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Artist’s Statement
Lucia King
Introduction
As an
artist productive over the last twenty years, I have lived and worked in
India, in the UK and in the Netherlands. I was based in Amsterdam between
1990 and 2000, following on from a postgraduate participation in the
Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (the State Academy of Fine Arts) and
moved to New Delhi between 2000 and 2005 working there on performance and
filmmaking projects. Since early 2006, I have returned to London (where I
was raised), but continue to move between India and the UK as a researcher
and artist-filmmaker. These cycles of geographical relocation have
inevitably triggered the need to engage critically in the wider politics of
cross-cultural collaboration as an integral aspect of practice. It becomes
increasingly urgent too to develop new theoretical models concerning the
imagined futures of painting and filmmaking, and the ways in which these are
impacted by shifts in the global art markets and institutionalized systems
of knowing and publicizing art. I have therefore regularly welcomed the
opportunity to initiate curatorial platforms that explore the contested
ideological spaces of art in the public realm, in other words, the ‘where we
are all heading’ questions in our media saturated worlds. However, only
certain kinds of issues can be addressed through public debate whilst others
must be resolved through being in the work itself, becoming one with the
logic of practice.
The role of drawing
Engaging in drawing is for me simultaneously a visual encounter and a
performance that reveals the worldview around which the rest of my practice
finds its form. It is the most spontaneous, deep-seated and recursive
element amidst other more complex and collectively authored projects in
filmmaking, in creating works for galleries and in critical research. My
film scripts are authored initially as sequences of drawings, my film sets
and designs for installations are imagined through drawing, and visual
diagrams frequently underscore lecture presentations and formats for
debates. But the primacy of drawing is also seen as an end in itself in my
work, without these design-driven functions. It permits a total immersion
into the performance of ‘the line’ and equally becomes the bedrock of the
collaborative projects.
Screen-based artworks and films
From 2003 to the present I have been working on a series of short films and
multi-screen installations for gallery and festival contexts. These
productions are intimate explorations of stage performers and choreographers
in dialogue with their work. Here, both the performance and the filmmaking
process converge on an existential level in the place where we intersect as
artists. Some of the artists with whom I have recently collaborated in India
are the theatre directors Veenapani Chawla, Vinay Kumar and Royston Abel,
and in the UK, Simon Vincenzi and Vayu Naidu. I also continue a studio-based
practice in parallel with these projects producing large scale drawing
installations and paintings. My role in the collaborative projects is not to
supply a ‘documentary record’ of the artists’ practices. Rather, we are
co-authoring and co-enacting a work based on what performance signifies for
us during the duration of the project. In my case, this links back to the
type of experience I undergo whilst drawing, but it becomes expanded under
my collaborators’ influence into a corporeal live dimension. Whilst my own
body (in the act of drawing) is experienced as partaking in a performance, I
do not mean for this to become the focal point for my audiences; the
drawings fulfil this function when they are later exhibited. It is rather
an open-ended authoring process that I seek with my collaborators whom I
film within the space-time that approximates the body memory of their craft.
I look for the pulse within the performer and respond intuitively to that
pulse. Sometimes these films may be scripted before I proceed to shoot,
having been involved in rehearsals or various form of preparatory methods
with the artists. At other times, I will intersect an ongoing production
where certain terms of our co-operation are mutually developed. A more
recent departure in 2010 is to film artists who do not belong to an
internationalized urban artists’ ‘intelligentsia’, but rather are followers
of devotional folk cultural movement in India known as the Warkari. This
introduces new questions and challenges about the impact my framing has on
the way in which their music and dance manifestations exist in the everyday.
It also shifts the parameters of what can be understood as ‘performance’
when it is linked to a devotional cult of people who would not think of
themselves as ‘artists’. For more on this, go to
forthcoming shows.
Between worlds: in performance
A recurring point of inquiry in my work is to consider what happens in the
process of adopting, and then discarding, the imaginary personae that
artists -particularly stage artists and ‘live artists’- depend on. Being at
the threshold between two states of reality, or being ‘in the collision
between two world cultures’, or being (metaphorically speaking) ‘on land
with sea legs’ can be a traumatic and vulnerable place, but it is also a
fertile point of departure for many journeys of self knowledge. By
‘personae’ here, I do not only mean the fictional roles from which actors
draw their behaviour, but also the ‘transitional states’ of those who
generate artworks or music, dance or film. This pluralism of creative
disciplines is important since each discipline speaks of its authors’ point
of entry to the reality they question. I have minutely observed and explored
this moment in some detail across many of my projects, both in film and in
painting and its thrall does not seem to diminish. This liminal space also
seems to stand for the various stations of performance that we required in
the cycle of our lives; in birth, in death and in change. It presses upon
you where your allegiances lay both politically and emotionally.
Between worlds: the geopolitics of ‘practice’
There is a particular kind of suspense and uncertainty that I associate and
have continually experienced when working with both filmed subjects and
collaborators, whether working on films that resemble ‘documentaries’ or
other that look more like ‘art’ films. Having observed how complex the
meeting of practices and perceptual frameworks can be between all
participants involved, I am now conducting a PhD research that addresses
this issue in a South Asian context, particularly where the filmmakers
concerned are engaging with ‘folk’ or ‘marginal’ cultural performance forms.
Thematically, this is a very current concern amongst avant-garde filmmaker
communities in India today, and one that does not have its equivalent in a
western art/documentary context, since the avant-garde and folk cultures in
Europe have been historicized as being mutually exclusive. The research
therefore becomes illuminating in area of the sociology of artists’
practice. It also encompasses an interdisciplinary and intercultural field
between film and performance practice. This research over the last three
years has significantly altered many of my assumptions about filmmaking and
performance methods, and indeed about the wider questions of
‘contemporality’ and ‘tradition’ when viewed through a geopolitically
sensitive lens.
Last updated 10.10.11
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