Australindopak Archive
2012-2016
Australindopak Archive scrolls I II III. Details. Watercolour, oil paint, found material, papercut, embroidered panels, gold and silver leaf, paper scrolls, field generated sound, voice composition, found sound. 3x1000cmx25cm (entire). Audio x 70 sections.
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 any of the above images to engage in an interactive tour of scrolls I, II, and III of the Australindopak Archive.
Michal Glikson demonstrating how the scroll can be shared and performed for small audiences using the 'Crankie' display case.
Initial stages of making the paintings in the Australindopak Archive involved sketching in-situ. This gave me opportunities to shared the scrolls with the people I drew, and interested passers by. These impromptu performances made a storyteller of me, an idea that deepened when I spent time with artists of the Chitrakar community in Naya, West Bengal who practice a caste-inherited nine hundred years old folk art form known as Patuya Sangit or 'Scroll Song'.
Though able to be exhibited as a static work, the Australindopak Archive, like the scrolls of the Patuya artists comes to life being shared and performed for small audiences. Displaying a scroll involves a 'Cranky' - a special rolling display box made of perspex, pictured above.
Acknowledgement to Omair Raza who created the virtual tours for the Australindopak Archive through innovations with architectural software.
Scan the icon with phone to donate or express support for the artist and her scroll practice.
Scan the icon with phone to donate or express support for the artist and her scroll practice.