House of the Rising Sun

A collaborative project by Nitin Mukul and Shelly Bahl

India Habitat Centre  |  Experimental Art Gallery  |  Dec. 14-20, 2007


The India Habitat Centre presents House of the Rising Sun, a collaborative multimedia installation that focuses
on two architectural environments, a former British colonial era courthouse (now a home) and a post-independence
modernist house in Delhi, India. Through the mediums of video, photography, painting, dance, and sound, the
artists conduct an interrogation into how these hybrid structures connote colonial and post-colonial histories, as well as
how their own trans-cultural experiences are informed by these spaces.

In a short experimental two-channel video, a dancer (Anusha Lall), trained in both Bharatanatyam
and contemporary dance, creates an improvisational and interpretive physical response to these two very different
environments. Two screens play simultaneously, with the dancer moving through a late 19th century Civil Lines colonial
building on one screen, and a 1974 Charles Correa modernist house on the other. The video examines the colonial/post
colonial contexts and hybrid natures of these spaces, through a feminist lens. In this project and other recent works, Bahl
has been interested in creating narratives that explore the lived experiences of women, madness/obsession and
orientalist fantasies via surreal and hybrid environments. An original music score composed by Nitin Mukul and Kurt Fedora
 accompanies the video piece.

Bahl's art practice explores the history and exotification of Indian art and culture, and much of her work plays with and
questions the practices of Orientalism, kitsch appropriation and the mass-production of culturally-specific iconography.
The narratives in her mixed-media works play with issue of cultural schizophrenia that can occur in the
translation/transmutation of time and space. She is specifically interested in the contemporary transmission
of visual culture, and the experiences of individuals who lead trans-cultural lives.

Mukul, primarily a painter, works in other visual media also, including photography, video and is also a musician.  
In this project he will address the exhibition space as an extension of his response to the other two
spaces explored in House of the Rising Sun, in a series of four paintings. This group of pieces takes the
locations for the video as a departure point,  the late 19th Century Civil Lines colonial building was the home
that his mother and her family grew up in. Mukul also spent part of his childhood in this home during numerous
visits to India. A few years ago, to save the house from razing, it was declared a national heritage site—but that also has
led to its crumbling state of disrepair and lost history. With no one able to save the house, its fate remains up for
speculation. As a result, its past might be read like something akin to tree rings or sedimentary formations, a colonial-era
ruin.The house intrigues him as a place that reflects his own bi-cultural position, integrating western classical forms and
the local vernacular of India. The modernist house on the other hand, also has a specific east – west relationship, but its
pristine state and planar structures stand in stark contrast. It stands testament to India's onetime choice to embrace an
international style in lieu of an independence vision. By contrasting both of these spaces, and via his own memories,
Mukul pieces together a picture that attempts to give form to the tensions of his own absence/presence, and how larger
patterns of migration and conquest throughout history collapse physical boundaries, reshape identity and breed new
expressions of cultural forms.