Invitation For a Coup

A coup is many things: recklessness, relay, an upset, a spider, a nest, an imperfect construction, a halt, a projectile, a maneuver or a stroke. ‘Invitation for a Coup’ proposes a space or a bricolage as created by an interaction and catalyzed by the artist’s speech. The series is one of the many exercises in ‘public scrutiny’, a form that has gained political prominence recently. It is informed by Ravish Kumar’s provocative performance on his Prime Time show ‘that we can hear what we say.’ Converting the television screen into a radio, implicating himself and his peers, he conducted a thorough inquiry into his profession and various aspects of organizing a public debate. Taking that cue, this series invites select artists to introduce certain keywords, questions, and doubts around their art-making and propose new spatial arrangements to publically discuss it at the museum. Each participating artist leads us into a discussion or a construction with anchors drawn from her/his art practice.

This deceptively timeless coup and the gathering it anticipates can be thought about via the literary form ‘Recit’, a brief novel which is an account of a single event that happened to somebody. The literary theorist Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘Recit’ is not just ‘narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen – an event that is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the Recit can hope to come into being too.’ Invitation for a Coup is a Recit. It works towards implicating oneself and one’s peers with utmost force into a stutter. The series is curated by Akansha Rastogi.