Who Are Your Companions?

Lakshmi Nagaraj Interviews Lakshmi Nagaraj

Lak: Hi Lakshmi. Thanks for meeting with me. We are here today to talk about your companions in your art practice. How do you want to start?

Lakshmi: There’s so much to say, everything is scattered in my mind. You should be guiding how we start. You’re kind of a bad interviewer. 

Lak: Okay, okay, let’s not take jabs. Start anywhere. What’s the first thing that pops into your mind?

Lakshmi: Personal objects have been starting points for most of my work. My earliest companion has been my Memory Box - a pink metal box where I stored objects associated with special memories that prevented me from forgetting them. A cutout from an old t-shirt embroidered by my mother, wrapping paper from birthday gifts, ticket stubs, my college notes – I inserted these into my paintings. Later, I began to make assemblages with objects still in use – my medicines, my to-do lists, furniture in my room. This developed into a methodology to explore intersections between my past and my disability. 

Lak: And how do personal objects show up in your work now?

Lakshmi: More recently, I have been using personal objects more as source material or references. I am exploring the lives of my mother and my grandmother and my complex relationships with them. 

My mother’s oven became a begrudging companion in my project exploring the grief that comes with throwing out our personal objects. 

My grandmother’s diaries are important companions. I used to call her Mom. I have two diaries of hers here. Year 2007 and Year 2010. Something I’ve been meaning to work on since the beginning of my Master’s is Adigemane Kelsa (translation: Kitchen Work) (previously known as The Kitchen). I am trying to dig into my memories of the kitchen in Kendriya Vihar, an apartment complex we lived in in Yelahanka Old Town, Bangalore from 2003 to 2007. I remember Mom making fish fry in that kitchen. I wanted to create a fantastical version of that kitchen. 

I started with two references, two works about ‘home’. Do Ho Suh’s Walk the House, full of large-scale, ethereal installations made with colourful sheer fabrics, and Sumakshi Singh’s 33 Link Road, the artist’s ancestral home, recreated to scale with white threads. The grandeur of these was something I wanted to emulate in my own work. 

But recently, I have been losing interest in this large-scale idea. It is evident from the fact that I have not worked on it much in the past 8 months, since I started conceptualising it. My body resists it. 

Someone in class said that at this point, this kitchen is a rumour. I have been sitting with that thought. At first, I am quite resistant to it because I have imagined it to be so magnificent and majestic in my head, with colour and textures, so visually aesthetic and intricate. Made with rigour. But maybe it is time to shed that idea and let the work transform. Let it breathe and become what it needs to be to live on. 

So it’s time to explore the idea of a stand-in. 

Lak: What’s a stand-in?

Lakshmi: In 2023, I visited the exhibition At the Kitchen Table at 1ShantiRoad, Bangalore. The exhibition showcased a selection of artworks that were all bound by the theme of cooking in some way or other. The catch: none of them was really an artwork in the traditional sense. Many of them were text-based, supplementary materials to the “actual” artwork which are not usually seen as worthy of showing the public. There were recipes, restaurant menus and coupons, subtitles of a cookery show. 

My favourite one which has stuck with me through the years is Document for a Proposal for a Monument for Zareen by Fazal Rizvi. It is a proposal written by the artist for a kitchen, a monument to honour his aunt Zareen. Through this fictional proposal for an artwork that may never be, it opens up infinite imaginations of the monument. That’s a stand-in. 

I bought the exhibition booklet so I could go back to these works. I don’t know if they meant for it to be so, but I see this booklet as an artwork in its own right. More recently, I also read an interview with Reliable Copy, the makers of this exhibition. Now it’s not just the exhibition or Rizvi’s work that have become my companions, but also the booklet and the interview. 

This idea of one thing masquerading as another fascinates me. Behind-the-scenes work as the artwork itself, the final product. Artwork titles, exhibition texts, interviews, to-do lists, video scripts, website content, classroom notes, sketchbook notes, exhibition schedules and playbooks, project budget breakdowns. I am interested in reframing these supporting texts as the main artwork, maybe the only artwork. Jason Hirata does this in his book Supporting Role. I haven’t read it completely yet, but it’s important to acknowledge this work, maybe as an acquaintance, if not a companion, for now. 

So with Adigemane Kelsa, maybe it’s time for the imagined installation to collapse and depart. My heart’s not fully in it, I still want to craft its elements by hand. But maybe I will start giving more importance to the supporting material: the proposal, the mini material experiments, the sketches, the notes, the digital illustrations, the animation, the rumour, my grandmother’s diaries themselves. 

Lak: Would you say your mother and grandmother are also your companions?

Lakshmi: Yes. It’s not just their objects but them as people, their emotions and their lives that guide this part of my practice. 

Lak: What other parts are there to your work then?

Lakshmi: I want to write fiction, or create fictitious work. 

Lak: Yes, yes, we have heard that many times. Why?

Lakshmi: At first, just because it’s a fun approach. But recently, it has become a nagging need that keeps knocking on my door. 

Lak: Why why why?

Lakshmi: Because work about myself and my family has been emotionally draining. It is becoming an urgent need to create imaginations. Investing in imagined worlds and characters. Where anything is possible. I don’t know if that’s bad, looking for distractions from myself. But I could really use a distraction right now. 

Lak: Then tell me about your fiction companions. 

Lakshmi: I am obsessed with graphic novels and manga. These formats are my companions. It blows my mind that someone put two and two together and decided to use text and drawing simultaneously. I like the accessibility of this medium. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

I have been thinking of how I can create “fine” art that has a narrative structure to it. Where the story moves forward. One event happens after the other. The story gets slowly revealed. I haven’t been able to find many references for this within “serious contemporary art”. But graphic novels and manga offer me a simple solution: just add text and dialogue to your visual work, or vice versa! 

I have been reading a lot of manga lately (shoutout to Bibliotheek Utrecht!). One that has become a companion is Nana by Ai Yazawa. I have read 7 volumes of 21 so far. It follows the lives of two twenty-something girls who move to Tokyo and begin their adult lives. 

Nimona by ND Stevenson is a graphic novel, an older companion of mine. The main character is the sidekick of the villain in this fantasy world. From this, I borrow the power of humour. The world is burning, and we need to talk about it, of course. But how radical it can be if we allow ourselves to have a little fun with our stories, feel a little joy, introduce some playfulness. My recent work has been quite heavy, with topics of death, rage, abandonment, exhaustion, disability. So sometimes, humour slips out as a coping mechanism when I am talking about my work.

Now I want to embrace it and incorporate humour and absurdity in the very foundation of my work. 

Hotel World by Ali Smith is an excellent example of how to make depressing topics entertaining. The novel has themes of class marginalisation, homelessness, disability and queer silence. But for most of the book, I was just laughing at the absurdity of the characters and the plotlessness of the book. Comedy from tragedy is a clever tool.

The unabashedness that Ali Smith embodies while writing in ways that disrupt conventions of a novel, those which are scoffed at by critics, is something I want to channel in my work. 

One of the main characters in the book is a ghost. There begins the absurdity. I latched onto this device of having a ghost as a character because it is such a simple way of departing from reality. As soon as one character becomes a ghost, they are unchained by the laws of physics and the real world. This gives me the freedom to do whatever the hell I want with my story. 

Ghosts, a sitcom with 5 seasons so far, is my other companion in this journey. All except two characters in the show are dead. They live in a mansion-turned-hotel. From this show, I am learning the art of world-building in narrative storytelling. What is and is not possible in this world? In the show, for example, the ghosts can transport through walls, but not through floors. They cannot leave the property where their death happened. They cannot move things around. Each ghost has a superpower. 

I recently co-facilitated a workshop on Alternative Ways of (Writing) Fiction with my classmate Gina, where we explored different tools of disruption to write a story about Emptying the Archive. The idea was to imagine if laws of reality and bureaucracy did not exist, how could we distribute knowledge (and objects) that have been historically violently taken away?

An interesting part of the workshop for me was to come up with world-rules on the spot for the participants, based on their conversations with each other. 

I am currently working on a zine for my Transdisciplinary Class, where I’m further practising world-building. It is a fictitious story of a grandmother and granddaughter set in the city of Utrecht. The grandmother is a ghost who died while on vacation in the city decades ago. Now the granddaughter has moved here, and the grandmother is stalking her. 

Initially, I got lost in my pursuit of making a perfect narrative structure for this story. Too unnecessarily focused on the technicalities of the craft. My classmates pointed out that the largeness of the idea is more suited for a novel than a zine. I used their feedback to pivot from conventional story writing. Now, there is a narrative structure to the story, but also narrative disruption in a very absurd way. You will see when it’s finished. 

Lak: Are there any other artists whose ways of working influence you? 

Lakshmi: Does that count as “bibliography” or is it just inspiration?

Lak: I don’t know. We will find out when this assignment is graded. 

Lakshmi: How’s this interview still going on? It’s been 7 hours. 

Lak: I know you’re tired. You don’t have to give me an exhaustive list. 

Lakshmi: But, I –

Lak: No, you don’t have to give me an optimised list of every artist who has ever inspired you in order of priority. Just pick a random few off the top of your head. Spit it out!

Lakshmi: Fine, fine. 

Indu Antony. Her work made me see artist books, collecting smells, collective resting, stitching with hair as art practices. She was my introduction to art beyond paintings. I’m so used to these ideas and have lost interest in her work, so perhaps she’s a companion turned acquaintance.  

More recently, a couple of my classmates, Gina van der Ploeg and Hilal Uzuner. Gina’s commitment to wool and natural materials inspires me to not run around like a chicken trying to upskill in the fear of being left behind. Hilal’s insistence on using paper and coloured pencils reminds me that the most evocative art can be made with the most accessible and inexpensive materials. Both of their practices remind me to commit to what I love: textiles, illustration, writing; to trust that creating powerful work doesn’t have to be technically complex, overstimulating, multi-phased or torturous. 

Romy Zwart, also a classmate, and Rama Duwaji. Romy’s indifference to the rat race of residencies, grants and exhibitions and letting her art just exist. Rama’s professional practice as a digital illustrator and animator, while also making ceramic illustrations as a hobby. 

They help me remember that it’s perfectly fine to turn to commercial work to make a living. 

Jesse Krimes. While in prison, he created Purgatory: a series of 300 prints of “offenders” made using soap bars, water, toothpaste and newspapers. To safely smuggle them out of prison, he created containers using playing cards. He tells me that art can be made anywhere, with anything, so don’t pay too much heed to constraints you may have after the Master’s. You’ll find a way.