Passage to India

>> Art confronts politics and national identity at Moving Ideas

by CHRISTINE REDFERN

Moving Ideas: A Contemporary Cultural Dialogue With India is one massive arts project. Organized by Hoopoe Curatorial, a collective consisting of Phinder Dulai, Peter White and Jamelie Hassan, it consists of discussions, films, a play, and two exhibitions. One exhibition, Secular Practice: Recent Art From India, is showing at four galleries: Optica, La Centrale, Oboro and Dazibao. The other exhibition, Dust on the Road, spotlights SAHMAT, a loose coalition of Indian artists from all disciplines, whose work denies a right-wing limited view of Indian culture. The show, on now at the MAI (Montréal arts interculturels), is an overview of SAHMAT's projects and publications and a group exhibition of work by Canadian artists in dialogue with the Indian coalition. The Mirror had a chance to speak with Ram Rahman, artist and SAHMAT organizer, about Marxism, murdered artist Safdar Hashmi and the multitude of Indian identities.

Mirror: SAHMAT grew out of the assassination of Safdar Hashmi. Tell me about that.

Ram Rahman: Safdar was a street theatre activist, poet and playwright who was a member of the Communist party. He set up a theatre group that was associated with the party and basically did plays on social issues he was working on. He was actually performing one of these plays in support of a labour strike in an industrial area of Delhi in '89, when he was singled out and attacked by a rival political party. He was killed by being dragged down the street and his head was battered open. It was a very, very brutal killing. There was a huge revulsion against that act. He was a doctrinaire Marxist but he had a wide artistic communication that went beyond his politics, which is unusual. That revulsion, particularly from the creative community, coalesced in the formation of SAHMAT.

M: And how did Hoopoe Curatorial and SAHMAT connect?

RR: I think they found out about our work and got interested in the fact that there was a group of contemporary artists who were working in the public sphere as a kind of artistic intervention.

M: SAHMAT goes against the narrow fundamentalist viewpoint represented by your government. The artwork is not necessarily political, but when you present it, it becomes something different.

RR: You make a political statement because you deny them their politics by saying, "You are defining identity in a very narrow and specifically religious manner." Our reality, as artists, as a country, as a culture, is a reality of multiple identities that we seek to celebrate and reinforce. The multiple opens the dialogue. You can't define it. We feel that is much less dangerous, because the minute you start defining, you create conflict. :

Dust on the Road: Canadian Artists in Dialogue with SAHMAT, at MAI until Dec. 15, 982-1812