The following online interview took place between Marie-Nour Hechaime and Meenakshi Thirukode in June 2020. The interview has been reproduced here as is, including a short description from that time of the school to give you a sense of the many ideas that have and continue to evolve and shape it. This exchange was previously never published.
Contemporary arts institutions take pride in developing critical discourses and in proposing alternative visions to the extractive grip of the neo-liberal system we live in. The past few years, most of them have been very vocal about environmental concerns, calling for a de-growing world, one that would be more united, sharing the burden of the environmental debt, aware of systemic structures of oppressions, re-shuffling labor priorities towards care and solidarity and finally invested in the commons and the act of ‘commoning’ together. However, by constantly refusing to practice reflectivity and take a hard look inside, most of them end-up reproducing a productivist mindset and fostering a culture of abuse, serving a privileged elite.
I e-met Meenakshi Thirukode in 2018, when researching the art scene of New Delhi. Meenakshi Thirukode is a political thinker, writer, feminist killjoy and curator based in New Delhi. She founded Instituting Otherwise (IO) in 2017. It functions as an improvised set of spaces for enquiries into curatorial and artistic practice, as a site for developing radical forms of temporal political agencies through a ‘decentralized internationalism’. Through varying modes of thinking and manifesting from, exhibition-making and Instagram ‘rants’ to publishing and research-based projects, it attempts to create platforms for enabling dialog across global networks, with an emphasis on unlearning and improvisation as a process.
I was immediately struck by how outspoken she was about the many faces of the art world and her commitment towards feminist politics. Since then, we both were part of life-changing protests and are currently living through a pandemic. I reached out to her to see where she was at in her thinking.
Marie-Nour: Can you tell me a bit about your practice, the process it took to develop Instituting Otherwise and how you came to realize that you wanted to talk and focus on structural oppressions, often reproduced in the art world?
Meenakshi Thirukode: It took me some time to find my theoretical grounding, find my footing and develop those friendships with people with whom I wanted to be involved with in certain types of politics. I am informed by my life experiences and I came to the philosophy and theory of it later.
I used to work in commercial art galleries and on the side start not-for-profit projects related to public spaces, communities, and alternative modes of art education. In 2016-17, I went on a scholarship to London, where I did the M.Res Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths. That was a very particular moment that completely changed my life’s direction; it was the year Mark Fisher died by suicide as a result of structural systemic violence and its hand in creating a mental health crisis that we need to never forget. Shortly after, while attending a summer school program at BAK on a scholarship in the Netherlands, I came across their research-based program ‘Instituting Otherwise’. This was an ‘aha’ moment for me where I was able to find the philosophical articulation I was missing. However, I started to recognize and to have problems with European institutions which I find very extractive of our labor and our knowledge – we are allowed the mobility and we produce the work but we are sent back ‘home’ and back into extremely precarious social and political circumstances from which our work is also produced. What I’d like to see is resources being channeled instead to political work located in their own situated, temporal contexts – this idea of a trans-local that’s not the neo-liberal framework of ‘globalization’. What I have been dealing with and haven’t really found a way out of is that I still work within the system from time to time, since I need to pay my bills – but IO is this ‘way out’ that will show itself. In the meantime, I put in the time to nurture and care for it. For which I have to be patient and ‘believe’ – belief in the way Elizabeth A. Povinelli speaks about it.
MN: I want to start by putting on the table the notion of “de-growth” and how it has been extensively researched these past few years by many institutions and contemporary art actors. For me, you are one of the few people who have been very vocal in highlighting the hypocrisy going on and have tried to propose strategy to counter it and to actually imagine alternative forms of curatorial practices. You have set up IO as an irregular platform, that can go silent and then pop-up again and take different forms, thus blurring the line between institutional and curatorial work.
MT: People often wonder what exactly IO is. If it is a project, if it is going to be a registered organization. It is many things. I don’t want it to be one thing – its improvisation, its intuition, it’s a gut feeling, its anger, its hope, its pain, it’s the many moments of a feminist snap – and this can manifest in many forms. Right after the anti-CAA protests had to stop because of the lockdown due to the pandemic, I decided to do Instagram live sessions on the questions I’m navigating via IO – a series of sort which I called a ‘curatorial masterclass’ – to share, learn, and think collectively, an important process to me, in a time of intense isolation, especially after this intensity of coming together during the resistance movement. People said that IO was back and I was like, it never left. I like that ambiguity and this ‘not knowing what to make of it’ – is essential to IO. That is my strategy in order not to be co-opted and do one thing and be defined as such. For me, the protests were as much of a space for thinking and doing as any other – perhaps even more than art world infrastructures. I don’t want to theorize it – I relate more to Moten and Harney’s idea of study.
It is where ideas of improvisations, being a part of the world come in – ‘creating a world in the world and not a room of her own’ to improvise Moten and Harney’s words. These conversations we had about citizenship, about our constitution are far more important and “of the world/ in the world”.
( Degrowth calls for the abolition of economic growth as a social objective, instead emphasizing on the need for a socially just and ecologically sustainable society.
For more info:https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/degrowth-case-for-constructing-new-economic-paradigm/ )
MN: I feel that your projects often work as propositions, each time reshuffling the decks of what could mean knowledge-production. It is especially valuable in contexts where there are so little financial possibilities and where it could be harder to envision what could be done.
MT: Scale, I think, is an important aspect for my work. For IO, I had collaborated with Chinar Shah, an artist who initiated a project called ‘Home Sweet Home’, to produce an exhibition in my flat. At the same time, I had just curated a performance program with Asia Art Archive as part of the Serendipity Arts Festival. This was on the scope of the larger art world – the kind of project that people would consider, makes your career. For me though, in a way, I wanted to show that you can curate something like that and you could also curate an apartment show. Career trajectories aren’t and shouldn’t be a linear upward trajectory.
Coming to the ways of thinking of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Sara Ahmed was a moment of recognition for what I was and am doing with IO. I understood what ‘study’ is about and is related to ‘un-learning’. Our experiences can be so much more important than anything that has been institutional for us and I am glad I came to it intuitively rather than from ‘learning’ about it – Moten, Harney, Ahmed just affirmed it for me. There is this pervasive idea that you need to read the books first, need to learn your Foucault and Derrida in order to unlearn them. I am at this moment where I am drawn to and relate to thinkers who articulate something that is so much about this un-articulation. You don’t need to box yourself; it can be and should be more complex. I realize that this is actually strategy, especially at this point of my practice. There is a lot of burden to keep talking about institutions and the trauma that they cause. You become that person that everyone eye-rolls at. Sara Ahmad says that eye-rolling is pedagogy, so I am ok with being that person. I might not get a lot of opportunities because of it, but it is a choice. Some days I struggle with it, some days I am okay.
MN: When you say that it is a choice you make; do you mean of being vocal about issues of abuse and oppression that goes on in the art world and beyond?
MT: The Indian art world solidarity is very complex. People take things very personally. Everyone thinks you attack them when you write or critique something. Our institutions are based on individual patrons having their own agenda. Our art education system is not very good; no one talks to young students. Moreover, hierarchy is a huge thing here. It is a very Sir/Ma’am culture. I have issues with those who have become sort of a cult and enjoy it. They can take all of these positions and be activists but could also be gatekeepers. You will be surprised by who they are. It goes to show that you become the gatekeeper you critique – at which point your critique is just performative and so you have to keep check on that constantly.
By opposition, feminist practices are about the dialogical, about listening, the conversations, creating a space of trust. It is not a happy place because you end up being a receptacle for a lot of people’s traumas, you don’t really know how to process or work through it most of the time, because you are only an individual still having to participate within a system. I am as much a part of the system as anyone else, which is why when Moten and Harney call for the abolition of “a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery […] abolition as the founding of a society”, I relate so much. Otherwise we will be stuck in this nightmare, loophole of a rhetoric. I feel we need that radicality, I don’t know how we will do it – but I am trying to get there. They [Moten and Harney] also say that as a subversive intellectual you create that world in the same world where you are living right now. We can’t escape somewhere else; we are in this world. For me that is key.
MN: Tell me more about your latest projects and how they relate to your politics.
MT: During the peak of #metoo, I started getting very involved in the movement, continuing to work on speaking up, listening and creating spaces where we confront and talk about the abuses and exploitation inherent in our many art worlds. A lot of the abuses, particularly that of sexual harassment was called out in the Indian art world. Post this peak, my work has been around how we collectivize, how we create what is called a ‘safe’ space to imagine another kind of art world. For me, curatorial work has always been around collaboration, so I do a lot of collaborative projects with other artists and curators. Lately, I have been working on a collaborative project Pact of Silent – How to break it? with Arnika Ahldag, an artist and PhD candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She and I worked on creating different projects, one of them being the ‘Feminist Syllabus’ – which are a series of workshops usually done in universities and/or through other projects. So for instance we were part of the 5 million incidents program organized by the Goethe Institute and RAQS Media Collective where we did a workshop with human rights lawyers to learn how to navigate the ‘Rule of Law’ around sexual harassment cases in India.
We were also recently part of Under the Mango Tree in Santiniketan co-curated by Sepake Angiama, Sanchayan Ghosh and Tara Lasrado. I did an iteration of the feminist syllabus workshop with students at Shantiniketan where we read from Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life and the notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’.
I realized that the more you are honest and upfront about what goes on, the more you attract similar people, and you become this person people are able to trust and be vulnerable with – and the space to be vulnerable is so important. It is not that a lot of us don’t exist, it is just that we are atomized, which is why for my IG lives, I spoke to curators like Sepake Angiama or Ainslie Roddick for example. These are relationships that are not dictated by this idea of the ‘professional’ relationship between curators, but these friendships are developed outside of that institutional framework. However, they are inside these places, inside institutions – just where I find myself from time to time. It was thus important to engage in a conversation and have an audience composed of young practitioners in India – who I consider the most vulnerable in the art world system – seeing people ‘chilling’ and talking, who are also women in positions of power. This is what power can look like, what friendship can look like. It is important in thinking about what curatorial spaces and practices could mean from these points of views.
MN: For me, I feel that I had and still have to unlearn so much. I always talk about the importance of horizontality, trust and care and the necessity to open up instead of acting as gatekeepers. It is nonetheless easy to fall into traps, revert to our old judgement of values – what is good art and what is not for example. It is especially true when we face difficulties dealing with friends or collaborators. I really think that we lack concrete tools to practice what we preach.
MT: I remember this particular time when I was part of the #metoo movement, and I reached a point where I was breaking down and lashing out at friends. It was a really difficult time – my mental health was deteriorating pretty badly then, and it has taken a lot of time and emotional labor and care from friends, family and my therapist to be able to return to the space of critique of neo-liberal art institutions. It truly tested friendships – some stayed, others left, fell apart and no one is to blame. It is how things pan out. All of this was coming from a personal battle against the system and its abuse and this constant realization that the legal system is not working to protect those who are abused and exploited. Months down the line, I am still grappling with having been part of the movement and the consequences of my choices to speak up and to create a platform for others. You push yourself to a point with the choices you make where you reach a breaking point and then you snap – and you do something that changes the course of your life, your relationships, your political work…
MN: Talking about mental exhaustion and the need to still check ourselves. I remember this episode in the early days of the revolution when I got into a huge fight with my best friend. I was in the streets, exhausted and wanted everyone to have the same level of engagement. I remember insisting and at one point she called me on my privileges.
MT: Privilege is so layered. How do we talk about it in a complex way so that we aren’t shutting out possibilities for coming together and being together? Sometimes the rhetoric becomes a jargon. Instead, you need to ask yourself certain questions and know if you can live with the answers you are giving to yourself. What does it mean for a woman from an upper caste and upper class – English-speaking, who had access to education in the western world to participate in the resistance movement and what could these privileges do for me in spaces such as Shaheen Bagh where I am able to enter and exit as I please, knowing that not much could happen to me contrary to the Muslim man or woman standing there or to those who come from more vulnerable marginalities. Our Hindu upper caste names “protected” us – although we were of course all embodying the ‘anti-national’ in the eyes of the fascists. People were being asked their name by authorities and right wingers. It came to that.
At one point, we decided to focus on entering the psyche of the middle class and started to stage protests in posh middle-class neighborhoods of Delhi. Some of the residents would be very polite because we looked our privileged upper middle-class selves; others would criticize us and what that did was spark a debate or cause a rift, say, in a posh neighborhood’s resident association – and that was progress. We would have a picnic, talk and hand some flyers. The cops would be there and take away our posters. At the end of the day it is important to talk to the bigoted uncle in your family or neighborhood, as important as being a body out there protesting. You practice resistance on different scales and modalities. There are different modalities, like persisting in the family WhatsApp groups which is the number one platform for the dissemination of fake news. I can’t do that myself because I don’t have the bandwidth, but I have friends who are able to do so – and this I think is as important as being on the streets. Resistance is also about code-switching.
MN: Can you tell me more about the anti-Citizenship amendment (CAA) movement that has spread in India since December and especially in Delhi and what is currently happening?
MT: On December 15, the police forcefully entered the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia University and attacked unarmed students protesting the CAA. These draconian laws amend Indian citizenship and are essentially anti-poor, anti-muslim, anti-woman and anti-minorities and pretty much serves a right, wing fascist agenda to homogenize the countries identity as being ‘Hindu’. Right before the resistance movement, I remember having conversations with friends on whether we would even see a resistance movement in India such as the ones in Beirut or Chile. It was hard to imagine a coming together because India is so complex, in the way that society has been built, in terms of caste, classe, religions, languages in addition to inherent violence related to issues of racism, sexism, misogyny, casteism.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has come in handy for the government since the attention is not on the movement anymore; there is a huge migrant crisis, people are dying everyday trying to get to their home and their family. They have to walk back home because they have no choice. A small percentage of ordinary citizens have been doing immense amounts of relief work, because the government has failed and pretty much doesn’t care. In the midst of it all, the fascist government is arresting well-known activists and intellectuals and transferring them into prisons where there have been known cases of Covid-19. At the moment, the authorities are focusing their repressive machine on well-known figures of the movement but there is a pervasive fear of how this might evolve and who might be targeted. Recently, two activists – Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal – from Pinjra Tod were arrested by the police, granted bail by the Court, re-arrested immediately by the police under the much more serious charges as well as the non-bailable Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). It is thus easier to break the resistance, because you are breaking the will of the people – they are going all out to try and do that. It doesn’t mean the resistance has stopped or won’t come back but I don’t know what it can or might look like.
MN: Once the repressive machine starts rolling, you know it serves the purpose of silencing any dissonant voices.
MT: The North East Delhi riots happened right before we went into lockdown. They were incited by the politicians in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Of course, none of them got arrested for hate speech. It is an old story that repeats itself and is about creating an environment of fear. It affects us on a collective and individual level. As a result, a lot of us are falling apart, at least in some of my immediate circles – we are trying really hard to keep it together. We talk a lot about ‘care’ without necessarily knowing how to do it – and that’s not anyone’s fault. It is just that this work of resistance is hard. It has been one thing after another and these traumas are real and affects us emotionally, psychologically, physically. This is especially salient in moments of disagreements in these times, especially because we are further atomized due to physical distancing. The fallout is more drastic, more escalated. You realize that this solidarity that we have been building, the way we talk about care and community has become words. We need to slow down and think about how to care for our friends and allies under these current circumstances.
MN: Are the disagreements political when you fall out?
MT: We go out and protest together and suddenly realize that we haven’t spent so much time trying to understand each others political stance and that there might be slight differences. There is no homogenized Left movement fighting against the right-wing. The ‘us’ is much more complex, and we need to understand that, listen and engage.
MN: Has the Covid-19 pandemic impacted your thinking and course of action?
MT: I didn’t think of designing something specific responding to the Covid-19 lockdown. A lot of the work I was doing had been under the radar and I felt like I wanted to claim a space and be more visible. This is why I started the Curatorial Masterclasses on Instagram. These were conversations I wanted to have with friends thinking similarly and open that up for an audience, to help us think of a moment and the meaning of our work collectively. Now, that we are forced into our own home, people are tuning in. I thought I was going to do a series of ten conversations but by the seventh I was exhausted, so I am fine with stopping.
The pandemic brought to light things we used to talk about. For example, so many times, I kept critiquing the system of applications and selection processes of institutions, but now people are paying more attention. An application process is about deciding what works and what doesn’t so it looks paradoxical to use a language of care –especially in these times– for an Open Call, while reproducing methods of exclusion. This is how art world institutions have always functioned but now it is glaringly obvious they have lost the plot in terms of responding with ‘care’ to the needs of artists and cultural workers.
MN: Because of the pandemic, we are forced into an entanglement, relying even more on the Internet and on technology built using minerals extracted in Africa such as Coltan for cellphones. We are dependent on them in order to connect while reproducing an extractive relationship.
MT: I am still trying to figure out what this digital space is and what our presence there means. It is nice to have these conversations but at the end of the day you are giving out all of this data and information and are being dependent on apps and platforms that we have been so critical of, such as Zoom, Instagram and Facebook. We subject ourselves to all these algorithms. So, I am wondering what does it even mean to build community and solidarity and think of inclusivity on these platforms?
MN: How did the lockdown impact your work rhythm? Did you have to slow down, especially knowing the crazy rhythm of the art world?
Meenakshi: I was always slow compared to a lot of my peers and never cared to be part of the wave as it takes a toll on your mental health and my health is more important than some institutionally sanctioned idea of a successful career. Right now, they are the ones re-thinking their pace, sitting in institutions that don’t understand how to respond to the times we are in. I don’t want to glorify precarity but, this rhythm is something I am familiar with. I never was into the whole flying around the world like some star curator – one biennale to another, talking about decolonizing and environmental precarities. (That’s me being smug about the hypocrisy of the art world of course and what their neo-liberal productivity has cost the world as well.)
MN: Instead of feeling un-productive, you know how to value this slower pace.
MT: Non-productivity is also a discourse to engage with and think through. I engage with so many conversations with friends. I might not work on a project with them, but they know exactly who I am, where I am at with my work and when the moment is right, something will come out of it – and it might never be a ‘project’, but it could be many other things such as care, such as intimate friendship, or even a fallout for instance. To nurture real relationships matters for our thought-process – and it is not always ‘positive’. In fact, sometimes it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy of finding oneself in extreme vulnerability and susceptible to anger, pain, hurt from which an articulation can occur but it will cost something. So, it is not an easy choice to make as opposed to the performative aspect of productivity in the neo-liberal sense. Lot more can come up out of conversations in a random WhatsApp chat or when trying to post bail for a friend who gets arrested while protesting, than writing a chapter for a book or conceptualizing a theme for a Biennale. One needs to understand productivity as non-productivity. The conversation we are having is of value. This conversation helps me, and you think further about our positionalities without it being a mere professional exchange. It is not only about the interview or the online platform of where it gets published, even if we are not aware of it now.
________________________________________________
Marie-Nour Hechaime is a curator and cultural practitioner based in Beirut. Her research interests range from commoning practices to environmental history and strive to articulate points of interrelation between disciplines. She is interested in self-organizing practices and alternative models of instituting. From 2020 to 2024, she worked as curator of contemporary art at the Sursock Museum. She is a board member of Arts Collaboratory, a self-organized horizontal art ecosystem of twenty-five socially engaged art institutions.