Tangled Hierarchy 2 – Review

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At the heart of this group exhibition curated by Jitish Kallat are reproductions of the five envelopes on which Mahatma Gandhi, under a vow of silence, wrote messages to Lord Mountbatten on the eve of India’s partition. The first of his scribbled replies to the last Viceroy of British India reads: I’m sorry / I can’t speak. The phrase introduces some of the paradoxes that drive this brilliantly executed show about historical trauma that continues to reverberate decades later: silence as protest, mourning as action, absence as presence.

The show opens with violence. Visitors to an exhibition spread over two floors of a hidden warehouse amidst a tangle of narrow streets in Fort Kochi are greeted by Zarinas Abyss (2013), a woodblock print that depicts the dividing line as a white chasm flowing like a wound through a black page, Mona Hatoums standing globe Hot Spot (Stand) (2018), its landmasses bounded by burning electric filaments that cast an ominous red light into the room, and the sound of falling bombs , whose source is Mykola Ridnyis Seacoast (2008). Shot in the aftermath of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, the short syncs noise with footage of jellyfish falling from the sky to crash into a fishing beach. These works confuse political disorder with earthly disruption: a continent torn to the seams; a planet literally and figuratively on fire; nature at war with humanity.

However, these first impressions are quickly complicated. In one of the initially confusing tonal shifts that make the show so compelling, the ground floor corner is given over to a series of sketches by Roger Penrose. Dating from a decade after partition, they describe a series of impossible stairways that the Nobel Prize-winning physicist used to demonstrate that humans could visualize non-Euclidean space. These abstract speculations are at first difficult to reconcile with the more direct politics of the surrounding works, but can be read as constituting an ambitious extension of their collective proposal. Not only is psychological trauma related to material damage in ways that Newtonian science doesn’t account for, but all of space, time, and consciousness are entangled in ways that art could help us conceptualize. Penroses’ sketches, after all, were inspired by the work of MC Escher.

If we understand time as linear and matter as governed only by cause and effect, how can a past event or an absent body cause us physical pain? On the first floor, Alexa Wrights series After Image (1997) considers the phenomenon of phantom limbs by digitally adjusting photographic portraits of amputees who suffer from the condition to visualize their experience, adding excerpts from their personal testimony. Kader Attias Reflecting Memory (2016) uses the same affliction as a metaphor to consider issues such as psychological disintegration, intergenerational trauma, and postcolonial condition. Why, asks the documentary through its interviews with psychoanalysts, surgeons and amputees, is it considered necessary to see the cause of the suffering of others to be convinced that it is real?

The idea that only what is visible is real reinforces the pressure on the victims to show their suffering. It also confuses visibility and representation. These two questions are tackled in the Caryatids series by Paul Pfeiffers (2003 in progress). The 2008 iteration on display here consists of three box monitors arranged in a continuous line on the floor like a mid-century minimalist sculpture. Each screen shows an isolated clip of a football match in which a male player throws himself to the ground, or writhes on it, in an exaggerated display of pain.

These individuals are transformed by erasing their primary color kits of names, numbers, and insignia into archetypes who perform suffering to entertain the public and seek justice. The key to the effect of these caryatids, named after the marble women who served as architectural columns in classical Greek temples and have since been transferred to archaeological museums, is that the attackers have also been erased from the scene. The viewer must decide whether this mediated, abstract, aestheticized pain is genuine. Which raises questions about whether the pain expressed in art is always real or, perhaps more precisely, what kind of reality we attribute to art and suffering.

The title Tangled Hierarchy took on an unexpected meaning in the context of the largest exhibition of which it is a satellite, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The opening of the latter has been delayed according to its curator, Shubigi Rao, speaking at the BMW Art Talk in a surreal first week in which no works were available for view, in solidarity with the wishes artists who have decided not to exhibit their work in conditions which have not (following various technical problems, bad weather and administrative blockages) presented all of their contributions in their best light. Conceived for a very different context, Kallats’ exhibition here argued for the principle that withdrawal is a positive action, that silence can be a powerful expression of resistance, that invisibility is preferable to losing control over one’s own representation, and that what is hidden continues to have effects. In itself, it is a moving account of how art could help us reimagine the relationship of individuals to the stories that shape them.

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