Jackfruit Research & Design

I have loved NYC from the moment I stepped in the City as an 8 year old. It’s a love that has stood the test of time. 1. David Adjaye’s Studio Museum at Harlem 2. Glen Ligon, “Give Us a Poem,” Studio Museum at Harlem 3. George Washington Bridge 4. Riverside Church, Upper West Side 5. Sunset framed by traffic lights, Riverside Park 6. Willoughby St, Brooklyn 7. Sky framed by Skyscrapers, Brooklyn 8. Plaza, Willoughby St, Brooklyn 9. Nani Chacón’s “Our Gods” sculptures, Whitney Biennial, NYC 10. Little Island, Hudson River, Manhattan 11. Joseph Stella, “The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme,” 1939, Whitney Museum, NYC 12. Edward Hopper, “Early Sunday Morning,” 1930, Whitney Museum, NYC 13. Along the High Line, Midtown, Manhattan 14. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, “The Light that Shines through the Universe,” The High Line, Midtown, Manhattan 15. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (America), 1994, Whitney Museum, NYC “America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to dream about. It is an imperfect state. As a child I remember the America I imagined, that I constructed from different sources. That particular America was full of lights. Of shiny reflections, of mirages. Paradise. The America that I now know is still a place of light, a place of opportunities, of risks, of justice, of racism, of injustice, of hunger and excess, of pleasure and growth. Democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication. My sculpture “Untitled” (America) comes with no instructions. It can be installed any way someone might want. I relinquish control, as with most of my work. It’s useful, practical: just a set of lightstrings, like the ones we see at so many fairs and celebrations, or just hanging in a small street somewhere, full of sad possibilities of a party no one came to. And like most of my work, and just like myself, the work is ephemeral. It doesn’t really exist, but hopefully will light some peoples’ spaces, at least for a short time. The instructions, or lack of them, guarantees that once I am no longer here this work will still be alive, in constant change, in different configurations. As in a dream, taking almost no space.” —Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1995

Some old faves and some new ones at the @visitpham

This week @nationalmuseumofasianart

Dog days of summer are here. Shravana masa will come but not yet. Reading Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, translated by James Mallinson, and looking at pictures of clouds I have taken over the last few years is joyous relief. Enjoying each season for the specific experience it offers, the heat still asks me to invite a merciful, loving cloud who will take this message. See Kalidasa (image 8, transliteration) and Mallinson: A cloud is a conglomeration of vapor, light, water and wind, and messages must be conveyed by living beings with keen faculties. Ignoring, in his enthusiasm, this incongruity, the yaksha made a request to the cloud— those consumed by love petition the sentient and the dumb indiscriminately.

She taught me how to let myself be hypnotised by song. Thank you for this amazing 💝

Annadanam, dasoha, Bhandara, langar, Iftaar, sadya….we have many words for collective eating and many ways to think about food and those who eat together. All this happening in our Bangalore at Ankamma Choultry, founded by the Ankamma and Subbaiah Reddy family nearly a 100 years ago, in celebration of the Ulsoor Someshvara temple’s car festival. The hub and the bub of the event settled instantly when the scent of a fantastic pulao hit my nose as I put it in my mouth.

I make a recommendation. Please listen to @art.alaap with Kamayani Sharma on a regular basis. I want art journalism. She is doing it with so much intelligence and generosity. I am listening to her interview with @jyotinisha , a Bahujan feminist filmmaker and theorist. While listening, I paused and went to read Nisha’s essay in EPW titled, “Indian Cinema and the Bahujan Spectatorship.” She articulates what makes me stay away from and reject a great deal of film and art - the need for a traumatized victim to justify the creation of an elite hero. The protagonist fixes the status quo so it can continue, reformed but intact. It’s a formula that mutates in favour of all kinds of creators, acts of creation and institutions. This is such a damaging ideology for everyone, but some much more than others, because it normalises and redeems the infliction of trauma and romanticises suffering. Artalaap > Nisha led me to this beautiful poem by Abhay Xaxa, “I Am Not Your Data,” 2011   I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank, I am not your project, or any exotic museum object, I am not the soul waiting to be harvested, Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested.   I am not your cannon fodder, or the invisible worker, Or your entertainment at India habitat center, I am not your field, your crowd, your history, your help, your guilt, medallions of your victory. I refuse, reject, resist your labels, your judgments, documents, definitions,   your models, leaders and patrons, because they deny me my existence, my vision, my space. Your words, maps, figures, indicators, they all create illusions and put you on a pedestal from where you look down upon me.   So I draw my own picture, and invent my own grammar, I make my own tools to fight my own battle, For me, my people, my world, and my Adivasi self. Necessary links in bio

Pasaporte/Passport 1972 Rosario Castellanos A woman of ideas? No, I’ve never had one.
Nor have I ever repeated anyone else’s (out of modesty or mnemonic lapse).
A woman of action? No, not that either.
One need only look at the size of my feet and hands. A woman of words, then. No, not a woman of my word.
But of words –
many of them, contradictory, alas, insignificant,
mere sound, a hollow sifting of arabesques,
a salon game, gossip, froth, oblivion. But if a definition is needed
for the identity card, write
that I am a woman of good intentions,
and that I have paved
a straight and easy road to hell. Jawaz al-Safar/Passport 1964 Mahmoud Darwish They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist who loves to
collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don’t leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make an example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is
From my forehead bursts the sward of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!

Images @abulhisham Abul Hisham “Places of the Spirit” Carving on wood 2023 @ Intersections: Sites of Becoming, INLAKS 50th anniversary show at Arthshila Delhi @abulhisham “Healing Room” 2025 @ Kochi-Muziris Biennale @kadamartivijay “Dohar” 2025 “Missing from my Kitchen” 2017-ongoing Wood Both seen @ Kochi-Muziris Biennale One of my drawers of spices I have seen two artists’ works at the Kochi Biennale that made me think about how much we enchant our lives with objects that we make and gather around us. Hisham’s work made me reflect on how parts of architecture come together to make an experience of a space touch transcendence. He did this, as I see it, by removing some of the conventional organisation of the parts into wholes. Kadam’s love of wood and the way the domestic is so often diminished for the importance it has for giving our lives order and meaning, made me love my own kitchen all the more. Wood as the medium of sculpture is so powerful and it lent so much integrity to each of their works. These artists made their work hold time very consciously. I stood a long time with them. That’s how I know this, because it was possible.

@kulpreet_singh ’s “Indelible Black Marks” (2022-24, 8 minutes 27 seconds, 5.1 surround sound) made the hair on my arms stand up. Horripilation is a fundamental experience that a rasika has when engaging with a powerful work of art. That’s what happened on the first outing on the first day of the Kochi Biennale. @stutibhavsar11 writes: “In the film, Singh and his collaborators, comprising farmers and colleagues, run across the torched fields. They engulf them in scorching temperatures and clouds of smoke. Long canvases trail behind them, blotched by sooty residues from fields permeated by chemical fertilisers and mono-cropping and inscribed oy the spiky stubble left by combine harvesters. These marks inscribe the burning earth on the canvas and recall the bitter inheritances of the Green Revolution. Singh reorients choreographed performance as a printmaking process that registers poignant states of life and land, culminating in singed canvases assembled linearly to present a large print that narrates the relentless pursuit of power, through images inked by ashy deposits. For instance, an imperial throne is flanked by forms such as a fallen tree and a dead bird, alongside a series of ape-like figures referencing the path of human evolution, reversed, to suggest regression.”

I am not at all academic in my relationship to histories of art. I burn slowly in thought, wanting to know the artist’s making and thinking and why their work moves me in this way, at this time. @mandeepraikhy ’s “Hallucinations of an Artefact” (2023), a 4-channel video installation with sound made me so happy to think about the artfulness of art history. @aparnachivukula_ wrote this text: “For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Raikhy presents Hallucinations of an Artifact (2023), bringing to life the 4,500-year-old, 10.5-centimetre-tall Dancing Girl, a bronze figurine from the Mohenjodaro settlement of the Indus Valley Civilisation, excavated in 1926 from Sindh. Since its discovery, the figurine has borne the weight of multiple political claims tied to national and art histories. Raikhy’s performance imagines other lives for the Dancing Girl as she travels across time, from the excavation site to the museum to a nightclub, taking on the energy of a child, a warrior, a friend, and a dancer. Central to the choreography is the tribhanga, a standing posture found in Indian classical dance and sculpture. Embodying the Dancing Girl, which is claimed to be the earliest evidence of this pose, the performers loosen and reinvent the tribhanga, creating space within it to play, fight, rest, and dance freely. Multidisciplinary artist Jonathan O’Hear’s Al-generated figure of the Dancing Girl becomes the fourth performer, introducing the disruptive potential of the glitch. The three dancers dialogue with their Al counterpart, responding to her movements. The word "hallucination" in the performance's title is borrowed from Al, finding human resonance in its tendency to invent responses based on insufficient or incorrect data.”

At the 6th Kochi Biennale, I saw a many things I really, really enjoyed. Here’s one: The Ghanaian artist @ibrahimmahama3 ’s “Parliament of Ghosts” (2017-ongoing) uses old chairs, redone in Kochi by local carpenters, to make them talk to each other. Same with the sack curtains on the wall. I felt he was a kindred spirit as were the chairs.