Later this week, during two public programs we will delve further into Karthik Pandian’s Forsythia cycle, an ongoing project bridging performance, film, and installation. Pandian’s மனசு (manasu), a 22-minute film currently on view in the galleries as part of The Art Gallery Problem, is one seed within this larger project.

Alongside montages, abstractions, performance documentation, and fragmentary conversations, மனசு (manasu) focuses on the first meeting between Pandian and soon-to-be collaborator Mike Forcia. By re-enacting their first meeting, the film speculates more broadly on what it means to connect and collaborate across difference. The scene shows Karthik approaching the campfire in Minneapolis where Mike runs security at an encampment for unhoused people. “Can I join you?” Karthik asks. “It depends what your intentions are,” Mike answers.

Their shared intentions—Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and solidarity between marginalized peoples—are made clear during the 2022 performance IN THE RIVER. The pair directed a three-act procession through the streets of Minneapolis-St. Paul, anchored by call-and-response chants led by Forcia. In the accompanying reader, which shares research and texts that informed the performance, Yasmina Price and Tommy Châu write: “There are many languages of rebellion: shared, negotiated, improvised. These are the many tributaries that show us our groundwater is connected, that hold us in movement, that meet in the river.”11Yasmina Price and Tommy Châu, “Confluence” in the reader for IN THE RIVER, published by Midway Contemporary Art, 2022, https://www.midwayart.org/event/in-the-river-document/.

The imagery of waterways connected by shared groundwater is doubly apt in the Twin Cities, a region bisected by the Mississippi and dotted with lakes and streams. But more than this, Pandian extends the metaphor of shared groundwater to signify cultural connections beyond physical geography; he considers “Indian”-ness as a shared experience between South Asia and Turtle Island rooted in Columbus’s misrecognition of the “new world,” and the subsequent distinct but parallel experiences of colonialism.

Here in the GTHA, these issues share literal and metaphoric groundwater, too. The GTHA and Twin Cities both fall within Anishinaabe territory of the Great Lakes. Water circulates between all five Lakes and their tributaries, reinforcing water’s capacity to serve, per Price and Châu, as “a fluid map for finding ways to co-exist.”22Ibid. Join our screening and discussion to follow these currents further.