SUMMARY

In Premodern and Modern era, art creation was restricted to the close spaces
such as in art galleries and art studios ; viewers, spectators and art lovers didn’t
had any art and artist relation with the art object, they weren’t the part of the
creation, time is the primary element not the space. But after the post modern
era artist begin to use their own space for creating art, as a part of the whole
process. This give rise to new forms of interaction and engagement with different
spaces, institution, system, structure, community, and everyday life. Thus
resulting in the production of an expanded field, new spaces, subjectivites and
agencies, transformation within the public/community through art. This is
reffered as Spatial Turn.

Participation, involvement of audience in a process of creating art, which

decreases the distance that was present formerly between art work and the
audience. With the changing scenarios in art practice in 90s, artist starts building a
heterogenous relations with their surrounding communities and they try to
understands the various aspects of their lives (Ethenography), eventually the
authorship of an artist is challenged. This shift in mode of ‘representation of the
community and its issues’ by the artist to ‘creating spaces for their participation in
engaging with it’ is a significant discursive shift in art practice. This engagement in
the everyday life’s micropolitics of the audience through different methods and
approaches turns the ‘Passive viewers’ to ‘Active participants’ in art making for
changes and their betterment.

‘Spatial turn’ and ‘Participation’ gives rise to a new form of art practice: we may
say new form of participatory spatial art practice or participatory public art
practice in contrast to the gallery based art practice. Eg: Savi Sarkar, a dalit – neo
buddhist community, and addressed the dehumanized conditions of the dalit in
his paintings. As an artist who occupied the space of outsider and insider, he
travelled across Karnataka and Maharashtra in the 1980s. Much like an
ethenographer, he charted the upper caste exploitation of the dalit, the devadasis
and the eunuchs from dalit community through his art work.
Spatial Turn And Participation In India In Post 1990s
Industrialization and globalization affects the world socio-political and economic
conditions globally; the five scapes - technoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes,
ethnoscapes, and financescape grows rapidly. In India, this also results in breaking
down of the traditional art practices and opens up new diverse modes, methods,
approaches of contemporary Indian art. Eg: installation art, new media art,
performance art, video art, site specific art, participatory socially engaged art, and
community based art and other form of hybrid art practices in the aftermath of
1990s. The breaking down in the harmony of india socio-political condition
through various events like the period of emergency in India(1975-77), the
Women’s Movement in India in the 1980s, the Mandal Commission Report, the
demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, the artist who were conscious about their
artistic freedom and their role as a ‘citizen artist’. They began to intervene in the
public domain through different form of ‘spatial art practice’ and fostered the
participation of the community. Artists starts working with the people of the
communities which were marginalized by the society such as rural or Adivasi
community. They began to addresses the everyday life issues of the downtrodden
community and other issues that are present in the society like caste, gender,
religion, and creating art through the means of participation of community, and
use of their own space.

Eg: Sheba chhachi, an activist and feminist artist and documentary photographer,
collaborated with the writer and activist, Sonia jabbar, and made ffrequent visits
to the refugee camps in Kashmir to interact with the women. This collaborative
project created a space for the voiceless women, suffering from brutal effect of
patriarchy and fundamentalist forces in the war torn Kashmir valleyas seen in
When the Gun is raised, dialogue stops…, Kashmiri Women Speak, a mixed
media installation which began in 2000.

Amar kanwar, The Soverign Forest: 272 Varieties Of Indigenous, Organic Rice
Seeds, 2012.
Tejal shah, another artist and queer activist, through her sustained interaction
and engagement with the Hijra Cummunity, addressed issues of gender,
sexuality, desire, representation and exploitation of transgender community
within the heteronormative structure of Indian society. She created a
performative stage for the members of the community in her digital, video works
and sound based installations in What Are You? In 2006.

Artist Birendra Pani’s continuous interaction with the Gotipua dancer community
in his native state of odisha considered the interface between visual
representation and live performance by dancers in art galleries. The travelling
exhibition, Boy Dancer: convergence and ontinuum, was created in 2007, which
highlighted the significant aesthetic of this dance form as well as marginality of
trhe Gotipua dance for and their difficult lived realities.

Inder salim’s, collaborative performance Mochi Ki-Dukaan, Kamlesh ki Rasoi with

the cobbler couple, who had lived near the artist’s house for generations, within a
gallery space as part of the khoj live festival in 2008. Salim had structure the event
so that the sale proceeds of the mock auction of the photographs generated from
the daily life of the cobbler family would go to them.

Everyday Object And Experienceas The Locus Of Participation Of The

Community

Artist start using the objects of everyday life and fostering participation of the
public so to enrich their experience.

In her travelling installation titled loca-cola(2000-03), Sharmila Samant invited a

group of friends and acquainances to share recepies for the local drinks from their
respective countries. In preparing these drinks, she filled up locally available
cocacola bottles. These gesture questioned the status of the local drink in
relationship to the domination of the US brand ‘Coke’btaken as assign of
American culture imperialism. As such, Samant posits the local in contestation
with the global. Moreover, the viewer were allowed to participate in this by
taking away one of the recepies with them.
Shilpa Gupta in her untitled project in 2001. She invited a group of women in
india to participate in her collective work by sharing their menstrual stained cloth
strips with her. Collecting and cutting these stained cloths, she stiched them
together into an abstract form which she exhibited in a gallery space. The artist
thereby intervened on a socio-cultural level as well as in the private/public realm
by exploring the menstruation taboo and rigid Indian beliefs concerning the
‘cleanliness’ of women.

Here the moment of communication and interaction between the artist and the
participating community in the joint art making and viewing were significant
moments of the aesthetic experience.

Community based art projets falls into two subcategories-

➢ Short Term Community based art projects are of short duration and
onetime workshop-based projects within the specific community. These
projects might leads to the action and transformation of the community in
the immediate/distant future. Eg: A Memoir To Unknown Dwellers: A
Loom house by Sanchayan Ghosh with the Bodo community at Kokrajhar in
southern Assam in December 2004.
➢ Long Term community based art projects as a sustained engagement of an
artist with a definite community or with a changing community with similar
attributes and contexts, for a significant period of time. Long term
community based art projects results in deeper understanding of
community’s attributes, their ideas, their structure, and various other
aspects and as well as this practice enhance the relationship between artist
and the community. This may lead to the eventual transformation of the
community and the production of the new knowledge.
Navjot Altaf is a Mumbai kondagaon based artist. Her long term
engagement with the Adivasi artist/craftpersons in kondagaon since 1997
can be seen as an expanded field of communication, interaction and
dialogue facilitating the participation of the Adivasi artists and community
through various workshop based art projects. Altaf’s engagement with the
 Marxist and later ‘feminism also led her to consider ‘art practice’ as ‘Life
praxis’ rather than a mere style to be emulated.

These works, conceptualized and visualized by the marginalized communities ave

releases to their deep-seated anger, feelingsof deprivation and sufferings.

The Visual voices of the Marginalized, an interactive and participatory art

projects among the dwellers of slum and resettlement colonies, grassroots level
activists from different villages in India and K.P.Sonam AIFACS Gallery, New Delhi
And School Of Arts And Aesthetics Gallery, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi, 2006.

Black Noise, a public community project, engaging with the issues of ‘eve teasing’,
street sexual violence and other gender related issues in public spaces, was
initiated by Jasmeen Patheja in banglore in 2003.

Spatial turn in the art practices, the major break in traditional art practices turns
out to be transforming effects in the developments of downtrodden and suffered
marginalized class. Now they have a platform for their voices, they have been
engaging with society in a better way, those who are privileged may have chances
to know about the various drawbacks of their societies praxis which need to be
removed immediately otherwise it would degrade the whole society. Participation
of audience, viewers in the art making process have aware the society about art
and their view of art as a low profession, now they have know the
communication, transformative, engaging power of art.