The artist-activist’s canvas of resistance
Agiant black and white photograph of Manipuri human rights activist Irom Sharmila greets you upon entering the multi-storey art gallery of the Lalit Kala Akademi. In this iconic image taken by Gauri Gill, she lies supine, with a drip attached to her nostrils, clothed in a plain cotton sari, covered with a blanket. On the wall behind her are images and postcards tacked up; next to the photograph sits a tall stool with what looks like her diary on it — thoughts on love, loss and agitation flow through the pages in her curly handwriting.
In the adjoining room, there is a charpoy with an immobile, shrouded figure lying on it. Supported against it is a black box with a scrolling marquee that reads “AFSPA you kill”. You realise the figure covered up in bedsheets is meant to signify a dead body; and if you stand and stare a while, the ticker also begins to read “you kill AFSPA”.
On a wall close to this installation by Kashmir-born artist Inder Salim is Delhi-based artist Sheba Chhachhi’s The Trophy Hunters, a pair of moving image lightbox installations. One of these muses on the AK47 — the background is an excerpt from a biography of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the creator of this gun that was to revolutio- nise armed conflict in ways that could not be predicted; the moving scroll on top of it is an account of a sister-brother duo who have suffered at the hands of the gun. This is complemented by images of battle scenes through history, topped with a moving screen illustrated with stag, deer, boar horns and heads, otherwise known as the trophies of successful hunts.
Behind you, sounds of gunshot and bomb blasts punctuate the mellow air of an art gallery in the capital. Veer Munshi’s video installation Shrapnel has animated remnants of an explosion floating on screen. Close by, Subba Ghosh’s Prisoners I, a painting done in charcoal on white paper, shows a man naked and squatting, with his arms wound under his knees and tied up behind his head. In conflict zones, this is how you “break” prisoners of war — or terrorists, in the present non-state armed conflict scenario — by “disintegrating any sense of the self”.
Elsewhere, Tushar Joag has set up a military-style compass pointing to the north-east next to a pile of gunny bags, on top of which sits a copy of the Supreme Court report on the six killings that took place in the Northeastern states as part of his installation Repeal, Resuscitate: Waiting for the Wind. Behind these is a table fan set on rotate mode — it alternately ruffles the wind sock and the pages of the report, symbolising the need for a fresh breath of judicial intervention in these cases.
Often shocking and deeply unsettling, these works belong to a mammoth art exhibition called Forms of Activism, part of the ongoing events to commemorate 25 years of SAHMAT. Curated by Vivan Sundaram, the exhibition “explores the interstices between art and activism” through the works of 36 contemporary and modern artists. “Ten years ago, I had curated an exhibition for Sahmat called Ways of Resisting, which was to map the period between 1992 and 2003, from the Babri Masjid incident till the Gujarat riots. Unlike that show, this time we invited artists to make larger works on issues of their concern — the brief is more open-ended and here we see artists proposing thoughts on as diverse as ecology, gender and communalism,” says Sundaram.
While Arunkumar H.G. makes a large, colourful, cursive wall out of bottle caps in his installation Droppings and the Dam(n), inciting the viewer to re-consider the concept of development; Sharmila Samant’s installation Churning Quick Silver has an automated baton swirling the emptiness inside a brass container, signifying the fruitlessness of concrete mixers, a staple of urban development.
There is also intense meditation on ideas of nation, community and constructed memory. Pushpamala N. has installed a huge painting called Kali, a part of her ongoing Mother India Project, in which she incorporates motifs of Christian evangelism like angels and the concept of heaven and hell with the very Indian iconography of the devi standing astride the demon Mahishasur; representing the death of British colonialism, but also raising questions of what Indian nationalism is. In front of this painting sits a long glass case with marble slabs placed inside it, like in a museum. These epitaphs are printed over with texts — “The Anti-Sikh Riots”, “Rath Yatra/Babri Masjid”, “Bombay Blasts” are some of the titles you’ll find here, but you can’t read them easily, because they are mirror-images.
Ram Rahman’s series of photographs of victims of the Gujarat riots is called Survivors — raw black and white images of men, women and children are placed alongside those of ruined homes and cracked walls. Arpana Caur’s painting Smouldering City has a seated Buddha cutting off his long mane with a bloody sword — an image seen in the monasteries of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and here meant as a reference to the 1984 massacre of Sikhs following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
“It took us three days to put this show together — sometimes, meaning emerges when you place works next to each other. We’ve also stressed on forms since today, multi-media art is common. In this lively display of works, curatorial practice is of essence,” says Sundaram.
The interplay between art and activism is fairly well-established; moments of historical importance have always triggered waves of thought, expression and often outrage. “The issues being dealt with here are more social in nature, proving that activism and art both have many facets. But activism often remains on the margins, outside the glare of the art gallery,” notes Sundaram. In that sense, Forms of Activism is an important intervention against the tide of time — the artists mark their resistance to the act of forgetting through stark political statements.