Students from the RLV College of Art and Music in Kerala recently held a seminar titled Intervisualities.
New York-based artist Noah Fischer collaborate with Indian artist Anil Dayanand and students from the college presented an installation and performance project Random Randel. The note for the project.

In Malayalam, “randel” means lantern, and ten large randels constructed of bamboo and fabric and decorated with block-text constitute the overall visual effect of the project. Random Randel also involves a spirit of experimentation regarding language and communication. For an intensive three days of workshop, students democratically generate hundreds of word-stamps (carved into potatoes) in various languages from English to Hindi to Malayalam to modern hieroglyphics. Students then form an assembly line which produces lantern-cloth stamped with these words and symbols. Inevitably, the random patterns of the words generate unexpected meanings and in this way students produce a physical artwork and an intertextual content simultaneously. For the final exhibition Fischer with Dayanand and the RLV students present ten large illuminated text-ured lanterns.  They turn on and off via a “switch piano,” which is accompanied by live Carnatic music in a sound-light performance. Random Randel is designed to provoke questions about authorship of an artwork, since it is executed completely in a collective/ democratic mode.  It is also a bridge between the worlds of language and of the purely visual: connecting students at the RLV college with new tools for meaning and content. Finally, it incorporates materials and language local to Kerala while also embodying an international cultural exchange.

Documentation and assistance: Elisa Soliven, New York
Curated by Bipin Balachandran