Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s HOME1947 reimagines Partition at the Manchester International Festival

The Pakistani filmmaker’s project at the Manchester International Festival marks the anniversary of a cataclysm, writes Nick Leech.

“When we think about refugees and wars and displacement, it’s all too political today. It’s about ‘us’ and ‘them’; about ‘their’ way of life and how it’s going to impact ‘our’ way of life. It’s all about boundaries,” says the award-winning Pakistani journalist, filmmaker and activist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

The crossing of borders is central to the Academy Award- and Emmy- and Academy Award-winning director’s latest project, HOME1947, which received its world premiere in June 2017 at The Lowry in Salford, Greater Manchester.

At a time when the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide has risen to an estimated 65.6 million according to the UN Refugee Agency, its highest level ever, HOME1947 could not be more timely. Yet and yet, as its title suggests, its immediate focus is not on the present but on the creation of Pakistan by partition, a 70-year-old event that still stands as one of the greatest migrations in human history.

The filmmaker’s first immersive installation, HOME1947 examines the human cost of the sub-division of the Indian subcontinent Subcontinent along religious lines, a process that began on 15 August 15, 1947, but still resonates today.

The creation of India and Pakistan saw Hindus and Sikhs cross new borders in one direction while Muslims travelled in the other amidst an unparalleled wave of murder, destruction and savage sectarian and sexual violence.

Within a few months, more than 10 million people were displaced, almost two2 million had died and an estimated 75,000 women were raped in an event that the Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, has described as a defining moment that “continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”.

Part of this year’s Manchester International Festival, HOME1947 has been devised by Obaid-Chinoy, in collaboration with the United Kingdom UK and Pakistan-based producers Shanaz Gulzar, Aleeha Badat and Maheen Sadiq, the Karachi-based architect Ali Asghar Alavi and filmmaker Kamal Khan, the musician Ahsan Bari, and the Islamabad-based photographer Mobeen Ansari.

Despite the team effort, however, the installation remains a deeply personal endeavour for Obaid-Chinoy, whose previous projects have included A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (20152016) and Saving Face (2012), Academy Award- and Emmy-winning documentaries that addressed issues of honour killings and acid attacks in her native Pakistan.

“I’ve been thinking about partition for a long time, so when the festival approached me, I knew that it would be the ideal subject for my very first installation,” she tells me. “The thing about history and 1947 is that it’s always very political, but I grew up listening to my grandparents’ stories about the childhood homes they left behind, the smell of the earth when it rained, the fragrance of jasmine in the spring and the friendships they longed to rekindle, and so I wanted to make it very personal.”

The 48-metre-long, four4-part installation consists of a series of interiors that use archival footage, film, music, objects and 360-degree photographs of abandoned homes to pay tribute to the generation who lived through the rupture and violent legacy of Partition.

“We want people to feel like they are back in the Indian subcontinent in 1947. One day your home was your home, but the next it was in another, enemy country,” explains Obaid-Chinoy, who has even employed the unmistakable fragrance of night-flowering jasmine to evoke a sense of place.

Despite the scale of the tragedy and its role in the formation of contemporary Indian and Pakistani identities, Obaid-Chinoy has taken every effort to avoid issues of nationalism and religion.

“It’s not about who did what; it’s about the individual and their experience,” she explains. “So at no point in any of the installations do you know whether somebody is from the Indian or the Pakistani side of the border.”

The installation draws on oral testimonies and old photographs that the filmmaker has been collecting since 2007 when she founded the Citizen’s Archive of Pakistan, with the aim of recording Pakistan’s vernacular history, and Obaid-Chinoy has also collaborated with the Partition Museum in Amritsar to gain access to similar material from India.

The decision to commission Obaid-Chinoy was made last year in 2016 by the Manchester International Festival’s new artistic director, John McGrath, who spent months travelling the world searching for the right mix of artists who could create brand new works for the MIF’s extraordinary 18-day run.

These include the Pakistani musician Sanam Marvi, a master of the epic qawwali style of devotional singing, and the Indian playback singer Harshdeep Kaur, both of whom will perform on stage in Sangam 2017, an evening of Sufi music that will mark the installation’s opening.

“Rather than commissioning a documentary from Sharmeen, we gave her the opportunity to work in a different way,” says McGrath says. “But even though HOME1947 is talking about something that happened 70 years ago, it’s also talking about something that’s happening today, – how things like violence can erupt when the world changes and how we get back to humanity and the things that we value.”

After the festival, Obaid-Chinoy plans to take HOME1947 to a second venue in the UK, before touring Pakistan and India, and hopes that the installation will play a part in a new living history museum that she plans to open in Lahore next year in 2018.

“Anybody that has ever left home, been asked to leave home and not been able to return will find a resonance in HOME1947, because if you listen to these stories, you feel for people because you realise leaving your home changes you forever,” the filmmaker saysinsists. “Today, the world is in conflict and families are making the same journey, and I want people to go through the installation and think about every refugee who has to leave home and the feelings they carry with them.”

This article originally appeared in The National

 

 

 

Art: Howard Hodgkin – a very private collector

Sotheby’s auction offers an unprecedented insight into the life and passions of the late Howard Hodgkin, a famously private artist.

On Tuesday, Sotheby’s will host an auction in London that will afford visitors and bidders a glimpse into the very private and intimate world of one the greatest artists of the late 20th century.

Hodkin’s living room in Bloomsbury included wall hung 19th century Persian carpets, a 16th century Spanish statue of a saint, a brass 16/17th century brass pilgrim flask, from the Deccan, India, a bust of King George II (1683-1760) by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack, (c.1739), 18th century relief panels with Allegories, Britain, 18th century, a mirror from the manor of John Vardy (c.1740), a bust of King Louis XIV (c. 1700-15) and a 19th century Venetian armchair. Sotheby’s

Howard Hodgkin died on March 9 at the age of 84, and like Henri Matisse, Yves Saint Laurent and Sol LeWitt before him, he not only left behind a vast body of work, but also a profoundly personal cabinet of curiosities that attests to his status as one of the great artist-collectors, a passionate connoisseur whose possessions reflected his interests, as well as served as his inspiration and muse. “There are moments in people’s lives when the desire to possess works of art takes possession of them, and that is of course where – as an almost registered sufferer – I know all about it,” the painter admitted in the 1980s.

A contemporary of David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Blake and John Hoyland, Hodgkin came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s – he shared his first show with Jones at London’s ICA Gallery in 1962 – but by the time he had his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, Hodgkin was better known in the art world as a collector than as a painter.

As a child, Hodgkin had grown up surrounded by objects, thanks to the prodigious collection formed by his great-grandparents. An account of the eclectic acquisitions and assemblages of largely English antiques was published by John Eliot Hodgkin in 1900, in three volumes called Rariora, listing “things wondrous, rare and strange”.

In the 1970s, Hodgkin supplemented his income as an artist and art teacher by trading in antiques, especially frames. As a lifelong pedestrian, he would often hitchhike around the country in pursuit of rare examples.

It was a quest that continued throughout Hodgkin’s life. Frames came to play a significant role in his paintings, which were always executed on wood and boards, never on canvas. When he travelled, he would often look for frames to take home with him, incorporating them in paintings of the place or trip from which they originated. Despite this, and his lifelong love of objects associated with South India and Central Asia – Hodgkin first visited India in 1964 and then returned almost annually – his approach to collecting was emphatically not one of a traveller in search of souvenirs.

From left: Bust of a female courtier, French, late 19th/early 20th century and a large bowl from the Deccan, India, circa 1900. Sotheby’s

“I particularly don’t like objects of sentiment: people who have things not because they like and admire them, but because they have associations. You should have what you want, what you like, around you,” the painter told World of Interiors’s Mirabel Cecil in 1989. “Things have to be acquired out of necessity, as well as passion.”

Those passions were evident from the items Hodgkin assembled in his central London home, a modest-looking house in Bloomsbury where the painter lived for more than 30 years, and from the outside offered no clues of the treasures contained within: French Aubusson tapestries and rare carpets from Khorasan, Indian miniatures, Ottoman candlesticks, relief panels and his particular passion, tiles.

It was Hodgkin’s art master at Eton, Wilfrid Blunt – the art historian Anthony Blunt’s brother – who first introduced him to non-western art and who inspired him to collect his first examples of Indian painting, which became the focus of Hodgkin’s passion.

“I think of collecting as a sort of virus really, and I was infected … It is an addiction,” said the painter, who was known to keep auction catalogues and a tape measure by his bedside, ready in case a potential new acquisition might delight and capture his eye.

“‘It’s all grist to the mill,’ Howard insisted … he collected in order to create new work. What he acquired fed into his work,” Hodgkin’s partner, Antony Peattie, explains in the 351-page catalogue that accompanies Sotheby’s 453-lot sale.

Much of that work was executed in the studio that was connected to Hodgkin’s house, but whose appearance could not have been more different. Whereas the building’s domestic interiors were festooned with objects and finished in colours such as a particular shade of pale blue-green, which Hodgkin referred to as “Indian vernacular”, his studio was a classic example of a modernist white cube, albeit one converted from a 19th-­century dairy.

The contrast between Hodgkin’s home and studio is instructive. Glass-roofed, white-walled and lit only by natural daylight, the artist’s studio was furnished only with comfortable chairs, painting equipment and large canvasses that were constructed solely for the purpose of concealing works in progress, some of which were literally years in the making.

Hodgkin’s studio, a converted dairy lit only by natural light, is linked directly to the house. The canvases were not for painting, Hodgkin only painted on wooden boards, but for covering his paintings while they were still works in progress. Sotheby’s

As Peattie explained, as Hodgkin grew older, so his work was conducted increasingly in his mind and through observation. Paintings were left facing the studio wall and only turned around at moments of inspiration, by which time their compositions and strokes had already been envisaged, enabling the painter to execute the swift, confident brushstrokes that were to become such a defining feature of his later work.

Hodgkin always insisted that painting was a torturous and solitary experience, which only became easier at the very end of his life, whereas collecting was quite the opposite. “Painting in a studio is naturally a lonely occupation,” he said. “Collecting, on the other hand, brings with it an almost automatic series of introductions, social contacts, with dealers, scholars and occasionally with fellow collectors.”

For Hodgkin, those collection-­based friendships not only included people who became fans and collectors of his work, such as the novelist Julian Barnes and the poet Seamus Heaney, but also people whose work he collected, such as Patrick Caulfield, whom Hodgkin once described as “the closest I ever came to having a painter-colleague”, and Bhupen Khakhar, whose De-Luxe Tailors (1972) promises to be one of the star lots in the forthcoming sale.

Hodgkin became friends with the collector Robert Erskine and through him, the network of Parisian dealers, including Charles “Uncle Charlie” Ratton. Robert Skelton, then assistant keeper at the V&A, also became a lifelong friend, who introduced him to other connoisseurs and collectors, such as Milo C Beach and Stuart Cary Welch, and filmmaker James Ivory, another famous collector of Indian miniatures whose career, like Hodgkin’s, was also transformed by visits to the Indian subcontinent.

According to Hodgkin’s wishes, the proceeds from various lots in the forthcoming auction will be donated to charities such as the Whitechapel Gallery education programme, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

Hodgkin’s carefully displayed collection of antique procelain and a Mughal Chini Kana Panel from Agra, circa 1620. A Chini Khana was an architectural element often used in Mughal garden design comprising a series of sandstone walls such as the present example which were carved with recessed niches of varied forms on which oil lamps or floral vases could be placed. The term ‘Chini Khana’ itself can be translated as ‘China Cabinet’. Sotheby’s

“Howard liked the idea of a sale after his death. The objects have served their purpose to him, they were what he called his ‘must-haves’ that, in some mysterious way, fed his work,” Peattie explains.

“The sale represents a personal portrait of Howard. And it will enable his executors to fulfil his wishes.”

Howard Hodgkin: Portrait of the Artist is on display at Sotheby’s, London, with the auction to take place on Tuesday. Howard Hodgkin: India on Paper runs at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until January 7; for more, see www.victoriagal.org.uk/events

This article was originally published in The National

Art: You Can’t Please All – Bhupen Khakhar’s Bombay

Economy, geography, demography and even the climate – there are many reasons for the rise and fall of great cities, but when we come to remember their trajectories we do so not through the lenses of the social or physical sciences but through the art and culture they produce.

In the same way that the journals of the Goncourt brothers, Baudelaire’s essays and the urban paintings of the Impressionists now frame our vision of 19th century Paris, the works of George Grosz, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht have helped to define popular memories of early 20th century Berlin. But who will provide the images, script and soundtrack by which the great cities of the early 21st century will be judged?

If growth, density, wealth and creativity are any guide to a city’s status then Mumbai already qualifies as one of the world’s great metropolises and if the curators of a new exhibition at London’s Tate Modern have their way then Bhupen Khakhar’s work will help to define the way future generations remember its rise.

For the rest of this story, please visit The National

Image: Bhupen Khakhar, You Can’t Please All (1981). Courtesy the estate of Bhupen Khakhar.