Vedika Rampal is among the 22 artists selected for this year’s Hatched: National Graduate Show at PICA and a winner of the $15,000 Dr Harold Schenberg Arts Award, along with fellow recipients Lily Trnovsky and Kate McGuinness. Vedika took the time to discuss her work, Pilgrimage II, in detail with Dispatch Review, ahead of the exhibition’s closing this Sunday, 13 October.
– Sam Beard

Dispatch Review: Hi Vedika, congratulations on your award-winning work in this year’s Hatched exhibition. As a recent graduate, could you tell us a little about your studies and what this past year has been like for your work?

Vedika Rampal: Thank you, it has been an incredible year, with Hatched being the highlight, of course. For my undergraduate studies, I did a double degree at UNSW in Fine Arts and Arts, majoring in English literature. For the longest time, that was the initial plan to pursue academia in critical theory with a focus on literature. While I have always been interested in visual arts since childhood, I never really saw it as a practice, just as something I enjoyed and something I wasn’t ready to let go of in my tertiary education. So, I studied it as an ‘additional’ interest to my more theoretical courses. And then Covid happened, and whilst a lot of people in my art classes took the ‘biographical turn’ in their work, I found myself turning instead toward the historical archive on the internet. Although, I no longer perceive memory and the archive as distinct, at the time, I thought I had found a way to continue to research history, such as the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan, on which I was already writing for a different creative writing course. Except when you are researching something for English, you often don’t think visually, so until that moment, I didn't know that photographs of the event which had been so deeply ingrained in my memories, my family’s stories, etc. existed. Since its narrative had been passed down to me through oral histories, it had always seemed so ancient, as though from a thousand years ago, not something of which there would be expansive photographic archives of… Upon encountering these images, I was immediately thrown into extensive research of the history of photography, its relationship to ethnographic indexing, the imperial shutter and subsequently colonial museological practices. All of this was seminal in commencing my art practice and thus became the locus of several bodies of work, my first exhibition Colonial Reveries I (2022) and more recently Residues (2024) shown at Firstdraft Gallery earlier this year. With Colonial Reveries I, two thoughts struck me—first that all of my theoretical interests in literature: post-colonial studies, feminist studies, eco-criticism, did not have to be separate from art, and the second, that if I am exploring histories of violence, the two-dimensional canvas is not enough. So my final year of studies, Honours in Fine Arts, realised that push into the realm of installation where the iterations of Pilgrimage were conceived and developed, with Pilgrimage II currently shown at PICA. As such, within my first year out of university, there have been several notable experiences including the opportunity to travel interstate and visit PICA in Perth/Boorloo, the opportunity to show at Sydney Contemporary with Dominik Mersch Gallery, and more recently the group show I curated for Airspace Projects, titled What’s in a Name? focalising upon voices from the broader South Asian diaspora, which was a poignant experience as it really paved the path for me to find my community and people after graduation, allowing me to think further about how my emerging arts practice fits into my conceptual concerns. 

Dispatch: Well, congratulations on the AIRspace show! Your work engages deeply with history, especially the residues of empire. What drew you to explore these themes? And, as you have touched on already, could you share more about that tension between personal history and broader collective histories in your work?

Vedika: What's really interesting is that when I was doing that creative writing course at university, I realised that there was never really a starting point for these narratives as both the personal and historical have always been intertwined as part of my consciousness. While I can't speak for the broader diaspora, for me as someone whose family history is so deeply linked to Partition history, I don’t remember the time where the Empire was not part of my consciousness. A hyperawareness of its violence has always embedded itself in different ways such as the hybridity of language—Urdu, the official language of what is now known as Pakistan is enmeshed in the dialectic of Hindi myself and my family speak—the loss of place—my family doesn’t have a “village” as my maternal lineage upon crossing the newly drawn border found itself in New Delhi, a metropolitan city as refugees, the silences of other family members on the past—my grandfather’s childhood friends were massacred in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre or even how for the past three or for generations all the women in my family have been working women—not as part of the upper echelons of society—but in the working class as seamstresses or teachers as when you're dislocated, you don't have that privilege to not work. So, I've never been from a family where I’ve seen women as homemakers, or women who are subject only to the domestic sphere—again, not out of agency but a product of Empire. So, as these questions of gender identity, language, place, have been intertwined with Empire since the beginning, I have always been drawn to it. In terms of Pilgrimage II, while the work is not a direct response to the experiences outlined above in the way Residues it is still concerned with concerns of memory and history, just a different kind. As I mentioned before, I had always been interested in art as a child. And so my father had always told me that I needed to go to the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, which apparently contained the most exquisite examples of Indian sculpture. But as is common when you are part of a diaspora, cultural narratives, memories, that aren’t experienced, still, somehow, are your own. Neither my father, nor any other member of my immediate family, or from past generations had ever been to the Ajanta Caves. And yet, it is our memory, a part of a broader cultural sense of belonging and consciousness. So, I guess the work started with a question about positionality—what does it mean to have the resources and means to go to a site that has been part of a familial history and yet there are no direct, physical ties to? Invariably, several dualities emerge. Of course, there's a great sense of loss, but then there's a great sense of agency as well. I think these dualities speak for the post-colonial moment, and I write the word post-colonial hyphenated, because the post, which I guess is the present, can’t ever be absolutely separated from the past, which is the colonial. There is a link, sometimes tenuous, other times robust, which coexists as a simultaneous rather than a linear aftermath. So, for me, the post-colonial is not a linear aftermath. It is a simultaneity.  And I think that simultaneity extends itself to the pre-colonial. After all, Pilgrimage II, grapples with murals from the 6BCE – 2CE, an ancient milieu. But because my consciousness is within the post-colonial, tethered to the colonial, the pre-colonial encounter must be a bond to it. These distinct temporalities seep into each other, coalescing. So, in that sense, both post and pre-colonial have been touched by the Empire even when they have not been.

Dispatch: That's fascinating. I should also ask for readers of this who are not familiar with the Ajanta Caves, is there anything you would like to describe about the site that is particularly significant to your work?

Vedika: Well, with the Ajanta caves, the most interesting thing was that my father was wrong. Or, perhaps not entirely right. Yes, there are sculptures in the latter caves (there are 30 of them), but in the first two, when you first enter, you are met with the most intricate canopy of murals. Their significance really was revealed to me in the aftermath, through research. I always say that this body of work interrogates a mélange of encounters—not a succession, because that implies a false linearity. So, these murals—which go left to right, right to left, ceiling to floor, floor to ceiling—were a profound experience because till that moment I did not know that India had a pre-colonial tradition of painting, which a lot of people you know find surprising. And I would like to think that I am a person who spends a lot of their time reading, so I guess for me to not know of their existence does suggest something bigger, a lacuna within cultural knowledges but also historical demarcations as well. Particularly with the presupposition of the art and artefact dialectic. Hegel, in his Lectures on Fine Arts, spoke about Indian art being the antithesis to Greek art. He set up this sort of diametric opposition. The thing to note is that Hegel never actually travelled to India. He never saw Indian art. His friends had been to India and showed him either photographs or sketches. Of course, he decided to write an entire chapter on it. Now this is a bit of a tangent from Pilgrimage II, but it's related. Hegel labelled this Indian art as “forms of a fermenting fantasy,” as he couldn’t locate it between the absolute and the finite, because it oscillated somewhere in between, which was a problem of course. And so I started thinking about collapsing that dialectical opposition between artwork and artefact which the composition of the caves themselves suggest as soon sculpture and mural become indistinguishable from one another, and even the formation of the cave itself as a monolith in which you cannot tell when the rock per se stops and the sculptural forms or murals begin. So, I guess Hegel was right in the sense that these dualities collapse. But Hegel only referred to sculpture, once again there is an omission of Indian painting, which makes the “salvage paradigm” of museological modalities almost too convenient, preserving and therefore creating a history for the “uncivilised” culture, or even the power to elevate an artefact or object to the status of an “artwork” within a museum display.

Dispatch: That is a very captivating equivalence to draw. Perhaps I am projecting, knowing now of your literary background, but these narratives and these stories appear to really drive your work. Some artists seem to have an image comes into the mind and becomes the impetus of the work, while for others, it may be a narrative or a word that starts the thinking about the subject. For you, is the latter the case?

Vedika Rampal: The Ajanta Caves evoke the image of murals, sculptures, the monolith of the cave, a long history of ancient Buddhist art—a denotation I’m sceptical of as when you read about the original artisans of the caves it is written that they could be from any religious background, Hindu, Jain, etc. Only their subject matter is of the Jataka narratives which contain about 550 stories of Buddha's lives and reincarnations. All of these narratives about compassion and what ecocriticism would refer to as a ‘flat ontology’ today—that idea that there are no hierarchal structures and everything is interconnected—so in these stories, the ant’s life is no more important than the Emperor’s. This is why the murals can be read left to right, right to left, top to bottom. There's no spatial hierarchy, and there's no linear time. Nor demarcations between the everyday life of people or the creation of art itself. Because the people who resided in the caves during this period, well, some were Buddhist monks, and others were just travellers who would use the caves as a place of dwelling. Interestingly, ‘pilgrimage’ is etymologically connected to the notion of dwelling or to sojourn, there is the idea of movement and a pause intertwined. Coming back to your question, it is not necessarily a narrative that drives my work but rather these encounters. Which could be with anything—a site, a word, a person, an object. That's where it begins for me. For Residues, it was an encounter with the archival photographs of the Partition, for Pilgrimage II it was with Ajanta itself, the murals, the diaries of the colonial officers, its histories and my own memories. Once again, these encounters evade chronology. Perhaps they can be mapped out in retrospect—even then, I'm not sure if that retrospect can ever be accurate or reliable, it is as obfuscated as memory itself. 

Dispatch: Would you think of your work as installation or sculpture, because, for me, Pilgrimage II struck me for its bold sculptural forms and the use of material. I am curious how you think of it?

Vedika: Someone once described me as a sculptor and it sort of threw me into crisis, the term does make me feel uncomfortable and I think it is because (and I’m sure that many sculptors would disagree with me passionately!)—but the term evokes the image of mastery over a material or a technique, and that is something that I do not possess, whether its over copper or textiles. That’s why I tend to stay wary of the term. If I were to describe my work then there would only be two terms that I would use: installation and post-disciplinary. Installation because it identifies a transient condition of existence, something which only comes into existence within the embodied space, and once it has been de-installed all that remains are fragments, every photographic documentation of it is always going to be the “poor image”, an ‘illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original’ (Hito Steyerl). Which is utterly counterintuitive to what the museum promises you—this notion of a time capsule, this idea of permanence, of something which transcends time and endures. The moment it's deinstalled, it doesn't endure, and may be put up in a different space, but it's an iteration. It is not the same. So this origin can't be located. It's perpetually flickering in this liminal space. And within this succession of iterations, all origins are disavowed. In terms of post-disciplinary—well that simply creates a relationship between the form of the artwork and content of it for me. For example, if I’m looking at the disproportionate violence against women that occurred during the Partition, I have to use textiles and ceramics. There's no choice. There's no question about that. And so, Residues uses textiles. When I'm talking about the destructive consequences of preservation, I have to use copper because copper oxidises and it can't be preserved. It is fundamentally antithetical to the museological impulse to preserve So, post-disciplinary renders the material as in discourse to the encounter itself, and what's adequate to that.

Dispatch: Speaking of materials, could you talk a little bit about the interplay between the copper, acrylic and projected text in Pilgrimage II?

Vedika: Yes, so there are three components to the installation: screens, copper image-forms and projected video-essays which I term to perform a ‘poetics of re-inscription’. Something that is innate and often overlooked is the linguistic violence of Empire—how language is used as a means of erasure and control and rewriting, but also to reclaim voices and assert agency. Yet there's also, at the same time, the question of whether agency can exist. What are the complications of this? What is left unsaid, what can be translated, what can't be translated, what are the limits of a) inscription and b) re-inscription? All of these open-ended questions arise for me. So, when it comes to text, it speaks to my interrogation of museological modalities, because the whole idea of the “India Museum” in London during the 1800s was related to the idea of inscription, as plunder was justified by the idea of the creation, the inscription of history for us. So, for me, this act of inscription is really fascinating. Does it mean anything? Does it mean nothing? How much power does it contain? Can you write over something? Does a word have any real-world implications? There are so many questions that arise from all this. But it also reminds us that there are narratives that are deeply intertwined. While this iteration of Pilgrimage there are only two diary entries projected, the first mine and the second of Lieutenant Alexander’s, in the first iteration there was a third of the pre-colonial voice as well: badly translated extracts by myself from the Chitrasutra from the Vishnudharmottara Purna, a 6th-century treatise on painting which emerged at the same time as the second phase of Ajanta’s excavation. These extracts asynchronous yet simultaneous projection immediately bring questions of linearity but also transience, after all these are just projections—the surfaces are not inscribed. Additionally, the fact that the projection is digital is quite important, because it counters this mythos of non-European cultures being time capsules of the past. One of the things that anthropologist, Bernard Cohn, wrote about was how the British saw India as this vast museum holding artefacts from Europe’s own history. This allowed the British to progress, in a linear timeline, to modernise, industrialise, urbanise, and move forward but still have access to mementos from a prelapsarian past which they can preserve, and romanticise. In my work, I think it's quite important that there is no illusion of this untouched culture hence no concealment of technology—yet one cannot forget how the projector is one of the first tools of ethnographic indexing. Another imperial history is alluded to.

Dispatch: Is there anything about the experience of being involved with Hatched, seeing your work in Hatched, and presenting your work in Perth/Boorloo that's been surprising to you?

Vedika: There are many incredible experiences of being involved with Hatched, the people, the team, the incredible Brent, the space, the cohort, and meeting all of these emerging artists with brilliant practices from around the country, was truly something! But I think my highlight would be that Pilgrimage went on a pilgrimage by going to Perth/Boorloo which enabled its own series of encounters with different audiences, different people with their own unique histories, narratives and memories. I am not sure if I have mentioned before but I am quite fond of the title ‘Pilgrimage’ because it is used by historians to describe the encounter of Indian art students in the 1850s who went on an excursion to Ajanta. These art students, two centuries ago, like myself, had no idea that India had a tradition of painting prior to the introduction of the European style. Both our encounters had become ‘great pilgrimages’.

Dispatch: Returning to that wonderful story that you began with about your father saying that you must see the Ajanta Caves, yet himself never having seen them, Ajanta has had a personal presence for you that comes from an absence—again, a duality, as you said earlier. So, I'm wondering, while exploring these historical archives, were there other striking dualities and paradoxes that, in discovering them, revealed something new to you about your own art?

Vedika: For sure. I think of the endlessness and the interconnectedness of it all—how one keeps uncovering and excavating all these new ideas and new histories, new journeys, which make you rethink old ones. Yet, they're not so disparate. You may have not known something, but suddenly you do, and suddenly now it's part of your knowledge, and it's part of all the knowledge that you're sharing, and engaging with through art. So that's what stands out to me—which is related to why in my practice I don't use materials that try and return to an origin. Yes, in the original caves, there are traditional materials such as cow dung and lapis lazuli used but I am not interested in attempting to reproduce that because it can’t be reproduced. Both materially and in terms of location because that admission would concede that yes, the Empire was successful in taking the hearts of people, communities and cultures with their plundered objects and artefacts. But for me, those plundered objects are anything but shadows, because they no longer has the contextual force of all their surroundings. A very interesting detail that emerged in my research was that Major Robert Gill’s attempt from 1844 – 1863 and John Griffiths’ from 1872 – 1885 to display their reproductions of the Ajanta paintings were coincidently destroyed by fires at the Albert Museum in London and the Indian Museum in South Kensington. Ajanta exists outside of the museum context. So, while it was literally not captured, its murals were still destroyed by the colonising shellac and varnishes applied to its surfaces in a ‘misguided’ attempt at preservation. Yet the site still remains, the fragments are embedded within the monolith itself. Could one not perceive that not only as tragedy but perhaps as a simultaneous refusal against capture? A refusal to be plundered—an act of self-immolation? Microresistence? With Ajanta, I always say that everything and nothing has been lost. That duality is perennially there.

Dispatch Review: That is such a beautifully hopeful point to conclude, Vedika. Thank you!

Vedika Rampal: Thank you so much for the conversation!

Hatched: National Graduate Show 2024 is open to the 13 October at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.

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Vedika Rampal’s project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.


Images: Vedika Rampal, Pilgrimage II, 2023, Hatched: National Graduates Show 2024, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2024. Photo: Dan McCabe.