When Charlie O’Mannin went to explore a 12th century fort in north India during his OE, the last thing he expected to find was the New Zealand High Commission playing avant-garde short films in a room full of historically significant pots.

It was hot and the late November air was tasty with pollution. An elderly man was playing bagpipes and a bird shat on my head at the exact moment I took my cap off to dry my sweat. 

The line for the Raj Mahal Palace in the North Indian state of Rajasthan was grindingly slow, and in the skies overhead jet fighters patrolled the Pakistan border.

Jaisalmer has roughly the same population as Palmerston North (about 90,000 people). The townscape is dominated by a vast 900-year-old fort that rises high up out of the desert sands, and is still home to a quarter of the city’s population, who still live inside the ancient sandstone buildings constructed by their distant ancestors.

The Raj Mahal Palace, at the heart of the fort, is preserved as a museum. My foreigner ticket cost $5 (₹250 rupees). I wound my way up through the palace, neck still sticky with warm birdshit, passing small children pawing flintlock rifles on the walls and stone carvings of gigantic, bug-eyed monsters chasing elephants. 

From the high palace roof, thick with people, I saw the desert stretch into the smog, which concealed the horizon. A man wearing black sunglasses and a large pair of gold angel wings lip-synched along to a silent song while his friends filmed him. 

Feeling overwhelmed, I made my way towards the exit. Just before the gift shop, I wandered down a corridor that diverted from the main path and through a small door that looked like it had been left open by accident. 

Inside was a big, sunken room filled with large pots: cracked, torn and soft, like someone forgot to fire the clay. I later found out they were made of ancient camel leather. Ceiling fans whirled air down into the pots’ open mouths.

In the corner of the room was a projector, sitting on a narrow stone shelf and held in place by a wooden plank. On a small screen a blur of colours and shapes played. Occasionally, a cigarette would flash on screen. A pair of tinny computer speakers blasted out a Cuban rumba. 

A ripped sheet of A4 near the door told me it was an art exhibition. An avant-garde 1930s cigarette commercial, playing on a 24/7 video loop, funded by the New Zealand government. 

Wait, what?

The sign informed me there were four films on display, by Christchurch-born visual artist Len Lye, supported by the New Zealand High Commission and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. The sign was in English only, with no Hindi translation.

Transfixed, I stood in the room for half an hour, watching the films until they began to repeat. They were quite good. Only one other person entered the room. He took one look at the broken pots and walked straight back out. 

I went back to the hostel and showered, but when I closed my eyes all I could see were frenetic shapes and all I could hear was rumba.

Len Lye, the ripped sign told me, was once described by Time magazine as England’s alternative to Walt Disney. The screening of his first film, A Colour Box, at the 1935 Venice film festival was disrupted by Nazis, who objected to the mix of total abstraction and Creole jazz: for them, Lye’s work was an example of modern art’s rapacious degeneracy.

His second film in the same style, Kaleidoscope, was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes. The wholesale rejection of photorealism and narration in favour of a whirling vortex of oversaturated shapes came as a shock  for mainstream audiences, who were only just starting to see colour in film.

Lye was heavily inspired by traditional Māori, Pasifika and Aboriginal art, and spent six months living in Samoa in 1924 studying tapa design. This so annoyed Samoa’s administrator, Major General George Richardson (a British-born New Zealander), that he asked Lye to leave Samoa on the grounds that he was getting too close to the locals. In the end, Lye left the Pacific entirely for the experimental art scenes of Europe and North America.

But I remained stumped about how Lye’s films ended up on a projector in a small town at the very edge of India. 

So I asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

According to a spokesperson, Lye’s films were initially put on display in the fort as part of an exhibition called “International Art Salon: Panorama Editions Vol 3. Silent/Sound Safari”. 

The New Zealand High Commission was one of several embassies in New Delhi who sponsored the event. David Pine, New Zealand high commissioner to India, suggested Lye’s films to the exhibition’s organisers who “responded enthusiastically” after viewing them online, the Mfat spokesperson said.

According to an Official Information Act (OIA) request, the New Zealand High Commission spent a total of $2,719 on the exhibition, largely on travel and accommodation for Pine and a policy advisor to attend the opening on November 4, 2023. 

For the installation itself (ie, the small projector, speakers, and a piece of wood holding it up), New Zealand contributed $504. Every foreign embassy involved contributed the same amount. 

Participating in the exhibition supported New Zealand’s India Strategy – a vague 11-page document produced the last time Winston Peters was minister of foreign affairs – the spokesperson said. 

The important parts of the strategy for the Jaisalmer exhibition are “stronger and broader”cultural connections between the two countries and that New Zealand’s “value proposition is known and understood”. 

The strategy aims to “strengthen understanding of New Zealand as a progressive nation of innovators”. The Mfat spokesperson pointed out that Lye was a prominent, internationally recognised representative of just that aspect of the national spirit. 

“The first step in a cultural connection is familiarisation, and through the High Commission’s participation in this festival, art lovers in India were introduced to the work of one of New Zealand’s most influential, multi-faceted and avant-garde artists,” the spokesperson said. 

“The exhibition was free and open to the public, which increased reach and exposure.” While the opening of the exhibition was free, for the rest of the exhibition’s run the only way to see it was to pay, as the ₹250 rupee-sized hole in my wallet attests. 

The spokesperson also said the opening attracted “visitors from all age groups, including young people”.

I was unable to confirm the number of “young people” in attendance. The only youthful face in photographs from the opening taken by the High Commission, obtained under the OIA, belonged to a young boy clinging to the hump of a dromedary camel under spotlights.

That being said, it looks like everybody had a grand old time at the opening, taking in some experimental soundscapes accompanied by what looks to be some fairly highbrow performances in a spectacular location.

When asked if there were more such initiatives in the pipeline, the Mfat spokesperson played coy: “As and when a suitable opportunity presents itself, the High Commission might support more art exhibitions in India.”

Throughout his life, Len Lye struggled to get funding for his films, depending on sponsorship from cigarette companies and airlines. Money problems eventually led to him abandoning his pioneering animation altogether.

He switched disciplines, developing small-scale kinetic sculptures and plans for huge installations that were never realised in his lifetime. 

However, 20 years after his death, New Plymouth realised one of his designs, building the Wind Wand, and soon afterwards Wellington built his Water Whirler.   

Len Lye was a strange, fascinating person. The projector showing his films was supposed to be removed on December 3, but I hope that someone forgot and it keeps playing until it’s as wrecked and ancient as the camel-skin pots it shares a basement with. 

– Additional reporting by Oscar Francis