Paradde to the "TIMES OF YORE"

Performance, a walk around the College Street, 26 Jan, Kolkata, 2015

Making connection to historical aspects of Kolkata was the key idea in this performance. The city Kolkata is one of the oldest city, ruled by East India Company, the buildings are as old as 150 to 200 hundred years and every stone of the city embedded with history. In this performance I viewed the city through an archaeological perspective and performed as archaeologist who want to collect all the evidences of historical Kolkata and in the process becoming like a socialist who is bringing the essence of city in the present times, who also stands for protest and revolution every time.

This performance was collaborated with common people as audience, who had their part of intervention, when they lend their voice for the performance, shouting "Ey amaar Kolkata, ey tomaar Kolkata" thereby reclaiming their own city.

Dimple B Shah

2015

Time Lapse - Reliving Past

Interactive Performative Installation & Perofrmance on the footpath, next to Ramkrishna Math, Basavanagudi, 7th June 2014.

A generation which ignores history has no past: and no future. 
- Lazarus Long, from the works of Robert Heinlein

Through this interactive performance audiance had a glimpse of bygone era, the sense of past, a journey and reflection of time to relive the time itself. This was done by showing small still moving images in a kaleidoscope box the old medium to reach out people in the present time. This medium was very popularly used in olden days, commonly used in villages, it is like bringing the past in to present.

The old indigenous kaleidoscope was designed in a new way, film positives of images from the past, where people could get the glimpse of that period. Through this interactive per formative installation. This performance was targeted all kinds of audience’s from School Children, Auto Drivers, Common people, Old people and Women. 

This performance is a journey in itself for me since from the time of hunting for old photos online and reading about them and learning more things which I didn’t knew like the history of National College, the first Abala Ashram and going through life of great personalities was indeed a great learning and inspiration for me. One really feels proud living in such a great place with so much history. The outer body of Kaleidoscope was mix of old imagery and flower print, I had also used custom made helmet which could display multiple portraits at a time, like turning pages of history book, with images of important people get registered and when you remember they pop up in our minds and I stood there wearing that helmet representing all those forgotten faces, it was very a tricky design to execute though, but this was a perfect match to represent all by one unknown.

The costume I had chosen again had to reflect time the pata-patti pant which was used in earlier days only few old people use it and you really need to hunt shop which sell this particular or you need to buy material and get it stitched. I went to shop where this man from past 60 year makes this and I got the costume made for this performance for my size and shop person also shared that now only few old people come there buy this since it no more popular now the track pants are popular.

Dimple B Shah

2014

Basavanagudi Live Art Project (Reliving Past, Present and Future) - Performances by Dimple B Shah

Basavanagudi Live Art Project (Reliving Past, Present and Future) is an Artist Initiative by Dimple B Shah funded by India Foundation for Arts through Project 560. The event will be from April 24th to June 8, 2014.

Basavanagudi is one of the oldest dwellings in the city and has many Temples, Religious Places and Oldest Educational Institutions that has rich history. People from this place has major contribution in the field of theater, Literature and Cultural Development of the City. The very well-known Lankesh Patrike is also based here and also notable theater personalities have grown up here. The Bull Temple, Gavi Gangadhareshwara Temple, Ramanjaneya Gudda / Temple, Ramakrishna Ashram, Shankar Math and The Flower Market in Gandhi Bazaar all these places have great relevance in the City Map and also played important role. There are many Educational Institution both in Engineering and Art Field that have great contributions to this area. Over the years despite many people migrating here from different places and part of city it has not lost its charm though the new flyover and construction of new metro line is redefining its beauty. Even today we meet lot of people living in old buildings that has history of 70, 80 years, and still exists representing the good old days and charm of that era. The project is basically to do intervention in form of performances in this area on streets of Basavanagudi. This Project is intent to build intervention in Public Space and create more space for Performances Art.

Black Fever II - Live Performance - Lagos, Nigeria.

From the Series of Cry from the Dark - Ejigbo, Lagos, December 27th 2013.

This was last performance for the year 2013 on 27th December done in Ejigbo ,Lagos, Nigeria. This was one more performance done on issue of rape crime on women in respect to socio-cultural situation in Lagos especially in Ejigbo area. The core concept was already worked out but I was also improvising to bring in cultural element of Yoruba culture and wanted to do Intervention with local community.

Day before the performance I went for survey of area to fix an ideal spot for my performance in Ejigbo and also to know more about Yoruba culture and intermingle with local in one of discussion with community members one of the member came with outburst of news the leak in YouTube video of local women tortured in Ejigbo it was about how police official handled the situation it was about how one local women was tortured by inserting spices in her private part because she happen to do small crime of stealing small amount of spice in market. This was shocking news and issue of concern so then my thought melt down to same thoughts of justice and humanity and respect to women the issues of rapes violence against women there seems to be no stop for crimes, I made my mind to perform to bring this concern this time I used local traditional hair dress 'Gele' to represent the mass Yoruba girls along with their name written on my face. I asked the local ladies to tie this head dress in public.

Very openly and generously they collaborated in tie headdress on my head and it become spontaneous collaboration with them also some of women also reading out the names as they were written on my face. After thoroughly studying the area I had chosen my spot in one corner where four road meet and where people catch local yellow cabs and it is busy with heavy traffic. The performance was a durational performance went for an hour where I interacted with local people of Yoruba community with audio. I used audio which were circulated through multiple ear phones to my audience and one to one interaction with my audience. The local community very well received my performance and seriously listening to the audio and I had one to one interaction with lots of women, men’s and local people and explained then about my concern many on the main road stopped by to know more about the Performance.

Dimple B Shah
2013

Time Immemorial -1st Aifriperform International Residency 14th -31 December 2013

The Black Fever - Live Performance in Delhi

This performance was about the darker shade of society. We are constantly bombarded with socio- political and religious issues in India. Every day we are bombarded with news of rape crime and even now when I am writing this the new rape case shown in News and might be even when I am performing some rape might be happening in any corner of our country every minute.  Every day we are left with feeling of helplessness with situation this news keep on circulating in one form or other form and we feel entangled with such unpleasant and insecure life with no hope for any good future.

Visually I wore black mourning dress with face covered with see through black mirrors that reflects audience face; simultaneously I could see audience, though audience could only see their reflection in Black. I have chosen black costume, to mourn, to show dark feeling and wound which has grown like black patch/reflection of society. I had conceived this idea keeping in mind the capital city New Delhi, since the news of Nirbhaiya, there had been no change in social security of women and especially girls and we have been seeing only an alarming amount of crime rates day by day in the villages, town and major cities in India. I really don’t understand why there is such a rise in such crimes may be  because those who  break laws and who does the crime  don’t have any more fear to be caught and punished, may be also due to decrease in moral values and respect to women or should we blame Bollywood items number and vulgar songs for this? We need to question and also seek out for answers about like what kind of mind set of people in the society is? Why women are not secure in India?  Once known for its moral and ethical values. 

The performance was done in highly populated area with migrated population from villages around and African population in Khirkee Village, Delhi and I used multiple audio receivers to interact with people in public space. The attempt was to bombard news to my audience just like News channels to a level of intolerance, to make them react and become sensitive towards issues of security and respect to women and voice their concern, rather than being passive to situations, I wanted my audience to react and become sensitive to issues rather than neglecting it as it has become a common news.

This performance was well received by people, some with very strange reaction they wanted me to pay to hear the audio and some seriously indulging in issue and inquiring whether I am activist or social worker etc., there were some more strange reaction since one audio was to calm them but they thought it was Bollywood music and tried to find out what song it was about.

Dimple B Shah

2013

Soul Purpose -Channel 6

Sheet Happen -Time Out Bangalore

One Monday last month, as the city slipped into the bustling rhythms of the morning, Dimple Shah began supervising the unloading of 15 boxes from a truck that had driven up to Gallery Sumukha. She was just emerging from about with conjunctivitis, which she contracted before undertaking a train journey to the city from Baroda– but with a tight schedule leading up to the opening of her latest show Catharsis in a Forbidden Zone, Shah couldn't afford to let physical discomfort derail her work.

Over the next few days the artist had the formidable job of unpacking 400 kgs of material and getting her show ready. Possibly the most daunting task – setting up the extraordinary piece titled “Catharsis Chamber” – a shower cubicle that she designed, surrounded by PVC curtains and shelves made of acrylic sheets. Once the basic structure of the cubicle was ready, Shah would have to line the shelves with 1,800 medicine bottles, each one filled with either ash, salt, hair or nail clippings, to create a room for a viewer to enter, a space permeated with a sense of privacy and almost ritualistic calm.

“I initially wanted to use pieces of my own nails for the work,” said Shah, who, while talking about her work, veers between earnestness and giggly delight (the former, in this case). “I started collecting clippings two years ago.” Does that mean she’s been planning the details of this show for the last two years? “No,” she clarified. “I just have a habit of collecting things which I might decide to use. I would have used my own clippings, but in a few days I found that they had started attracting ants, so I threw them away. I don’t know why ants were interested in my nails. Maybe the ants inBaroda[where Shah studied, at the Maharaja Sayajirao University] are a little mad.”

The clippings that finally became a part of the show were artificial, procured by Shah after scouring dozens of beauty shops. But there was a problem. “They looked terrible, too artificial and white. My friend and I sat and painted each individual clipping so that it looked a little more natural.” What about the hair in the other bottles? “That’s my hair,” said Shah. “I collected it over two years.”

The sense of theatricality in Shah’s installation work is perhaps explained by the fact that, for many years, she’s had a parallel interest in performance art. Through her training inBaroda, she held performance art shows in which she herself featured, often rendered unrecognisable by blotches of paint. And over the years, photographs of these performances showed up in Shah’s print works and paintings, along with other traces of herself – an image of an eye, a hand print, a diary entry.

“You might enjoy this,” said Shah, momentarily distracted in the middle of going over slides of her work, and flipping open a notebook crammed with preparatory notes and sketches.

A glance through its pages suggested an almost obsessive bent of mind. Reams of notes about psychoanalytic concepts jostle for space with conceptual diagrams, such as the ones of imaginary scientific apparati that Shah ended up fabricating out of copper for Forbidden Zone.

In creating these apparati, and, indeed, in all her explorations into the show’s central theme of alchemy, Shah seems to be responding to a need to explain the inexplicable, and to organise the chaotic storm of ideas that rage through her mind. And while some of her earlier works can bewilder the viewer just because of the sheer number of elements used, in newer works like “Catharsis Chamber” these impulses are expressed simply, with an immediate and undeniable power.

Showing off the sketch of a piece of apparatus, which didn’t make it to the final show, Shah said it was a challenge to get vendors to carry out her orders. “They go crazy when I show them what I want done,” she said. “They’re used to normal orders. I have to spend days with them. They eat my head, and I eat their heads.”

These tedious transactions more than exhausted her, Shah admitted. “Every single work seems to take a toll on my body,” she said, gesturing towards the example of her infected eye. Then, a smile appearing, and her tone growing kinder, “But it doesn’t matter. After all, art is about hard work.”

Ajay Krishnan
Time Out Bangalore
October 01 2010 7.14am

Saffron Border - Live Performance at Kanoria Art Center

This performance addresses socio political situations in Gujarat, India, done in 2003 a year later communal massacre happened in Godhra. The communal violence took thousands of lives and many were left homeless. This massacre unfolded right in front of my eyes and I went through many horrific experiences and I tried to bring in my traumatic experience through this performance. The experience during the riots was terrifying. The city on fire, being surrounded by sensitive areas, the experience of  Gas cylinder bursting in neighboring lane from the burning houses, Milk man coming in middle of night, black commandos patrolling on streets. Hearing heart breaking stories of terror and violence’s where people were brutally killed by mobs, Women and children who were tortured and killed. Groups of mob came in hundreds and thousands killing and looting the people, houses and shops. Experiences of all this in my closed room with fear of that this can also happen to me anytime.

This experience of fear amplified with time as I could not see any news of the situation as there was no TV and with no sign of slowing down of riots in the city or in neighboring town and villages. I was only relieved from this situation and traumatic experience after the curfew was called off in four days. The city looked very different after that riots, there were hundreds of small houses in next lane belonging to one community, they were all burnt to ashes, people were killed, some of them escaped and fled, only vacant, broken and burnt houses left. It is very difficult to explain in word the loss and pain of the people during these riots. 

The performance was a combination of audio-video and live performance. The video shoot was done in Baroda; the video was combination of my performance, passion of saffron color, fear, lost dreams and pain, the fragmented and random images from city life this shots were amalgamated which were juxtaposed in layers. The video was supported by continues audio of railways tracks, which constantly reminds the "Burning Train" incident in Godhra massacre.

There was an additional audio along with video, voice given by Mumbai based Artist Bharati Kapadia, the audio narrates my journey and obsession with saffron color the color of passion and strength and how this color later on turned into color of fear and terror.  Basically this performance raised some of the basic questions of common man/women, their fears, insecurity, communal harmony, freedom and socio-political rights in the society. Questions like why history keeps on repeating and when there will be an end to such bloody violence.

The live performance was an act to bring out the traumatic experience of a person who has got stuck in fire, with no escape situation, the traumatic experience, the pain of burning live, and the cry for life. I tried to bring in all this experiences, with ritualistic performance of symbolically marking the border in saffron color and placing green house inside this boundary. The performance was basically to invoke the feeling of fear and terror inside the burning house and bring out the traumatic experience in front of audience. Then in the end of performance the green house was burnt. This performance work performed in many cities (Ahmadabad, Mumbai and in Bangalore) in front of varied audience which gave me opportunity to reach out community in large there by spreading my concerns.

RE-FLEX - An essay about a new medium.

Re-flex, the latest project at Bar1 curated by Christoph Storz, or Estee Oarsed

Whether you like it or not, in recent years the banners and hoardings on vinyl, flex etc., are an integral part of the visual city. Bengaluru, with its lax regulations, is plastered with stretches of flex wherever you look. Put up for a short while, they catch your attention and then disappear again. Later the same flex may reappear in a less official role as protective covers against rain and dust. In this second life, the imagery on the material gets ignored. Features of local operators blown up to the size of statesmen might end up upside down, as covers for tempos, makeshift shacks and pushcarts. The second life flex authoritatively negates any pretence and come back into the world of things, where surface is just surface. 

The exhibition curated by Bar1/No Bars, artists and going-to-be artists responded to the public presence of flex and appropriated it in their own ways. 28 artists (Aishwaryan K, Alaka Rau P, Ameer, Anjana Kothamachu, Archana Prasad, Biju Joze, Chaitra Puthran, Charitha, Christoph Storz , Dimple B Shah, Estee Oarsed, Mohan Kumar T, Mangala A M, Meghana Rao, M G Kulkarni, Mohammed Yunees, Prakash L, Rakesh Kallur, Ravi Shah, Ravikumar S M Halli, Sheela Gowda, Shiva Prasad KT, Smitha Cariappa, Subramani J, Shivaprasad S, Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy, Urmila V G and VG Venugopal) were the artists who participated in the show from all over the Bangalore.

- Christoph Storz, or Estee Oarsed

From Left - Alka, Rau P, Dimple B Shah, Ravi Shah, Smitha Carriappa, Aishwaryan K, Biju Joze, Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy, Subramani J, Shivaprasad S, Ravikumar S M Halli, Mangala A M, Rakesh Kallur & Anjana K.

Contemporary Voices - Compiled from interviews by Waswo X. Waswo

In early August I asked a selection of younger artists to talk about their work via answering a short questionnaire. All of these artists have been, or currently are, highly involved with printmaking as a medium. The artists questioned were: B. Karuna, Dhruv Sonar, Dimple Shah, Jagadeesh T.R., Kurma Nadham, L.N. Bhuvaneshwari, Maripelly Praveen Goud, Prathap Modi, Moutushi, Neeraj Singh Khandka, Prabhakar Alok, Preeti Agrawal, Rajan Fulari, Rajesh Deb, Soghra Khurasani, and Srikanta Paul. Below are selections from their varied responses.

L.N. Bhuvaneshwari:  My imagery has often been things like motorcycles and ceiling fans. Reality can never be completely reproduced, so I grew curious about what happens to the essence of an image when it is bent and squiggled by the human hand. The cement and metal plants of a factory, the automobiles...hard iron and jagged-edged reality gained strangely soft edges when isolated from their harsh surroundings. But my fascination with machines didn't end there. In some ways they seemed essential, in others, senseless. Reality became fraught with uncertainties, paradoxes, limited joys and infinite anguish, all speeding towards an unknown direction, a symbolic representation of human progress, destructibility, creative goodness and its inherent evil. Carving, etching and printing became to me a means of seeking harmony and integration.

Maripelly Praveen Goud:  I am more fascinated with science, technology and mathematics. I use science diagrams, schematic drawings, circuits, electrical elements and other images in my prints. I started working on portraits (the black portrait series) and gradually made them more conceptual. Always my works questioned “originality”. For example, one of my prints which is titled MODERNIZATION, tells how culture and tradition is slowly vanishing in villages and technology is reaching almost everywhere. This is partially personal experience because I myself migrated from a village to the cities.