Archana Hande's Installation

Relics Of Grey

Archana Hande’s latest exhibition project at Chemould Prescott, Mumbai captures the essence of a metro life in all its festivities and tragedies. In this review, Kanchi Mehta analyses Hande’s installations and feels that the works reveal the inner truths of human aspirations.

“1970. A child was born to a Kannadiga Brahmin family; technocrats who were precariously balancing a traditional belief system and the call of cosmopolitanism in a post independent industrial town. Rourkela, the town, with its colonial heritage of hierarchical cityscape, modernist-nationalist zeal for developmental construction and the impending political upheaval of the landless, was bursting at the seams. A White town, Black town, Grey town.” - Archana’s wall text by Madhusree Dutta

Archana Hande

1:00 pm, the day after the preview at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. The fatigue on Archana Hande reflected the late night after party. However, two magical cups of Green Tea, and we were racing with the words. I hadn’t quite placed the installation and its motive the first time I looked at it the day before. It was beautifully executed, but I had to travel many layers before I could connect the dots.

Hande’s work has networked into diverse issues and avenues, socially and politically. She has played the roles of an activist, facilitator, interventionist, creator, and I am guessing one role where she fits all characters into one, which is the main reason her subjects become complex with intricacies. Her works have been displayed primarily in the forms of installations, including sights, sounds, moods, and emotions that she recreates for the viewers in the way her reality and imagination together have decided. Her large, project-based, installation artworks – Play House, Mumbai, 1998; The Veil-Shop, Bangalore, Mumbai, 1999; The Journal, Bangalore 2003; www dot arrange your own marriage dot com, Mumbai, 2005; and Victoria House, 2006. All these works magnified a social phenomena like marriage, women, caste systems, etc., that have become a part of our culture and belief systems and yet have a grave repercussion to the people. Each project has linked Hande into the next one.

In her current exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Hande presents her year-and-a-half long project that culminated in the production of 3 large sculptural installations – White Town, Black Town & Grey Town.
 
Hande’s roots go back to Mangalore, a port city on the west coast of India, “…which was the famous gateway into the country for the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, etc., a large cause for the ‘mix-blood’, a race of people, the consequence of the ‘mingling’ of the Indians with the foreigners.” The issue of marriage, purity, descendents, religion, money, and other concepts were an outcome of this effect, and is a large part of Hande’s installation. The project was initiated as an investigation into the cultural, social and political attitudes of people in the four port cities and commercial hubs of Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Mangalore. From Manglore herself, she has retraced the Colonial influences we have adapted, architectural and social. Today, our systems aim at erasing all the British evidences, like the grand landmark, Victoria Terminus that is visited by millions of people daily to commute to several ends of the city, and country. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Mimicking architectural façades from different eras Archana created an illusion using materials like cloth, linoleum, stickers and packing materials. Doorways in the facades lead into inviting back rooms housed with objects, videos, sound, drawing or collage; the faux decor suggesting references to specific urban communities and issues. ‘From this place of intense social-political-familial critique she continued to probe and unearth narratives of different castes, classes, communities, and professions. She conducted video interviews with members from the Anglo-Indian, the Parsee, and the Portuguese-Manglorian minority communities, which she used to create mini-mock documentaries, news reports, or TV entertainment shows.’

In White Town- Victoria House, the re-assembled VT Station holds a great significance to the upper class of society who has been heirs to wealth, power and land, and has lived in great comfort and has certainly been oblivious to living conditions of the lower strata. This consists of the industrialists, many Parsees, the Brahma Samaj, etc, who have adopted the British culture. However, this phenomenon of the White Town is gradually becoming extinct with the rise of the New Rich. The same way that Victoria Terminus is displaced into a structure named after Shivaji, with no relevance whatsoever, this strata of people are becoming displaced, “…if they come out of this time, they don’t know what to do…they are rigidly and fanatically holding on to what they have and are threatened of losing their wealth and property to the new rich…”

The Grey Town-Chowdhry House is where most people fall under. “It is in turmoil, and this strata is struggling to be somewhere, prove themselves, and enjoy the perks of a good lifestyle.” ‘Hande evokes aspects of an earlier interactive performance-installation, in-which she played the character of a Hindu woman influenced by Western libratory ideals, who attempts to illegally claim a share of her adopted family’s property.’ The Chowdhry House becomes an icon with several generations of photographs, furniture, and their home. The family tree that has been recreated by Hande aptly reflects the middle class life. The sounds in the room repeatedly play in the background of the neighbors, the arguments, the reality bites, and the issues, which build a mood to the locality. The hard work and ambition to rise to the upper class of the society becomes a goal. But sadly enough, the White Town, being highly insecure, makes it only harder.

The Black Town-Adarsh Nagar, completes the vicious circle with the migrants and the displaced people. Represented by the railway tracks and an installation with an aerial view to the sides of local trains, which are passed by thousands of people, but noticed by none. “Thousands who enter the Metros from villages and remote areas with hopes of monetary satisfaction have no choice but spend their waiting days living in the slums, in environs that are low in hygiene and lack of facilities.” They are at constant threat to be displaced and at the hands of the powerful, which indirectly aggravate the slum system. With nothing to lose, they remain in the dark, hopeful for light at the end of the tunnel.

Today, we have all subconsciously buried this truth. We have all become complacent. The large communities of the labor class are subdued even though cities depend on them. “…we need to vote for better people..” Archana’s subject deals with the strife of the common man for his basic necessities. Her entire research is based on verbal stories shared with hundreds of locals of their lives, work, joys and pain. Each facet of her installation brings about emotions of thousands of people who are stuck in this vicious circle.

I pondered on this for days to come. Her stories and the intensity with which they were narrated to me did, in fact alter the way I understood the society. It takes relentless pursuit and vision to compress such a vast study into an installation, where complex societies affect the infrastructure.

Archana Hande is presently on vacation, or so she says. The artist lives and works in Mumbai and Manglore.