Co-commissioned by Colomboscope and Ishara Art Foundation; supported by Project 88.
2024
Ink, Tarpaulin, Video, Acrylic, Cotton fabric, Paper, Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Time is an index of the changing material reality. Yet it is an incomplete experience. Occurrences are liquid in time, their traces moving and fluid in that motile enclosement. Arching as this wave does, events coalesce cusps in the pace of time. We trace these cusps of the social paradox and build archives as baffles in a container. These archives, in inertia, mediate the sloshes of time where a multiplicity of events jitter. They call into question the procedures of individuation promulgated by the discourses of modernity.
The tyrannical many splinters the idea of an inclusive, egalitarian, and renascent India. A strange social bind hums of tatters. All institutions are shackled into offence and defence. The voices of the independent are stifled with impunity. Auguries of genocide replace freedom of expression. We live where time is sloshing. To analyze — to change what we need — is to be in continuous preparation for action. This is my role as a practitioner.
These actions are temporal and mobile. They may not consolidate, but their spillage becomes propositions, and in their making rings the insistence of collective endeavours. A participation of voices defying the capitalist mode of production. A coming-together that addresses the absence of the collective imagination — the absence of creative action against the fascist bulldozer.
We belong to the land; our bodies are its liquid agents. As the state and capital collude in clinical methodicalities of slaughter and administration, I see land as a vessel ferrying existence where bare lives are configured through constant expropriation and infinite accumulation. Those zoēs and their bearers struggle to fortify each other in the sloshing of time. Their vibrations in this sloshing are compiled and drawn on different surfaces. Multiple forms of expression are realised through plural ways of dissemination.
Three time-based media on the movement from Deucha Pachami against a proposed coal mine — on manipulation of the mass media and artists, land acquisition, and majoritarianism — imitate a sense of preparation. Journals, diaries, and zines unfold fractal records of everyday memory. Images of mordant landscapes and landguards appear as propositions within the paradigm.
Labani Jangi, Subhankar Sengupta, Sudip Chakraborty, Tanmay Das, Halishahar Sanskrit Sanstha, Malay Tiwari, Merve Espina, Pinak Banik, Birbhum Jomi Jibon Jeebika o Prakriti Bachao Mahasabha, Panjeri Artists’ Union, JINN Publication, Nabarun Publication, Saptak Mistri
Ruvin de Silva, Sarkar Protick, Sanjaya Mendis, and Tanmay Das