कला

कला highlights non-Western art practices and replaces a colonial pedagogy as default. कला means Art in the Hindi language. The change in language demarcates the very difference between colonial art and non-colonial art. Non-western art practices revolve around community, storytelling and the passing of knowledge.

कला is not an object placed on a pedestal to gawk upon. It does not exist in a capitalistic context and inhibits human movement around it. It is a medium to build community. It depicts our connections within an ecosystem. The connections we make through that tool, are the art. Our stories are our art. 

This project stems from the numerous mandatory art/ design “history” classes I have sat through during the period of my formal education. They only ever taught me about Western art pedagogies, movements, and styles as the pillars of art education, mediums to revolutionize culture and media, and the very foundation of forming an art/ design practice. I would always ponder the question: Why is this the default/ dominant? My obvious interpretation of the word history (or at least obvious to me),

Objective

led me to believe that I would learn about different cultural designs, infused with various beliefs and aesthetics. By week 3, I became aware of the real meaning of the word “history”. I learned two things then. First, as Dionne Brand puts it, “No Language Is Neutral”. Second, the institution of history is as dark as it is white. The question that carried forward with me through the years was, Who gets to dominate the narrative of history? And to what extent?

This project seeks to bring attention to, appreciate, and re-situate non-colonial practices in our current Eurocentric systems of art institutions. Decolonization is an experimental process, and quite often it’s messy. The labor of decolonization is heavy, something that can only be established through sharing the workload.

This exhibition was a public history class called ‘Art in the Flesh’ which was part of a larger ongoing faculty show ‘This Exhibition is not an Exhibition’ curated at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr. Through the curation of this exhibition, I wanted to create a space where movements of the body aren’t inhibited and there is no object on a pedestal to interact with. Where objects are not valued above the needs of the community, but rather act as a medium of storytelling and sharing.

Through this exhibition, I intend for us to think critically and converse about dominant art practices all around us. My capstone project turns to art philosophies that have been difficult to process in western methodologies and institutions. Non-western cultures believe in the art of storytelling, an art of living rather than objectified aesthetics. How do those values translate into a pedagogy dominated by objectification and hierarchies?

The next phase of my project was to decolonize the classrooms. During my research, I came across numerous articles and literature that emphasize: “Decolonization starts at an education level”. I conducted a workshop/class and framed it in the context of a Mandatory HUMN 100- Week 14 class that never took place due to colonial shortcomings. My insights from this workshop were that, given the tools and resources, people are highly curious and interested in the various art practices

and de-objectification of art. Setting up the workshop was a community effort in itself. All the students sat in a circle and conversed about how difficult it can be to situate ourselves as a Person Of Colour within institutions that still continue to uphold white supremacy. After an introduction to the various facets of Warli art and Indian Folk art, we all came together to visualize our communities on a giant canvas in front of us in Warli Art style.

These fold-out “class notes” serves as an avenue to fill in the gaps present in a Eurocentric curriculum. Due to the limited scope of my project, I was able to create class notes on only three types of Indian Folk art, out of the many types that exist. In concept, these class notes should already be integrated into an art history curriculum at universities and should exist from various cultures as well. 

The design process started with thumbnail sketches and iterative design revisions to Risograph and Laser printed ephemera through Adobe Illustrator. The notes are accompanied by a vellum sleeve that adds visual interest. The identity of the notes is loyal to the nuances of the folk art style it depicts. Emulating actual Warli, Gond and Bhil art, each ephemera’s details speak to the art form’s details. The open-source graphics and images used in my notes belong to actual Warli artists, Gond Artists and Bhil Artists, retaining their signatures to spotlight the artist themselves and give credit to the respective tribes.