Mala Yamey: 'Mapping Diasporic Entanglements'

“...I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue...” 

- Sujata Bhatt, Search for My Tongue, 1988 

For hundreds of years, South Asia and the West have been linked by exchanges of people and ideas. For many members of the South Asian diaspora, their sense of belonging is suspended between multiple worlds. The connecting threads of the self are held in tension, and as the thin membrane of diasporic identity becomes increasingly porous, we find coping mechanisms to hold together a sense of cultural identity. Methods to navigate these many tongues are hard to find in daily life, but contemporary art practice offers hope in untangling the feeling of being tongue-tied.

I found a poetic guide to unravelling this diasporic puzzle in the practice of British-Indian artist Paul Purgas. Paul Purgas is an artist, curator and musician based in London and is one half of the electronic music duo Emptyset. He recently devised installations at Tramway in Glasgow (2021) and Kunstverein Gartenhaus in Vienna (2022). Purgas’ work draws on the neglected archive of 20th-century Indian modernism, bringing it into dialogue with the contemporary imaginary. I spoke with him about the ways in which his installations entangle temporalities and geographies.

Purgas focuses on excavating global art histories and mapping the non-linearity of the events of Indian modernism. Unlike Western modernism, postcolonial modernisms cannot be understood as following a teleological pattern of development “in the manner of the stations of the cross,” and instead, the multiple moments of postcolonial modernisms should be seen as “criss-crossing” Euro-American art histories. [1] Applying a similar approach to Geeta Kapur’s seminal text “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?” (2000), Purgas investigates the relationships between Indian and American modernism in the immediate postcolonial period. He first became fascinated by this period when he discovered twenty-five hours of electronic music tapes at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, which he restored and digitised. The tapes were recorded at India’s first electronic music studio, housing the first Moog synthesiser in the country, which was set up at NID in 1969 by the American experimental musician David Tudor at the invitation of Gautam and Gira Sarabhai.

The Sarabhais were wealthy Indian industrialists who ran the NID, funded by the Ford Foundation at the time as part of America’s Cold War soft-power strategy. They were hugely influential in bringing Euro-American Modernism to India and cultivating a fertile ground for Indian modernism. Their brother, Vikram, collaborated with NASA on ISRO, the first Indian space programme. Gira was an architect and musician, who had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and John Cage in New York. The Sarabhais hosted countless international artists at their family home in Ahmedabad, designed by Le Corbusier in 1951, including Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, and Isamu Noguchi. For Purgas, the NID tapes represent a form of sonic transmission from this lost moment in Indian musical history. He views his installations as a “crystal” to hold up this moment of unrealised potential to the light, and to refract these multiple histories.

In the multi-sensory installation ‘We Found Our Own Reality’ Purgas “stitched together” the NID archival material to bring this historical moment into the present for contemporary audiences. Purgas installed his new sound work in an immersive room with deep teal acoustic panels, two Pierre Jeanneret chairs, and a single lota holding a stick of sandalwood incense. The only figurative element in the installation was the hand of the Indian dancer Chandralekha, screen-printed onto a teal panel, her bangled and bejewelled hand instantly recognisable as that of an Indian woman. The image was taken from the cover of an issue of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’s journal entitled “American Artists in India 1970-72.” The chairs, now synonymous with mid-century design, nod to Jeanneret’s collaboration with his cousin Le Corbusier on the city of Chandigarh in the Punjab, while the lota refers to Charles and Ray Eames’ “The India Report” of 1958. The Eameses were commissioned by the Indian government to produce recommendations for a national design training programme; in the report, they heralded the lota (water carrier) as “the greatest, the most beautiful” symbol of pure Indian design.[2] These elements form “insignia” for Purgas to navigate the enmeshed relationships between Indian and Euro-American modernism in the 1970s. Immersing the viewer in a tapestry of the original recordings from Tudor’s Moog, the electronic sounds blur any preconceived notions of temporality. “What’s great about the sonic,” Purgas says, “is you have the capacity to eject from the paradigm of temporality to create something more sensory and transportive.”

At Tramway, with more space to play with, Purgas combined his atemporal electronic composition with architectural designs and acoustic panels in colours akin to the traditional dyes of Gujarati fabrics. This heightened the “slippery sense of temporality” for Purgas, positioning the foundations of Indian modernism as a meeting point between the ancient and modern. A double diamond floor sculpture in the installation was inspired by the Indian architect Aditya Prakash’s 1961 design of the Tagore Theatre in Chandigarh. Prakash had studied at the Glasgow School of Art before working with Le Corbusier on the modular city of Chandigarh. By juxtaposing Prakash’s design with European modernist architectural traditions, Purgas recentred the importance of the Indian architect.

The floating smoke from the sandalwood incense acted as a “musical counterpoint and metaphor” for “something human, immeasurable and unruly that is interacting with the rationalistic modern industrialised visual vocabulary.” Redolent of the South Asian diasporic experience, the wafting incense within Purgas’ installation resists containment. He incorporated the feeling of “something human” with the height of each speaker, which corresponded with the Indian standard height taken from NID’s Indian Anthropometric Dimensions for Ergonomic Design. [3] This survey proposed an alternative to Le Corbusier’s modular system; the NID undertook a nationwide survey to make design ergonomic for the South Asian body. They recorded data from both men and women to make a unified genderless standard. Inserting the South Asian body into the Tramway space along with the spectral sounds of the NID archive, Purgas crafted a haunting image of a modernist future that never quite arrived, because of the structural, economic, and geopolitical headwinds.

Through Purgas’ holistic environments he evokes not only possible futures, but also contemporary reimaginings of cross-cultural art histories. His “insignias” speak together in the space to reflect the threads of multiple histories that yearn to be spoken. These devices resist temporal and geographical categorisations. Although his work is a product of his research into electronic music, he acknowledges the inescapable nature of his diasporic experience. He explains that “the diasporic nature of my existence sits within the wheel.” For Purgas, the “wheel” represents how understandings of histories and identity exist within a unified circular space. These feelings are constantly being messily mapped, leaving us tongue-tied in expressing ourselves. In crafting a “postcolonial poetic” through the sonic, Purgas does not centre historic and geopolitical discourse explicitly, but instead finds a more meaningful way to imagine the histories and futures of diasporic entanglements. 

[1] Geeta Kapur, ‘When Was Modernism in Indian Art?’, in When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, by Geeta Kapur (New Delhi: Tulika
Books, 2000), 297.

[2] Charles Eames and Ray Eames, The India Report (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 1958), 8.

[3] Debkumar Chakrabarti, Indian Anthropometric Dimensions (For Ergonomic Design Practice) (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design), 1997.

Mala Yamey is an independent curator, writer, and art historian. She works as the Program Manager for Art South Asia Project and Associate Assistant Curator for Invisible Dust. She has a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art. In June 2022, she graduated with an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, where her thesis focussed on transnational exhibition histories around South Asia.