A review of Turning: On Field and Work, a visual arts exhibit curated by Vidya Shivdas, at Serendipity Arts Festival, 2023.
As I make my way from Bangalore to Goa on an overnight bus, the ugly eye of a CCTV camera stares at me from the roof of the aisle. I draw the curtains shut to block its gaze. The other passengers have also retreated into their private spaces, reading, chatting with their partners, or scrolling on their phones. I am travelling on the bus without any company. Naturally, I too succumb to the urge to whip my phone out and scroll on Instagram. There is nothing in particular I want to see. It is just the soothing feeling of letting an endless stream of tiny images wash over me that I am addicted to. It gives me a quick glimpse into the lives of hundreds of people I may or may not have met, even as I block out those in my immediate vicinity. I could do this for hours.
I am enroute to Goa to attend the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF), a cultural festival spanning a period of nine days and 13 venues, in the state’s capital city, Panaji. Organised annually by Delhi-based arts organisation, Serendipity Arts, the festival ran between December 15 and 23 this year. As I walk into the festival, not only am I uncomfortable with the camera’s lingering gaze, but I also can’t help but think about the pressure to use mine to document this trip. Increasingly, it feels like we are gripped by the compulsion to document on the daily—for our family WhatsApp groups, friends and “followers” on social media, or just our ever-growing archive of cloud-based photo galleries. It feels almost inane to question the pervasiveness of the CCTV camera, whether on the streets or inside workplaces, hotel lobbies, and even the classroom. A banner at the airport promising seamless travel announces, ‘Your face is now your ID.’
Two advertisements showing off the advanced face-scanning abilities of the Govt. of India’s recent Digi Yatra initiative. Source: India Today, TEAM-BHP.com
Here, the act of seeing has become interchangeable with the act of knowing. We know what happened because the camera recorded it, or we know you were there because you posted a picture on your WhatsApp story. Similarly, the act of doing, performing, or recording for the camera stems from the desire to show—look at how cute my daughter is; look at this grand wedding I attended; I swear I was there, look, I have a photo to prove it; or, I swear I am the person I claim to be, look, I have a photo to prove it. In an image-saturated culture, thus, a knowledge position can be comfortably derived from the condition of having seen. This knowledge position then invalidates all other modes of knowing.
A sinister insecurity pervades our image-saturated culture. We curate images of the self in an attempt to bolster its relevance. This compulsion to record is deeply rooted in an impulse to postpone, if not defy, the fact of a moment’s transience. A restless, desperate search for posterity runs through the ubiquity of the recorded image.
***
SAF comprises various programming within the fields of visual, performing, and culinary arts. I was there for only a day and a half, and so, I was able to witness only a section of the festival’s many offerings. Still, I left the festival deeply moved by what I had seen.
Vidya Shivdas’ powerful curation of visual works, housed in the Old GMC Complex as part of the SAF, stands out against my landscape of anxieties surrounding the recorded image. Titled Turning: On Field and Work, the exhibition presents an alternate to the seeing-as-knowing mode of inhabiting the world that plagues me. In the framing exhibition note, she writes,
The exhibition is interested in […] acts of assimilation and dispersal that the individual/collective projects present—in the way they carry and transmit diverse ways of knowing and inhabiting the world via an accumulation and reassemblage of materials, objects, things, and processes of making. We imagine the projects encountered here as potent texts that embodied ways of reading and writing (about) the field (emphasis mine).
In the exhibition, Shivdas curates visual works that engage with the past, the present, and possible imaginings of the future through tangible and intangible archives and accumulations: the songs of female tilemakers of Shantiniketan, Ambedkarite compositions recorded and carried in a portable trunk, the ‘exhumation’ (as she calls it) of the early history of women’s organisation in Tezpur, narratives of lives precariously lived on an arterial road between India and Bangladesh, and 47 years of accumulation lovingly compiled into a dream museum. Her central concerns, i.e. the notions of the ‘turn’, ‘field’, and ‘work’, all carry within them notions of continuous movement, regeneration, and impermanence. Unlike the recorded images I discussed earlier, works in the exhibition submit to, and even highlight, aspects of transience and ephemerality as well as the inanity of individual life. Their engagement with the documentary and archival forms depends on the use of a discerning eye. Coded with thought, intention, and deep emotion, the images they carry leave a lasting impression on their viewers.
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Even before I formally enter the exhibition space, the rhythmic beating of roof tiles into shape, intermingled with the piercing voices of the Bauri women engaged in this manual labour, sets the tone of the exhibition. In his exhibit, Sanchayan Ghosh engages with the practice of chhad petano—or roof making—as it was employed in Santiniketan before being replaced by the use of concrete in the 1960s. Connecting this with a detailed breakdown of the physical landscape of Santiniketan and its modernist architecture, he ‘re-engages the notion of modernity as a multilayered phenomenon of diverse practices and engagements’, as he writes in his exhibition note.
Significantly, Ghosh’s exhibit engages with the women (Durga Bauri, Pari Bauri, Astami Bauri, China Bauri, Koti Bauri, Jyotsana Buari, Mongli Bauri, Santi Bauri, Suksari Bauri, and Tulsi Bauri) carrying out the practice, but left out of the records of Santiketan’s modernist narratives. Ghosh highlights the songs these women sang as they worked. These songs centred around themes of lost friendships, unrequited love, and the everyday hardships of a life of physical labour. One of them reads,
The cuckoo flies above the
Land of my friend
Tell me o cuckoo
Tell me the truth
How is he doing
My friend has gone afar
I don’t know the post office
I sent letters in envelopes
Got no reply
O dear, I got no reply
Another couplet reads,
Babu has a chain watch
When will it be five
Alongside this documentation, Ghosh carries out an almost scientific mapping of soil samples from Bengal’s Birbhum region, along with archival documents relating to Santiniketan’s Tagorean architecture. As I parse through this material, the women’s voices resounding in my ears, it is impossible to separate the story of the place— its land and its architecture—from that of the labourers who constructed it.
The songs, drawing their rhythm from the repeated act of beating brick dust to make tiles, cannot exist in this form outside of this land. This deep interconnectedness between music and the land provides the women an intimate understanding of the field—they know it through its rhythms and its textures, and the land is in turn imbued with mundane stories of their existence. As this form of manual labour slowly died out in the 1960s, the songs too dwindled away, now residing solely in the embodied memories of the women who sang them. I think of how vastly different this knowledge position is from the one defined earlier, where the act of seeing stands in for knowledge.
A similar kind of ephemerality runs through Ohida Khadakar’s installation, a short film titled Dream Your Museum. Drawing on the story of her uncle, Khadakar Selim, who has amassed a large collection of objects and items over the last 47 years, the artist curates a display of objects and ephemera arranged neatly on shelves and in glass vitrines. The room is bereft of any text, apart from the exhibition note contextualising her work. The objects on display include but are not limited to: empty perfume bottles, postal stamps, and postcards; discarded diaries and used pens; a wooden top; an intricately engraved hand mirror; two slightly chipped ceramic cups bearing the logo of Kolkata’s Calcutta Club; old train tickets (prices: Rs. 9.00, Rs. 6.00, Rs. 3.00, Rs. 36.00, Rs. 9.00, and Rs. 11.00); and Gold Flake cigarette boxes preserved behind glass frames.
A small room attached to the one with the installation screens Khadakar’s film. Set in West Bengal’s Kelepara Village, it follows an old man as he meticulously collects and tends to objects that draw his attention. A young girl—possibly eight or nine years old—trails him, asking questions about the objects he has amassed. Where did you get this? What will you do with it? Almost halfway through the film, the protagonist draws out an old photograph of Kolkata’s Indian Museum—the largest museum in the country, and the ninth largest in the world—housed carefully in a steel trunk with many other such objects. He sounds in awe of the Indian Museum’s scale and collection. The viewer cannot help but notice the stark difference between these two kinds of museums—the first, a massive, colonial-era structure, now part of the country’s national identity, and the second, a vast array of everyday ephemera collected and meticulously preserved by an individual in his quiet home in Kelepara.
Despite their intentional arrangement within the decontextualized setting of the exhibition space, Khandakar’s objects carry imprints of the several hands that have passed them down. Even in their quietude, they brim with the intimacy of the domestic spaces they presumably occupied in previous lives. These objects are fragile. They comprise browning sheets of papers preserved in zip lock bags, glass vessels with chipped rims, precariously bound books. But, it is exactly this fragility that evokes a feeling of protectiveness in the viewer towards them. The tender impulse to collect, preserve, and tend to seemingly forgettable objects that make up our everyday lives and that belies the exhibit is deeply moving. This curation, though deeply personal, is shaped not by anxiety or insecurity but by a sincere, almost childlike fascination for the objects within the curation.
The dual strains of ephemerality and fragility continue to shadow me as I move through Shivdas’ curation. I encounter women who remember bits and pieces of multiple national anthems due to the precarious and unstable nature of their citizenships over the years; I encounter innumerable disembodied clay feet harking back to the mass migration of refugees from Bangladesh to India, amidst changing political tides. This piece is part of a larger network of narratives of people living along Jessore Road—an arterial road connecting Jessore in Bangladesh to Kolkata—brought out in an exhibit conceptualised and installed by the Panjeri Artists’ Union. The exhibit presents stories of lives on the fringes of political borders, uprooted and displaced multiple times, first during the 1947 Partition, and later during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
The exhibition moves from national boundaries to the graded inequality of the caste system operating at the heart of the same political terrain. In his video work titled Black Masks on Roller Skates, Amol Patil centres the figure of a sanitation worker and foregrounds the interconnectedness of music with the experience of marginalisation. He pays homage to his father’s friend, Anil Tuebhekar, who used to move around and sweep the streets of Mumbai on skates with a broom in his hands and a radio at his waist. According to Patil’s exhibition note,
[Tuebhekar] cleaned the city but knew he would not be welcomed on a bus or offered a drink of water in a hotel. To shut the world out with music was his individual protest. His signature style of skating through the streets was an act of staking his freedom.
In Patil’s video, a solitary figure weaves through the streets of Mumbai on a specially designed pair of roller skates equipped with brushes, radio in hand, listening to the powerful words of the revolutionary shahir Vilas Ghoghre. Here, Patil also draws on Maharashtra’s tradition of Powadas—or devotional music sung by travelling performers in the 13th century—later adopted by the Dalit anti-caste movement to confront social issues plaguing Indian society. As the central character skates through Mumbai’s streets, Ghoghre’s powerful refrain resounds in your ears:
Ye kaisa raaj hai bhai?
Ye jhoota raaj hai bhai.
What kind of a rule is this, brother?
It is a sham rule, brother.
Patil’s music—just as his inspiration, Tuebhekar’s, surely was—is one amongst the many sounds that emerge from and constitute a city. The city holds several such stories of love, loss, pain, belonging, and un-belonging that express themselves in song, indifferent to who is listening. The viewer of Patil’s work knows that even long after they are gone and the city has morphed into something else, these songs will continue to exist and tell the stories of all who inhabit it.
***
The many notes of the exhibition’s music reverberate in my ears long after I leave the festival premises. They mingle with the repetitive rhythm of the waves arising from the vast sea bordering Goa’s coast. Here, it is difficult not to think of an unreachable beyond that has, and will, continue to outlive us. My phone sits silent in my pocket, unwilling to disrupt the sanctity of the moment by recording and reproducing it. In the artists’ work, I recognise a grappling of duality between the immediate and the present, and the eternal and the beyond. Even as these works submit to the fragility and ephemerality of our lives, they record their own—their pains and hardships, mundane joys and intimate loves—in an attempt to leave a mark that outlives them. They long deeply for a moment of recognition of the richness of the lives they have lived.
