Art_Africa_2016_02_

CURATOR’S INSIGHT

THE PORCUPINE IN THE ROOM / GITANJALI DANG 4/7 ARTAFRICA

‘The Porcupine in the Room,’ curated by Gitanjali Dang of Khanabadosh,

is a project that draws on greater and lesser acts of intimacy across

habitual categories such as ‘human and nonhuman’ and ‘culture and

nature.’ With research stemming from Freud’s ‘porcupine dilemma’, this

ongoing conversation is unpacked by fourteen artistic positions and

includes artists currently in residence at Delfina Foundation.

Yvette Greslé: What is at stake for you in the idea of intimacy? What is

the impetus for this idea?

Gitanjali Dang: I have been thinking about the idea of intimacy for a while but

have never quite identified why or when I started thinking about it. Many of the

projects explored by Khanabadosh, the Arts Lab that I run, look at history and

the idea of making the invisible visible somehow. I have been thinking about

the anxiety of the visible, and what happens when we make invisible things

visible. What next? I feel that there is a certain anxiety about putting these

things out as information in different public spheres. Perhaps these things

that are invisible do not desire a certain kind of visibility? Perhaps they thrive

on their invisibility? These are some of the questions that ‘The Porcupine in

the Room’ brings to the fore.

You can spend your whole life fighting to be visible in a political sense

(“listen to me, hear me, see me”) but I think about what it might mean

to embrace invisibility. We could explore the inflections to these words

and states of being, and what this might mean in a pragmatic sense.

To be comfortable with that level of invisibility would also somehow be about

being outside of needing so many intimacies – with people, with meaning,

with power, with pleasure.

Is Khanabadosh focusing on a specific kind of historical invisibility

through its work with artists and curators?

We are not focusing on a specific narrative of invisibility/visibility. The emphases

of particular projects emerge through conversation. We are a disparate group

of people who come together every now and again to work on projects. We did

a project in Bombay that placed four video works from Ana Mendieta’s Silueta

series in relation to a site-specific installation by Ratna Gupta, a younger artist

who has similar concerns. Mendieta is located in a particular way within art

history, in relation to her gender, her nationality and her art. It was interesting

to create this pattern of circulation for her, and to bring her work into proximity

with that of Ratna Gupta.

Curator Q&A: Gitanjali Dang in Conversation with Yvette Greslé