Exhibitions in the cities
of Panjim and Paris prove the need for art curation that heeds history and
Goans themselves.
In
The Rape of Europa (2006),
a documentary about World War II-era efforts to protect European art from the
looting Nazis, there is a striking segment about St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków,
Poland. Its storied altarpiece had been dismantled and taken to Nuremberg by
the Germans. This loss was not only that of an artistic legacy, but that of the
community’s heritage. When sculptor Veit Stoss’ Gothic masterpiece was unveiled
in the fifteenth century, the Polish were awestruck. But it was not religious
wonderment they experienced as much as a sense of familiarity. The icons that
constituted the altar looked like them, ordinary Poles. Stoss had used his
neighbours as the models for his creation.
In
December 2016, for the first time in my life, I entered the Palácio Idalcão,
recently thrown open to Goans after years of having been off-limits due to
renovations. Beautifully restored, the nearly half-millennium old building
overlooking the Mandovi river in Panjim, was the site of an exhibition that
constituted the Serendipity Arts Festival
2016. As in Kraków, ordinary folk in Goa
would have been able to see people who looked like themselves in an artistic
setting. On exhibit was a set of vintage photographs titled “The Way we Were”.
Curated from the archive of Souza & Paul, a studio still in existence in
Panjim and whose origins date back to the late nineteenth century, many of the
images were on view publicly for the first time.
While
art and exhibitions of it delimit viewership by class and social status, the
situation of these historic photographs in the iconic building in the capital
city of Goa denotes the importance of creating public spaces in which Goans can
appreciate their own artistic heritage. There has been talk for some
time now of the Palácio serving as a
permanent museum of specifically Goan art, but one wonders why it took an
effort from outside Goa to create the exhibition being discussed here. A museum
at the Palácio would go a long way in bolstering art appreciation and education
in Goa, but it would also re-enliven engagement with Goa’s history. When I
asked the person that gave me a ride to the exhibition to drop me off at the
Adil Shah Palace, he looked at me quizzically. “Old Secretariat”, I clarified.
Certainly,
the Palácio’s function as the former site of the Goa Assembly is one that is
far more recent than its having been the viceregal residence during the
Portuguese era, or Adil Shah’s summer palace until his ouster by the Portuguese
in 1510. Yet, the erasure of the edifice’s erstwhile name from public memory,
and the absence of any prominent signage to mark the building’s originary
title, evidences the ongoing amnesia around and deliberate eclipsing of Goa’s
Islamicate heritage. The ability of museums to serve as public spaces through
which to propagate such learning was made apparent at an exhibition I visited
at Paris’ L’Institut du Monde Arabe, or the Arab World Institute (AWI).
The
AWI exhibition “Ocean
Explorers from Sinbad to Marco Polo”
(15 November, 2016 to 26 February, 2017) puts on display objects associated
with the history of medieval and early modern seafaring. Prominent among these
are elements specific to Goa and Iberian history as they relate to the
Islamicate world. As one of the exhibition notes explains, the European search
for oceanic routes to the Indies was largely predicated upon undermining the
centuries-old “sea trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean [which]
was controlled by the Muslims … Right at the end of the 15th
century, the Portuguese began to sail in the Indian Ocean…” Consequently, there
was a rise of exports from such places as “Goa and Iznik [Turkey], [where
craftspeople] began to work in a semi-industrial way to produce the goods destined
exclusively for external markets. This … established new dynamics, laying the
foundations for the first phenomenon of globalisation”.
Items
such as an ornate late-seventeenth century chest with inlay work, exported from
Goa, serve as proof of the region’s involvement in this global circuit.
Simultaneously, the influence of Goa’s contact with other parts of the world is
to be seen in various artefacts. Chief among these is a sixteenth century
marble tombstone from Goa (on loan to the AWI from Lisbon’s Society of
Geography Museum), which bears inscriptions in Roman and Arabic scripts in
addition to calligraphic design. It struck me that one had to come to Paris to
see such instructive examples of Goa’s past.
Part
of the educational experience was the level of detail in the curation, something
which was sorely lacking at Serendipity. For instance, many of the Souza &
Paul images were presented sans dates and with dubious information about the
subjects. “Christian Man” a note would say, as if the subject’s ‘Western’ garb
would be enough to derive such information. As Goan art historian Savia Viegas
demonstrated in “Moments, Memory, Memorabilia: An Exhibition of old Goan
Photographs”, which she curated at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in
December 2015, even Catholic subjects would sometimes affect ‘Hindu’ style in
order to demarcate their caste standing. The curators at Serendipity, it would
seem, needed to have done a little more homework.
When
Stoss’ altarpiece was rescued from Nuremberg, it was returned to its rightful
owners, the people of Kraków whose likeness the sculptor had captured. Likewise,
the Idalcão belongs to the people of Goa. That it could serve as the site of
preservation and propagation of Goan art can only be a vision fulfilled if it
also involves those whom that art represents.
From The Goan.
