Dearest batch of 2022,
I have been meaning to write to you all for some time now while also wanting to write other things I have been meaning to write and during this time of wanting to write and staring blankly at different types of pages, I realised that the most dreadful place to be in, is the stationary place between a blank piece of paper and a mind full of a lot of things to say. In this state, one overthinks without moving their hands and i hate not moving my hands, it is very bad for my brain. So I have decided to move my hands and write something (anything) addressed to you guys.
The reason I am doing this (apart from the fact that I was asked to write this a little bit) is because I met some of you during the south asian playground exhibit which was put up by some of our professors. The exhibit was one of those mind-life-art shifting moments for me, it was a point of respite, which was put together by friends, in the burning, bleeding mind-numbingly-fucked up world of live-streamed atrocities, we all find ourselves in. It was an event that made it clear to me that we have to make art for each other, and we have to make it together.
Talking to Suhani there, I wondered if for you guys, the imagination of our batch (and the art that we made) exists within the shiny- sparkly white walls of IIC, in the shiny- sparkly time of our final show. And if that is the case I want you guys to re-situate us in the walls of the studio we now share as our own and be a little aware of the absolute mess our collective process was. It was full of tantrums, laziness, procrastination, synced periods, rage, silly conflicts, gossip, hunger, different flavours of addictions and desperate attempts to be afloat, so consider this a type of khulasa.
But first I have to address how strange it is to make sense of having to exist in Jindal.
Once while walking from SH-14 to the mess at night through the football field, me and vaishnavi talked about how time in jindal seems to work differently, how the time in-between, going from one place to another, goes in a state of complete dissociation. Outside campus we are adequately stimulated, completely aware of our surroundings, but inside it feels like it’s accidentally designed to induce numbness. It is also a space that looks and feels like inside a ‘world building simulation game’, made on a whim. Aesthetically, because it is a repetition of the same colours, buildings, blocks of land,pathways, trimmed bushes and similar types of plants and trees copy-pasted all over the place with no apparent thought. And experientially, because where we go, how we go there, where to walk and where to sit is all controlled and recorded, like living inside a game you are not playing. Under heavy surveillance, a complete lack of space for students to just chill (a result of adda becoming administration office) and the ever present sewage stink, life is strange for the student there. And for the artist, it is a place with peculiar possibilities. Not one day went by without something completely bizarre happening, only craziness surrounded us. But to manage how to be both artist and student in the space is where complications occur.
We were particularly bad at balancing between these two roles, the timeline of our working process clashed with the timeline of the course outline and in between somewhere the time we had was mostly spent going to the new mess building, waiting for the stupid lift to deliver us squished between bodies, to the floor where the food we did not have to pay for but we already paid for was; and then to stand among more bodies, reach for plates, shimmy to get to some hot bhaturas, and complain about kids who never fucking put their half eaten messy plates back to the dish keeping station.
All of us had different individual strategies of combating the jindal simulation, but mostly it was the late night rants caught up while doing acts illegal on campus, that shaped us the most, not as artists or students but as friends figuring out how to be artists and students. Some of us worked meticulously, on and on, where finishing the work wasn’t the objective, some of us made art in spurts between long gaps of nothingness and some of us did not work in the studio but came there to eat and have conversations, and many many more different ways of being and doing shaped the way all of us were working together. To the point where the half walls separating our studios were not keeping our individual practices apart. And by the end of it we had come up with pretty good ways of being in the studio and dealing with each other, creating, sharing and doing things together in spite of the tiny qualms or little fights we had with each other outside the studio.
When the campus was emptied in a day, after a missile was intercepted in Sirsa, some of us stayed back and took over this side of the campus. We converted the project room into a make-shift theatre where we would watch films (the most notable one being mai hoon na) in between calls with our parents, trying to convince them to not panic, and trust our decision to stay. The truth was that we wanted to stay together and we all hated the idea of leaving behind our daily practices of being in the studio, we did not want whatever was happening in the world to stop us from creating this little world of our own we had been creating. Thinking and writing about all of this now is unbelievable and comical but mostly it is making me miss having a creative generative space with my friends.
And the last thing I want to do is be preachy but if I may preach one thing, it is for creating that kind of space for yourselves. To situate ourselves among the weirdness around us and working it out with each other is the only thing that is making sense to me right now and it is the only thing I wish to pass along.
Hopefully jaldi milte hai
With lots and lots of love
Sabar
P.S “masti karo art will happen”- Hasvini
P.S.S “khana khao art hota rahega”- Sabaah
(batch of 2021)