Matti Braun

Besides the work of Matti Braun, the present book has in view above all Bengali science fiction and aspects of modernity in India in the second half of the twentieth century. It was developed in close collaboration with the co-editors Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, an associate professor of global culture studies in Oslo, and Beth Citron, a curator from New York specialising in modern art from South Asia. When one sees Matti Braun’s batiks and silk paintings in the exhibition space, and how he presents historical saris alongside them within the same framing, one begins to sense what it means when it is said that the artist investigates unexpected and often little-known effects of intercultural dynamics and makes patterns of artistic migration and cultural disregard visible. Here his enchantingly beautiful silk painting, which touches on minimalism as much as on pop art; there the historical fabrics of the traditional garment, a wrapped skirt worn from India to Nepal which, besides its festive versions, offers its wearers positively super-practical possibilities in the everyday life of subtropical countries, and which today is traded at auction and hangs, mounted and framed, as a picture in the museums of Asia and Europe. The present book goes one step further: it offers comprehensive insights into the associative network underlying Matti Braun’s work of recent years. One aspect concerns the history of the never-realised film “The Alien” by the Indian director and author Satyajit Ray, which he was to have produced for one of the big Hollywood studios in the mid-1960s. In 1982 Steven Spielberg’s mega-blockbuster “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” was released – to this day it appears disputed whether or not it was a plagiarism. Matti Braun, however, takes this spectacularly further, for it is the whole scenery behind it that interests him, and so, together with his co-editors Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Beth Citron, he sets off a veritable “Bengali” firework display, bringing to light the early science fiction culture of the Indian subcontinent, the stories in its various magazines, its authors and books, the effects on Bollywood and even the political ambitions of the Indian rocket programme: a gripping story!

Exhibition:
Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin, 17/1–22/2/2020