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A new generation of Goan artists is still looking for its identity and place in the world

It is 7 am. Slowly and somnambulantly, there is a woman walking, a dog in the middle of the road, flowerbeds and shutters peering out from Mumbai’s doorways and, in that same dark alleyway, a Christian saint is lit by an electric candle in a small niche. Before I leave for Goa, I will visit some of the exhibitions launched on the occasion of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend.

Wandering around the art galleries in the Colaba neighbourhood, I came across Line of Fire by Nikhil Chopra, who now lives in Goa and whose works are on show at Chatterjee & Lal. A brief enquiry also led me to find out about the artist’s performance work, especially a recent intervention at the Met in New York, which Chopra used as a house, studio and gallery for his own body.

Most of the exhibition is comprised of large charcoal and pastel drawings, highlighting some of the subjects that I will be finding and experiencing in Goa. These include the mutation of the landscape, a former colonial setting now taken over by tourism, and the void of meaning entailed by this process. The triptych Line of Fire I could just as easily be placed in Goa as in similar settings. In the text supporting the exhibition, Mario D’souza cites the example of Vietnam, a country Chopra recently visited.

As well as the significance of its monuments and ancestral practices, India has established itself as a major hub in producing and promoting contemporary art. Mumbai and New Delhi have, in recent years, cemented their status as important sites on the international circuit and India has attracted such high-profile names as the sculptor Anish Kapoor and, more recently, the artist Shilpa Gupta.

A country that only obtained its independence from British rule in 1947, and then underwent the separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, saw artists such as Francis Newton Sousa and Vasudev Gaitonde experiment. They masterfully synthesised British colonial rule, in its academic and aesthetic aspects, and the birth of an independent country, surrounded by its cultural, linguistic and religious differences, in an attempt to give it a collective purpose and a national identity embracing this same diversity of traditions.

This generation’s work still has an impact in Goa, a state that officially belonged to Portuguese India until 1961. Stemming from a unique historical journey and a hybrid component – not wholly European and not wholly Indian – those who have developed their practice here have ended up somewhere between these two realms. The city provides them with their own context, encouraging artists to question, through their work, what it means to experience and share their identity.

 

The scenery outside the sleeper bus window lingers through the Indian night until it rises at dawn and drops me off at the Pangim bus stop. There is much Portuguese culture in this part of Goa or, more accurately, remnants left behind or concocted by the people who inhabit it. The latitude is probably sufficiently wide to call Portuguese artists like Vamona Navelcar, born in Goa (then part of Portuguese India) in 1930, who graduated in fine arts in Lisbon and taught for twelve years in Mozambique before returning to his homeland.

A painter at heart, Vamona and his brother Krishna Navelcar, an important photographer who has captured several decades of Goan life, were beloved figures in the local community. Their work depicts Goa’s transitional period from the 1960s to the present. As a tribute to a brother of both, who died early, the artists signed their work as Ganesh, the name of the Indian deity connected to resurrection and wisdom.

 

 

Having settled in Pangim, I wipe the dust off my shoes and head outside to meet the artist Diptej Vernekar. I wait for him in front of a pub under the blazing afternoon sun. Diptej comes in on his motorbike from Old Goa and asks me to sit on the river, dotted with boats and floating casinos. The young Indian was invited to take part in a residency at Casa da Cerca after winning a competition put on by the Fundação Oriente, and will be travelling to Portugal next May.

We speak of Nikhil Chopra and the venue he runs with other artists, called HH Art Spaces, where Diptej has also exhibited, in Goa. Galleries and institutional projects are few and far between in these parts, and the art scene is mostly nourished by the efforts of collectives and artists, as well as the festivals held throughout the year. After starting out making sculptures for Hindu processions, Diptej later studied art at university and is now a member of several of the informal structures operating in the region.

As his interests and relationship with Goa’s landscape evolved, the artist eventually distanced himself from the human representation and mythological tradition he had started working with. He currently works with drawings, such as Untitled (2016), which connect the vibrant nature surrounding him with some material symbols of human intervention. Diptej also employs media such as video, performance and installation, such as Lost in Times (2013), proving that he is in tune with some of the current global practices and trends.

Nalini Elvino de Sousa’s work also reflects the Indian-Portuguese fusion that is the hallmark of Goa. Born in Portugal to a Goan family, the filmmaker has devoted herself to filming several unique aspects of the region’s culture since she moved here in 1998. Through her documentaries and television features as an RTP correspondent, Nalini reveals many of the stories underpinning the life of the Goan and Portuguese communities in India.

During the last few years, the filmmaker has been following the nonagenarian Braz Gonsalves, an important saxophonist who combines jazz techniques with Indian ragas. The Goan musician, who even played at Lisbon’s Hot Club after its founder attended a concert he had given in Macau, perfectly embodies this ability to bring together practices and styles, typical of the plastic arts and even Goan cuisine.

From his studio in Pangim, Vivek Menezes, a writer, critic and curator, shows me a print behind him, next to a window from which a lush green landscape protrudes. The painting consists of names of different cities connected by the Portuguese, from Asia to Africa and the Americas. He then tells me about the historical context of this territory, set in an enclave on the Malabar Coast, which resulted in a mixed society that brought together influences from the many peoples who settled here and took on a Portuguese flavour without its people perceiving themselves as inferior to any white man from another continent, as ancient travel narratives attest.

Vivek adds that, as a matter of fact, many trade routes associated with the Portuguese empire were run from Goa, when the country revealed its weakness and shortcomings, citing the period when Portugal joined the Iberian Union as an important moment when the Goans made contact with the Philippines or Mexico. As a curator, Vivek singles out the Panjim 175 exhibition, organised as part of the Serendipity festival, celebrating this neighbourhood’s mixed culture, built by the Goan aristocracy in the eighteenth century following the epidemics that led to the abandonment of Old Goa.

Before I leave him to his morning work in the studio, my host hands me a Gropius Bau catalogue with photos exhibited there by the artist Dayanita Singh (who recently had a show at Serralves). This Indian photographer considers the book as one of the key objects of her work, not as documentary evidence of an exhibition but as an exhibition object in itself, processed as such, in this instance with the famous German publisher Steidl. The Indian curator then shows me one of the photographs, a self-portrait, slightly reminiscent of Vivian Meyer’s style, and tells me that the artist made it in Goa.

A couple of days later, the painter Loretti Pinto welcomed me into her home and took me through the range of works she has produced. Her engravings, drawings and canvases tackle subjects related to the community where she was born, in Siridão, along with the concerns that have shaped the Goan political scene in recent decades. These include autonomy and the quest for a Goan identity that includes its diversity, or the preservation of its natural landscape, threatened by excessive tourism and industrial exploitation.

Now a teacher in the Pangim area, Loretti acknowledges the growing pains faced by the education system when she started her studies and criticises the lack of investment in Goa’s rural and fishing areas. From her personal and family experience, the artist reflects on the migration of fishing communities, the religious and ceremonial rites involved in their departure and the idea of prosperity that many go to Europe to find.

Loretti’s paintings reveal some of the new developments in Goa, such as mining operations, which the artist calls out as interference from outside parties or the casinos that now operate on the Mandovi River. The gambling business offered by these floating megastructures is pitted against a notion of Christian purity that still harbours in the territory nowadays. Loretti establishes a bridge between Old Goa – the map which she uses in one of the works featured in the Panjim 175 exhibition – and the new habits thriving in the region.

 

With 500 years of Portuguese occupation still colouring the local imagination, and India’s future shifting between secularism and populist nationalism, Goa’s artists will keep voicing the most pressing issues of their environment, willing to learn and embrace new aesthetics and geographies.

 

This article was supported by the Indian Delegation of Fundação Oriente.

Born in Sintra (1998), studied history and literature in Lisbon and London. Poet and researcher on diasporic perspectives of Portuguese identity. Based in Berlin.

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