Full Transcript:
Dot Zhihan Jia:
Thank you, everyone, for joining us for the Artist Talks. So today, we have four artists with us. They're all part of our current LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award programme. It's currently in its second edition.
So the LOEWE FOUNDATION, a bit about the foundation itself – it was established as a private cultural foundation in 1988 by Eric Loewe. Today, the Foundation continues to to promote creativity, organise educational programs, and protect cultural heritage in the fields of craft, design, photography, poetry, and dance. The LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award was launched in March 2021, to celebrate talent, creative thinking, and the individuality in contemporary art practice. The award works to increase and strengthen equitable representation and access, and amplifies artistic voices across class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability. So yeah, like I mentioned, currently we're in our second edition. Back in 2023, last year, we awarded seven artists with two years of support through rent-free studio space, an individualised programme of mentoring and professional development opportunities, as well as curatorial and pastoral support and a bursary. The seven artists are Babajide Brian, Maz Murray, Emily Pope, Shamica Ruddock, Meera Shakti Osborne, Nick Smith and Ossie Williams. And also another aspect of the Award is that we award an international artist a one-year-long residency programme.
Last year, the first edition recipient was Hong Kong artist Beatrix Pang. And this year, we have Prajakta Potnis with us, who joined us in the first week of October and is staying with us for one year. So for today's talks, we will hear from Prajakta Potnis, Nick Smith, Babajide Brian, and Shamica Ruddock. So first of all, as we welcome Prajakta, I will talk a bit about your biography. Do you want to come up?
Okay, so Prajakta is, like I mentioned, our edition two of the international residency award that we do. She lives and works in Mumbai. Her paintings, videos and time-based installations highlight the fractures within everyday domestic life, particularly in the context of gender and social divide. Her works deal between the intimate world of the individual and the world outside, effortlessly weaving together the complexities of emotions. Prajakta has exhibited extensively, both nationally within India and internationally. This residency is her first project in the UK. Her recent solo and group presentations include the 15th Sharjah Biennial, Rencontres d'Arles in France, and New Meda Artspace in New York, as well as Project 88, Mumbai. And she has a solo show coming up in January that will open in Mumbai soon, but we'll hear more from her. Thank you.
Prajakta Potnis:
Hi, friends. Thanks for coming. It's great to be here and to be sharing work. It's always a dilemma to, I mean, how do you decide what to show. Instead of, I think, looking at the whole practice, I thought I'd just bring out one leaf from my practice and share it with everyone. So I thought the best would be to show this one body of work, which was part of my solo, which happened in 2020. We opened it just one week before the pandemic. It was a crazy time. So the work was obviously happening, I think, almost two years in advance. In 2018, there's this close uncle of mine who had some issues with breathing. So he went to the doctor. The first thing that the doctors asked him was, where was he working? This uncle of mine is almost 75 years old. He's, I think, retired almost 15, 20 years ago. The first thing the doctors asked was, where was he working? He said that he was working in a soap factory. Basically, they found some elements, some chemicals in his lungs.
He still finds it difficult. He really finds it difficult to breathe now. I think after the pandemic, and even now, also the way the city is, it's extremely polluted. Back home in Bombay, he lives in Bombay. I think the mornings, I know, go only in settling to breathe because he has to use a nebuliser. I think he starts his day only around 12:00, once the morning sessions of breathing this nebuliser and helping it... It helps him breathe then. So that became a trigger point for the work.
That became the starting point or the germ, I would say, because there's always these trigger points or germs that you look for. This became the initial starting point to start work. I was also thinking of not just him because he also kept saying... I mean, he was still in a managerial position and he was in an office cabin. He wasn't directly exposed to making soap. He kept speaking about what it would be for some of these workers who are actually exposed to the material.
I started thinking about the body of a worker and how this body could be a space, could be a place where these different toxic elements start making home. That became the theme for the show. The title is a body without organs. What you see here is an installation shot. Since I was seeing so many of his X-rays, I was quite sure I wanted to use that as one of the elements within the show.
What you see are almost three elements here. There's a projection here on the right – it's actually a video of these gas burners that are shot from the top view, and they basically just keep playing in loop. For me, those gas burners, those two round circles in blue are almost like irises, like eyes looking back at you. This is the entrance to the gallery. As you enter, you see this projection. Then you see the light box, the X-ray light box. And then there's a painting on the left.
I'll speak in detail. This is another installation shot. Again, there are paperwork, drawings, and some of these light boxes. It's always strange when you're thinking of a solo and you're thinking of which mediums to pin down your thoughts. I was quite sure I wanted to use the X-rays. I was quite sure I wanted to work with this element of this film and seeing things from the inside.
Then I was quite sure I wanted to work with painting as well because I thought, for me, at that moment, I was also thinking, does painting stand a chance in the contemporary? Does it even make sense to make paintings today? I thought, no, I should go back and see if it has a chance. The paintings were, in a way, for me, almost like how criminal portraiture happens. There's someone who's describing the face of a criminal, and then there's this artist who draws the face. Usually, there's a vast difference. Sometimes the portraiture comes close to the description or the imagination of this person.
I was listening to my uncle's stories and trying to draw from his memory. Obviously, there is a gap, and there are my own notations in it. These are X-rays, basically, of random objects. The title of the work is, He Woke Up with Seeds in His Lungs. What I would do, basically, is I would take random objects, take them to a local X-ray clinic, and install them as sculptural pieces, and then let an X-ray machine go through them. This is possible only in India, I think, where there were other patients pre-pandemic, other patients, some with broken bones.
Then here, me carrying these really strange things like plastic and coconut branches. When people ask you, ‘What are you doing?’, and when you say, ‘No, it's art [you're] making art,’ and then everything gets justified. So no questions asked. I managed to make this happen. Also, the problem is I don't think I'll be able to make this work again because X-ray clinics have become completely digitised now. This, I think, was the last few where I could manage to literally work through a film. Also, the process is quite similar to filmmaking, like photographic filmmaking. We would let the X-ray machine pass through these objects and then let the film go through a dark room and then these images would appear. Again, here what you see is the steel wool, used to clean dishes, and then plastic tubes and some glass beads.
This is a close-up of a painting. I title my paintings. It's a huge problem – how do you title your work? I've sorted it out for myself. I title them with time. This one is 10:34 AM. It could mean the time the painting is showing, maybe 10:34 AM within the painting, or it could be the moment I finish painting this. It's absurd.
These are pencil works, and the grey that you see is actually grey of paint. It's not a grey paper, but there's layers of paint that makes this grey. I feel really terrible showing paintings on I feel like you need to be in the presence of a painting. It's very difficult because it becomes all flat. But yeah, this is an image of probably an office with this cloud on top. It's a detail. Again, a detail. Again, this one had taken steel wool and some glass beads. And then this dot that you see on the corner here is actually an X-ray of an ant. So we didn't realize she was there, and we managed to have her in.
It was also interesting because one didn't know what to expect. The tonality of each object was quite unpredictable for even me. There was a sense of excitement till the final image emerged. This is coconut branches and steel wool. I wanted them to have a sense of the body, but also look at objects and see how they look from inside.
This is an installation image, it's called 11:23 PM. It's an image of a bed. I was thinking of the idea of an overburdened body, a body that has different toxins within it.
Again, these were water balloons and some wires that were put together. 6:45. Again, so layers of paint. I was also thinking of them as something between a drawing and a painting.
Another installed image. This one's called Still Life. I added two elements within this show. I was quite sure I wanted to get a soap in to this whole show. This particular soap bar is used for washing clothes, and it's usually quite bad on your skin. What I did was every few minutes, I had a water droplet falling on it. And towards the end of the show, it was supposed to create its own pattern.
When one is imagining a show, I think one's also thinking of the smell and the and how it will... How elements will work together. There's this one particular work, which is called the Floating Island, where I projected about 81 slides of this form in my sink. You just want this feeling of toxicity, that feels or plays around in the whole show, not directly, but indirectly, at least. These are the images.
And then next to it are these two drawings. I call them toxic drawings. So these are drawings on the wall. They're basically two lungs. One is the left lung and the right lung. And one is supposed to look at these through the surface of a foam sheet. So it's almost like you're looking at this drawing through this one layer of a sheet, and that's the detail. Then this is the projection. It's a video which is not playing, but it's actually just these two gas burners which are just flickering and looking back at you. I think that's my presentation.
