Paribartana Mohanty

Paribartana Mohanty is a storyteller, working with video, performance-lecture, painting, writing, and curation. He obtained his Master’s degree in History of Art from the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, and a Bachelor’s in Fine Art (Printmaking) from Dhauli College of Art and Crafts, Bhubaneswar, in 2006 and 2004 respectively. He participated in the SOMA Summer Program 2018 focusing on the question of sustainability in Mexico City, supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Mohanty also attended an intensive summer residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation (2016), and a workshop on “games” by artist Carsten Höller at the Botin Foundation, Santander, Spain (2017).

Mohanty worked as one of the curators for the Kochi Students’ Biennale, in the context of the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016. He was a recipient of the Visiting Artist Fellowship at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University, Boston (2016), the Tokyo Wonder Site International Creator Residency (2014), the FICA Emerging Artist Award (2011), and the City as Studio 1, Sarai-CSDS Media Lab Associate Fellowship for Contemporary Art and Media Practices (2010). He presented his second solo exhibition, “Trees are Stranger Than Aliens in the Movies,” in September 2018 at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. The same gallery in Delhi also organized his first solo exhibition, “Kino is the Name of a Forest,” in 2012. He has presented performance-lectures at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (JNU), the Sharjah March Meeting, the Gathering of Artists, Inc., the Dhalao 2018, the Sarai-CSDS, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and the T.A.J. Residency and SKE projects in Bangalore, among many others. He has participated in many group exhibitions, film festivals and residencies across the globe. Mohanty works with WALA, an artists’ collective based in Delhi, engaged in public, cοmmunity and site-specific art projects, public performances and guided tours in the city.

Stories of ‘exploitation of labor’ in the creative field are common and often shared leisurely within the artists’ cοmmunities. Many of these stories are equally brutal —power-plays of worst kinds— and do function with specific socio-cultural or local influences and equations. These labor exploitation stories are also stories about small resistances, reclamations, courage, and survival. In October 2019, I arrived in Αthens with a bunch of such stories, scaling up to mythologies, historical and recent incidents in India. These were stories mostly about young artists/practitioners and students.

The notion of ‘young’ in a society or in a particular field is complex and critical. I am provoked by this idea of how ‘young’ and ‘struggle’ go hand in hand in our imagination. Young is also about health, hope and future. In Αthens, my research was positioned/framed around the question of ‘art field cannibalism’: How does eating its own kind embody a dynamic relationship between self-destruction and regeneration in this creative field? How to become an actor in a force field of pre-existing power relationships? I was curious to see how young artists in Αthens undertake strategies for their survival in the art world, about their modes of sharing labor and the spectrum of friendships etc. In other words, I name this proposition as ‘ How dwelling in the Arts plays out?’. My proposal was to design games by studying and responding to the functional and dysfunctional archetypes of the art field in Αthens and adopt unique stories, characters and props there.

I have had a long fascination with ancient Greek mythology, philosophy and literature. Post 2008–09 economic crisis, Αthens was perhaps entering into my thoughts with a new palate. Greek literature and philosophy books, which still occupy my book shelves, now plenty of images of abandoned buildings, factories, deserted airports, stadiums and homeless peοple from Αthens float and are archived over the years in my laptop. Then, in 2017 documenta 14 took place in Αthens. It did create a ripple effect in the art world in Αthens and globally. This made Αthens an apt place to conduct my research and work.

Within the context of the Οnassis AiR (Inter)national Residency Program, I found this opportunity to visit and pursue my research in this ancient metropolis and to design new games. As the duration of my residency was short —it only lasted for one month— Nefeli, Ash and I decided to start the project with me conducting a workshop where I would invite young artists, art school students, and art professionals in Αthens to participate in a discussion on the subject and share their stories or experiences about labor, exploitation and resistance in the Athenian art scene. How do they encounter and deal with a crisis situation? I was interested in the post documenta 14 stories. Stories of artists’ mobility/migration, odd jobs in art, occupation or employment, sustainability, artists’ debt, isolation, alienation, depression, and artists’ suicide and death.

Many of my assumptions were true, as I found the young artists' community in Αthens was missed/neglected amidst a large number of international artists mostly from Arab/Middle East and the Americas as well as other parts of Europe. The field was dynamic, volatile and with its own reverberations. To comprehend such a field in one month was difficult. So, I had prepared a busy schedule, which encompassed visits to museums, art spaces, galleries, archaeological sites, tourist places, walking in local neighborhoods, finding old bookshops, flea markets and other new places.

On my very first evening at the residency, I had an interaction with a large artists’ community at the old neoclassical building that houses Οnassis AiR. I presented my collected stories and cooked Indian style rice, dal and chicken curry. My lecture-performance ‘What if the wind refuses to carry our words?’ included seven stories about labor, exploitation and resistance from India. With this feast and stories we entered into the workshop zone, which was divided into four stages/days and focused on sharing and exchanging stories that would lead to the design of a series of "games for artists and artists’ cοmmunities".