Sharing experiences: ...
... the creative curve and the ethico-political task of an artist is not to represent from a comfortable outsider’s position, but to leave oneself exposed to the brutality of the world in the possibility of transforming it

Anupam Roy and Susanne M. Winterling

 

a conversation between Anupam Roy and Susanne M. Winterling
book launch "Pandora's box" @kunsthall trondheim, norway, 05/2022 https://kunsthalltrondheim.no/en/arra...

Propagandaist and artist Anupam Roy creates works across media to communicate the tenets of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. The CPI (M-L) Liberation has been an instrumental voice of the working class, women, and the minority struggle in India both at the national and the regional level for over three decades. Through elected representatives, affiliated student bodies, as well as many other mass organizations, the party has been doing grassroots level work in different parts of the country. As a member of the party, Roy has been visually articulating its ongoing struggle against the current government’s rhetoric of hate based on religious fundamentalism. Through his posters, slogans, pamphlets, placards, and large-scale murals, Roy highlights the state of things as they are whilst at the same time offering a personal and artistic reflection on them. In his view, the creative practitioner today has to expose oneself to the brutality of the world in the course of transforming it. The artist-intellectual for him, has to take up a new role of propagandist, whose ambition should be the fearless propagation of truth. This conversation between Roy and Winterling took place in Delhi, 2017 and continued via email and meetings through 2019.

Pandora's Box

Good things, bad things. The good ones sometimes followed the bad ones, and this, against all odds, gave the impression of an actual improvement in collective desire. Poetic utterances can anticipate scientific advances by decades apparently. But this is never an obvious consequence, neither is it a direct effect of poetry. There must be salt... and there must be people who read the poetry... others who learn it by heart, some who write those verses again, with a few variations.
 

The best artists don't ever repeat themselves, they start over and over again from scratch, uncertain with each new attempt precisely where their next experiment will take them, but suddenly, spontaneously, and unaccountably, there comes something which your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing which you could begin to develop.
 

The Pandora project is a collective artifact which started with a group of artists, poets and cultural producers, as they suddenly began to talk to each other from different angles, unusual positions, far from the couch. – poet Isidore Ducasse once wrote “do not succumb / under-lie / move away from that couch.” – he was right.
 

These talks expanded each time these artists met, as they were bringing in their new friends, their greatest antagonists, their demonic persecutors. They became a long long series of dialogues, which were later collected on the soft fibers of a papyrus roll. Suddenly it became clear to them that, while talking, they were also transforming their mutual discourses, as well as the necessity that laid behind them. With the flow of the roll they were actually creating an artifact – a Pandora Box – a mischievous gesture that for as tiny and unassuming it was, could as well be capable of emanating extraordinary sounds and powers, redeploy the order of things, set free the anguish of their private, earthy mythologies.
 

So, this is just another story from a Pandoras box, and there is no better way to introduce it to you than by opening the lid.

Content is copyrighted to
Susanne M. Winterling

Thanks to:
Francesca Lacatena, Alain Siboni, Antonia Lotz, Chiara Figone, Archive Books, Susanne Pfeffer, Silvia Federici, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elisabeth Povinelli, Franco Berardi Bifo, Suzana Milevska, 

Parts are supported by the research fund of Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Pandoras's Box

Good things, bad things. 
The good ones sometimes followed
the bad ones, and this, against all odds, gave
the impression of an actual improvement
in collective desire.

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Pandora's Box