Last Post?

This might be my last post. I am contemplating deleting my facebook account also, were it not for some photos there which I don't want to lose... I am not trying to erase out memories, after all.

But I do want to go off the grid now, not stay in touch with people, focus on my work and not let anything else intrude into my life or tap into my emotional or intellectual resources. Not be distracted by anything.

Here's today's: [I haven't checked the paper, but I expect it was published. It is a terrible piece of writing, for which I apologize].

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Windows into Freedom


Chobi Mela is a Bangladesh art tradition. The fifth edition of Chobi Mela has come to Kathmandu. The exhibition started on Friday, May 22, and concludes on Thursday, May 28, at Nepal Art Council Gallery in Babarmahal. It includes photographs by one Nepali artist, and there is a portrait of a Nepali woman in the body of another photographer's work. But this doesn't mean Nepali viewers won't feel the immediacy of most of the photographs in the exhibition. Whereas a photograph of young men leaping in the air to kick a donkey with "Gyanendra" painted on its side might draw chuckles or gasps of horror—what is the poor animal's fault?—other photographs will reduce the viewer to reverential fervor. From the strained wit of spectacles from the Burning Man festival to the quiet strength on faces of individuals whose portraits are only just the invitation to their stories of struggle for freedom, the travelling Chobi Mela, V, is bound to be a crowd pleaser in a city where photography as a cultural experience is a rare privilege. It is also bound to provoke thoughts in many directions.

Masaki Hirano's color photographs are among the quieter body of work in a festival dominated by high-drama narratives in black and white. The other series in color are obviously attractive—the Krazy Kumba Mela by Marti, for instance, with its surreal extremism, or Isabelle Eshraghi's decade-mature catalogue of Women, More than a Veil, where women behind veils surprise you with defiance more often than with complicity to a paternalistic narrative. But Hirano's series, Windows—2001, East Timor (From Down the Road of Life Series) is as contemplative as photography gets. It is full of implied moments, hidden movements, of light and color and the true blood with which art is constructed—the lives of others. If a viewer stands before these photographs of walls, windows and doors, if she cares to count just the layers of paint on a sun-washed wall, she will see the layers of narratives that Hirano has arranged in his photographs.

And these are arrangements, staged to proportional perfection. But these photographs don't yield to a cursory glance the story they contain. Hirano's photographs are without caption, a choice suited to the series if you consider the background of it: “When the independence of East Timor was settled, and the Indonesian army withdrew, Indonesia took advantage of its militia to burn down much of the infrastructure and many buildings. Approximately over 90 percent of private houses were burned down.” These very houses make the protagonists in this single-note story of suffering and defiance. And what attracts first with its color, then shocks with the revelations it can contain, is the square or rectangle of a blur sky that manages to enter each frame, each mood. The innocuous blue consolidates the threat to human life and culture from the era of repression in its recurrence in each photograph. The sun always slants down into what should have been roofed rooms, halls. Windows look past the edge of what must have been a family's intimate quarters, and sees palm fronds in the distance. Rusted tin bars windows: what should have protected from elements transforms into the malice of imprisonment. The translucent shoot of a papaya tree becomes a smirk, a measure of dark humor, as it strains upwards, but is framed by a window that frames in the far distance a small patch of blue sky, a dash of sunlight upon concrete walls without any familial or social function.

Hirano rescues the walls, their layers of paint. I was struck by exactly how many layers of paint I could count on a single wall. How many different lives must touch a wall to paint it over five times, six times, each into a vibrant, unique defiance? What function does such a wall play? There isn't a single inner wall of a house that still carries the soot of the fires that must have made them unusable, yet there are layers upon layers of chromatic playfulness; and Hirano arranging his forms, his squares and rectangles, around these colors on the wall or of the obtrusive exterior or the disarming blue of the sky above, transforms a simple view into a balanced, meditated work of art. Indeed, many of the photographs are in conversation with paintings by great masters. My notes for one of the photographs reads: “Rothko over Rousseau,” my shorthand to remember the arrangement of a rectangle of fading afternoon sky over weathered, rusted paint, and that “Rothko” over a mural of an elephant and a zebra in tall grass, more reminiscent of Rousseau's jungle paintings than a crude, childlike rendering. Sure, the mural alone was enough to suggest the nostalgia the people of Dili must feel for some culture, but it is Hirano's arrangement of the sky over the wall over the mural, in precise proportions, that includes it in a larger conversation about art.

Dili must have had an affinity for stringed instruments: in relief and murals, harpsichords and violins and cellos wait for somebody to come along and strum them. There is an entire jazz band outlined in a timelessly imprecise style, waiting on the walls of what must have been an oft-frequented watering hole. There are violins and cellos on the walls of a building that easily could have been a home, an arts center, a community hall. What the enemy has managed to burn out, what Hirano can only imply through his photographs, are the range of functions of the individual houses. Still, even as charcoal outlines, the intention of the people survive, surprise from unexpected corners: there is the ubiquitous Ché—perhaps in our age more often replicated than Buddha himself—outlined in his brooding rebellious intensity. It reminds the viewer that she isn't simply admiring the colors left on the walls by an oppressed people, or the superb mastery of shapes and colors shown by Hirano, but also that there lived a people in these abandoned houses that cared for things that make us truly human—music, political awareness and action, the desire and capacity to change our surroundings through layers after debated layers of color, and an awareness of where we belong in the jungle, among our fellow inhabitants of this planet.