On 12 March, the British Council will host its annual reception to celebrate the awards that the Charles Wallace India Trust makes in support of the visual and performing arts, literature, conservation and journalism.

Over the last 25 years, the Trust has contributed immeasurably to creative and conservation practice in India, offering talented individuals the opportunity to broaden their experience and enrich their practice through its support for further education, research and experimentation.  

This year we are delighted to profile the work of Amitesh Grover, who attended Wimbledon College of Art in the last academic year on the College’s Visual Language of Performance MA (www.wimbledon.ac.uk), and Emma Ridgway, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) curation course (www.rca.ac.uk).  Whilst Emma herself is not a direct beneficiary of the Trust’s support – being British – we felt it would be exciting to use the opportunity of Emma’s having been in India working with KHOJ, and at a time when the Trust has announced its partnership with the RCA, to demonstrate the kind of rigour and approach that the RCA experience fosters and to celebrate the Trust’s ongoing relationship with KHOJ. Her exhibition will include artists she has encountered at KHOJ as well as some that she has already worked with in the UK. Titled Beings and Doings, the exhibition explores artists’ performances that employ absurd humour as a way of making familiar situations surreal. Amitesh’s work, Memorable Equinox, uses visual art and technology in performance to place narrative control in the power of the audience, encouraging participation and interaction with the performers; it is inspired by Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

The performance starts at 7.00 p.m. at the British Council, 17 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi followed by the private view and reception. For further information, contact Arunaa RK at RK.Arunaa@in.britishcouncil.org. The exhibition will remain in the gallery until 17 March. The performance is for one night only.

The Trust’s current Chair, Catherine Lampert, will be in conversation on Monday 12 March starting sharp at 11.00 a.m. at the Attic in Connaught Place. Lampert is a freelance curator whose recent exhibitions include the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy (September 2006-January 2007); Lucian Freud (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin June 2007); Frank Auerbach (Royal Academy of Arts, London 2001); and Nan Goldin (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2001-2). She was Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London from 1988 to 2001 and a senior figure in the Arts Council of England. Catherine will share her past experience and work on current projects, as well as be available for questions.

To register, please e-mail Arunaa RK at RK.Arunaa@in.britishcouncil.org

For more information on the Charles Wallace India Trust, its awards and the application process, please explore our website www.britishcouncil.org/india-scholarships-cwit.htm

Memorable Equinox
By Amitesh Grover

‘Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh-igh
Shadows…
No
Moments
Your moments, my moments’

Based on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, this performance delves into our modern life’s urge to record and digitise memory and stock it within arm’s reach, should the desire to relive and recount events of the past egress. But far from revealing and confirming individual identity, this act of re-visiting and re-imaging tends to destabilise and disperse it.

The aging central character of this piece is an indulgent, involuntary storyteller, who seldom distinguishes between fact and fiction while re-telling events. She compulsively records her own narration of events at different times of her life, plays and ponders over them later to make sense of it all. However, she remains oblivious to the fact that she is becoming a victim of her own memory, her own act of ‘wanting-to-recollect’. Her memory betrays, hurts, blurs and re-invents itself through her, even as she disagrees with her younger self. Her memorabilia gets visualised and projected on the wall behind her. She is split, inevitably. Her practice of recording commits her to conflicting formations of the self. She becomes ‘a notorious self-interrupter’.

Memorable Equinox indulges in this continuous staging of identity as spectacle.

It places itself at the crossroads of interplay between the virtuality of memory and the reality of the present living moment. As our central character performs and watches her own memories (re)played, she discovers how reason and linearity get marvellously hijacked by the accidental, and how man incessantly seeks meaning in history to lend identity to the present and desire to the future. This highly interactive performance proceeds through audience participation. Viewers will be empowered by being presented with an opportunity to pick and choose incidents (from projected parts of her memory on the wall) that they want to be told, in their choice of succession. This nature of audience intervention will spring up the unpredictable path for each performance with the intention of becoming a metaphor for the proceedings.