Games for Artists or Artists' Games? - A conversation with Paribartana Mohanty

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens, initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process. Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

This afternoon I am very happy to welcome back Paribartana Mohanty. Paribartana is a storyteller working with various artistic media, such as video, lecture performance, painting, writing and curating. In addition to his individual work, he is also part of WALA, an artist collective based in Delhi engaged in public, community and site-specific art projects, public performances and guided tours in the city. In October 2019, Paribartana came to Athens as a participant of the (Inter)national Residency program of Onassis AiR. In this conversation we discuss about his research into art and labor and more specifically into the notion of art field cannibalism that he tries to tackle in his work through the design of game situations.

Paribartana, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you Myrto.

It is so nice to have you back. It's been more than two years now that you were in Athens and I am looking forward to reflect together on your time here. I would like to start with the night of your lecture performance that we hosted at Onassis AiR where you introduced us to your practice through some stories, in which you used a mix of mythological, historical and actual incidents that were happening in India at that time. Most of these stories had to do with exploitation. I would like to start this conversation by asking you, how did you start engaging with stories of exploitation in your art practice?

There's no linear answer for this, though there are some incidents, which were provocative. The first was, if I remember correctly, Kochi Students' Biennale in 2016, where I was one of those 14 curators appointed for the selection of students' work for the Biennale. Our job was to travel in different states in India. We visited almost fifty five art schools where we met art students, teachers from all over and found students' work for the Biennale. This experience was eye opening as I got to know how students were exploited, not only by outsiders —galleries or other outside agents of the art world— but also by the teachers themselves. Lots of teachers take their students for commercial work, commissioned work. They use them and they are hardly paid. When you go deeper, you see that these forms of exploitation are layered based on different issues such as gender, caste, class and money and many other forms. This event was one of the first where I understood briefly what is this exploitation all about.

Then, of course, the #MeToo movement, which brought another layer to my understanding of the same issue. We all were kind of aware of these #MeToo stories before it became a movement, but through gossips. It was more like gossiping, talking about these exploitation and harassment stories, laughing over it. Never knew that these stories can be so intense or that they would have haunting or dramatic effects on people. I know women and men, both. I am not saying it is one or another. Everyone was laughing and sharing. So this was another incident that again attracted me and pushed me to think about the exploitation in the art world. But when I searched deeper, I found a long thread connected to historical events and mythologies, where young artists have been exploited or sacrificed. This notion of the young, which is discussed a lot in the art world, like in open calls that say up to 35 years old —until 35 you are young. This idea of young in relation to labor, suffering, and death fascinated me a lot. So that's how I started.

It is interesting to me how in your practice, you use the notion of "cannibalism" to refer to this kind of relation of exploitation.

You know, as humans, for our individual or collective morals and ethics, I think cannibalism becomes a very fascinating, provocative cultural question and people have been answering and dealing with this anxiety throughout history. We do detach ourselves or align with this idea based on our compulsion, on profits, etc. My use of the term cannibalism came from my understanding of the art world as a monolith collective, like when we talk about the art fraternity or the art field or the art world as family. I don't know how to say it. When we say art world, it seems like art world is not part of this world. It is another family, another body. So it was this question of morality and ethics, which is always attached to creative practice. From there, this idea of cannibalism came. But I used the term more confidently when I read the Cannibalist Manifesto, where cannibalism was used as another term "anthropophagy". Its etymology and the way the word is pronounced and sounds attracted me. I found "Cannibalist Manifesto" very thoughtful and thought provoking, the way it connected with savage, colonialism and the critique of European modernism. I guess in India we are facing the same question. So this is how I use the term and I think it was very suitable for my project and made it attractive in some way.

I think we all have one story of exploitation to share and it is very common not only in the art field, of course. I think one of the reasons that these stories get perpetuated is because they remain hidden or not shared. I want to go back to the format of the game that you employ to address this dysfunctionality of the art world and ask you, how did you come up with the idea of designing a game situation?

Before answering that I just want to add one sentence. As you said, we all have one story of exploitation to share. I think we all have two exploitation stories to share. One is where we are exploited and another where we have exploited someone else. So that is how I am understanding the art world and the whole story of exploitation now. Before the idea of the game came to being I was already writing and expressing my anxiety and my struggle in the art world in Delhi and in different hierarchical systems. I was writing about it in social media with my unsophisticated broken language. I studied art history, but was never interested in the theoretical articulation of the stories, like long writing or something like that. The idea of the game came to me in 2017 in a workshop on games conducted by artist Carsten Holler at Botin Foundation that happened in Santander, Spain. Carsten Holler invited a group of young artists from all over the world and we were supposed to make a book of games. There, I tried a few things and the whole experience kind of challenged my perception about the art world because in some way I thought I was exploited there, because we were not paid enough —we were paid a one-way ticket and some place to stay. Anyway, this is how I got to know that I can make games about these complex issues.

I would like to go back to your remark that we all have two stories to share in the end, being exploited and also exploiting others. Thank you for pointing this out. In a way, you are using the game as a form or a strategy of critique of the situation.

Yeah, you are right and that's because I think that the act of criticizing or critiquing, that critique is a big inherent problem. A critique can be trapped in binaries if it lacks a proposition and sometimes when you criticize too much for too long, the subject becomes immune and the subjectivity sounds like a rhetorical question. Then you are unable to hear what is happening outside or beyond the binaries and in public domain, the critic appears to be the moralist somehow. And it's not a nice place to be. This is what I realized in 2014 when I started writing on social media, but it took me some time to formally convert. The biggest challenge in this practice is that you hear stories as gossip, but converting that story into a game situation is really challenging. We have to plot it somewhere, like a theater story. You have to find a character —good or bad or evil. So it took some time. I think around 2016 I started this process and I thought that this is a better way to critique —these games where the participants are mostly artists and they would be playing this hypothetically. Actually, what happens is that this reality becomes a hypothesis, because you play the character, so maybe you feel victim in your real life, but in the game you may become the perpetrator, the criminal. So I found it very interesting to use this strategy —the games— to critique.

In the past, you have developed different games, like the "Game for promising young artists" or the "Game for young artists". Can you walk us through these games? How do we enter the game and are there any different scenarios or conflict situations that the participants have to confront while playing the games?

I forgot to mention that the stories of exploitation are also stories of resistance. So the first game I wrote is the "Game for promising young artists", where young artists play a game. This game is kind of an international game with different characters worldwide —the way you said you were having this meeting for the future of Onassis AiR programming. So it's a similar kind of game where you gather, for example, five international artists and we meet through Zoom and then we make a proposal and we get the phone number from some founders like, for example, the Onassis founders, and we get a big amount from them, supposedly one million dollars. That money will go to my account and the next day it will go to your account in Athens. Then, the next day you will forward that money to another person in Europe or in America or in Africa. So this money will circulate and that's the logic of capitalism, how money circulation increases. But what will happen here? The condition is —and this is also an art project— that the money will circulate, but you can't debate it. You can't take anything from the base money and when the money will come to my account again after one week, I have to pay taxes continuously. So this is a way I'll go bankrupt gradually. The money will come to my account. The money will pass. You have to keep forwarding. All the players need to keep forwarding these money and they have to pay tax for that. So this is kind of an exploitation game and this idea came when I realized that as an artist you have to write proposals all the time, then wait for another proposal and then hardly are there any proposals, which suggest that artists can have their fee. All these games have different strategies, like the game I was just narrating. Suppose that the money went to your account and you did not forward it. You just vanished. You just took it and ran away. So that's also another possibility, but this is not written in the game. So there are moments of confrontation. There are moments of humiliation. There is exploitation, but it's all satirical. I know that this game it would never be possible to be played. No organization would agree to give you one million dollars just to rotate it like this and criticize them.

I guess one of the elements of these games is that it also puts you in a place where you have to rethink your own system of values. Paribartana, in Athens your research also involved the process of designing a new game with art students or young artists from the local scene. There is always a collective aspect in the design of the games, as you described. Can you walk us through this process?

Collectivity and collaboration have always been an important part of my practice, sometimes as an internal or hidden process and sometimes as visible elements or spectacle. Here in Athens, I was interested in the visible aspect of this collectivity. This idea comes from my work with WALA collective in Delhi where we have explored many forms of gathering that are human, non-human, political, survival, festivals or the instinctive idea of gathering —why people gather together, why they are seen as a collective. In this context of the art world, there are different forms of gathering which we encounter in our everyday lives, like gathering in the gallery, opening parties, seminars, gathering in school or colleges, public performances, or protest gatherings and so on. There are also museums, galleries, artist-run spaces which host gatherings. So that's how I was coming to this idea of collectivity and collaboration in Athens. What is interesting about this form is that they are malleable. They are vague. They emerge and in certain intervals they disappear and then they again reappear. There are proximities and distances between the characters of these, if we can say these are clusters —I mean hierarchies. So I was interested in all of this and in my game I wanted to talk and to articulate about the art world's responsibilities and particularly about labor exploitation resistance. I thought it's necessary to make a group and bring some stakeholders or practitioners into the process just to have multiple perspectives to make the narrative more complex. And also, this is a way to bring more voices and stories.

The process in Athens was kind of developed through many discussions with Ash and Nefeli because the residency was for one month and we were very scared of how to go through this long process. Because, you know, all these games and what I said previously is that it takes a lot of time to meet people, to collect stories and to convert the story into a game situation. So I was interested and Nefeli and Ash suggested to gather an audience before the residency started and kind of continue and talk about my interest and whatever story they would have. There were two ideas I was interested in. One was documenta 14, which happened in Athens and the economic crisis in Athens in 2008. These two events were very provocative to me, from a distance.

Two very hot topics in the Greek scene. In just one month, you managed to form this work group and you had four meetings, if I am correct.

Yeah.

In a way, storytelling became a platform for you to initiate a discussion. Was this also the case in the work group that you formed here in Athens?

Yeah. In the workshop the very first idea was to start with storytelling only, just like a casual meeting and gossiping. Then no one would feel bothered or intimidated or bored. We thought that when you ask for a story or even share your own story, people feel intimidated. When you ask people or any individual to tell you about their victimhood in public, where there are more people and they are not your friends, people get apprehensive and scared. But there are also other layers. For example, the issues which people feel seriously about in Athens. What I am trying to say is that the issues which were important in Athens are not the same in India, for example. In India, the question of gender or caste related harassment are more visible, whereas in Europe and in Athens it becomes more about labor, wage and time. People do multiple jobs to survive — that's mostly what I've seen as an outsider. This intensity changes. So the story also changes.

I guess it's interesting to observe in parallel, you know, these contrasting elements between Greece and India for you. I was just wondering whether you faced any challenges along this process. How did this process with these new people evolved during these meetings?

Definitely, it's a big challenge when you have to do this kind of intense project in one month. The first challenge is that you see a lot of new faces. There is cultural difference, the intensity as individuals or as a collective that we have or we produce. So the biggest challenge is making friends. And this is the time when we are all struggling through different crisis, where there is a lack of trust in public domain. To build that trust, to make friends, which is a very important aspect of this project, becomes more challenging —to bring all of them to the confidence that they can share and they are safe and there is nobody who is going to exploit them. Building the trust is very difficult and that's the biggest challenge I faced in Athens.

You need time for that. I remember that you were telling me that it was really difficult in the beginning for the people who participated to start sharing and I wanted to ask you from your experience, where is this fine line between exchanging and sharing information, let's say, collective thinking and exploitation?

Everything is all about collective thinking and sharing of knowledge or information, but most importantly, what I have observed from my process is that it is gradually becoming more about the return, like what will I get through this process of exchange in return. If you are sharing something what is my stake. If I am saying anything to you what will you give me in return? I am not talking necessarily about money or something like that, but about this trust just in principle. For example, our field is not well-structured. Everything is kind of moving around. It is vague. Not everything is written on paper, like that's how we are going to exchange. A lot of exchange happens like this. Suppose if I am helping my friend economically or through some material or some instrument or something, I also hope that someday he will return me that favor in some way. This exchange matters a lot and for that you need friendship. In Delhi, we have formed many groups and I have collaborated with many people, but gradually I find it very difficult and very challenging to continue these groups and that's because we are losing faith in some way. That, I think, is because of various propaganda machinery, which is about working 24 hours or fake news and big data that kind of creates this. In the context of art, the evaluation system, the canon, are different from the outside world. I mean that the sense of morality and spirituality attached to art practice do complicate the way we experience the whole process. So I think this exchange is also about value and which kind of value we are looking for.

It's been more than two years now that you came to Athens for the first time and I would be interested to know, looking back, how did this research that you did here feed into your practice thereafter? Did you use any of the stories that you collected here?

In Athens, the experience was really amazing, but it was very intense and really interesting, because of the two cultures and all the artists I met had never been to India. So equally we were both missing some points. As I said, I was more interested in the stories of sexual or racist exploitation, but then you would find stories where there is labor exploitation or about wage and time and all that I mentioned above. People in Athens would get astonished by my intension of narrating those #MeToo stories in India, how it unfolded here and how #MeToo movement unfolded in Athens. So we shared a lot about this and we read a lot of stories, like Kafka's A Hunger Artist. There is another —I find it very difficult to pronounce his name— Phrynichus...

Phrynichus.

He was the first person who made a mask of a crying woman in the theater. These stories are really eye opening for me. If you read "A Hunger Artist". These are very Western perspectives. It's not interesting in many ways. Then, I discovered the city of Athens, which was super layered. If you see closely, there is archaeology, then you'll find on top of archaeology these urban layouts, modern architecture. I developed a project which I could not continue there. It's about the Acropolis museum, which is literally a structure built on archaeology. So I made this proposal and applied in Kungsbacka in Sweden. I did the same project there. It was about making diagrams on the street and making people play on those diagrams in public places. It was kind of a success there. We made a guided tour and an audio storytelling tour, but due to COVID-19 I couldn't travel there. So going back to what you asked, since Athens I am continuing these ideas, but the forms have changed and new elements are coming on my way.

Your observation about Athens is very nice. I think Athens is a palimpsest of itself and I also think that the way that you described how the one game or the one story feeds into the next one is also a palimpsest.

There is this object that I found in Athens —I am forgetting the name of the museum. It is a shoe on which it is written "follow me". The Greek sex workers during that time used to wear this "follow me" shoes for which people used to follow them. The clients used to follow them. I made the same shoe for my performance in Kungsbacka with the words "follow me".

Really?

Yes. So, I am saying that as a storyteller, I not only carry a story, I also carry objects. And I think it is going to come back in some way in many other places.

Before we close this conversation, I wanted to ask you one last thing. What are you working on at the moment?

As an artist, you know, I work on many projects simultaneously. I feel that's kind of engaging, where you are engaging your hands, your eyes and your brain. At this moment I am working on one project, which is called "Rice Hunger Sorrow", going back to my village in Odisha which is situated in the eastern part of India. The place is one of the poorest states. Odisha is one of the poorest states in India, but has lots of nature, a lot of ghost stories, and that's how I was brought up, like hearing all the time my mother and grandmother telling me ghost stories. That's also another reason why I am also scared. Till today I get scared of ghosts in the night. This place is going through a lot of changes, geographically. The demographics are changing because of cyclones and tsunamis, which have been regular now. Every year in the month of May and October we are used to cyclones and tsunamis that are hitting the coast, and I come from a coastal state. So what I have been doing the past year after COVID is that I travel with a few of my friends. We have traveled almost 500 kilometers in the coastal district documenting these affected areas, meeting people, artists and activists. We have made a group collective there and we have been collecting images, different data and we are making films. We are doing a lot of things there. So it's been really fun.

I guess you are trying to weave a new story for Odisha. Well, Paribartana, it was so nice catching up with you. Thank you so much for discussing with me and looking back into your time here. It was great. Thank you!

Thank you Myrto. It was really great talking to you and thinking about the process.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find out more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.