Ankon Mitra – “Paper had to sing and dance in a fundamental way in this show”

Looking at the paucity of opportunities to showcase and celebrate paper art in the country when I started my practice in 2008-2009, I actively sought participation in biennales and exhibitions abroad, like the CODA Museum paper exhibition, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, the Lucca Paper Biennale in Italy, and the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale. I also became a member of the International Association of Hand-Paper Makers and Artists (IAPMA), Origami USA, and the Paper Artist Collective, which were active meeting points of paper artists globally. The engagements, exhibitions and interactions were fantastic. I felt privileged to have these opportunities and strongly felt that things must change in India too. From 2019, I started keeping my own list of Indian paper artists who were doing fantastic work but were not showing at the level they should for lack of a platform in India. This day-dreaming and a little bit of concerted effort over the last one year has resulted in ‘On Paper Of Paper’. Sharan Apparao of Apparao Galleries and the management of India Design ID wholeheartedly shared this vision and we came together to make it happen. A clutch of galleries in India, which are patrons to paper artists also gave their unstinted support to make this possible. I am very grateful a seed like this has been planted.

The show features 75 odd artists, designers, and architects from various backgrounds. How did you go about curating it?

Initially, my longlist had 120 artists, architects and designers with a diversity of paper techniques. Once India Design ID gave us a space, and we started planning the exhibition layout in earnest — for practical and logistical reasons — I tightened the list to 75 artists. There are both veterans and first-timers, also some who are experts in their technique but are working with paper for the first time. To give an example, Shalini Mithal is an educator and has worked with macramé for decades, but she worked with paper raffia/paper twine for the first time in this exhibition to most spectacular effect — combining her skills with a new paper material. There are also some collaborations in this show and about 15 international artists, who sent work from around the globe. Anne Vilsbøll flew down from Denmark with her work, paying for her own ticket. The support and love we received was unbelievable.  

Since you’re a trained architect, how do you see your art getting influenced by elements of architecture?

A lot of architectural concepts — structure, material behaviour, three dimensional form, geometry, light and shadow — play a very important role in my own work. In this show also, there are about 12 architects among the 75 artists, as also some artists who work with architectural expression and philosophies. This natural bias of mine shows up in the overall curation also — because I focused on structural and sculptural uses of paper in this exhibition and steered clear of paper being used as an inert and flat medium — as in watercolours, charcoal and oil pastels. Paper itself had to sing and dance in a fundamental way in this show. I saw no problem in this. I had to be authentic to my own convictions.   

How do you see paper evolving in contemporary art and design?

There was a pleated paper dress, an architecture model, paper clay ceramics, honeycomb furniture, paper twine macramé and crochet, charcoal-paper pulp sculptures, cardboard furniture, paper-pulp and earth plaster furniture, a pavilion made from air-conditioning baffle paper-panels, beaten wood-pulp sculptures, paper lights, crumpled paper animals, cutting, folding, tearing, quilling, layering, weaving, wet-moulding, stacking, miniature techniques, decoupage, slice-form, modular origami, use of found industrial paper materials like cigarettes and matchboxes and scores of other techniques on display. Perhaps there is no other material invented by man which shows this kind of diversity in its usage. Paper as a material has immense potential moving forward, but as designers and consumers, we must also be cognizant of where the paper is coming from, how it is being made and what it is composed of. If we become more vigilant of these aspects, we can make hundreds of design and architecture products from paper, even entire houses out of paper, as the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has already demonstrated more than a decade ago.

Could you talk about how the theme of “Dashavatar” influenced the artistic direction and curation of the exhibition?

The concept of the show was “Paper – Dashāvatāra/ Kagaz Dashavatar” . It is a metaphor of evolution as demonstrated by the 10 avatars of Vishnu from our ancient lore. The energy of the cosmos evolves from the simplest life-form and transforms from fish, through turtle, to boar, then man-lion, onwards and upwards to more and more complex life forms. The exhibition brief to the artists was to look at the simplest use of paper to its most sublime effect, onwards and upwards to its most complex renditions as a material of thinking and making. The visitors were intrigued, surprised and awe-inspired to see the mind-boggling things that the artists, architects and designers could do with paper. From that humble flat and white sheet of weak inert material sprung forth a cosmos full of possibilities. The hope was that this evolution would eventually become a revolution — with paper.

What qualities does paper as a medium bring to artistic expression?

There was a panel discussion as part of the exhibition and we had among other eminent panelists Manohar Devraj from Xylem Paper, Ritu Sethi from the Craft Revival Trust and Anne Vilsbøll, a Danish artist, who has researched extensively on paper-making histories in India. They illuminated us about paper making traditions in India. It is one of the most neglected and sidelined of crafts in contemporary India. At the exhibition, we had work by Neeta Premchand, who established Bombay Paperie and revived the Daulatabad hand paper-making tradition, enabling the export of paper with Indian motifs and patterns. Tara-Gram, an initiative of Development Alternatives, has also been working tirelessly for decades to revive hand-paper making. But Manohar Devraj pointed out that these efforts would have little meaning as the traditional uses of paper have declined rapidly post the smartphone revolution. And so, for a new renaissance of paper, the architecture, design and art “industries” have to start working with paper in a big way, and find new uses for it. He was calling for us to reinvent paper. And we see the beginnings of this with the paper furniture, lighting and architecture on display at the exhibition. But we also need to involve more traditional crafts with paper — Sanjhi, kite-making, lifafa-making and numerous other crafts that are dying — in new and inventive ways. Until a revival can spur job creation and sustainable growth, it cannot be meaningful in India’s context. And we cannot hope for public and government support.

Were there any hiccups in curating this exhibition of paper art, design, and architecture?

Actually to be honest, I had a lot of support — intellectual, voluntary and in-kind from Apparao Galleries, India Design ID and many of the artists and wider community of paper lovers. Perhaps the time was ripe for it, so it flowered. We achieved the whole thing on a very tight budget because nothing like this — dedicated to paper — has been mounted at this scale in India in living memory, so this had to be a proof of concept of sorts. A few paper artists I reached out to couldn’t believe something like this was actually happening, and they thought that maybe I was spamming them. This entire exhibition was mounted on a completely pro-bono/voluntary basis by all the stakeholders and I have to salute their conviction and bow in humility and gratitude to them for sharing equally in my passion for paper. 

How do you envision the future of paper art in India, especially after the exposure and recognition gained from exhibitions like “On Paper Of Paper”?

I believe this is a turning point for paper art in India. Many galleries have been showing a clutch of fantastic paper artists for over a decade now in their own curations. But there has been no concerted focus. Nobody realized that there were so many practices, of such strong identity, and working with such a diversity of paper techniques. I am working tirelessly and assiduously towards an Indian Paper Triennale and I invite captains of the paper industry, museums and art foundations to partner with me in this dream. An estimated 40,000 people came to see the show in four days. This was unprecedented. Paper Art is still undervalued as compared to many other mediums and this is now going to change in the coming years and decades. And paper artists must step up to this.

How do you see the show fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic mediums?

Interestingly, some of the artists in this show are not paper artists and chose to experiment with the medium for the first time or came back to it after a very long hiatus. I hope this exhibition will push paper artists to collaborate with artists of other mediums and also vice versa. A lot of my own work starts with paper explorations and ends up in materials like steel, concrete, glass, brass and the like. Paper is a great preparatory/exploratory material and I know that a lot of sculptors use paper for their initial studies and maquettes and I think these should also come out from artists’ studios and be exhibited for a larger audience. If traditional canvas artists’ preparatory sketches and jottings are now seen as works of art in their own right, why shouldn’t paper studies also be seen and reveal how the pliancy and diversity of paper is used by the wider community of artists to think, plan and shape their final works in other mediums? What about printed photographic sculptures in the round? Once we start peeling the layers of what all paper can do (and is used for), there are about a 100 original paper-art curations that could emerge from inside my head! All hail paper! 

Shireen Quadri is the editor of The Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing: Select Short Stories by Women Writers.

Paper remains under-recognised as an art form in India. Please tell us about your engagement with the medium and the thought behind curating ‘On Paper Of Paper’?

Looking at the paucity of opportunities to showcase and celebrate paper art in the country when I started my practice in 2008-2009, I actively sought participation in biennales and exhibitions abroad, like the CODA Museum paper exhibition, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, the Lucca Paper Biennale in Italy, and the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale. I also became a member of the International Association of Hand-Paper Makers and Artists (IAPMA), Origami USA, and the Paper Artist Collective, which were active meeting points of paper artists globally. The engagements, exhibitions and interactions were fantastic. I felt privileged to have these opportunities and strongly felt that things must change in India too. From 2019, I started keeping my own list of Indian paper artists who were doing fantastic work but were not showing at the level they should for lack of a platform in India. This day-dreaming and a little bit of concerted effort over the last one year has resulted in ‘On Paper Of Paper’. Sharan Apparao of Apparao Galleries and the management of India Design ID wholeheartedly shared this vision and we came together to make it happen. A clutch of galleries in India, which are patrons to paper artists also gave their unstinted support to make this possible. I am very grateful a seed like this has been planted.

The show features 75 odd artists, designers, and architects from various backgrounds. How did you go about curating it?

Initially, my longlist had 120 artists, architects and designers with a diversity of paper techniques. Once India Design ID gave us a space, and we started planning the exhibition layout in earnest — for practical and logistical reasons — I tightened the list to 75 artists. There are both veterans and first-timers, also some who are experts in their technique but are working with paper for the first time. To give an example, Shalini Mithal is an educator and has worked with macramé for decades, but she worked with paper raffia/paper twine for the first time in this exhibition to most spectacular effect — combining her skills with a new paper material. There are also some collaborations in this show and about 15 international artists, who sent work from around the globe. Anne Vilsbøll flew down from Denmark with her work, paying for her own ticket. The support and love we received was unbelievable.  

Since you’re a trained architect, how do you see your art getting influenced by elements of architecture?

A lot of architectural concepts — structure, material behaviour, three dimensional form, geometry, light and shadow — play a very important role in my own work. In this show also, there are about 12 architects among the 75 artists, as also some artists who work with architectural expression and philosophies. This natural bias of mine shows up in the overall curation also — because I focused on structural and sculptural uses of paper in this exhibition and steered clear of paper being used as an inert and flat medium — as in watercolours, charcoal and oil pastels. Paper itself had to sing and dance in a fundamental way in this show. I saw no problem in this. I had to be authentic to my own convictions.   

How do you see paper evolving in contemporary art and design?

There was a pleated paper dress, an architecture model, paper clay ceramics, honeycomb furniture, paper twine macramé and crochet, charcoal-paper pulp sculptures, cardboard furniture, paper-pulp and earth plaster furniture, a pavilion made from air-conditioning baffle paper-panels, beaten wood-pulp sculptures, paper lights, crumpled paper animals, cutting, folding, tearing, quilling, layering, weaving, wet-moulding, stacking, miniature techniques, decoupage, slice-form, modular origami, use of found industrial paper materials like cigarettes and matchboxes and scores of other techniques on display. Perhaps there is no other material invented by man which shows this kind of diversity in its usage. Paper as a material has immense potential moving forward, but as designers and consumers, we must also be cognizant of where the paper is coming from, how it is being made and what it is composed of. If we become more vigilant of these aspects, we can make hundreds of design and architecture products from paper, even entire houses out of paper, as the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has already demonstrated more than a decade ago.

Could you talk about how the theme of “Dashavatar” influenced the artistic direction and curation of the exhibition?

The concept of the show was “Paper – Dashāvatāra/ Kagaz Dashavatar” . It is a metaphor of evolution as demonstrated by the 10 avatars of Vishnu from our ancient lore. The energy of the cosmos evolves from the simplest life-form and transforms from fish, through turtle, to boar, then man-lion, onwards and upwards to more and more complex life forms. The exhibition brief to the artists was to look at the simplest use of paper to its most sublime effect, onwards and upwards to its most complex renditions as a material of thinking and making. The visitors were intrigued, surprised and awe-inspired to see the mind-boggling things that the artists, architects and designers could do with paper. From that humble flat and white sheet of weak inert material sprung forth a cosmos full of possibilities. The hope was that this evolution would eventually become a revolution — with paper.

What qualities does paper as a medium bring to artistic expression?

There was a panel discussion as part of the exhibition and we had among other eminent panelists Manohar Devraj from Xylem Paper, Ritu Sethi from the Craft Revival Trust and Anne Vilsbøll, a Danish artist, who has researched extensively on paper-making histories in India. They illuminated us about paper making traditions in India. It is one of the most neglected and sidelined of crafts in contemporary India. At the exhibition, we had work by Neeta Premchand, who established Bombay Paperie and revived the Daulatabad hand paper-making tradition, enabling the export of paper with Indian motifs and patterns. Tara-Gram, an initiative of Development Alternatives, has also been working tirelessly for decades to revive hand-paper making. But Manohar Devraj pointed out that these efforts would have little meaning as the traditional uses of paper have declined rapidly post the smartphone revolution. And so, for a new renaissance of paper, the architecture, design and art “industries” have to start working with paper in a big way, and find new uses for it. He was calling for us to reinvent paper. And we see the beginnings of this with the paper furniture, lighting and architecture on display at the exhibition. But we also need to involve more traditional crafts with paper — Sanjhi, kite-making, lifafa-making and numerous other crafts that are dying — in new and inventive ways. Until a revival can spur job creation and sustainable growth, it cannot be meaningful in India’s context. And we cannot hope for public and government support.

Were there any hiccups in curating this exhibition of paper art, design, and architecture?

Actually to be honest, I had a lot of support — intellectual, voluntary and in-kind from Apparao Galleries, India Design ID and many of the artists and wider community of paper lovers. Perhaps the time was ripe for it, so it flowered. We achieved the whole thing on a very tight budget because nothing like this — dedicated to paper — has been mounted at this scale in India in living memory, so this had to be a proof of concept of sorts. A few paper artists I reached out to couldn’t believe something like this was actually happening, and they thought that maybe I was spamming them. This entire exhibition was mounted on a completely pro-bono/voluntary basis by all the stakeholders and I have to salute their conviction and bow in humility and gratitude to them for sharing equally in my passion for paper. 

How do you envision the future of paper art in India, especially after the exposure and recognition gained from exhibitions like “On Paper Of Paper”?

I believe this is a turning point for paper art in India. Many galleries have been showing a clutch of fantastic paper artists for over a decade now in their own curations. But there has been no concerted focus. Nobody realized that there were so many practices, of such strong identity, and working with such a diversity of paper techniques. I am working tirelessly and assiduously towards an Indian Paper Triennale and I invite captains of the paper industry, museums and art foundations to partner with me in this dream. An estimated 40,000 people came to see the show in four days. This was unprecedented. Paper Art is still undervalued as compared to many other mediums and this is now going to change in the coming years and decades. And paper artists must step up to this.

How do you see the show fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic mediums?

Interestingly, some of the artists in this show are not paper artists and chose to experiment with the medium for the first time or came back to it after a very long hiatus. I hope this exhibition will push paper artists to collaborate with artists of other mediums and also vice versa. A lot of my own work starts with paper explorations and ends up in materials like steel, concrete, glass, brass and the like. Paper is a great preparatory/exploratory material and I know that a lot of sculptors use paper for their initial studies and maquettes and I think these should also come out from artists’ studios and be exhibited for a larger audience. If traditional canvas artists’ preparatory sketches and jottings are now seen as works of art in their own right, why shouldn’t paper studies also be seen and reveal how the pliancy and diversity of paper is used by the wider community of artists to think, plan and shape their final works in other mediums? What about printed photographic sculptures in the round? Once we start peeling the layers of what all paper can do (and is used for), there are about a 100 original paper-art curations that could emerge from inside my head! All hail paper! 

Shireen Quadri is the editor of The Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing: Select Short Stories by Women Writers.