Visual Arts Gallery / India Habitat Centre / New Delhi PROPAGANDA SERIES HERWIG STEINER - solo exhibition floorinstallation - Computergenerated Prints Curator: Alka Pande , director / Visual Arts Gallery / India Habitat Centre / New Delhi dates of exhibition: 12th till 17th of March 2004, *** THE HINDU, Saturday, March 13, 2004 / LIFE / DELHI / page 2 A WALK THROUGH DISCOURSES IMAGINE WALKING on the floor through an artwork pathway created only out of text. Yes, that is what Austrian artist Herwig Steiner has managed to accomplish through the floor installation, "Propaganda Series", which was thrown open to the public on Friday evening. Starting from the contemporary media experience as an inextricable interlacing of text and image, the project attempts a comparison and reflexive exploration of optical and textual persuasive structures thereby acknowledging the essentially creative and meaning- assigning aspect of text within cultural production. "This floor installation of computer - generated prints could be described as a walk through discourses," says Steiner, adding: "From the diversity of meaning streaming in the flow of time, excerpts from about 100 sources and authors have been used interweaving into a dynamic fabric of meaning construction and theme representation and in their contextual relations creating interpretation zones beyond immediate contents." Texts from important Indian authors, like for example, Shahid Amin, Upendra Baxi, Siddharth Varadarajan and many others concentrate reflexively on special issues that India is grappling with. Viewers walking through the artwork pathway can come across various different textual fields of tension and also confront with partly unpleasant, and controversial statements. "the grandmasters of propaganda who inflicted terror in the 20th century are used as examples to begin the discourse. The central passages of the text material from which the title of the floor installation derives focuses on the discourses of power, the potential for violence and manipulative capacity of texts," say Steiner, adding that the pattern for the art - work has been derived from "Kolam", a traditional art work in front of almost all homes in South India. "It was while travelling in South India in the seventies that I discovered this artwork. And now I have adapted it as a pattern for my floor installation." And it is during the civil war in Yugoslavia that Steiner first decided to speak against the machinations of power that distort human relations by taking recourse to floor installations. "The call of fundamentalist terrorists for the random murdering of Americans and their allies, the cynical-technical report about the use of gas vans or the mass - murderous machinery of mobile gas chambers once used in the Balkans during world war II are shocking because of their outrageous cruelty and these also figure in the Propaganda Series." More sophisticated, but no less informed by the wish for power are those texts that deliberately thwart factual accounts of historical constellations. "They are an ingenious blend of provable fact and unprovable proposition, drawing a curtain over, mostly criminal historical events so as to efface and leave matters undecided. Kafka`s Gregor Samsa as a death figure or as embodying the degradation of a once - dear member of the family to that point of disgust when elimination seems to be the only choice left, is a providential find around which media mechanisms and foe - image constructions used to reassert one`s own distinctive identity." The provocation of conspicuous luxury in a view of Manhattan, the outdated concept of the nation state or `blind` followership of a fatal leader figure ( R. Domanovic) provide additional levels of textual zones. Thus the piece can be viewed on several levels and they represent different cognitive processes creating an interactive relationship of viewing, reading, imagining, remembering and starting all over again, a creative loop of interpretation. The exhibition will be on at the VISUAL ARTS GALLERY till March 17 and is supported by the Austrian Embassy in New Delhi. By K. Kannan