In Between Places, the Hearth Remains: A Conversation with Varsha Nair

Devashish Sharma (DS):

Could you share how your engagement with the SCCA (Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo) began? What drew you to that region, to the Balkans?

Varsha Nair (VH): 

It goes back to before I had any kind of connection with the SCCA or found myself in Sarajevo. It goes back to Womanifesto in many ways, because for the second event, in 1999, we had invited Sanja Iveković from Zagreb, Croatia, as one of the participants. I didn’t know Sanja before that. Her name came up via somebody else. We were always very curious to invite and include people in Womanifesto who otherwise wouldn’t come so easily our way in Thailand, Bangkok, where I lived from 1995 until 2019, when I moved back to Baroda. We were interested to invite and host people from different parts of the world including Eastern Europe, and later on, Africa. We were always very open to artists that were not on the usual lists of already known artists that one came across.  

Sanja came in 1999. She travelled to Bangkok with her daughter. We tried to host the artists in our own homes, for the duration that they were visiting. Often when they came from quite far, they would end up staying for [an] extra couple of weeks to travel around. Sanja and her daughter stayed with me, and we got to know each other quite well. She mentioned she was organizing this event called Cooperation (2000) and she would be in touch because she would like a voice from Asia to talk about women’s collectives and women artists from Asia. So, I got invited to go to Dubrovnik for Cooperation. I also ended up spending some time in Zagreb with Sanja. The event in Dubrovnik really opened a whole other world. All these wonderful connections started to happen. From Dunja [Blažević], Lejla Hodžić, Maja Bajević, Šejla Kamerić, to Kai Kaljo, Sandra Sterle, and Renata Poljak. Marjetica Potrč, we met later in Sarajevo. All these incredible women. Danica Dakić, and, of course, there was Martha Rosler. There was also Katy Deepwell and Hilary Robinson, from the UK. Katy Deepwell is the founder of n.paradoxa, a feminist journal. Hilary Robinson is a feminist art historian. There were also various people from Switzerland to Austria who set up spaces or wrote, and there was someone from Springerin Magazine from Vienna. It was such an incredible group of people to suddenly find yourself in.

COOPERATION (POSTER), DUBROVNIK, 2000
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

COOPERATION GROUP, DUBROVNIK, 2000
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

The first discussion with Sanja was when she asked me to talk about Asian women’s art. I said to her: ‘Hang on a minute, what do you mean Asia? It’s like me asking you to talk about Europe – Eastern, Western, everything.’ I can talk about Womanifesto, and I can talk about certain aspects of works by women artists that I know of in Thailand, what it is to be a woman and an artist in an Asian environment, broadly speaking. There were these talk sessions arranged over a period of four or five days. That’s where I got to meet people. When I met Dunja, she mentioned they were planning an exhibition which was around questions of home. Cooperation became this kind of gateway. There was an online project that Danica and Sandra were planning called GO HOME(2002), for which they invited me.

There were also Womanifesto projects coming up and I invited quite a few of them to participate subsequently. There was a kind of a relationship. Even though we couldn’t necessarily meet but by then this whole re-connecting through the net…working online, working through email, was opening up. Procreation/Postcreation (2003) for Womanifesto was an email art project. I sent an open call out and some of the women I had met in Dubrovnik, and then later in Sarajevo, responded and joined the project. But after meeting Dunja in Dubrovnik, she invited me to join the exhibition, Home (2002), in Sarajevo.

DS:

This exhibition Home was conceived by Maja Bajević and curated by Dunja Blažević. How did the conversation regarding the exhibition evolve? Did you develop the work as a response to a conversation, or was it something that you had already been working on? It seems that the idea of home as a place of belonging was already part of your practice.

VN:

There was an interesting conversation with both Maja and Dunja, in Dubrovnik. I was born somewhere else, am from somewhere else, and was living somewhere else. This question of defining home, how it’s not there, not here, but somewhere in between. This concept of ‘how do you locate yourself?’ There was that conversation already. The invitation arrived interestingly when I was visiting Baroda. I am originally from Baroda and at that point of receiving the invitation, I was involved with a residency which was held in a ceramics workshop. The workshop was housed within a factory where they were making packaging cartons. I was working with ceramics and at the same time I was also constructing these cardboard boxes that had images pasted inside – I was talking about packing and moving. The images were of my own family home from Baroda, which had been locked up after my grandmother passed away. There were all these dislocations I never knew I would feel but was feeling being back by having this family home not accessible anymore. Suddenly, there was this real question of rootedness. I had never thought of this place as really rooting me. There was this incredible emotional reaction, a deep feeling of loss.

VARSHA NAIR: IN BETWEEN PLACES (200), HOME EXHIBITION, SCCA SARAJEVO
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

The invitation to join this exhibition arrived from Dunja just as I had started to make a work with the boxes. She said, ‘Let us know what you would like to show, and how we go about it. And if you need time, think about it.’ And I said, ‘Well, actually I know exactly what I want to show. Can I bring across a few big cartons, containing lots of small packaging cartons with photographs in them?’ I had this idea, they are like building bricks and it happened spontaneously. The work I had already started to do resounded with the whole thinking behind that exhibition as well. Then, it became even more poignant when I was in Sarajevo to install the work. I had already installed this work in Baroda. There were possibilities with this installation, these brick-like boxes could be built up to install any kind of shelter, or architectural space in response to the context and specifics of any given site. Wandering around Sarajevo, the installation just became this remnant wall. The signs of the siege and the war were still so present. It was this leftover kind of wall of a house, like a facade almost. Being there opened yet another whole world of meeting with various people. It was quite an amazing and very intense time.

From the early travels I have done, Sarajevo was the first one that shook something in the core of me. Of course, Dubrovnik was a dream place that opened a world in another way. But Sarajevo brought home certain realities which you had only seen from afar on your television screen, and then you were there and it was so present. The second round of travel that impacted me significantly was in Iran, over a couple of years, two times.

VARSHA NAIR: IN BETWEEN PLACES (2002), HOME EXHIBITION, SCCA SARAJEVO
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

DS:

Do you have more recollections of Dunja Blažević’s curatorial process?

VN:

It was very informal in many ways. I don’t remember receiving any kind of curatorial note. I am not even sure whether I received something saying who are the artists participating in this exhibition, or what was required of me. I think the Breakfast at the SCCA was mentioned as a gathering that would be very informal. That summed up my feeling of how everything happened there. I might be wrong, because I wasn’t so involved, and didn’t know the back story of how they got the funding, the organizing and so on. But I do know that the Swiss Council was quite involved, because we had a number of receptions in their homes. Maybe it was Pro-Helvetia who was there. Before I arrived, I had this idea of it being a big, very formal gallery, a museum kind of organization. Actually it was just three of them – Dunja, Lejla and Naida Begeta. Naida was very young and doing all the running around. Lejla was next in line to Dunja, and they had this very comfortable relationship. Dunja would say something, and Lejla would turn around and say, ‘What, I need to do that as well?’ They seemed to be friends with ideas of how they would organize things, work together in an informal way.

DS:

What did you think about the Breakfast format? How successful was it to have this informal moment with people from Sarajevo? And who attended this breakfast, and what was the conversation about?

Biljana Ciric (BC):

What was on the menu?

VN:

[laughs] The breakfast was held downstairs, a space below the offices, where there was a cafe at street level. The windows opened out into the street. One thing about Sarajevo, and indeed in Dubrovnik before that, was that you couldn’t do anything more than half an hour without stopping for a cup of coffee and few cigarettes – which I was well into. Either Lejla or somebody would turn around and say, ‘Shall we have a coffee?’ This was really underlining the whole thing: the coffee and the cigarettes. You see in the photos, everyone has a cigarette and an ash tray in front of them.

SCCA BREAKFAST, SARAJEVO, 2002
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

So, the Breakfast. I loved the whole easy-going idea of it. It was so up my street. They told me to just talk about myself, and what it is like in Thailand, what it is to come from India, and what is it to work as an artist. Lejla said, ‘the way we plan our breakfast is that we have the usual, the muesli and the coffee. But what is your favourite food that you would like to introduce?’ When I arrived from Thailand, I had brought a box of Thai fruits, mangoes, and mangosteens for Dunja and her team. They got very excited. I said, ‘We should save a couple of mangosteens for breakfast, because nobody would have seen one, and we can cut one during the breakfast and hope it’s still edible.’ I also said to Lejla, ‘Okay, I don’t care about anything else, but there’s got to be big bowls filled with cherries on the table, because they are my favourite fruit’, and I couldn’t get enough of them. We went to the market that same Breakfast morning and bought a whole lot. We also bought oranges to make fresh juice. It was quite simple and, I thought, wholesome. It wasn’t eggs and that kind of stuff.

Many people turned up, of course there were artists who were part of the Home exhibition. There were other people who were part of the art community. There were also other laypeople because they know about these Breakfasts. With every artist that was invited or events that were taking place the SCCA they would host a Breakfast. A poster would go up in the cafe, and people would know that this is coming up. Sunday, I think, would be the Breakfasts. It was free, and there were conversations happening. It was full. Honestly, I really don’t remember what I talked about. I seemed to remember that it was recorded, and from the photos I see there was a video camera. I don’t know where these records are. They should be in the archives of the SCCA, if there is an archive that remains. Lejla might know about it, or Dunja?

HOME EXHIBITION POSTER, SARAJEVO, 2002
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

It was an informal and more general conversation, about home, and a bit about living and working in Thailand and my own personal work with Womanifesto. Also, I was asked, ‘What is your impression of Sarajevo?’ and ‘What does it mean? Did you ever think you would travel to Sarajevo one day?’ I remember that question very clearly. Because I remember arriving in Sarajevo and thinking that I never thought I would be in this place one day.

DS:

Thinking about how the funding of the SCCA stopped and with your experience with Womanifesto, what are your thoughts regarding the financial sustainability of such institutions, and how they might continue to evolve? 

VN:

The SCCA had funding from the Soros Foundation, and the issue was they weren’t sure how much longer it would keep going. I think these things [like SCCA] keep going also because of the investment of personal energy from the people who are involved in it. Perhaps you reach a point where it just runs its course, or it just becomes too much to carry. The financial part becomes a big burden. If you grow, then you need to employ people. If you don’t have the finances, how do you pay people? How do you plan exhibitions, and invite artists without funding?

It might not really be apt to compare it with this one space in Thailand called, About Studio/About Cafe. The woman who set it up came from a wealthy family. There was a lot of her own personal money that went into it, constantly. Then she would get odd bits of funding to do certain projects. In the long run, it wasn’t a viable working situation. I think you burn out after a while

WOMANIFESTO II, DINNER AT HOME, 1999 
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

We also faced this with Womanifesto. There was this big break from 2008 until we restarted planning in 2018, a good ten years. There were a number of reasons. One was because we applied for funding to a number of places, and we were unsuccessful. The second thing was that we were in the stage of our lives, as women, where we were also the caregivers of not just our homes, but also our parents. Nitaya [Ueareeworakul] and me, we had to take care of that part of our lives. We just said, ‘We are not stopping, we are not ending it, we are just taking a break.’ It was a situation where if we had pushed on, we would have burnt out.

I can’t give you a reading of what really happened at the SCCA. I think they were individuals who were very passionately involved in putting in that extra work. Or they didn’t even see it as extra work. They did it because it had to be done. I think they did a number of interesting exhibitions. For example, they did Meeting Point (1997). They did these exhibitions soon after the war ended. It was also about trying to build bridges again, to bring back people who had left, artists who had left. From the conversations that I had, if somebody had managed to get out of Sarajevo during the siege, then when they came back, they were a little bit like, ‘Oh well, you left’. Because the people who had stayed back had borne so much. I think there was also this thing, to say, ‘No, let bygones be bygones. We are here now, and we should start to work together.’ They did these kinds of projects trying to rebuild connections. There were a couple of projects that I heard about directly from Maja and Sejla.

DS:

Since you have moved to Baroda now, how will Womanifesto continue? Will it have two locations? How are you planning the future activities of Womanifesto?

VN:

Actually, we never plan future activities, one thing leads to another. There was this plan, at the end of 2019, to meet up in Thailand in a workshop situation. My colleague Nitaya lives on a farm in the north-east part of Thailand. We said, ‘We’ll establish a home for Womanifesto.’ It never had a permanent space. We always conceived projects to happen wherever it made sense for projects to happen. If we were going to be on a farm for a ten-day workshop, that’s what it was. We also did this email project, which ended up being a publication. We did an online project because we had a website. So, the idea was to establish a residency on this farm, which we thought would be a kind of permanent thing. We already did one in 2008, but we couldn’t follow up on that because there was no funding. That whole idea of having a permanent space didn’t happen.

WOMANIFESTO RESIDENCY, OPEN DAY, 2008
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

WOMANIFESTO RESIDENCY, PAN PARAHOM AND ONANONG WEAVING, 2008
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

WOMANIFESTO RESIDENCY, MAE PAN EXPLAINS NATURAL DYES, 2008
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

Just as we were thinking that we would plan this home for Womanifesto, where the archive would be, and where we could gather and do small projects, the whole lockdown came. By then, I had left. I was here, in Baroda. At that point my idea was that I would actually travel quite often back to Thailand. In conversations between Nitaya and myself, we thought, ‘Why don’t we just do it where we are? Why are we struggling with this?’ We said, ‘Let’s invite some of the people who have been part of Womanifesto, and still active and we are in contact with, to set up little gathering points wherever they are’. After all, in this current scenario, it makes sense to gather in your own backyard with the people around you, who you are able to meet. This is this iteration of Womanifesto. (Womanifesto 2020: Gatherings)

We do need to work on and set up the archive in Nitaya’s space, the farm in north-eastern Thailand. We want to work with the immediate community of artisans in this area. There is a rich tradition of fabric dying, weaving, working with paper, with wood. This was something we found quite amazing when we did the workshops in 2001 and the residency program in 2008. Putting together an intergenerational group, a mix of both artists and artisans, including also certain folk singing traditions, and keeping it open and process-based, seeing what emerges out of it rather than thematically closing up an idea. After the first two Womanifestoprojects, this is how things have been done. We set parameters, of course, but we don’t set the absolute outcome parameters. That allows for a lot of different things to emerge. Hopefully, we can continue.

We have to rethink, and I think we haven’t really rethought this exhibition that we are doing in Guangzhou. It’s a part of that process. We have been rethinking so many things. How we are going to be showing, and how we are going to be bringing things together? What does it mean to do community art projects? What does it mean that you were able so easily to gather an international group? You could invite people from anywhere, from Argentina to Japan. These are all things which might not be possible for the foreseeable future.

WOMANIFESTO, EXHIBITION, GUANGZHOU, 2021
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel (BR):

While you were living in Bangkok, were you travelling between India and Thailand very regularly?

VN:

I would travel, if not twice, at least once a year to India. It’s not a great distance. In my mind, I wasn’t even living in different countries because there is so much about Thailand that is relatable. It’s a place that I immediately understood, because Buddhism is something that we are aware of. We know the beginnings of Buddhism from India. The trees that are growing outside my window here in Baroda, are the same ones that were growing over there. Of course, Bangkok is a slicker city and has become even more so now. I first arrived there in 1995 and didn’t know anybody at all. But even then, I didn’t have this feeling of being somewhere totally different. I couldn’t understand Thai at all, and I couldn’t speak it. That was quite necessary because the street signs weren’t written in English. That changed in the next few years. Somehow, it didn’t matter that I didn’t speak the language. Some bits I would pick up on, because the root of the language is from Pali. I would fly back to India often because my parents were here.

BR:

After you started living in Bangkok, was Dubrovnik your first round of travel?

VN:

No, I had travelled before that. I met Sanja in 1999. I had been in Bangkok since 1995. I had travelled quite a lot by then, I had also lived in the UK for a while in the 80s. I had been part of an exhibition in Japan and in Singapore. Singapore was just a hop over. It was something that we did quite often – go across if there was an interesting exhibition going on in Singapore. I had friends there.

Dubrovnik happened in 2000. The Gujarat (India) riots happened in 2002, that was the time of the workshop in Baroda, and also when Dunja’s invitation arrived for the Home exhibition. That was a very, very strong moment for me, for a lot of realizations. A lot of things had changed. It wasn’t just this thing of a family home; it was this whole notion of home. Just as I was about to leave, the riots happened in Gujarat and I was scared there would be a curfew, that I wouldn’t be able to leave. I knew something had changed forever. There were riots in Baroda, it was already beginning to flare up virtually all over the state. So early 2002, it was exactly when I made this work, and plans to go to Sarajevo took shape. This communal strife and this terrible violence, it was interesting because it’s what Sarajevo had experienced. To make this work in Baroda and take it there, it was really something, how situations started to relate.

BR:

How did you find that your work translated into this new context? What was it like to see the way in which your work transforms in that context?

VN:

All those thoughts really don’t come up all at once. These realizations happen gradually. I had a good ten days before we started to install, and I just found myself wandering around, hearing many personal stories each day. I was staying with a family. The people were amazing. There would be these amazing moments of warmth, and then there would be these real lows. You would hear the story of a personal loss. It was a time filled with conflicting emotions. I remember wandering through an old cemetery and suddenly somebody running and saying, ‘Don’t veer off the path, don’t veer off the path. Because space hasn’t been cleared yet’. Land mines. When I was landing into Sarajevo, I remember thinking if what had happened there in recent history would be visible. Even before your plane touches down, you start to see it. In buildings you are passing by, as you taxi down, the pockmarked buildings with no balconies. And people still living there, their clothes are hung out to dry. Life in homes going on.

I made this work with this very burning question about home. Does the space of the home, a physical, architectural space, root you? And also, more philosophical questions about how you need to find your root within yourself. I did a number of works around that, which I call Point 33. It was taking 32 points on a compass pointing in different directions, directions you roam around in. Point 33 was the point I came up with, as a point that is rooted very deep within you. As long as you kept sight of that point 33, you were alright.

VARSHA NAIR: POINT 33 DISTILLED (2006) NRLA, GLASGOW
IMAGE: KARLA SACHSE

VARSHA NAIR: POINT 33 DISTILLED (2009), ON THE MOVE, HONG KONG
IMAGE: PHOEBE WONG

Bringing this work [In Between Places, the Hearth Remains (2002)] to Sarajevo, when it was time to install, I had this big room, which I shared with Adrian Paci. The work started to converse on many levels. One was with the place. In Between Places, The Foundation is what it was called when it was installed in Baroda. Then in Sarajevo, it became In Between Places, the Hearth Remains. Because whatever I saw of the destroyed buildings, the heart of a home, where the fireplace, the chimney and the supporting wall was, remained. Somehow, the bricks had baked so much over time with the fire always being lit. It spoke about how you could never really destroy what is at the root of human beings. This thing of gathering, of sitting around a hearth, the closeness.

Adrian Paci’s paintings were literally family portraits. People who had to leave their family homes behind and move to Italy as refugees. It was very evocative. The refugees are painted with all their worldly belongings, in their living rooms, from photographs. It ties up with this whole architecture of what constitutes a home space. My work was mimicking the remaining walls I had seen around Sarajevo; the chimney with a bit of a wall standing.

VARSHA NAIR: IN BETWEEN PLACES, (2002), HOME EXHIBITION, SCCA SARAJEVO
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

Later on came this realization about how the work was created amongst communal violence happening here. Then, taken to a place where communal violence, war, and religious differences have torn the place apart. That realization hits you. This is how the work takes on its readings, you might not see, but other people might see.

BR:

Do you feel like there was a certain impact of showing that work in Sarajevo, to that audience?

VN:

Well, I don’t know. Personally, as an impact, you get new readings into your own work. This certainly was unexpected. I was a bit nervous. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know the people or the place and I am supposed to install my work. I didn’t even have an idea of the exhibition space. This installation didn’t have a clear diagram of how it must be installed. These [boxes] are just building bricks, components you can do whatever with. I wasn’t sure of how the work should look. The idea was to make it site-specific. That opens up so much. I would keep telling myself that failure is always an option. That frees you up a hell of a lot to do what you want.

MARJETICA POTRĆ: HOUSE FOR TRAVELERS, HOME EXHIBITION, SARAJEVO, 2002
IMAGE: VARSHA NAIR

As far as the audience was concerned, I think the only real conversations were with some of the other artists. There was a very interesting conversation with Marjetica Potrč. She worked with architectural spaces and did this amazing project with the gypsies. There is a photo of us sitting in this house that was built in the gypsy community. There was an afternoon where we had tea, and everyone gathered together there over conversations; we had a wonderful time.. There is this discrimination against the gypsies, across the board, no matter where you are. That was an interesting conversation with Marjetica. She also shared her reading into my work. She was interested in how this way of working, of making components and travelling with them, of installing them over and over again, how it just becomes a part of wherever you go. If you are sensitive and keep all that awareness of installing it in different places.

I might have had more conversations, but honestly, I can’t remember. Adrian Paci and I did talk, about being neighbours in the show. He connected and was very happy with the way our room looked and how the works spoke with each other. He felt that the question that connected our works was: What is it that you really leave behind? Those walls are what we remember of our family spaces.

—End of interview—