Life Tools
Birender Yadav
When the pandemic hit India hard, the government, without thinking much about the repercussions and preparations, decided to go for a complete lockdown. The tragedy that unfolded was witnessed by the whole world. Further, instead of managing the medical system properly the state and the ruler were only concerned about how to utilize the tragedy to build the public image through advertising and campaigns. Far yet very near to these happenings I was holed up in my studio and was also tested positive for corona. It was at the same time that I happened to rent a studio space in the basement of my residence.
Like many others, I too wanted to react to this unprecedented shutdown and complete stalling of life in some ways. But I wasn’t happy to reproduce the sensationalised media images in other artistic mediums (which was of course how we came to know what was happening). Rather I decided to go back to my memory and thought of looking at the people who have been historically at the receiving end whenever any such tragedies or calamities unfolded. Though it was imperative to react to the immediate, I was also inclined to think or stretch the event historically.
Historically, the labouring classes/castes have been the worst affected whenever calamities struck. Without any support systems to cushion their existence, the oppressed suffer more from the conditions of their poverty than from the immediate threat of disease. This can be glaringly seen in the events that unfolded during the lockdown and the aftermath. While the privileged too mourned their departed due to disease, the impoverished had to mourn their continuous exploitation in addition to the pandemic excesses. The diseased bodies were equally marked by their differences in the caste/class/ gender markings. This understanding made me stick to my earlier preoccupations with labour and the labouring masses a bit more vigorously.
Going back to my earlier works, I started redoing or extracting particularly the tools of the oppressed. Having been always branded as a mass without an independent identity, I started to visualize the tools of labour with their individual and independent identity. Each tool started to become human personalities narrating their individual stories. They became facsimile portraits of the labourer who used them. Slowly the tools started metamorphosing into peculiar/mutated beings. They started developing limbs and other parts and started inhabiting my studio and other spaces within the picture plane.
My intention is to now take this process further in recording how these mutated tools of labour articulate their stories of resistance in different mediums other than drawings. I have started understanding that as an artist I am more a witness recording the various ways the oppressed mutate/transform or negotiate whenever a pandemic/calamity is just added to their already existing woes.
