ART AS A SOCIO-POLITICAL STATEMENT

THINGS LOST, REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

Shoma A. Chatterji

Things Lost, Remembering the Future is the title of an unique art exhibition held in Kolkata
recently curated by Nepal-based artist Kurchi Dasgupta and Amritah Sen of Kolkata. The common
thread running through these works covers paintings, sketches, collage, photographs, installations
and a couple of video films that run continuously as one is walking through Studio Ganges in
Kolkata.

According to Dasgupta and Sen, talented artists in their own right, Things
Lost/Remembering the Future focuses essentially on the small, the forgotten, the mis-represented
as opposed to the official and the monumental. It looks upon the present from both the past and the
future and investigates the processes through which historical narratives habitually emerge. We
hope it will allow an alternative perception of history to spill through, one that links the South
Asian experience to the larger, Global South.

They go on to add This is possibly the first exhibition in Kolkata that brings together 14
artists from eight South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Myanmar,
Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) on one platform. The works were selected with an eye on the
unexpected in terms of media and content. Some of the artists are globally established names,
some are comparatively new, and a few are fresh graduates. Our one aim was to magnify those
rare, incisive voices that are consciously commenting on, critiquing and resisting the xenophobic
and gender-biased, mainstream idea of the regions history. The other was to give space to the
forgotten and the personal, hoping this would evolve into an inclusive identity map that differs
from the currently available version.

As one walks through the gallery on the ground floor and first floor, along with Kurchi who
suggests that the viewer interprets and perceives rather than be taken by the explanations that run
alongside the displays, one is amazed at how these works of art, through different subjects, media,
conceived and executed by different creative artists, define diverse socio-political statements unto
themselves ranging from Karl Marxs theory of Labour that argues about the exploitation of the
proletariat by the bourgeoisie through gender statements against child trafficking through a series
of photographs or a video installation that shows the artist walking back into a time and place she
belonged to and came from.

It could be a critique on globalization focussed on a painting of the almost obsolete candy-

floss seller posing for the art work holding balls of candy floss in his hand. The artist (Kurchi
Dasgupta) freezes this candy-floss seller, a marginalized man almost erased from our culture in
time by framing him in a painting and placing him as an exhibit on the wall of a gallery, as a
celebratory tribute. Is this celebratory? Or, is this yet another way of wiping him out of our
memories by investing him with a once-upon-a-time story? It is left to the observer to decide.
The artistes explanation however, is quite different and this shows how perspectives differ and
how art is really to be interpreted and not to be taken at face value. She calls her work displaced
which is an apt title. The portrait is modelled on a real candy floss seller which invests it with both
archival and historical value.

The title of the exhibition, Things Lost, Remembering the Future spell out that the artists are
not out to make any propaganda on the social and political environment they have experiences
through memory and the nostalgia associated with memory. Yet, they become consciously or not so
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consciously, socio-political statements unto themselves, creating a unique thought process that
unifies these artists from different parts of the world to share similar ideas springing from similar
ideologies.

Without really intending to, consciously or unconsciously, the artistes works lend
themselves to multi-layered readings. The most prominent is the socio-political statements these
works make, subtle yet sharply defined never mind if the images are photographs or video
installations, sketches or paintings or a blend of all of these. The art works also spell out how the
artistes unwittingly raise questions on economic, political and sociological issues. They shape the
way the viewers interpret and appreciate or critique culture.

Some of the works are drawn from intimate and personal memories and experiences while
some memories are individual but the creative comments have a collective impact. For example,
there was one work by the Nepal-based performance artist who also works on art. His name is
Sunil Sigdel. According to his own statement on "Blue Slavery in Golden Construction" it is an
offering to those workers, who are labouring at the construction of the magnificent infrastructure
and stadium for the upcoming 2022 world cup. Recently, I did a performance on the subject in
Moesgaard Museum, Denmark. I wore a labourers used, blue uniform and hooked a gold painted
iron hammer (symbol of the World Cup Gold) that weighed 6 kgs on the back of my uniform. My
body was bent backward and I was in physical pain.

The eleven men dressed in blue workmans overalls, without heads, bent differently across
the canvas, with their backs stapled with golden pins stand out as a scathing indictment on the
2022 World Cup. It is a collage that represents the workers as a football team that has lost the
World Cup even before it has started off in Qatar. It is a diptych. The entire work is adapted from
the artistes personal performance and the missing heads reflect how the brains of the workers are
chewed away, turning them not only into slaves but to human machines doctored to do as told.

How Tall We Were, How Tall We Are is a beautiful installation by Thisath Thoradeniya from
Sri Lanka. It is a pigment print done on archival canvas which offers a digitalised aerial view of
the city of Bengaluru. This map is overlaid with 13 iron chisels of different kinds placed in an
organized line on top of this map. This is one realisation of the idea of being trapped in a time-
warp with the map of one of the most modernised South Asian cities of the world on the one hand
and the ancient tools that made this city happen on the other. The tools are erased from human
memory but the beauty of the cityscape caught in aerial view remains. In one sense therefore, it is
a critical political statement on what development, urbanisation and beautification truly
mean gained at the heavy cost of labourers who have used these tools to make it happen.

Thyitar from Myanmar exhibited her works entitled Self-Labelled comprised of a series of
performance photographs in colour that freezes in time, different expressions of a burkha-clad
woman in different stages. The photographs are based on the artistes own performance to depict
the constraints Islamic women have to live within and asked a friend of hers to click those
photographs. The hands are instrumental in carrying the messages of confinement in different
forms. But the burkha also tells its own story. The poster for this exhibition was taken from one of
these photographs.

David Alesworth of Pakistan/UK presented a series of four huge photographs under the title
Record Room Series where we are witness to history in one sense and displacement in another
sense. The photographs are placed corner-wise in the gallery where the viewer feels a sense of
being suffocated by piles and piles of papers, records, files and so on, put together any which way,
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some threatening to fall over others, representing the disorganized and fractured image of a record
room that exists only in name today and no one really needs to enter it any more. On the other
hand, it is soon to become a part of fossilised history because digitization, the computerised way of
maintaining records is rapidly pushing these record rooms to extinction. It is a socio-cultural
statement on things as they were in the past (visible) and things as they now are (off screen.)

Kurchi Dasguptas Blockade (Oil on Canvas) is an excellent collage of footprints in red,

some faded, many overlapping one another aimlessly moving without direction in a rambling
manner. It is as if people are trying to escape from somewhere to somewhere else, jostling and
being jostled. The footprints are in different degrees of lucidity placed in stitched-over pieces of
canvas with the stitches sticking out. One footprint has been smudged out explained by the artist as
having begun on an inspiration from a Frida Kahlo painting which she late smudged out because
she wanted the work to be completely independent of influences. This painting lends itself to an
international interpretation of the threat of refuges in flight not only from Syria but from all over
the world.

Dasgupta however, says, the painting is her personal reaction to what happened following the
series of earthquakes that hit Nepal in 2015. The same year, when the country was still trying to
get back on its broken feet, a neighbouring country blockaded its southern border and its access to
the Kolkata port for nearly six months. Says Dasgupta, Blockade materially documents the
shortage, the scarcities, the trauma we all went through in 2015; it is hopefully made visible
through every stitch I have put in place on this canvas. In this, as in all the other works displayed,
the personal evolves into the political and the social. Things Lost but be found and refound and
reinstated, in different ways such as works of art and performance and literature and poetry. Then
and only then will it be possible for entire humanity across time and space, to remember the
future. It would indeed be interesting to find out what these works of art would have stood for
minus the graphic explanations that ran alongside the works!

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Tuesday, 04 April 2017