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Art in Public Space: Sandarbh 2007
Partapur, Banswara District, Rajasthan becomes active with public art projects as Sandarbh Workshop starts during the month of November. Initiated by Chintan Upadhyay and Baneswar Lok Vikas Sansthan, Sandarbh enters sixth year in 2007. JohnyML visits the ten day long workshop, Sandarbh 2007 and reports.
Suddenly from nowhere five ghost like figures, all clad in white and faces masked with white paint, carrying cradles that look like coffins appear in the main street of Partapur, a small town in Banswara District, Rajasthan. Curious people gather around them as these apparition-like figures place the cradle-coffins around a large piece of white clothe that obviously reminds one of a shroud. Then one by one they lie on the shroud, crouching themselves like fetuses and they scream out a monologue, as if uttered by a female foetus from mother’s womb. Through this dramatic monologue, the foetus reveals her story; her desires and ambitions to grow into a fully formed girl child, too see the light of the day. But one fine morning she is killed within the womb itself. From amidst the gathering crowd the ghosts rise up, take the cradle-coffins in their hands and walk towards the next street.
This scene is from a Kanpur based artist Koumudi Patil’s performance cum public art project conceived and executed as a part of the ten day long Sandarbh Workshop at Partapur, Banswara District, Rajasthan. Taking cue from the horrible incidents of female foeticide prevalent in the state of Rajasthan, Koumudi was trying to communicate the same sense of horror to a public that is partisan, collaborator and witness to such incidents. The ghost like performers after enacting the same scene in different spots, walk towards a river that borders the village and consign the cradle-coffin to the water. Slowly they drown and disappear from the public gaze. But the gaze lingers on and the questions raised by the performative act find echo in the narrow back streets of Partapur.
The success of the Sandarbh Workshop for Public Art Projects that has been happening in this remote region in Rajasthan for the last six years lies in its capacity to engage the public with the projects initiated by the artists, who volunteer to come, stay and work for a considerable period of time. The urban educated artists once they start working here find their ideological vantage points coalescing with the rural ambience and resulting into participatory acts of producing visually engaging works of art, at times done in enduring materials and at other times in those materials that disintegrate with time. Most of the works done in Sandarbh so far remain in documentation as well as in the public memory. Some of the works have already become a part of the local environment and people live with them. There was a time when the local population viewed the Indian as well as foreign artists coming to Partapaur and the surrounding villages with suspicion. Now the local populace awaits their arrival and is excited about the public art projects.
A public space has its own systems of functioning. They might look abandoned and neglected by the society. But the moment an intervention, artistic or otherwise, happens in that space, the invisible functional systems suddenly take shape and appear before the artist. Reji Arakkal’s idea to intervene the waste dumping area in Partapur main town however revealed the hitherto invisible systems. Reji’s idea was to mark out the waste dumping land with pigments and create a ‘green land’ amongst a heap of plastic waste, which he collected from the surrounding shops, houses and streets with the help of school children who volunteered to do some scavenging for the artist. However, each morning Reji found the collected wastes disappearing from the waste land and he found out some local scavengers ‘reclaiming’ the plastic waste from the artists’ collection and selling it to the local ‘waste merchant’. Also Reji found out that most of the poor people (who do not have water heating facilities at home) use plastic waste for boiling water. Eventually Reji’s became a ‘process cum performance art’, which could not be ‘executed’ in a ‘final work of public art.’
The surprise of Sandarbh is nothing but the challenges that the place itself offers to the artists. If Reji’s idea was to create a ‘waste land’ of certain visual impact, Makrani Mansoor Irshad’s idea was to engage the public politically with the burning issue of religious divisions and growing fundamentalism in India. Finding his act would perhaps, disturb the religious harmony of the place (why should a work of art intended to aestheticize a political issue ultimately turn counter productive and engender religious disharmony?), he decided to scale down his work into a performance and the making of a few big size unbaked bricks (reminding the Ayodhaya, Sethu Samudram issues where brick play a symbolic role of religious/ideological construction). In his performance, he assumed the role of a beast of burden along with a few artist-friends and carried a plough on his neck and pulled along the road till all the beasts collapsed. This was a symbolic act (was it a bit of school theatre?) to tell people that the imperialist forces (both the home grown and the foreign ones) would make them the beasts of burden if they did not ‘wake up’ in time and act.
In Sandarbh the artists also get chance to work with non-controversial but visually engaging works of art, using the vast land in and around Partapur and the locally available materials. Barbara Ash, a Bristol, UK based artist decided to make a flower of stones on a barren hill, which is visible from the main road. With the help of local volunteers Barbara made this flower of stones. Bhavin Mistry, a Baroda based young artist worked on a boat structure, which had been executed by Yatin Upadhyay in the adjacent in one of the previous Sandarbh workshops. The intervention of Bhavin turned Yatin’s boat into a small air craft, fitted with propellers, cockpit and passengers cabin. Sishir Thapa, a young artist from Sikkim made a boat in the shallow waters of the Mahi River, out of the babool thorns, which are mainly used for making fences by the local people. Also he created large impressions of foot steps under water using black pebbles. Both these works better viewed from the bridge across the river stated the artist’s visual philosophy in subtle but effective terms.
Malvika Mankotia, a Mumbai based young artist, in her ambitious project painted the debris of an old bridge in the Mahi River, with yellow paint. It was an act of retrieval of the lost past and Chintan Upadhyay has worked as a collaborator in this project by fine tuning the nuances of its color and design. Rahul Jain, a young art history student from Baroda doubled himself up as a photographer of the Sandarbh Project and as a photography artist. His project comprised a vast collection of portrait photographs of the people whom he chanced upon while traveling in Partapur villages. Heena, the Baroda based young artist, converted a triangular agricultural field into a school of letters and thorns. By replicating the cactus fencing the field, she created artificial plants with the cactus movement, using dead branches of trees and sticks. Each artificial plant was topped with bulbous structures of thorns. These plants looked at once alluring and hurting, and the artist’s intention was to make a critique on the desires generated by the consumer culture. Heena found the young children playing in the fields bunking school. She invited them to participate in her project and she asked them to write huge alphabets in the filed using pigments.
Sindhu RV’s intervention in the domestic spaces of the Bhai Ka Ghada village, 22 kilometers away from the Partapur town was one of the highlights of the Sandarbh 2007. Sindhu brought the daily lives of the villagers into her project. She after collecting forty two clay stoves that the womenfolk in the village make for domestic purpose as well as for selling in the local market, converted them into womb-cum-stoves where the feminine sensibility and experience collated. She painted them with black pigment and placed beautifully decorated firewood in each of the clay stove. The female-male relationship, with its power and erotic connotations was well expressed in this work and finally Sindhu took them to the very same village from where she collected the stoves. She installed these stoves in one of the courtyards she found convenient. Later the village women came forward to ‘buy’ these stoves as an act of local patronage and appreciation.
Sindhu conceived these stoves as women’s body, the most potential tool of the womenfolk. According to her, the woman’s strength lies in her capacity to work with her body, co-opt it not only to the act of procreation but also into the act of nurturing and surviving. Sindhu went on to do a performative act within the kitchens of the local houses, where she decorated the functional stoves with different pigments. This resulted into the local women borrowing colors from the artist and decorating their stoves. This was one of the spontaneous work happened in Sandarbh this year, where the local people’s participation became quite natural and aesthetical.
Lochan Upadhyay incorporated the public realm of wastes and the private realm of cleanliness, two spheres where rejection and acceptance generally get demarcated and defined, in his work titled ‘Ghumakkad Ghar’, a Moving House. A sofa made out of iron armature and wire-mesh, fitted with wheels functioned as a ‘house for living and a place for dumping waste’. The sofa, decorated with plastic waste collected from the surroundings at once functioned as an inviting structure and an untouchable object.
Sandarbh, that literally means ‘context’, absorbs everything around it into its context of engagement. Hence, the final display of the projects and the documentation annually takes place in the local bus stand. The bus stand, with the art works looks a transformed space but still retaining its basic qualities. People come in and look at the works of art and participate in the act of touching and understanding, entering into spontaneous discussions about the art works and the context with the fellow viewers and the artists, they transcend the meanings of a gallery space. It was in this space Chintan Upadhyay placed his video projection of ‘loading ideas and people’, a series of manipulated still photographs of the people traveling on the top of crowded buses and jeeps, a common sight in Rajasthan. Chintan converted the ticket booth in the bus stand into a video projection room and the viewing was facilitated through the ticket counters. A peep show into the daily acts of the commuters became a field of spirited discourse for the viewers who usually did what had been projected there. Chintan also did an extempore installation using stones and shadows of laborers utensils.
Somoo Desai, a Baroda based artist intervened the bus stand space with iron strings, which he tied diagonally between a concrete bench and a peg in the ceiling. The slanting pyramid structure and the corresponding criss-cross division of the space suddenly converted the mundane space into a space of loaded divisions. While allowing free entry into the space, the work made the people conscious of their own movements between the wires. Ashok Kansara, a local artist in Partapur carved the silhouetted images of the people in a rusting iron sheet and presented them as if they were hung for drying. The absurdity of waiting and the precariousness of daily happenings were suggested in this works. Bharat Singh, a local college student came up with his ‘question marks’ made out of thermocol sheets. Iqbal Bhai and Salim Bhai, who had been helping the artists for welding metals, came up with their collection of sea shells and created a bird form out of them, while the local crowd watched them performing.
Another highlight of the Sandarbh 2007 was Yatin Upadhyay’s ‘Green Man’ performance. Yatin placed his Maruti 800 car on a concrete bench and painted it with blue pigments. He and his team of actors then smeared themselves with green pigments and moved around the car as if they were sexy models introducing a new automobile. It was a spoof on the consumer culture and it became quite distinct when these green men confronted the local viewers with different facial expressions. Then the green men walked along the main street of Partapur town, exchanging pleasantries with the onlookers. Sandarbh continues.
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