When Nikhil Tiwari and Friends Hold Hands with Marina Abromovic in Khairagarh

(Nikhil Tiwari and team performing Even Odd One)

‘Even Odd One’, conceptualized and performed by Nikhil Tiwari, a first year MFA Painting student at the ISKVV, Khairagarh was meant to be a part of Inktober Khairagarh Festival 2018, undertaken by a Mauritian student artist-curator, Akshay Seebaluck whose collaborative ink art project would be on display on 15^th October 2018 at an alternative exhibition venue at the basketball court in the campus. ‘Even Odd One’ started off as a complementary project however soon gained its own identity bringing out the desired participatory dynamics from among the student community by the artist-curator, Nikhil Tiwari. The project held at the ‘street’, the main road that runs through the small university campus had the resonances of the ‘notorious’ performance art piece titled ‘Rhythm 0’ by the grandmother of performance art, Marina Abromovic. More about it later.

Indira Sangeet Kala Viswa Vidyalaya aka ISKVV aka Khairagarh University is one of the exclusive universities in India that offers graduate and post graduate courses in only in ‘fine arts’ disciplines that include painting, sculpture, graphic arts, dance, music, instrumental music, theatre, folk art performances. Tucked inside a small town surrounded by expanses of rice fields and orchards, this university is at once well-known and ill-known. Seen as a small town university, it has not gained the so called ‘intellectual institute’ status amongst the mainstream academies in the country. However, the contributions of this university are no longer overlooked even by the Kochi Muziris Biennale organization. While Khairagarh is known for its graphics art department headed by Prof.V.Nagdas, the repute of the same faculty is known in a global scenario as the Graphics Art Department conducts annual international printmaking symposiums which are attended regularly by famous printmakers from at least ten different countries.

Students still bend down to touch the feet of the teachers; the Vice Chancellor is fondly called Didi (elder sister) by the students. A sense of tradition envelops the university whose main building is a small of palace of the erstwhile kings. The traditional appearance could be a bit deceptive for the university has all the facilities including 24x7 free wifi connectivity, gym, hostels within the campus, canteen, basketball and volleyball court, garden, two auditoriums and much more. A state of the art gallery is soon to be completed to house a permanent collection of contemporary art and a regular gallery. But when it comes to radical performance art, may be the tradition poses some hurdles for the students. The clever ones overcome the hurdles with their neatly planned projects and ‘Even Odd One’ is one such program nicely packaged to get the accolades even from the teaching community and the village folks who use the campus road as a thoroughfare.

Nikhil Tiwari conceptualized the whole performance as a social experiment project in which he wanted to show the ‘soft’ and ‘tough’ side of feminine nature and at the same time he wanted to tell the people that the ‘male world was not that bad’. Discussions on feminist and the feminine aspect of women in the contemporary societies held in various occasions in my classes had led him to come up with such a project. The project demanded a collective participation of the female students who at some point developed ideological differences with the conceptualizer and in a way he was abandon the project. Clever as he is always, Nikhil Tiwari could tweak the whole project into an ink hurling project where he managed to get two fellow female students and another willing male artist from his own class. They were dressed up in white and black attire and black and white colors were ready for the audience to throw at the performers. Nikhil’s idea was to highlight the human qualities; the nature of nature is contrast- white could carry black and black could carry white. In the process of carrying the other in oneself, one’s own identity merges with the other thereby nullifying all kinds of discriminations. But at the same time, the natural outcome of the project was the possible orgy of violence when the performers make themselves available objects to be smeared upon by ink. The splash of black and white started off in a slower pace only to gain momentum by the seventh minute or so and everyone was attacking the performers with black and white ink till their identities were merged into an abstraction. The white backdrop against which the whole performance took place remained the only ‘archive’ of such interaction/violent interaction/playful interaction which would be carrying the story of the enacted violence for the posterity. This backdrop carrying the stains of ink would be on display at the Inktober venue on 15^th October 2018.

About her six hour long performance titled ‘Rhythm 0’ in Italy in 1974, Marina Abromovic said, “This work reveals something about humanity. It shows how fast a person can hurt you under favorable circumstances. It shows how easy it is to dehumanize a person who does not fight, who does not defend himself. It shows that if he provides the stage, the majority of the ‘normal’ people, apparently can become truly violent.’ This forty four year old statement rings true even today. When Nikhil’s performance started the students were hesitant to attack him and his friends with ink. So the volunteers wearing Inktober uniform came to fore and started doing the needful only to give a cue to the onlookers who soon became willing participants in the attack and the volunteers had to stop the attackers on the midway to protect the eyes of the performers from the constant ink attack. Abromovic was not speaking about India’s mob lynching today. But Nikhil’s project could push it towards the mob lynching tendencies that contemporary India has been showing in the recent times. A person with a clear identity could turn into the arms of a faceless mob provided he/she is given the ‘right occasion’.  Both Abromovic and Yves Klein have been the source of inspiration for the Inktober artists in Khairagarh so far and on 15^th more surprises are waiting in wings for you; perhaps some of them would be the first of its kind in the history of Khairagarh.