Vol 4 No 1 2010
A Little Distillery in Nowgong—Enter Gallery
Artists: Ashok Mathur (Initiator of the project), Brendan Lee Satish Tang (ceramic),
Diyan Achjadi (Print & video), David H. Bateman (Painting & Performance)
Curator: Makiko Hara
The project was presented in City Hall Gallery in Ottawa in April 2009 as
an official program of BC Scene in April- May, 2009.
The central tenet of A Little Distillery in Nowgong project was to develop
an interdisciplinary narrative that exemplified the transformative nature of
artistic production. While one of the major generative elements was the research
and writing of a novel that, like the earlier work of Ashok Mathur, drew on
postcolonial, diasporic, and globalization theories, integral to this project
was the degree of interdisciplinarity that engaged the reader/viewer through
an interactive installation. By fully integrating multiple disciplines – specifically,
writing, video, ceramics, printmaking, performance, and installation – this
project was disseminated through several distinct forms to function in Canada
and abroad in literary and visual arts environments. The overall objective
of this project was to explore and articulate possibilities for an extensive
interdisciplinary production that allows for full development of all its composite
elements.
While artists frequently incorporate textual elements into their work, the
actual incorporation of a full-scale novel into an interactive installation
space is relatively unprecedented. In this project, viewers/readers participate
in asynchronous patterns – they read the novel a considerable amount of time
before or after participating in the installation, and their involvement with
the video and installation components is not linear or time-dependent. Those
who have the opportunity to experience the novel and the installation components
are able to think through not just how the different elements of the project
come together, but how they as individual agents affect the work itself. The
book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver (September, 2009) acts as
a novel in its own right, exploring the politics and migratory history of a
fictionalized Parsi family from India to North America. But the book also functions
as a remnant and memory (much as video-documentary works with performance art)
of the installation. The installation, itself a remnant/memory of the research
and history of the novel, is a collaborative project comprised of numerous
video-poems, performances, and project-specific art objects that reflect the
novel’s focus on a historical time of great flux in terms of immigration to
Canada from postcolonial states such as India.
While the text of the novel (variously transposed to a three-dimensional installation
space) and the videos (projected and triggered by audience movement) comprise
a substantial amount of material in the installation, additional elements include
ceramic vessels created by Brendan Tang, video animations from Diyan Achjadi,
and a performance piece created by David Bateman. Together, these objects create
a virtual reality space where audience members “inhabit” the narrative by moving
around and between images and text.
Ashok Mathur was born in Bhopal, India, and he grew up in Canada, first in Nova Scotia, and later in Calgary. After training and working as a photojournalist, he returned to university to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees inliterature, earning a doctorate in 1999. Connections between art, writing, and social justice were always significant in this educational process, and Ashok taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design while writing, publishing, and doing various forms of cultural organizing. He continued at ACAD and in the Calgary arts scene until he was offered a post at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2001, where he worked as a faculty member and head of Critical + Cultural Studies for the next four years. In 2005, he took up a Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry at Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops, B.C.) where he is cross-posted to the departments of English & Modern Languages and Visual & Performing Arts. He directs the Centre for innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada (CiCAC) an artistic think-tank and residency programme dedicated to progressive creative research across visual, media, performance, and literary disciplines.
