Revisiting Imran Qureshi’s Roof Garden Commission: Miniature as Medium

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If you are like me, you might not have realized how closely Imran Qureshi’s installation on this roof of the Met this summer is connected to the tradition of miniature painting in South Asia. Certainly the red splatters remind one more immediately of Jackson Pollock, as well as of bloodstains, even if the suggestion of violence felt somehow unreal when seen over the trees of Central Park. When I saw the Pakistani artist’s more traditionally realized miniature painting below, it clicked into place for me.

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Qureshi’s 2011 miniature on traditional wasli paper, Blessings on the Land of My Love, uses the same splattered motif as the roof garden, only organized around the drainage grate on an interior courtyard. Blessings Upon the Land of My Love was also a 2011 site-specific installation at the Sharjah Biennial 10 that used this red vegetal patterning to take on the architectural structure.  The miniature on paper suggests that Qureshi sees the same vision whether writ small or large, and that moving the miniature off the page and putting it in dialogue with architecture still retains some essence of the miniature. In fact, considering the installation in closer relation to miniature painting allows one to see both how Qureshi employed formal elements of his traditional miniature training, in the Pahari style foliage, and even to connect it with the Mughal practice of employing pictorial artists to decorate their palaces with large wall paintings in addition to illustrating books. In a sense, miniature painting is a medium that the artist works through, rather than resides in.

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Nalini Malani’s In Search of Vanished Blood at Galerie Lelong, Chelsea

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InuSearch of Vanished Blood contains video and sound as well as a shadow play created by five suspended Mylar cylinders to tell an overlaid narrative of multiple parts, rather like a collage. Malani is a pioneering female Indian artist who showed this work at last summer’s dOCUMENTA in Kassel. There’s a lot going on, but this video clip gives you some sense of the effect and environment. Up through Saturday!

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Sewing with Plywood: Istvan Csakany’s Ghostkeeping

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This realistic model of a sewing factory workroom could almost be frozen in time, if you disregard the material. The shot above shows Istvan Csakany‘s Ghost Keeping (2012) installed in the Ludwig Museum, who recently acquired the piece after it was commissioned and shown at dOCUMENTA in Kassel this summer.

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The work consists of a slightly larger than life-size wooden model of a sewing workshop, aligned in two rows. Csakany, together with two carpenters, spent almost a year making this. Ever piece from dangling electrical cord to sewing machine bobbin was made by hand with meticulous care and with an eye to historical accuracy.  The typically raw, simple, and cheap materials, here unfinished plywood, contrasts with the care taken in fashioning it. The “do-it-yourself” workshop aesthetic present here can be connected to the identity of the Central and Eastern European region.

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Similarly, there is a contrast in the figures who face the sewing room. The suits are made of delicate, expensive material, but the style is that of a worker’s uniform. Notably the suits are empty. Csakany arranged the positions after monumental Social Realist figures of the Soviet period, thus the active poses draw a parallel with the workers of the past, now gone.

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Between the empty suits and the empty sewing room, the most notable feature of the atmosphere is absence. Csakany examines the value of work and the position of laborers in society, and through his own care in creating such a non-functional wooden replica of dated machinery he also conflates  physical and artistic work. The historical past, like this dated representation of labor, now serve an aesthetic purpose as they are recreated and re-remembered, perhaps an example of how culturally we perform an act of ghost keeping.

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