A group of Norwegian artists recreates the “mad scientist workshop” at the Currency Building.
And all the question-marks started to sing of
God’s being.
So he thought.
A music broke out
and walked in the swirling snow
with long steps.
Everything on the way towards the note C.
— From “C Major”, by Tomas Tranströmer
The audio-visual context of this show during the last week in Kolkata was a unity of marked opposites. A handful of Norwegian artists with different backgrounds piled up a complex and highly tech-savvy installation performance with shrieking art machines. The show was held inside the broken-down old edifice of Currency Building (being renovated by the Archaeological Survey of India) in the city’s main office hub of Dalhousie Square. Supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in India, Telenor Group and Arts Council Norway, artists from the Oslo-based group Verdensteatret mounted this installation and performance (of limited shows) that resembled an esoteric workshop of a scientist gone mad. The spacious display of the kinetic electro-mechanical installation was backed by accoutrements of several computers, video projectors, three-channel video splitters, dmx shutters, multi-channel audio converters and audio mixers, low-current motor controllers and hall-effect sensors
The show’s title, And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing (AQSS) is borrowed from a line from Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s poem “C Major”. With diverse animation techniques, this installation of kinetic sculptures, modified bicycle wheels and other wheels, rotating megaphone speakers, wireless microphones, all kinds of lamps, and a breathing piano accordion with the human touch of its gasping bellows — could make the viewer totally flummoxed or even helplessly bored at worst, or transport him to a sphere of wild, futuristic fantasy. “The idea of this poem,” explains visual artist Asle Nilsen, “is a celebration of happiness that recounts how a man has a joyous meeting with his mistress, and this merry state makes all his question marks sing. The micro-puppetry of chirping birds in the shadow-play on the wall give some hint to it.”
On the first three days, AQSS added live Performance Concerts combining the manual with the automatic. Some actors played on the installation wheels which were used as multi-purpose instruments. The wheels were also manipulated and the sensors gave direction and speed to the wheels — while the element of coincidence also playing the added role.
The members of Verdensteatret hail from different art disciplines of visual and kinetic arts, video, theatre, music. They all produce live-art and other art-related projects that bridge the gap between different artistic mediums through incompatible technologies and materials. “We work like an orchestra from scratch and like many musical instruments, compose with different artistic media. Verdensteatret’s art is born when the most diverse elements begin to work together,” says Lisbeth J Bodd, the key person of this production in Kolkata, the sole Indian city to host their production.
Apart from its productions in Norway, AQSS was first presented last year at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China, at Festival Theater der Welt in Essen, Germany, and at The Shanghai Biennale. This year, it toured Quebec, New York, Florence, Wroc·aw, Herzliya, Caen, among other places with the long journey ending in Kolkata.
More From This Section
Video artist Piotr Pajchel adds, “Without any masterplan our projects begin with very small details and we develop slowly and find the inner logic as we go along.” In this production, as in others by Verdensteatret, the use of video is not meant to be the usual rectangular projection on a wall. It can rather be conceived as an extended sculpture or a tool for defining space, adds Pajchel.
The shadow plays on the wall with sources of light through lenses used the techniques of movie projections before technology advanced. However, in this ‘movie’, the ‘actors’ in question were small pieces of metal, wire and glass and the inner chips of glass modules that give light-sources within bulbs — objects picked up from the roadside and then twisted, bent and carefully reassembled to create new contexts when seen through lenses as projected images on the wall. In their other productions, they also use film-strips with images that serve as background landscapes for the exhibited art objects. The film moves physically back and forth from one reel to another, thus creating a kind of rolling backdrop on the move.
In this broken-down heritage building undergoing renovation in the busy downtown Kolkata, this experimental use of audiovisual technology that made use of simple objects and scraps to create a futurist dream, and the accompanied spaced-out music in the background contributed to the show’s unique artistic appeal.
(Romain Maitra is an art critic and independent curator who lives in Kolkata)
