Precarities of the Real: Abhishek Hazra’s The Aesthetics of Nandan Flat-Formalism
Supported by the India Foundation for the Arts’ (IFA) 25x25 programme in 2020 that marked their twenty-fifth anniversary of grantmaking as well as twenty-five years of the internet in India, visual artist Abhishek Hazra’s The Aesthetics of Nandan Flat-Formalism is a recorded video-lecture-performance that combines elements of fictionality, participatory art and institutional critique. While Bengaluru-based Hazra’s practice demonstrates a deep fascination with the permeabilities that reside between real and fictional narratives, he also works with a network of interconnected experiments involving video and performance-based media. The video-lecture-performance supported by the IFA seeks to unravel notions of artistic precarity, the expanse of art philanthropy, the crumbling digital façades under state-led surveillance, and what it means to situate one’s practice within discursive technologies of making and for making.
The video begins with a voiceover introducing a fictional showcase that attempts to shed light on emerging socio-technical practices, deemed to influence the next twenty-five years of the internet. In his introduction, the presenter announces that as part of this showcase, certain start-ups from the HSR (Hosur-Sarjapur Road) Layout in south-east Bengaluru have agreed to share a glimpse of this exploratory work estimating the future of the internet. The showcase proceeds to highlight an unnamed start-up’s work on developing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning algorithms and digital helper programmes for industry-specific verticals, particularly the beta version of their latest product: Zlambda. A voice-based agent, based on a conversational interface, Zlambda is programmed for the art industry and is being built to assist first-time art buyers. Viewers are then invited to listen in to a recreated conversation between Zlambda and a young, mathematically-minded buyer looking to purchase a specific type of artwork.
Left: A still from the video with an image of a swimmer, exhausted after having reached the shore.
Right: A still from the video featuring a boatman, attempting to stay afloat with all.
Both these images appear as part of a longer series early on in the video, as the voiceover introduces viewers to the fictional showcase and the premise of the conversation that is to follow.
As the conversation between the Zlambda and the buyer proceeds, we are made aware of the existence of an island-country called STOA (State of the Arts) and their former embassy in Bengaluru. As a country dedicated to the arts, their embassy had, at one point, functioned as a safe house for dissenting artists—a group of abstract painters—who were facing threats at the time due to their unapologetically vocal activism to protect digital privacy. Through the video, we are made alert of the narrative surrounding the artists. Grateful for the asylum offered to them, the painters made a series of abstract artworks called Sloppy Abstractions and donated them to the diplomats at the embassy. However, instead of accepting the right to safe passage made available to them, they chose to disappear, leaving behind a declaration, “Instead of supporting artistic autonomy through statist structures, we will create temporary zones of autonomy.”
Stills from the video with the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.
Also known as the Parthenon Marbles, the Elgin Marbles are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures that were originally part of the temple of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum, and had them transported by sea to Britain. An episode of possibly wrongful acquisition, vandalism and looting, the Elgin Marbles are an interesting encounter in Hazra’s video-lecture-performance, silhouetted against a conversation that unfolds around subjects of ownership, autonomy and art.
In a virtual conversation with John Xaviers from the IFA, Hazra spoke of the genesis of the work, recollecting his experience of buying a ticket for an online fundraising event hosted by the IFA. He was struck by the act of feeding his personal details into the digital payment platform that was processing transactions for the same. He found himself face to face with what he calls “the gaze of the database,” and began to think about the possibility of being profiled by such systems. The expanse of the digital promises new and dangerous threats of compromise and intrusion, and in the case of the viewer-listeners who attended the event hosted by IFA, one is inclined to imagine the potentialities of a profile created to monitor and document citizenry and their personal interests.
A still from the video with images of pixelated human faces. Hazra incorporates a strange subset of imagery in an attempt to communicate a variety of themes around digital privacy, surveillance, anonymity, and the art world.
Hazra has been particularly interested in the future of independent grantmaking and evident shifts in art philanthropy. A question that he pursues through his various enquiries is one of how artistic practice can illuminate the tensions between institutions and their contexts of functioning. STOA is one such fictional construct that provides a possible outlet for this enquiry. Hazra was prompted by the nature of the open call for the 25x25 grants, and as the IFA was celebrating two milestones in 2020—the anniversary of the internet as well as its own silver jubilee—his proposed work sought to both amplify that particular moment as well as pose an inevitable question: what does the future of grantmaking in India look like? In the video, we see the office and staff of the IFA incorporated into the work, re-imagined as the embassy and diplomats of Stoa in Bengaluru. By choosing to cast IFA staff, Hazra has attempted to represent a seamlessness between the imaginative capacities of art and the real world, intervening in the otherwise administrative space of the institution with his speculative, extrapolative artistic methodology. The abstract artworks—the Sloppy Abstractions seen as Zoom backgrounds used by IFA staff—shown in recordings of their meetings are also part of the lecture-performance video.
Stills from the video, featuring IFA staff in a Zoom video recording, with the Sloppy Abstractions as the Zoom backgrounds. Each staff member part of the lecture-performance video also had a fictitious title accorded to them, locating them within the embassy of STOA.
Hazra’s efforts bring into question the architecture of contemporary grantmaking and the kind of refuge that is factored into systems of support for artists. While The Aesthetics of Nandan Flat-Formalism is a proposition instigating one to think of the predicament of artmaking today, it also produces a reflection over how institutional spaces define art, and the ways in which art practice is affected by the expectation to conform. Furthermore, though speculative aspects—both financial and fictional—remain at the heart of this work, Hazra manages to hint at issues of artistic relevance, immortality and positioning as overlapping aspects of the market, of non-human elements, mathematics, mathematical modelling, derivatives and, most importantly, abstraction to convey the intricacies that plague the afterlives of the artists as well as the artworks.
All images from The Aesthetics of Nandan Flat-Formalism by Abhishek Hazra. Images courtesy of the artist.
