Sunil go”? because
I had the INIVA franchise and because there was a sense of my
‘black endeavour’. The Johannesburg people were
trying to be as together as they could be – trying to
research people – they weren’t just getting the
official and the usual suspects to come. So next thing I had
a communication from down there saying ‘What about India?’
Who is from India? They couldn’t think of anybody. And
I couldn’t think of anybody other than the state –
I couldn’t think of anybody who was like a critic or an
academic. There was no Cultural Theory course. There was only
studio and studio teachers’ and media reviews that were
written by friends trying to attract audiences to their shows.
It wasn’t in any way critical. The only one I could think
of was, funnily enough, Geeta Kapoor, so they took her. She
turned up with six Indian artists. They were literally carrying
their work in their heads. I have this picture of them arriving
with no money at all, just hand luggage. And then there was
the Asia Society in NY, which was trying to make these links.
In ‘95 we all got together as a preliminary thing and
that was one of the most interesting art worldy experience that
I’ve ever had. These people in South Africa got 35 curators
that they’d chosen from different countries – to
get together and visit them and then they gave us this art tour
of the place. It was extraordinary – like the UN. So in
that there were some strange discrepancies – there were
people from Latin America – yet there was a Latin American
expert from New York. I met the Asia Society. And in terms of
Asia alone – I think what’s happening is that they’ve
narrowed things down – there’s become a shortlist
of people. There are two shortlists – one of artists and
one of curators and there’s one from every country. Only
the one – and I think that’s terrible because they’ve
created a really weird power base – a skewed situation.
So if it’s Thailand, it’s always Apinan. They themselves,
the Asia Society – I find them quite impenetrable –
they want to create their own version of the hiatus –
that’s not what its about…So its crazy. And the
artists we know because they are so regular to the Biennales.
BB: Why don’t you describe to me what’s
happening here in the current work?
SG: Well all the moving images were shot in
India. What I was trying to do was suggest a kind of travelogue
– my personal travelogue. There’s this ambivalence
around HIV because these are the landscapes in which, if you
like, the HIV is travelling. Because HIV is usually visualised
either, in a kind of pseudo-scientific picture – or in
victim pictures of people who have got terrible ailments. But
actually I wanted to have some quite benign and soft pictures
of the places where its travelling through. And a corollary
of that is that, as a traveller going through the spaces, the
virus is travelling with me – I carry it with me, so there
is a lot of fear by the people who control the places –
namely the governments who want to restrict my movement, because
I am the carrier. So I suppose, maybe I shouldn’t be doing
this – because they won’t allow me to go anywhere
in the future.
BB: We’re back to this image again of
travel and movement but one which is impeded or limited all
the time….
SG: Yes, the Indians are trying to introduce
a law, which would require you to have a HIV Negative medical
certificate before they give you a Visa. I need a Visa to go
there.
So literally the series began somewhere here in these very
simply dichotomies. [Looking at Mundia Pramar, Uttar Pradesh
/ Chesapeake Bay, Maryland] On the left is the agricultural
area that I was talking about – which I have some kind
of title to. But I never see it, so it’s a distant memory
– and it’s only there in the photograph. Anyway,
I thought this might be getting a little limiting as a kind
of visual structure, so I opened it up a bit more.
BB: They're very reticent aren’t they?
SG: Yeah. They’re meant to be quite
non-threatening…For example if you look at this one…[Points
to photograph of Dairy Queen restaurant in Great Yarmouth, Nova
Scotia – right hand panel of Ajmer Rajasthan / Great Yarmouth,
Nova Scotia], there’s a little reflection of me, so like
I’m the scary monster but you can’t really see me.
BB: A scary monster in pastel colours…it
doesn’t quite scare…
SG: [Laughs]… but these are the places
you might encounter me. And then I just used a lot of editorial
devices basically. This was a little bit about the chaos of
India. The impact of India is very chaotic. No surfaces are
finished. I had a friend come from here and I thought he would
really hate it because he’s such a designer queen. I had
to warn him: “No pavement is finished, no wall is finished,
no corners come together.” So it’s sometimes a bit
jokey you know but, you know, but it’s basically showing
things that struck me…Asia is very feminine-looking in
its architecture compared to the west.
[Looking at Mundia Pamar, Uttar Pradesh / Bar Harbor, Maine]
This is again this Northern Indian rural area and that’s
Maine. They’re actually both, geologically, very old landscapes.
They’re not young, if you see what I mean, they’re
very eroded. Leftovers. That whole east coast of America is
a mountain range that’s been eroded right down with quite
small hills left. The aging brings it together.
[Looking at Constitution House, New Delhi / Downtown Montreal]
This is a bit sentimental, but it’s the last picture in
the book.
BB: How did you fix on the order of the works
for the show?
SG: They’re not in an order as such.
They’re on their own as far as possible. Not too close
together. What I’ve done basically, is shoot all these
pictures separately and I’ve indulged myself in terms
of putting them together. Because that’s a very exciting
part for me. I just make little thumbprints of all of them –
like a puzzle and they might fit together for a combination
of aesthetic reasons and content. But the video has significant
sound in it. There’re people speaking and this environmental
stuff. I decided to emulate Indian cinema in that there are
bits of nature in it, which I wouldn’t have thought of
doing over here. Also, it’s quite long – it’s
something which you have to sit down and see. It’s not
a 4-minute loop. I was going to make it shorter – like
4 or 5 minutes long – but I’ve become quite self-conscious
about working out of India, so I always discuss what I’m
doing with people there and they’re involved in it in
some way. They might be in the visuals or on the sound or something.
They wanted it to be in-depth, to be longer. They wanted me
to say it in a thousand words. They wanted a whole half hour
so it’s kind of a bit long. Issues around sexuality and
current theory about it point to it being quite indigenous –
which is a very important step locally for them. They are in
the middle of an enormous battle to legalise it. It’s
still illegal. Of course in all these former colonies, they’ve
all kept aspects of British law that suited them. So they’ve
all got anti-sodomy laws and they’ve all got anti-terrorism
laws still which they will use to imprison people – like
Malaysia did – without trial. But this is actually a British
law from its Irish days. So that then, they don’t think
is emulating white people. So the video is a bit informative
and kind of longish.
BB: But the process of assemblage and collage
is a really crucial one. Disparate images get put together and
order is only the last thing that happens…
SG: What this process allows is for me to
be quite straight-forward about the photography aspect. So I’ve
been able to return to the streets and to the outside with a
camera without getting too bogged down in the theoretical aspects
— like whether it’s art or photography; whether
it’s journalism or not...And it liberated me to see just
imagery again. I was trying to take pretty pictures I suppose
BB: They are very beautiful pictures…
SG: They’re seductive. So I chose my
material by going to areas that seem significant to me. And
that can change, depending on the larger social context of the
place. So for example lately in India, the most talked about
issue is that of the Muslims. So some of these places are no
longer neutral any more – they’re Islamic. They’ve
all become sites of some resistance. Similarly Canary Wharf
since 9/11 has taken on another kind of meaning. [Looking at
Mizamuddin, New Delhi / Docklands, London] So that’s how,
naturally there’s some editing at the shooting stage.
And then you’re working on it, maybe two years later –
in my case, maybe three years later – and something else
might be happening. So in a way it doesn’t get fixed until
the opening night really – which is a nightmare for the
gallery organisers because they need to have it in advance.
But I know from other artists, there’s always this tension
between the people who need to ‘sell’ you and you
who want every last minute before you put it out. And you know,
this came out of something and this has led me to something,
so I know what the next thing is now and I’ve kind of
started that…
BB: What is it?
SG: I’ve become extremely interested
in the place and the geography and in Delhi. It’s meant
to be looking at the history of Delhi, but through its geography.
So I’m taking those kind of landscape images and then
I’ve been collecting accounts by travellers and courtiers
– memoirs by ruling families about what these places were
like. I’m just informing myself and I think, it’s
very interesting for me and I’m an interested person and
if I didn’t know this before then there must be some other
people who might be interested. There’s a domestic little
airfield in the middle of the town. And it looks like it was
late for that, but it turns out its always been a plain, so
it was used by invading armies as a camp, much like the Americans
are camped outside Baghdad. It was used by people like Timor.
He was there the night before they invaded the town and they
just killed everyone. I just received an email from a friend
about Iraq and he was saying, “things just get worse,
don’t they?” And I said “no things like this
have been the same – it’s been going on…in
fact they’re luckier today because they’re thinking
of sending them first aid. In the old days they would have just
gone in and wiped them out. So I hesitate to call it ‘history’
because one of the things that informed this – I mean
for my research-research, in terms of reading – what I
read was a lot of stuff about geography and literature and the
city as a place rather than as a history. I think a lot of us
are driven by history – I’m thinking of a progression
of…whether it’s events or periods or in our case
and its all ‘postmodern’…Actually its quite
interesting to stop and think of things in terms of a geography
where things might have happened, but the place is constant
there and you can still keep going back to it.
BB: That’s interesting…of course
there is a strand of postmodernism that is all the time interested
in the city – in the alienation in the city and the sense
of displacement that pervades it. I am thinking of Hans Ulrich
Obrist’s work for example and his Cities on the Move…
SG: I thought that show was grossly disappointing
– I thought it was most unhelpful for the arts. It was
very hard to see it actually.
BB: Yes, one critic described the experience
as like having a pneumatic drill going off inside your head
for two hours.
SG: And they said they were trying to create
a kind of laboratory, but it didn’t it just looked very
messy. Especially the competing sound from it …you could
hardly look at anything or hear anything.
BB: But that again is interesting to me, because
of the way in which an idea, which is about pluralism, and diversity
and heterogeneity and inclusion, when it’s worked out
as an exhibition becomes a kind of babble. I wonder if, as suggested
by Peter Hallward in Absolutely Postcolonialism, that we need
to return to some notion of the universal? You yourself get
around these kinds of difficulties though, by making no grand
claims in your work.
SG: Sometimes in talks people ask me sweeping
questions like ‘what is it like to be gay in India?’
I say ‘well I haven’t done a study of that, but
I can tell you what I’ve found, in a limited way.’
But people are always wanting me to be representative of something
and I really hate to hear people on the radio or TV who talk
like that. So then the other thing is that I’m a very
staunch supporter of the position that there’s this work
and that I’m coming from a very particular background
and race and culture and being gay and part of the black arts
movement etc – very much so. I have no time for certain
black artists now who don’t think of themselves as being
black artists. And I have a very long memory and I’m very
old now and in London, you know people remember – Anish
didn’t want to be part of The Other Story – we haven’t
forgotten that. But, I didn’t go to India as a journalist.
When I was there, there were a lot of helpful suggestions of
places we could go to – to visit NGOs etc. (there’s
a whole world around AIDS and care) and I said that really wasn’t
what I was doing. That was a bit hard to get over. When people
come and see the video, it’s not going to be a journalistic
account of what’s happening there. What I was trying to
do, was literally have a conversation with myself – as
if I hadn’t left there. So what if I’d stayed and
then had become positive, what would it be like? So I tried
to do this by creating a situation where I’m in conversation
with somebody very like me – that was the best I could
do. I researched somebody roughly my age, who’d been to
my school, who was from a similar class background, but who
still lived there, who’d never left. And we started doing
this and something unpredictable then happened. It took me a
couple of visits to persuade the person to appear on camera
and talk. And when we actually started filming, he had a breakdown,
he couldn’t talk. So now the outcome is that, people are
unable to even speak and my being able to speak so freely is
a consequence of my living here. So what I’m going to
say at the end of the video is that they’re unable to
even speak – it’s just too difficult still and I
don’t want to fill in their story for them. So I hope
the grant people will be satisfied because I think they want
to see an outcome. But the outcome is that it’s not there…
BB: But I think that is something that I see
in your work – a tension between muteness and silence
and yet at the same time, the attempt to articulate, to speak
to position oneself, to place oneself, is always there. And
these two things are not resolved ever but are perhaps at odds
with one another.
SG: Mmm... the whole book is about pictures
I’ve taken but then the cover is a picture I haven’t
taken ..of my mother
BB: But it’s a picture of you in some
senses, isn’t it?
SG: Yes, but my mother was curious as to why
I cut her eyes out. She understands practicalities better, so
I said to here that we paid a very fashionable designer a whole
lot of money to come up with this. She said well why didn’t
you do it? I said, well I don’t do that kind of work,
other people do book design. But it was important to me that
it should look like it is from here, which it is. There’s
always this issue about the look of things. Are they from here
or are they from there? Because I have another role sometimes.
As a curator I’ve made catalogues about artists from Asia.
I always insist that we design them here…
BB: Well thank you very much for that interview
Sunil – I’m looking forward to the show opening
on the 27th May…
SG: A pleasure, thank you.
