HH Art Spaces invited artists, Mandakini Trivedi with K.N.P Nambisan, Nikhil Chopra and Madhurjya Dey to engage in an interaction and dialogue, and produce a live performance-installation work over the duration of a week; and to use the HH Art Spaces Gallery as a laboratory for their collaborative process, which included rehearsals and laying the base drawing in charcoal making the scenography to build on during the live performance. Nikhil Chopra and Madhurjya Dey use charcoal and oil paint, installation and live art, to draw our attention to the politics and poetics of the regions in the Himalayan mountains, which span the entire North of India from West to East. Tracing their roots to home land in Kashmir and Assam, they problematise historical narratives, local psyche, personal memory, and notions of authenticity through their work and practice. Mandakini Trivedi, exponent of Mohini Attam, is based in Maharashtra. She embodies the language of classical dance and movement, as she gently and sensitively stretches the boundaries of ancient and traditional scripts with a contemporary lens.

Melam

Melam means, coming together.

Agni Melam, was performed on 13th September 2024 at HH Art Spaces, Goa. Melam was ‘a coming together’ of many kinds: A collaboration between, Live Art as presented by Nikhil Chopra; the classical dance form of Mohini Attam practiced by Mandakini Trivedi; the traditional Kerala percussion instruments of Edakya and Ellataalam performed by K.N.P.Nambisan; and contemporary painting as presented by Madhurjya Dey. Without locking each other in water-tight compartments, the practitioners and their forms drew from each other and supported each other to create a dialogue between classical and contemporary forms and practices. Melam was a dialogue between contemporary painting and live art, Mohini Attam, the gentle dance form of Kerala, and traditional percussion from Kerala. Meelam was a collaboration of rhythm & painting, rhythm and movement, and movement and Vedic and Tantric ritual.

The collaborations converged on the theme of Agni or Fire: both in its creative and destructive aspects: Fire as the life-giver, as the Sun, and, the metabolic Fire, and, Fire as destroyer reducing everything to ashes.

Fire was also explored as Agni Devata. In transcendental Vedic philosophy, Agni Deveta, literally translates as Fire God. He has seven tongues, carries oblation to the Gods and connects Man to higher energies that nourish; He is the Element of Light, Space & Radiance and the inner fire of our intellect.

Finally, Fire was explored as Life. Its death is Death.

Nikhil Chopra’s engagement with landscape painting made in-situ during a live performance, plays with representing the elements; land, water and sky. Most recently his interest has turned to ‘fire’. Chopra questions our relationship with fire; Where does it burn? Where does it hurt? Where/how does it comfort? Are we of mud, water, air and fire? If so, where does this fire burn? In the ticking of our heart, in the flow of blood through our veins, in our minds, in our need to survive, in desire, in acceptance, in pleasure, and in pain? Fire has been crucial in our proliferation as beings on this planet, to the point where it threatens to destroy us as we huff-out the atmosphere of air to breathe.

In his on-going collaborations with Mohiniattam maestro Mandakini Trivedi, Chopra has enjoyed the intertwining and dialogue between classical and contemporary practices and repertoires. Here divergent disciplines and languages meet each other in the live space with not merely the desire to experiment, but to allow for a new language to emerge, where performance becomes the common tool for transformation and perhaps transcendence.

Mandakini Tivedi’s search for Truth has led her to frontiers beyond the form. She seeks to express and understand the Transcendental Yogic world-view through her practice. Over the many years she has studied the structure of Transcendental Arts, which she believes Classical Indian Dance is. The layering of the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the yogic, that which is unique to the Transcendental Arts, is also what she tries to retain in her choreographies. Her re-creation of ancient dance movements from the Natya Shastra, called karanas, are dance meditations, which are a case in point.

While working in her chosen style of Mohini Attam, Mandakini Trivedi has attempted to push the boundaries of its form, for she believes that traditions have to be sensitively re-interpreted and enhanced by every practitioner. The role of traditions is not policing but that of guiding and revealing Truth in Art.

Madhurjya’s oil diptych, titled, From the Eastern Mirror, which comprised the scenography, are based in the year 1987. The paintings are visual and textual, semi-fictive accounts of suspended irrigation projects, bureaucratic failures and ailing administrative machinery in the Autonomous District Council of N.C. Hills, Assam. The narrative of the work is built around a prolonged water crisis in the headquarters (966 meters above sea level) and its impact on the psyche of its people.

The color black, which boldly covers the overall visual surface in the paintings, refers to - ‘as time passed’, ‘fossilized’ with micro actions/conditions that tweaked the course of events, and, that which has to be revisited in order to navigate the ‘now’.

Besides the diptych, Madhurjya paints a set of seven images sourced from various sites on the internet. These images were placed alongside newspaper report titles, which are contextually similar but regionally distant. The seven images are a dig on the nature of representative images used in print media, that often ends up misleading the reader.

Project title - Appropriation fetish III