Art_Africa_2016_02_

ARTAFRICA

CURATOR’S INSIGHT

THE PORCUPINE IN THE ROOM / GITANJALI DANG

Even though the trope is a reflection on human intimacy, the project draws on greater

and lesser acts of intimacy – across habitual categories such as human/nonhuman and

culture/nature – and the narrow separation between intimacy and absolute intimacy.

Recognising that visibility and invisibility are very much an extension of the intimacy

narrative, intimacy itself was posited as the material base from which radical praxis could

crop out. As such, ‘The Porcupine in the Room’ brings up the invisible, but this invisibility

is far from homogenous.

In transforming what is defined as ‘a piece of cloth intended to block or obscure light,’

Prajakta Potnis’s ever-so-subtle intervention The Curtain (2005) questions the notion of

the monolithic ‘real’ that walls us in. As if in spontaneous response, Ian Whittlesea

states The Invisible is Real (Walter De Maria). Invisible violence is real too and it is a long-

standing preoccupation for Jaebum Kim. In I am Jesus Christ (2008) the artist looks at

the case of Lazlo Toth, the mysterious geologist who in 1972 vandalised Michelangelo’s

Pietà. Patterns of misplaced and spurned intimacies ossify like geological formations,

connecting the empirical earth to the ‘abstract world.’

Onur Gökmen’s Turned out to be a House (2015) and Karan Shrestha’s Abarohan (Descent)

(2013) witnesses these patterns as they are transmitted through genes and across

generations. Throughout the project, artistic positions unpacked the need for intimacy

and the attendant tensions, while the wide-ranging contexts were themselves concurrently

unpacked through the lens of intimacy.

Gitanjali Dang is curator and writer at Khanabadosh, an itinerant arts lab she

founded in Bombay in 2012.

3/7 ARTAFRICA