Reliable Copy

Ian Wallace: So thank you so much for having me to the studio. It’s great to be here.
Sarasija Subramanian: Thank you for coming.
Ian Wallace: So maybe to start with, could you just say a little bit about where you’re coming from, where you were before you arrived at Amant, and just a little bit about your practice and what you do.
Sarasija Subramanian: Okay. So I’m Sarasija Subramanian and I’m here with Nihaal Faizal. Both of us are artists. We’re based in Bangalore, in India, and we’ve both been running a publishing house together for the past about six years now. I think this is the sixth year. And because we’re both artists, the publishing house also began as a way to think through publishing within arts and culture because, even though there’s a lot of it in other parts of the world, India is not somewhere where independent publishing within the arts has really been explored that much. So we publish artworks by artists that require the format of a book or a digital publication or research and writing by artists, which kind of slips through the cracks of academic spaces and then can still circulate in this way.
Ian Wallace: You’re both also artists with your own individual practices. I’m curious if there’s some way that that intersects with Reliable Copy. I know that here in your residency, you’ve both also been working on your own projects.
Sarasija Subramanian: There are definitely intersections. The need we felt to start something like Reliable Copy and the need I felt to engage with it more and more over the years is also because we as artists now get a very different insight into other practices, because when we collaborate with an artist, we’re privy to so much more information and so much more of that process and their frameworks and systems, and all of that comes from us being artists and wanting to see it in that way. So both our practices are really different from each other.We’ve always had the slight shared sense of the White Cube Gallery not always being able to hold everything in terms of what we’ve been working on in our studios or our own individual practices.
Both our individual practices are very, very solitary. It’s very much in my studio with myself, with my own thoughts, and so the collaborative element that Reliable Copy brings in is great. It’s great in a whole other way.. And my own practice also has that same editorial tendency. I’m working with found image and found text and kind of usually dealing with it as an editor of some sort.
Ian Wallace: Could you say a little bit about how Reliable Copy got started and share a bit about the kind of publishing scene in Bangalore and how you guys fit into that?
Sarasija Subramanian: Reliable Copy was set up as an idea and registered by Nihaal in 2018. At that point, he was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Lebanon, and he was trying to figure out what he was going to do next when he came back. And at that point, he had thought through this idea of a publishing house to a very great extent. He hadn’t started operations in any manner, but he really had set the base for it and registered it at that point. And it was based on models elsewhere because there wasn’t a model like this to really go by in India.
And so it was very much to do with publishing models in other parts of the world like Germany, Egypt, USA to a very great extent, New York in specific, because there’s been publishing happening here from the ‘60s in very much the same way that we were thinking of Reliable Copy. And then I joined a few months later and then started working on the first project with him.

The publishing scene in Bangalore is a tricky one to answer because we are very much outside of what the cultural publishing scene is in India. The art world in Bangalore is very, very alternative space driven. It’s not something that has too many commercial galleriesthere are lots of artist-run spaces. And in that way, we’re also quite far away from the art market, at least a few hours by flight away from where the art market centers are.
Publishing as such within the art world is very gallery driven in terms of monographs or catalogs or these independent projects that pop up very, very durationally, like for a year or two. Now, as such, there’s either zines or photo books, but there isn’t really other stuff. So how we fit into it is a really tricky one to answer because we’re trying to figure that out as well. When we started six years ago, it took us really long to even explain to the art world in India what we were doing because it was really alien, this concept. Whereas here, well every day, I think we meet someone from the publishing industry in the arts.
Ian Wallace: You guys have also organized workshops, you’ve done an exhibition, you just had this really great screening program here at Amant. Could you tell us a little bit about the relationship between research and the publishing practice and how you see or how you think about the relationship between them?
Sarasija Subramanian: In terms of programming, I think publishing for us has always had a really expanded definition. I don’t think when we began, we thought we’d be doing only books, to be honest, that just for some reason, every project, even if it started as something else, would eventually become a book. And we also didn’t want to push out of this framework too soon because neither of us is from a publishing background. So we just wanted to first learn the ropes of this. And so because publishing was about making certain kinds of information public and thinking of distribution and circulation, exhibitions became an interesting model. Basically curatorial projects of any kind became an interesting model to be able to do that. And so the exhibitions we’ve done so far have been looking at distribution and circulation before the thematic or the idea of the exhibition itself.
So the one that we did a few years ago, the artworks were not exhibited because we didn’t have a budget for it, but we developed documents with each of the artists to stand in for the artwork. And then that also becomes a very easy way to travel those ideas. And it’s interesting because we had encountered most of those artworks only as articles and books or the website. There was PowerPoint presentations, audio files, A4 documents that were proposals for projects. It was really, really open-ended. The only thing in that show that was our first curatorial project that remained as is were the videos because they have a similar sense of circulatability and addition, which moves across time and space in a different manner.
And so we thought that would be a nice way to program, and now we really hope we can do that many, many more times, keep changing the list of films because based on the context, they can change, but retain that model. It is a fairly self-centered way of picking artists, has been very much about who we want to be spending more time with. And so yeah, that’s kind of what [our] curation programming has been. We’ve done some other stuff. We’ve done launches, we’ve facilitated some workshops, but all of it has the same base need.
Ian Wallace: The screening also included a few trailers for books, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trailer for a book before.
Sarasija Subramanian: So apparently this is a very, very well-honed tradition in book fairs, which I also didn’t know. The first one that we showed was made a few years ago when one of the books was featured at the Bangkok Art Book Fair. The reason we thought of trailers is because the Book Fair brought it up and said, “Do you want to contribute to this promotion of ours?” And the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair has an archive of them online.
Sarasija Subramanian: And also for some reason, the artist, the two that we showed the artist took to it so easily, I have no idea what I would do if I had to make a book trailer. We thought about it before New York Art Book Fair. Nihaal and I were like, “Okay, maybe we should try making some for our books.” We don’t even know where to begin.
Ian Wallace: This was with Dave Robbins, I think, right?
Sarasija Subramanian: Yeah. David Robbins made one and the other one is a Colombian artist, Mario Santanilla. But yeah, it is cool. It is actually a really cool format. We’re hoping to convince a few other artists to try this as well.
Ian Wallace: You mentioned this kind of very rich publishing community in New York, which I’m sure was part of the interest in coming here for the residency, but I understand you also were planning this research project that sort of centers around the Chelsea Hotel. I’m curious to hear a little bit about that. I understand that the research process has kind of gone in different directions since that initial proposal, if you don’t mind telling a little bit about what you’ve been working on while you’re here and how it’s going.
Sarasija Subramanian: Yeah, it’s been really, really changing every few days. It’s crazy. So the research project we kind of initially planned to spend time with here is also one that we’ve been looking at in different ways for almost five years now, which is a publishing series called Hanuman Books that was being run by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. And Raymond Foye was running the office out of the Chelsea Hotel and he was the lead editor, and the other side of this project, which was all the printing and production, was happening in Chennai in India. That was because Clemente had created certain relationships with a photographer and printer there. And so that person, Nachiappan, became a way for them to be able to produce these in a very specific way.
I’m not going to get too much into the project itself because it’s a really long story, but yeah, we did realize very, very clearly we’ve been doing a part of the research in India in Chennai, but there was a very, very clear realization that it’s impossible to take this anywhere without coming to New York because all the resources are here, all the people are here. There’s a very, very extensive archive of the project, but it’s in the Michigan State University in Ann Arbor. And so we knew we had to, in some way, make our way here. And that way, Amant has been really, really great because Nihaal and I have never been to the US before.
That being said, the research project has taken a lot of different turns because we have been looking at it with a certain amount of criticality, but we’ve also been very, very far away from it. We still have many, many similar issues to what Foye and Clemente were facing in the '80s and '90s.
So I think there’s a slight change in how we have looked at this project now, and there are many reasons why we are not sure what the outcome will be and if there really will be an outcome. So at the moment, I think it’ll just remain all of the material that’s been collected, we will make it public or have it accessible for researchers to be able to look at it further.
Ian Wallace: Are there particular archives you’ve been using while you’ve been here, or resources that you found particularly exciting to dig into?
Sarasija Subramanian: It has really been the bookshops and the kind of rare book collectors, but the ones that are also dealing in the city, because that is the market and the auction house market is where these books have been circulating for a while. And in terms of in the USA, the Ann Arbor Archive was one of the most phenomenal experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen an archive, which is this extensive. You go there expecting to find sixteen, seventeen boxes of just material or Hanuman books, but it’s not. There’s an entire folder where Raymond Foye is just, he was very, very close to Andy Warhol and he would think of Andy Warhol before he would ever take any steps, is how he describes it.
And so there’s an entire folder about Andy Warhol’s death. Every single newspaper article that came out then, he’s archived them. He has all of these invites and letters put in. So it’s also just about spending time with archives and material here that you didn’t plan on, which has been nice. I feel like we’ve been fairly zen about the fact that Hanuman books may not work out the way we want to because there’s been so much other material here.
Ian Wallace: Yeah, I mean, it is an interesting case study because it’s part of this bigger story obviously of Western artists and particularly American artists kind of becoming enamored with India, in this what we would call problematic way. And also I was thinking of it as this kind of example of offshoring and that it’s American artists having these books that are sort of formally imitating prayer books, right?
Sarasija Subramanian: Yeah, exactly.
Ian Wallace: And they’re having them produced in India, but then they’re coming back to be consumed by American artists, and they’re not being circulated in Chennai where they’re being printed.
Sarasija Subramanian: No. And these were the kind of things we were super, super critical about initially. And now, the more and more we dig into this, we’re starting to realize that there were so many content censorship laws in India— that two of these books had a really, really long trial that Raymond Foye had to win in the Indian courts because this book was getting printed there, that if he had tried circulating these, I think they would’ve had to shut operations really soon. So the complexity of the project has increased at such a speed that everybody really needs to think about how we want to do this and take this forward. That’s also what I think has gone wrong in the fact that anyone taking it forward now has done it as a very snap judgment kind of project, which is, yeah, it’s too complex for that.
Ian Wallace: What does it mean to be in residence for you as a publishing practice? What does that experience look like?
Sarasija Subramanian: We’ve only done residencies as individual artists before this. We don’t have an office space back in Bangalore, and 90% of the time, it’s just Nihaal and me. Every once in a while we have two other people that work with us, more of late. Over the past two years, we’ve been a team of four, but we always looked at it as us just shifting office to another country for three months. And that seems to have really been what has happened, because back home, we’d be working on three or four projects at a time. we have studios in our own homes. Here as well, it’s kind of become time to also have a studio practice.
Surprisingly, the next two books that we’re working on are both with authors based in the US and I have never met either of them before. Nihaal has met one of them before. And there are also authors here like David Robbins, who we’ve never met who hopefully is going to come down next week. So it really did seem very much like Reliable Copy just shifted base and operations to another place and another setting. And it’s been a really, really interesting setting to be in because of how much publishing there is here and how much of the interest there is. And it’s really hard back in India because there are certain conversations where you are fairly alienated with, just the people who are in your immediate circles. But here, that’s not been the case. Even the team at Amant in fact has had such an impact on who they’ve put us in touch with. And yeah, I think that made all the difference.
Ian Wallace: What’s the next book that you’re working on?
Sarasija Subramanian: That’s easy. The next book is with this artist, his name is Jason Hirata, he’s based in New Jersey. And we’ve been doing a series, we started a series last year called Wiggle Room, and the first book in that was David Robbins. And the second one is Jason Hirata. And its writings by them, but it looks at a framework that they have developed for themselves for their own practices, which can also then act as a sort of guide for other practices. And that’s the general idea of their entire series, looking for a little bit of wiggle room within the art world and within the context that you’ve been inside and trying to see if you can stretch those boundaries. So they’re really different from each other. And we also think the authors will contradict each other over the years as the series expands, but that’s the fun of it.
Ian Wallace: Well, I look forward to seeing it.
Sarasija Subramanian: Thank you. I hope we have it soon. I hope Jason hears this.
Ian Wallace: Jason, get to work.
Sarasija Subramanian: Yeah.