2012-2016
Australindopak Archive
Australindopak Archive
Australindopak Archive. Details. Watercolour, oil paint, found material, paper-cut, embroidered panels, gold and silver leaf, paper scrolls, voice, found sound.
Scroll I: 3mx25cm. Scroll II: 10mx25cm. Scroll III: 10x25cm. 70 sound compositions. Distributed throughout.
Scroll I: 3mx25cm. Scroll II: 10mx25cm. Scroll III: 10x25cm. 70 sound compositions. Distributed throughout.
The Australindopak Archive chronicles three years of increasingly immersive journeys in Australia, India, and Pakistan. The archive comprises three extended scroll paintings that together with seventy associated audio works explore experiences of crossing cultures. Themes such as non/belonging, transience, and desire for connection recurrent throughout these journeys often contextualised my encounters with people, animals, plants, and environments.
The Archive developed incrementally as an act of diary keeping. I made it on scrolls of paper that I carried and which, as I travelled, I made drawings and paintings. The scrolls contain hundreds of little stories that take the form of vignettes, portraits, self-portraits, anecdotes, notes, and also collaboratively-generated paintings. Cross cultural in form as well as in content, the paintings were made using a fusion of techniques that include styles of Indian and Persian miniature painting, techniques of marbling, life drawing, plein air painting, collage, memory drawing, translucent and opaque watercolour techniques, paper cut, and gold and silver leaf.
As I walked and navigated places, on the street alongside making drawings and collecting material for collage, I carried an audio recorder and collected sound. Some of this sound took the form of informal interviews or recordings of conversations. Other recordings were of environmental sounds, songs I heard being sung on trains or buses, and anecdotes which I might speak out loud in response to an encounter with a place or situation. These recordings became material with which I could play and edit, to expand stories in the paintings.
The paintings and sound pieces have bene unified within the three virtual interactive tours that make up the Australindopak Archive. These tours allow the panoramic scrolls to be navigated in entirety. Individual paintings may be magnified using the tool bar, and audio recordings can be listened to by clicking the hotspots outlined in green or purple. These hotspots may also be turned off for uninterrupted viewing of the paintings.
Click on an image above to engage in an interactive tour of scrolls I, II, and III of the Australindopak Archive.
Michal shows how the scroll can be shared with small audiences using the 'Crankie' display case.
Initial stages of making the paintings in the Australindopak Archive involved a lot of sketching in-situ, providing opportunities to share the scrolls with people who I drew, and interested passers by. These impromptu sharings made a storyteller of me, an idea that deepened when I spent time with artists of the Chitrakar community in Naya, West Bengal. These artists practice a caste-inherited nine hundred odd-years old folk art form known as Patuya Sangit or 'Scroll Song'. They still travel around, performing their scrolls. Though now this is often at conferences, sometimes they will go their neighbours and sit, unfurling their scroll, singing all the while. People will turn off their televisions. Children will come and be captured.Gifts of money and food will be given.
Though mostly exhibited as a static work, the Australindopak Archive, like the scrolls of the Patuya artists comes to life being shared in intimate settings for small audiences. Displaying a scroll utilises a 'Crankie' - a custom-made display box, pictured above.
Acknowledgement to Omair Raza and realising the virtual tours for the Australindopak Archive