Kunst Kiosk, a long-term project by the Goethe-Institut Kolkata, aims to give art lovers access to relevant approaches and trends in contemporary art from Germany and India. In a series of regularly changing presentations, exemplary artistic works displayed in a concentrated space offer viewers the opportunity to explore the varied thematic and formal aspects of the broad spectrum of artistic creation that has taken place in both countries since the 1960s. The focus is on works featuring moving images that can be viewed on screens in their original form.
These presentations are shown in a specially developed, site-specific artistic installation titled “Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles”, created by the renowned artist and art mediator Sanchayan Ghosh. Its sphere-like structure in the foyer of the Goethe-Institut Kolkata offers space for two to three viewers at the same time. Up to ten works of art are presented alternately on three screens and a monitor; however, visitors can also select and view them individually, like in a temporary mini archive.
Astrid Wege
Director, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata
“Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles” is a multimedia architectural installation placed in the reception area of the Goethe-Institut Kolkata. It is an interdisciplinary and pedagogical site consisting of multiple converging and diverging circles made of both natural and industrial materials, tracing a material encounter between the rural and the industrial in the last century. This installation is also an attempt to map the encounter between different traditions of visual culture in the post-World War II era and trace it into the post-industrial era as a collage and collapse of ideas and events that constitute the characteristics of contemporary art from both a local and global perspective. Exploring image culture in the age of mechanical reproduction and live performative practices, this installation is a durational exhibition site that explores both the Indian and German evolution of mediatic impact on visual art practice.
Extreme weather events and the consequences of climate change are fundamentally altering the planet’s ecosystems and challenge humanity in the Anthropocene to redefine its role within the global network. The exhibition Shifting Ecologies presents artistic video works that explore the complex interplay of humans, nature, and technology. They reflect ecological and social crises, question the boundaries between the real and the virtual as well as between body and environment, and open up visions of posthuman, symbiotic, or dystopian worlds. The video program invites viewers to understand the Earth as an interconnected whole and to gain new insights for a mindful engagement with both nature and the “more-than-human world.”
FEATURED ARTISTS
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind, 2021
Jérôme Cortie, Paradise, 2022
Anne Dukhee Jordan, Brakfesten – La Grande Bouffe, 2022-2023
Lukas Marxt, Imperial Irrigation, 2020
Emilia Skarnylyte, Sirenomelia, 2018
Simon Speiser, Drenched in Coexistence, 2025
Susanne Wiegner, Bellevue, 2020
Sissel Marie Tonn, Becoming a Sentinel Species, 2020
Ziyang Wu, Agartha, 2024
For a long time now, it has been a scientifically established fact that global warming is progressing: ocean temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, permafrost regions are shrinking, and polar ice masses are disappearing. Yet political action remains hesitant, and the measures agreed upon are insufficient. It is equally well established that global warming is largely man-made, and that humans have become one of the most significant influencing factors on the biological, geological, and atmospheric processes of the Earth.
Artists have always engaged with the perception of nature and ecological questions. In recent years, with the intensifying ecological crisis and the devastating effects of global climate change, there has been a growing interest in this topic. Today, we speak of the Anthropocene era—a geological epoch shaped by human activity and its profound impact on the environment. Many artists explore in their work the possibility of communicating with a “more-than-human world,” a world in which other living beings are considered just as important as humans. Technologies help us give a river a voice by monitoring pollution levels, or track a flock of birds using sensors to better understand their migration patterns.
In recent theoretical discourse, the term “symbiosis” has gained prominence. It emphasizes the understanding of Earth as a vast organism built on symbiotic networks that include all forms of life—a theory based on the scientific research of molecular biologist Lynn Margulis. Similarly, the Gaia concept, brought to the forefront by biophysicist James Lovelock, describes the Earth's surface as a complex, ever-changing system shaped by living organisms.
Artists are embracing these ideas of hybrid networks between humans and their environment—as a forward-looking ecological principle of interconnectedness and kinship among species.
Accordingly, the video program aims to raise awareness of the urgent ecological issues and questions of our time, and to highlight sustainable design possibilities from an artistic perspective. We must learn to live with the world, rather than trying to dominate it.
ABOUT SABINE HIMMELSBACH
Since 2012, Sabine Himmelsbach has been director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel. After studying art history in Munich, she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna from 1993–1996 and later became project manager for exhibitions and conferences for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria. In 1999 she became exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011 she was the artistic director of the Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. Her exhibitions at HEK in Basel include Ryoji Ikeda (2014), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Preabsence (2016), Eco-Visionaries (2018), Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (2019), Making FASHION Sense, Real Feelings. Emotion and Technology (2020) and Libby Heany: Quantum Soup (2024). As a writer and lecturer, she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture.
Humans and Nature – Symbiosis and Ecological Reflection
Works that explore the interplay between humans, nature, and ecosystems, addressing questions of symbiosis and coexistence with the more-than-human. This includes Forest Mind by Ursula Biemann, which examines the Amazon rainforest as a thinking, communicating entity and highlights the symbiotic relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe by Anne Duk Hee Jordan shows how dead elms in Sweden become part of the ecological cycle, linking vitality, enjoyment, and the transience of nature.
Technology and the Anthropocene – Dystopias and Critical Visions
Artistic explorations of technology, industrialization, and the consequences of human activity in the Anthropocene, often framed as dystopian or critical scenarios. In this thematic block, Jérôme Cortie’s Paradise combines satellite surveillance, AI-generated imagery, and apocalypse tourism to examine the interplay of humans, data, and synthetic reality. Bellevue by Susanne Wiegner presents a dystopian cityscape from the perspective of a train window, making the viewer part of a destroyed, deconstructed world. Lukas Marxt’s Imperial Irrigation addresses the ecological and social consequences of industrial agriculture at the Salton Sea, visualizing a post-apocalyptic landscape shaped by environmental destruction and human neglect.
Mythology, Networks, and Alternative Infrastructures
Projects that explore myths, narratives, and interconnected systems between humans, nature, and technology, opening up new speculative perspectives. Sirenomelia by Emilija Škarnulytė links humans, nature, and machines in a cosmic meditation on posthuman mythologies and the deeper connection between humans and nature. Agartha by Ziyang Wu combines historical footage, 3D renderings, and AI-generated content to explore a mythical underworld and the networks connecting humans, animals, technology, and ecology.
Body, Environment, and Posthumanism
Works that question the boundaries between body, nature, and technology, address posthumanist concepts, and make visible the physical and symbolic entanglement of humans with their environment. Simon Speiser’s work addresses the dissolution of fixed bodily boundaries and the symbiotic interconnection of all life forms within an ecological network—a poetic metaphor for the posthumanist notion of the human as part of a larger, living web of biological and technological relations. Becoming a Sentinel Species by Sissel Marie Tonn examines the merging of body and environment through microplastics, portraying humanity as permeable organisms deeply intertwined with their surroundings.
Forest Mind by Ursula Biemann is an art-science project that explores the ecological, spiritual, and epistemic dimensions of the Amazon rainforest. In this work, Biemann connects insights from neuroscience, botany, and indigenous cosmologies with questions about collective intelligence and the coexistence of humans and nature. The forest is understood not only as an ecosystem but also as a thinking, communicating entity, opening up new perspectives on a symbiotic relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist working at the intersection of art, ecology, feminism, and technology. Since the 1990s, she has been known for her essayistic video works addressing themes such as migration, resource politics, climate change, and planetary ecology. Her projects combine artistic practice with scientific research and documentary methods. She lives and works in Zurich.
Video, 15:24 Min.
When its scientific mission comes to an end, a satellite in charge of monitoring climate change deorbits to a devastated Earth. In this mad race for survival, it meets a guide operating for Pelerin, an apocalypse tourism agency that offers survivors expeditions to thrilling places. In this speculative tale, data collection, i.e. the activity of the satellite, meets the synthetic image which is the manipulation of digital data. The Paradise project has its source in this interaction between the subject and the material that sustains it.
Jérôme Cortie is a French artist whose practice encompasses photography, video, and computer-generated imagery. His work evolves through continuous experimentation and hybridization, creating an ambiguous perspective that questions the collective belief systems underpinning our perception of reality. His research draws richly from references to science, science fiction, and ecology.
Video, ca. 30 Min.
Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe, created in collaboration with curator Pauline Doutreluingne, was realized in the Södra Hällarna nature reserve in Sweden, where elm trees infested by bark beetles had been felled and stripped of their bark. The artists returned the dead wood to its original site, arranging it according to the feeding patterns of the beetle larvae—a symbol of the ongoing cycle of life and decay. The camera traces the fallen trees, revealing how even dead wood becomes a source of nourishment for new life—a true feast for insects and forest dwellers. The title also references the 1973 film La Grande Bouffe, in which pleasure, excess, and death are inseparably intertwined—motifs that Jordan and Doutreluingne revisit in their work, celebrating the exuberant vitality of nature.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan (born in South Korea) lives and works in Berlin. Her work explores the intertwined relationships between humans and other living beings. Driven by her fascination with marine animals, technology, sexuality, food, and ecosystems, she creates installations in which organic materials and robotic entities merge, offering a reflection on socio-political questions at the intersection of the living and the non-living.
Video, 20:04 Min., Narrator: Julia Scher
Imperial Irrigation examines the ecological and social consequences of industrial agriculture in the area surrounding the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, which is projected to dry up over the next 20 to 25 years. The project highlights the looming environmental catastrophe—toxic dust from fertilizers and pesticides, algal blooms, oxygen depletion, and fish and bird die-offs—while connecting these ecological crises to the region’s social injustices. Through various types of images, digitally manipulated, cut, and altered with time-stop effects and subtle visual distortions, the landscape is revealed in its complex, ever-changing history. The result is a post-apocalyptic panorama reflecting both the destructive impact of human activity and the widespread ignorance of this crisis.
Lukas Marxt (born in Austria) is an artist and filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. His work focuses on the dialogue between human and geological existence, as well as humanity’s impact on nature. He presents his practice both in the context of visual art and in cinema.
Film, 12 Min.
Sirenomelia links humans, nature, and machines while envisioning possible post-human mythologies. It was filmed in an abandoned Cold War NATO submarine base in Olavsvern, Norway. The video is a cosmic portrait of one of humanity’s oldest mythical creatures—the mermaid. The artist, performing as a siren, swims through the decayed facility as cosmic signals and white noise permeate the entire space, reaching even its most distant corners beyond human influence. Sirenomelia is a fictional visual meditation on contemporary science, terrestrial and cosmic forces, and the possibility of a deeper human connection with nature.
Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker. Working between the realms of the documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures. She works in realms that range from the cosmic and geological to the ecological and political.
Drenched in Coexistence explores the deep, invisible interconnectedness of all living beings within an ecosystem. Through pollen, spores, insects, microbes, and bacteria, bodies are in constant exchange—communicating, sharing information, and adapting to one another. Mosquitoes become mediators in a network of liquid communication, while pollen and spores embody the principles of life, reproduction, and decay. The work creates a poetic vision of the forest as a living, sentient web in which everything is interwoven and mutually dependent. The piece is a collage of 3D scans based on a VR work Speiser created in Manaus, Brazil.
Simon Speiser is a German-Ecuadorian artist who merges nature and technology through various media. Exploring themes of origins and the interplay between human and technological worlds, virtual reality and ancestral folklore, sci-fi and non-western conceptions of technology, and using storytelling as a tool in the fight against dystopian thinking, Speiser creates immersive, sensory experiences that highlight the resilience and adaptability of pre-colonial cultures.
Animation (HD 1920/1080, 16:9, 25fps, Stereo), 7 Min.
The title Bellevue ironically alludes to a view that is anything but beautiful—neither from the train window onto a dystopian cityscape, nor, in a figurative sense, onto a world heading toward the abyss, or perhaps already beyond it. The hopelessness of the scene is heightened by the presence of absurd platforms for protection and rescue. The absent viewer, seated at the supposedly safe window, gazes out at a deconstructed, deserted world—and is at the same time part of it.
Susanne Wiegner's artistic practice revolves around the intersection of science, technology, and art. She integrates complex, future-oriented topics and techniques such as AI, cybernetics, augmented reality, and bio art into her work. Wiegner's main themes include the relationship between man and machine, man and environment, and man and global developments.
Video, 17:26 Min.
In Becoming a Sentinel Species, the boundaries between body and environment blur. The video follows two researchers who experimentally introduce microplastics from the sea into their own bodies, isolating macrophages and contaminating them in the lab to “become sentinels.” Interwoven with documentary footage of creating a human biomarker to microplastics, the film imagines the immune system activating, causing hallucinations where bodies merge with the primordial sea. The work underscores that humans are not impermeable entities but fluid organisms, inseparable from the environments we shape.
The video is a co-production of artist Sissel Marie Tonn with microplastics expert Heather Leslie and immunologist Juan Garcia Vallejo. The project was inspired by the role of a sentinel, a species that functions as a canary in a coalmine, used to measure environmental pollution.
Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist based in The Hague, the Netherlands. In her practice she explores the complex ways humans perceive, act upon and are entangled with their environments. Her work examines the question at the core of ecological thought, focusing on where we perceive our bodies to end, and the environment to begin.
Video, 15 Min.
Made in the combination of historical and political footages, 3D renderings and AI generations, the video essay of Agartha blends media archaeology, historical research, and science fiction. It's set in a mythical underground world with global connections and starts with the Tree Alliance in Guatemala and the social behavior of Peruvian rattlesnakes, introducing concepts like "conjunction" from alchemy and modern sociological terms like "network" and "collective." It also envisions an ecological political imagination through a '60s cross-species experiment, and a silicon entity's efforts for "decentralization." The work explores the complexity of interconnected entities. The Internet Pigeon Network in Gaza exemplifies the blend of biology and communication, raising new possibilities of alternative infrastructures. The piece underscores the accidental, mutated, or erroneous connections that shape our world, pointing out the material and spiritual dangers concealed in today’s ecosystems.
Ziyang Wu is a Chinese artist based in New York and Hangzhou. His work examines how the virtual world, data and algorithms as invisible forces ubiquitously alienate and reconstruct human experience in a globalized post-Internet society.
Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) is regarded as one of the most important artists of the present day. Over the course of her remarkable career, she created a substantial body of work in the fields of painting and graphics alongside her excursions into (animated) film and sculpture. Lassnig conducted a focused dialogue with her art, which always constituted the pivotal strand of her life.
The key notion which came to characterise Lassnig’s work was above all the concept of Körpergefühl or body awareness: by introspectively discovering the true nature of her own condition, she expressed physical sensations through the use of artistic media. Numerous self-portraits offer evidence of the form of self-analysis to which the highly sensitive artist constantly subjected herself. Since Lassnig has left her mark on a number of artistic developments, she is regarded as one of the founders of art informel in Austria and as a pioneer of female emancipation in a world of art dominated by men. Her visionary work has had a great influence on subsequent generations of artists.
As of the late 1990s, Lassnig increasingly focused her attention on creating so-called Drastische Bilder (Drastic Pictures) in which she explored major existential themes such as the difficult relationship between men and women, unchosen lifestyles – Illusionen (Illusions), as well as impermanence, death and destruction. Her numerous self-portraits with animals also refer to the combination of the human and the animalistic. Moreover, Lassnig worked on the extensive graphic cycle of Landleute (Country People) as of 1996. With her so-called Fußballbilder (Football Pictures), Lassnig took an ironic swipe at a domain of sport dominated by men. In 2002, Lassnig was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, a distinction followed by the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, which marked the first time that this award had been conferred on a woman artist. In 2004, Lassnig was recognised by the city of Frankfurt with the Max Beckmann Prize for her “exceptional contribution to contemporary painting”. In 2005, Lassnig received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the highest award bestowed by the Republic of Austria for scientific or artistic achievements.
ARTWORKS - KUNST KIOSK #2
Artworks
1976 / 8 minutes / Austria, USA / English
Feministic interpretations of famous paintings by Vermeer, Michelangelo and others
Oh Lady bright, can it be right?
Your window, open to the night?
Oh Lady dear, oh have no fear,
why and what are you dreaming here?
Strange is your pallor, strange your dress,
strange, you will be soon a mess,
and this in solemn silentness!
My love do sleep, oh may you sleep
with me be sure in sleep so deep.
Oh angel mine, oh have no fear,
will whole night stand on the ladder here,
will stand as long as hold will be the ladder,
and in the cold will hold my bladder.
By the way, want some ice cream?
No, No?
(Old American poem, transformed by Maria Lassnig)
John the Baptist as a real talking head in the bowl carried by Judith: ”Oh, why did I resist her?” By having him say something relatively banal, Lassnig demystifies the masculinity cult of famous works of art from Vermeer to Michelangelo.
(Tricky Women Animation Festival)
1970 – 1974 / 15 min / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
In an associative montage statues of saints in rigid and rapt poses are cross cut with those of real actors until the two can no longer be told apart. Gradually the real bodies break away from the constraints of their wooden models through increasingly improvised dance. A successful act of liberation from (Catholic) convention, which the material celebrates in an ecstasy of multiple exposures and psychedelic colors.
(Maya McKechneay)
1971 / 2 mins / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
Chairs move like human beings. (Maria Lassnig)
Apparently drawn quickly on paper with a felt-tip pen, various kinds of chairs resemble breathing beings. Accompanied by an out-of-tune piano playing music for a silent film, they begin to move. Sketches of the objects’ incarnation resemble both slapstick and a threat. (Maya McKechneay)
1971 / 9 mins / Austria, USA / English
The tone is lyrical, the voices are real, the bodies are sketchy: A couple talks at the phone and in bed (a casanova and his victim). "You helped me, you made me strong, but you can´t blame me for anything. When somebody loves so blindly, they pay with their life." (Maria Lassnig)
1970 / 1 mins / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
Encounter is Maria Lassnig’s first traditional hand-drawn animated film. Her process involved altering original drawings and setting them into motion, which Lassnig referred to in her writings as “ensoulment.” two anthropomorphized figures, one friendly and the other menacing, happen upon one another. At first recoiling in fear, the innocent figure eventually risks leaping forwards to explore the other. As the sense of danger dissipates, this act of courage is rewarded as both figures unite in harmony. Many of Lassnig’s artworks and writings closely examine the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, especially intimate ones, and Encounter directly addresses the trepidations, braveries, disappointments, and ecstasies inherent to relationships. Published in 1970 and shown regularly throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Encounter was made at the same time as Lassnig’s already well-known film Couples (1972). Though originally screened with varying musical accompaniment, the final restored version of the film reflects Lassnig’s wish that the piece ultimately be set to Morton Subotnick’s Touch (1969).
Final cut by Maria Lassnig. Color correction completed posthumously by Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko.
Soundtrack composed of Morton Subotnick’s Touch from the artist’s own music collection, in accordance with her instructions.
Digitization by Haghefilm, Amsterdam. This film was preserved and restored by the Maria Lassnig Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum.
1971 / 10 mins / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
Women´s bodies are presented as ambiguous erotic landscapes, sometimes classically baroque, sometimes cubistic visions in a distorted reflection, depending on the camera angle and shot size. Finally the female flesh frees itself to the accompaniment of electronic smacking noises and, ignoring all gender borderlines, unites with itself in Cronenbergesque growths. (Maya McKechneay)
1974 / 10 mins / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
a fat girl singing about not wanting to get thin just to please men.
b) the first time for her and him.
c) at the fortune-teller.
A confrontation of horrible science and horrible superstition.
The song of the fat girl:
I like to eat, I like to drink,
so made me god, I will not shrink
I like the cakes, I like the pies
as long as you eat, you will not die, //
To starve to death, to please a man
is woman´s curse, it is a shame
because he leaves you anyway,
so why not eat, stay cheerfull and gay. //
There comes a little man along,
I blow him up, I make him strong,
he eats with me from my substance,
I feed him, rear him, give him a chance,
I do not flinch when he swells up,
In surface leaves and makes a swap:
He will not live long anyway,
from borrowed strength, I can so say, //
So I go back to eat and drink
This will not hurt me, make me shrink,
I like the cakes, I like the pies,
as long as you eat, you will not die.
(Maria Lassnig)
Here Lassnig examines the gap between one’s sense of their own body and that of others: A fortuneteller typical of those populating entire streets in New York’s Little Italy is not far from the truth: ”You like good food!” Girl: ”I am only eating rice and noodles.” Fortune teller: ”Your lifeline is far apart from the headline, you are not dominated by the head.” Girl: ”I read Kant and Plato.”
(Tricky Women Animation Festival)
1971 / 4 mins 30 secs / Austria, USA / English
Lassnig, or more precisely her head, drawn with felt-tip pen, sings in English with a heart-rending Austrian accent about her life, her dreams, her eternal search for a male partner: "To look for the better half." But whenever one which is suitable with regard to color and shape appears, he calls her "weak" and "woman" in the same verse. (Maya McKechneay)
A conciliatory review of the life of the author using the techniques of animated film. In 1972, Selfportrait received the award of the New York State Council. (Maria Lassnig)
1972 / 9 mins / Austria, USA / No Dialogue
Human forms in Shapes dance to J.S. Bach´s breakneck runs on the harpsicord. However the animated stenciled spray paintings of plump discus throwers and wiry girls quickly confuse our culturally conditioned eye: What´s male, what´s female?
The music quickens. As they dance in a sped-up micro-evolution, their movements become increasingly voluptuous, their bodies fullermore: feminine it would seem, but who could say in this case?
(Maya McKechneay)
Silhouettes of human figures move following baroque-music (Johann Sebastian Bach).
(Maria Lassnig)
1992 / 8 mins / Austria / German with English subtitles
The Austrian artist Maria Lassnig tells us the story of her life in 14 verses, beginning with her birth and ending with her life as it is today. Simultaneously - in the background - we see the story as animated drawings, full of irony, humor and wisdom.
(Hubert Sielecki)
"The world and the people in their comic-tragic confusion, prejudices, and superstitions gave me plenty of material, to point my finger at. Imperfection and pain can be overcome with humor. To write articles, dialogues, and songs as a painter was a big adventure, but it also awakened my conscience and a feeling of responsibility, if not before the film then in any case afterwards." (Maria Lassnig)
Exhibition #1
With works by:
Bettina Gruber/Maria Vedder, Ratnabali Kant, Sonia Khurana, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Katharina Sieverding, Surekha, Wolf Vostell, Ursula Wevers
Excursion: VIDEO ART FROM GERMANY
In “Grounded Grid: Encounter of Circles”, a spatial installation conceived by Sanchayan Ghosh, the presentation of film works from India is accompanied by a selection of exemplary video works from Germany that were mostly created in the 1960s and 1970s. This selection – the first chapter of a two-year programme – is based on the two-part extensive research project “40 Jahre Videokunst” (40 Years of Video Art, 2006) and “Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst, Teil 2” (40 Years of Video Art, Part 2, 2010), which analysed the history of the moving image in Germany and made it accessible to audiences in the form of DVD archive editions. “Excursion: Video Art from Germany” features distinctive, often short works by several pioneering representatives of video art, including Bettina Gruber/Maria Vedder, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, Katharina Sieverding, Wolf Vostell and Ursula Wevers.
At the end of the 1960s, the video tape was a new technology that was already being used intensively by women artists in particular. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of the works shown here were produced by women artists. However, the generic term “moving image” – which does not refer to a specific medium – is actually more accurate, as a variety of media (television images, 16 mm film, digital post-processing, and so on) are used and converge in some of the works. Alongside this technological diversity, the selection is also intended to represent the broadest possible aesthetic and thematic spectrum of artistic approaches: elements that are narrative and analytical, poetic and political, and that critique both media and society all occupy different spaces in the works and are often combined with each other. What unites all of the works is the fact that verbal language plays a subordinate role within them: their primary focus is the communicative possibilities of different visual languages – and therefore transnational modes of interpretation, too.
Dr. Barbara Hess
Curator
PEDAGOGY OF FREE EXPRESSION: RECLAIMING THE PERSONAL AS THE POLITICAL
As a transformative public space, Kunst Kiosk aims to be a critical site of contemporary discourse on emerging trends in art practice in India and Germany. The first phase of Kunst Kiosk from an Indian perspective will trace the various experiments and explorations of video as a tool in visual art practice and share some of these projects as a live experience. This is an attempt to critically contextualise the artistic ventures to engage with the changing realities and tools of a mediatic era and its impact on individual identity, and to archive the trends from an Indian perspective. Phase #1 includes works by artists like Ratnabali Kant, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Surekha, Sonia Khurana who have used the video camera as a direct tool to intervene in notions of performance, the ritualistic, gaze and public engagement as a direct concern in their practice. There will also be a documentary on Badal Sircar by Suman Mukhopadhyay, that sets the body as a core concern in the 1970s. Finally, it will include digital prints of recordings of works by Nalini Malini, Rumana Hussain, Vivan Sundaram, who were pioneers in initiating the above-mentioned trends in contemporary Indian art.
Sanchayan Ghosh
Artist and Curator
ARTWORKS – KUNST KIOSK #1
GERMANY
1963, 5' 15'', b/w, mono
Wolf Vostell’s (1932–1998) “Sun in your head” (1963) is based on manipulated, deliberately distorted and rapidly edited television images, which the cameraman Edo Jansen filmed from the screen under the artist’s instructions: shots of the then American President John F. Kennedy, television announcers, a military parade, meetings between politicians, moments from feature films, and abstract, almost painterly blurs. According to the closing credits, the footage was shot in Cologne in 1963; the work was subsequently re-edited and copied onto video in 1967.
One of the protagonists of the international Fluxus movement since the early 1960s, Vostell applied his artistic process of “dé-coll/age” to the mass medium television for the first time here. The term “dé-coll/age” was partly inspired by the Nouveaux Réalistes, a French artistic movement that transformed torn advertising posters from public urban spaces into panel paintings at the end of the 1950s. However, Vostell was also playing with the ambiguity of the word “décollage”, which can refer to an aeroplane taking off, too.
The briefly inserted, self-deprecating note in English, “Silence please! You are in the presence of a Genius at work”, is counteracted by the continuous siren sound that accompanies the entire film. In terms of the work’s content, this warning tone corresponds to footage of a U.S. Air Force aeroplane that dominates the second half of the film’s duration. Vostell juxtaposed the technological optimism and the repression of the crimes of National Socialism that prevailed in post-war West German society with complex images that were difficult to comprehend. Last but not least, “Sun in your head” raises the question of the extent to which the mass medium of public television in Germany in the early 1960s actually fulfilled its state mandate to entertain, inform and educate.
1969, 35', 16mm film transferred to digital video
In collaboration with: Stephan Runge
Sound: Kraftwerk
Performers: Katharina Sieverding, Stephan Runge, Holger Bombusch, Othello
Katharina Sieverding (b. 1941 in Prague) achieved international recognition with her iconic close-ups of her face and her large format photographs, which she was one of the first to introduce into the visual arts in the mid-1970s. Her early film work “Life-Death” (1969) marked a turning point in her career. Sieverding initially began studying stage design under Teo Otto at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1964, before transferring to Joseph Beuys’s class in 1967. This was triggered by a pivotal event in German post-war history: during a Berlin demonstration against a state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on 2 June 1967, a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman. This led to the nationwide spread of the student movement; as a protest against the police violence in Berlin, Beuys founded the pacifist German Student Party (DSP).
The footage for “Life-Death” was recorded in Berlin in 1969. At the time, the western part of the city was an experimental enclave for alternative lifestyles due to its insular location, surrounded by the territory of the former East Germany. A sense of experimentation also characterises the scenes in Life-Death, which were filmed without a script. The camera lingers for a long time on the – often heavily made-up – faces of the four actors and on flamboyant props such as a cardinal-red coat. The shiny metallic make-up is equally reminiscent of masks and the golden backgrounds of icon paintings. Just as the title of the work links the opposites of life and death, the scenes and motifs of the film also celebrate connections between opposites and fluid transitions – between night and day, between the genders. “Life-Death” not only anticipates some elements of the glam aesthetic of the 1970s; the soundtrack by the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk, who were pioneers of electronic music, is also groundbreaking. The 16mm footage of the original film recordings was later transferred to digital video and subsequently edited by the artist – a transformation process that is characteristic of Katharina Sieverding’s artistic practice.
1974, 8', b/w, mono
As a leading representative of performance and video art in the 1970s, Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1943 in Bad Salzdetfurth) critically examined societal stereotypes relating to “femininity”. In the mid-1970s, she founded the Schule des kreativen Feminismus” (School of Creative Feminism).
The starting point for “Tanz für eine Frau” (Dance for a Woman) is the waltz – a partner dance that involves constant turning. For the soundtrack, Rosenbach chose a popular composition by Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (1905–1980); its title, “Ich tanze mit dir in den Himmel hinein” (I’ll Dance to Heaven with You), already reveals a great deal about conventional gender roles and (female) fantasies of escape in the German post-war period.
In the video, Rosenbach performs a solo instead of a partner dance. The artist begins by standing in the centre of a circular surface. She is seen from above: a round, lightly swaying mirror has been installed above her. Her reflection was filmed with a video camera, with the mirror evoking the image of a spinning turntable. When the music starts, the artist begins to spin on her own axis. The long tulle skirt of her formal, off-the-shoulder ball gown, studded with small mirrors, swirls around her body as she moves in circles and fills the image field. While the music is repeated in an exact, continuous loop, the dancer’s movements become increasingly out of control after a few minutes. Dizziness and exhaustion seem to cause her to sink to the floor, where she remains motionless. What began as an act of emancipation and self-empowerment appears to come to a standstill at the end – at least temporarily – but can also be read as a much-needed exit from an endless loop and the “prison” of female gender roles (Lucy Lippard).
1978, 3' 40'', b/w, mono, Half-inch open Reel PAL
Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953 in Cologne) has been one of the most internationally renowned pioneers of video art since the mid-1970s. In 1978, he acquired one of the first portable open-reel recorders and used it to produce “Gespräch zwischen Ost und West” (Conversation between East and West). The protagonists are the Hungarian experimental filmmaker, screenwriter and theorist Gábor Bódy (1946–1985) and the artist himself. Both sit at an improvised podium with handwritten name tags and a Pernod jug between them – a reference to the filming location of Paris, where Odenbach was in receipt of a scholarship from the Franco-German Youth Office at the time. Filming took place in the flat of the actor Udo Kier (b. 1944).
The setting alludes to a popular West German television programme at that time, the political talk show “Der internationale Frühschoppen”. “Frühschoppen” refers to the once widespread German and Austrian ritual of going to the pub in the morning, usually on Sundays after church. Starting in 1952 – initially on the radio and then televised from August 1953 – “Der internationale Frühschoppen” brought together “six journalists from five countries” (female journalists were rare) on Sundays; the presenter was Werner Höfer. Wine and cigarettes were actually consumed during the live programme. Foreign policy issues were debated, with “government by discussion” as the guiding principle; in other words, democratic governance based on argument and debate in contrast to the authoritarian rule of National Socialism.
In their performance, however, Odenbach and Bódy ironically interrogate this ideal of communication in political culture. Instead of constructive talks between East and West – between the “Eastern bloc” under Soviet domination and the “Western powers” led by the USA – the two actors produce nothing but bubbles of spit. They symbolise the deadlocked negotiations during the Cold War, which only ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Odenbach set the video to music by the Hungarian composer Béla Bártok (1881–1945), who emigrated to the USA in 1940. With countless new crises around the world, the almost uncanny speechlessness between the performers on the podium still seems highly relevant today.
1979, 12' 29'', Colour, sound, Two-channel video installation
Horizontal/Vertical Jumping is a two-channel video installation filmed with a static camera for two side-by-side monitors; a filmed installation view of this work is being shown in the presentation at the Goethe-Institut Kolkata. On both monitors, the legs and torso of a person can be seen jumping through the image field, sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically, in front of a light-coloured background. Although the two figures never act in parallel, the work cannot be viewed without focusing on the relationship between the two images/monitors.
The sound of the work reveals that the figures are jumping on a trampoline. The viewer can also hear excerpts from the fantasy film “Duelle” (1976), part of the series “Scènes de la vie parallèle” (Scenes from a Parallel Life) by French director Jacques Rivette (1928–2016). In this work by the leading representative of the innovative French New Wave movement, the daughter of the moon, Leni, and the daughter of the sun, Viva, are locked in a battle to remain on earth. “Horizontales/Vertikales Springen” is therefore not only a formally sophisticated experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of two-channel videos, but also a discreet homage to avant-garde cinema. The visual element of the work satisfies one of Jacques Rivette’s criteria for good music: that the next beat must be surprising yet logical at the same time.
Ursula Wevers (b. 1943 in Hamelin/Weser) is an artist known primarily for her work at the intersection of photography and the moving image. She helped shape the beginnings of video art in several different ways: at the beginning of her career, she collaborated on the avant-garde media art project Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (1968–1970), which produced exhibitions of film artworks that were specifically conceived for television, and she was also a co-founder of videogalerie schum (1971–1973) in Düsseldorf, which produced and distributed early works of video art. In 1972, Wevers opened a gallery named Projection in Cologne, where she presented film and video productions, books, records and photographic works by visual artists until 1976. In 1976, she founded the video department of the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
1988, 4' 57'', Colour, stereo, U-matic Low-band
Performers: Fritz Heubach, Flikki
Music: Bettina Gruber, Igor Tillmann, Uwe Wiesemann, Gerhard Zilligen
Scenography: Fritz Heubach, Achim Mantscheff, Christian Toelke
The collaboration between the artists Bettina Gruber (b. 1947 in Minden) and Maria Vedder (b. 1948 in Cologne) from 1978 to 1988 not only resulted in a series of video works, but also in the publication of two books that have since become reference works on video art: DuMont’s “Handbuch der Video-Praxis: Technik, Theorie und Tips” (DuMont’s Video Praxis Manual: Techniques, Theory and Tips, Cologne, 1982); and “Kunst und Video: Theorie und Geschichte des Mediums” (Art and Video: Theory and History of the Medium, Cologne, 1983).
“Der Herzschlag des Anubis” (The Heartbeat of Anubis, 1988) turns the box-shaped television set of the era into part of the artwork itself, transforming it into a kind of peep box stage on which a narrative about the transition from life to death is staged in several tableaux. A key point of reference for this work is ancient Egyptian mythology, in which Anubis, the god of funeral rites and mummification, is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal. The first tableau depicts him in a rowing boat mounted on a rotating plinth. His task is to bring the souls of the dead to the afterlife. This is interspersed with another tableau featuring a man lying down, as if in a state of death, blowing into a carnivalesque party horn with two black feathers on either side. This shot is interrupted by cuts to the next scene, the “Horus tableau”. Its ‘protagonists’ are four pencil sharpeners in the shape of falcons, a reference to the deity Horus, who had many significances in ancient Egyptian mythology, including an association with the passage of the soul into the afterlife. In the subsequent “Flikki-Cerberus tableau”, the head of a dog (Flikki) serves as a projection surface for a film scene in which a cheetah kills an antelope; in Greek mythology, Cerberus is the dog that guards the entrance to the underworld. Finally, the “Anubis tableau” reappears. With deliberately simple and straightforward methods, “Der Herzschlag des Anubis” tells a story about death and suggests that imaginative and visual storytelling serves a vital function.
India
1996, Ritual Installation Performance, Kamani Auditorium, “No Parking” area, in the open air, 4pm–6pm; on the occasion of Uday Sankar Kala Utsav, organized by Sahitya Kala Parishad, Delhi.
Materials used are: readymades, threads, nails, hammer, iron sticks, terracotta pots, red powder, acrylic colours, papier-mâché mask
“In the performance “Death of Desire” which was named “Ritual Installation Performance”, I performed almost like a ritualistic act in a new configuration with my own statement.
My idea was to make use of ritualistic acts to portray the death of desire, and that is what I performed in ritually decorating the ‘gharas’ (terracotta pots), and then breaking them into pieces to symbolize the demise of what had been desired. In this performance, the participating child is the authentic artist of spontaneous vision and imagination.
The Performance Art “Death of Desire” brings to the fore the important issues of detachment, alienation and separation from pure representation, which therefore demands moving through several layers or multiple levels of understanding simultaneously.
“Death of Desire” was an installation constructed and deconstructed through destruction in a performance, which was unique and path-breaking in contemporary art of India.
I uttered a few poetic lines from Novel laureate Greek poet George Seferis’ poetry during the performance which I relate to my daring step into my difficult art practice, and with the ‘Installation performance’ form of art.”
– Ratnabali Kant
2005, Road Performance, Vithalbhai Patel House, Rafi Marg, New Delhi
“’The Last Performance’ was performed on January 1, 2005, on the open lawn of Vithalbhai Patel House, Rafi Marg, New Delhi, completing twenty years of my exploration of this art form. This presentation was conceived and dedicated to the memory of Safdar Hashmi and many other creative persons who had worked for the people and given joy to the millions yet suffered heavily for the daring expression of their creative genius.
Concept: Fury and brute force, and orgies of violence and bloodshed cannot wash away an artist’s creative expression, nor muzzle his or her daring, creative voice. Out of the looming black clouds will emerge everywhere and every day a hundred rainbows, mirroring the glint of the artist’s creative genius.
I uttered a few memorable lines from Pablo Neruda’s poetry during the performance.”
– Ratnabali Kant
When and why I started performance art practice
“In the mid-1980s I started Body-Art Performance using my own body as a medium/site for art practice in Greece, while I was engaged with my Doctoral Research in Athens University, Greece, on a Greek Govt. Scholarship. There I had spent several years. Later after my return to India, I combined Performance with Installation and named the art form Installation Performance under which I had introduced and developed a performative visual art for the first time in India. I began to disseminate this form of art widely through live and videos of performances in various universities art institutions in India. My efforts in this direction have been later followed by other artists in the fields of visual and performing arts and thus it has created an art movement on the contemporary Indian art scene.”
– Ratnabali Kant
“Sonia Khurana is part of the lineage of women working through the body into a space of erotic efflorescence recognized/shown to be (almost definitively) blocked, thwarted, problematized, and therefore won, if ever, by searing forms of self-exposure. Can she, with controlled states of neurosis, turn irony into gravitas? I refer to her performance video ‘Bird’, in which the artist as dancer, awkwardly naked, rolls, jumps, beats her arms, and tries to take off, holding the camera close to her flesh. As a dancer she fails to fly, but as the artist—modulating the speed, editing the choreography into staccato-style balletic parody—she, Chaplin-like, succeeds. The brief black-and-white video provides a kind of autographical trace of self-propelled liberation, but through a teasing travesty of formulaic autonomy. ‘Bird’ is ironical for being embarrassing, and, being so classically anti sublime, it is paradoxically iconic.”
- Dr Geeta Kapur, 2007, excerpts from her essay in the book “Global feminisms”, for the exhibition with the same title at Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Part I
1997−1999
Excerpts from early key works made at R.C.A. Video, photo, moving image, kinetic objects, installation
Breath
Anhad
I’m tied to my mother’s womb
Big sleep
Waters, forgotten of the foot
Lone women don’t lie
Bird
Zoetrope
1999−2000
Early works made in Delhi, and Modi Nagar, at Khoj International artists’ workshop
The Thing
Closet
Wailing well
Flower carrier I
2001−2004
Selected works produced between Delhi, Amsterdam, Cameroon while at Residency, at the Rijksakademie
Meat
The world
Part II
2001−2004
Selected works produced between Delhi, Amsterdam, Cameroon while at Residency, at the Rijksakademie [continued]
Mona’s song
Tantra
Head hand
Skin
2005−2007
Select works made between Delhi and other cities and residencies
Laura’s song
Sleep
tramping
Flower Carrier III
Logic of birds
Four full length short films
Bird
The world
Head hand
Flower carrier III
2001, 2' 5'', Sound, Captured on MiniDV in 2001 and digitised later. Video camera/Concept: Surekha
In “Line of Control”, a mere marker-pen marks a random boundary. An ant is caught within this drawn frame, unable to get out and it imagines the drawn line as a boundary. It hesitates to cross the line but never stops walking towards and away from it simultaneously, in anticipation of the unpredictable. Finally, by choice or chance, it comes out or crosses the boundary, at the end of the video. In this one-shot spontaneous work, the artist contemplates on a beings’ behaviour when confronted with boundaries – real, imagined and metaphoric.
Boundaries are set by human conditions, are often imposed, assumed, accepted and acknowledged. The video addresses several such issues of the notion of ‘boundary’ that act as an agency of control, power and bifurcation – be it that of geography, gender, colour or otherwise. It plays on the ambiguity of our choice to be “in” or “out,” our indecisiveness, and our euphoric awareness against something which we have been deeply conditioned into. Through the discourse and practice of art, one becomes aware that a boundary is a construct, like the pen line is to the ant.
2006/7, 5', Sound, Triptych
The video installation addresses an indoor activity that occurs within a kitchen space. The mundane act of cooking metamorphoses into an evocative game: it ironically repeats yet changes within the domestic routine, as though it follows a given scheme of meandering. The simple, casual and mundane act traverses into an over-life size event, over the stretch of video time. The simple act of mixing and kneading of the dough in the due process ‘remind’ of a mountainscape and various body organs. In the end they metamorphose into appearances that lie between the body organs and flowers.
'I can see you all' is a video film from the project reduced spaces 2001. 'I have addressed the violated spaces of women where they experience fear, very little freedom to express and move within the private and public spaces. The title suggests lack of visibility.'
'Confinement'
Concept, production, performance by Shakuntala Kulkarni
‘Film is about hope and despair, about hope and resignation.
When I heard about some women and children were burnt alive in a building during 2000 Gujrat riots, I was angry. The only way to express my upset and address this horrible act was through the moving images using my body as a site .
This is my first attempt at shooting a video film using Hi8 camera. I have used dark and light, sound and silence and a tight indoor space to convey the claustrophobic and desperate situation.’
