IN AN ESSAY THAT MAPS THE CHANGING CONTOURS of new media art in India, cultural theorist and art critic Nancy Adajania has outlined the questions with which many of these artists engage with the contemporary political context: “How to pursue a politics that is not compromised by the political? How to make cultural productions that are not neutralised by the art market?”
Some of these questions came to mind as I walked into the ID/entity exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi. The exhibition brought together seven artists, working in different media, to address questions of identity. The works dealt with the concerns being raised over the Unique Identification card (UID) project envisioned by the Government of India. The project’s aim is to provide a unique number to all Indians, and maintain a database of all residents in biometrics. The project has led to apprehensions in civil society about violation of privacy, potential for surveillance and misuse of the data generated. Earlier this year, just before the first unique identity numbers were given out in the state of Maharashtra, several jurists, academics, activists and filmmakers pointed out the need to debate the feasibility and consequences of this large-scale undertaking.
The artists in the ID/entity exhibition brought out a varied set of responses, not only on the changing nature of citizenship, but also in the ways in people’s their identities are shaped by gender and by the spaces which they inhabit, work and travel in.
I was confronted by a series of close-up photographs of the human body on the first floor of the gallery. In these almost microscopic images, called ‘Untitled (Markings)’ Atul Bhalla focussed the camera on his own body’s physical markings. The intriguing images seemed to occupy an ambiguous participatory space, as viewers were invited to carry the images of the artist’s private markings through the exhibition. Bhalla, who has been known for his self-performative photographs around the theme of water, said these images reflect an inward move to explore how his markings will define him, even after the mandatory introduction of an identity card. They also come from a concern that after such an identification procedure is undertaken, identities will belong to the state, and the social spaces available for them to change will cease to exist.
In other instances, clever placement of works added newer meanings. Shilpa Gupta’s ‘100 Hand Drawn Maps of India’ alluded to the constructed nature of the nation-state, posing an interesting range of questions. Gupta’s single-channel video presentation displayed a series made up of 100 maps of India that have been drawn by her acquaintances, indicating the fluid and subjective nature of the nation-state. With each redrawing of the map, the cartographic contours mutate, making the idea of a fixed, defined India seem almost like a mirage. As the viewer watches the maps change, the northern and eastern boundaries shift and, strangely, Sri Lanka appears and disappears. Yet the individual interpretations also reflect the role of memory in shaping the way the country is perceived and remembered.
Gupta’s work readies the viewer for the next exhibit—two video installations by the Guwahati-based Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain of the Desire Machine Collective. These introduce the experience of the Northeast into the current debates on state surveillance. Walking into the video booths where these works are being screened is like being shown into someone else’s worldview. Their first work, ‘25/75,’ is a dream-like representation of daily life in Shillong, Meghalaya, with the motif of the numbers 25 and 75 running through the imagery. This numerical repetition refers to a local archery game, where people bet on either the number 25 or 75, based on the dreams they have had the previous night. As people sit at their shops and go about their daily lives, the camera seems to move in synchrony with the sound of flowing water. Each wave of water coincides with the flow of traffic and people through the city, the windows and windshields of the vehicles becoming watery reflections of the life around them.
The subtle, poetic glimpses of 25/75 add several layers of meaning to the Desire Machine Collective’s other work, an overtly political video installation called ‘Daily Checkup.’ The video combined ‘found footage’ with the performance of an interrogation to represent the experience of bodily violence in everyday life in the Northeast. Young men stand with their hands raised against blank walls, as the camera takes the viewer through their experience of being frisked. The visuals run on a loop, alluding to the way in which these procedures have become routine and ritualised. This is juxtaposed with footage of police raids and encounters in Manipur—men being beaten and dragged across roads. As the video ends, the official stamp for a security check flashes across the screen, and over the bodies of those who are being interrogated. The last visual links it to the various official documents and exhibits on the Northeast displayed on either side of the video booth. These include an 18th-century anthropological travel account by a French explorer, a colonial official memorandum complaining about the “warlike and uncivilised tribes” in the region, a documents listing offences under the Army Rules of 1954, a confiscated Marxist pamphlet, and a notice of the Northeast Frontier Railway on the installation of the first closed circuit television at the Guwahati railway station. Together they draw attention to the historical trajectory of constituting the Northeast as a frontier region, as well as the laws and the state apparatus that govern it. Both these works also engage with the politics of representing and misrepresenting indigenous people formalistically.
The exhibition note identifies the body as “a crucial site of inquiry, a contested terrain.” In this context, Bhalla’s ‘Untitled (Markings)’ series leads to a complex dialogue with the images of interrogation in ‘Daily Checkup.’
Another set of works situate the body within a wider range of connections to places and spaces, to which individuals define their identities. A couple of drawings by Tushar Joag featured a superhero-like figure called the ‘Unicell Man,’ who intervenes on behalf of the citizens and the state. Adding a satirical edge to the exhibition, the drawings unmasked the skewed nature of the relationship between citizens, the state and private interests. The works are a part of Joag’s larger UNICELL Public Works Cell project, a fictitious company set up by the artist. By proposing fantastical projects, such as the conversion of Mumbai into a ‘Venice of the East,’ which has been represented in one of the drawings, the project brings out the violence embedded in urban displacement.
Bhalla’s second series, ‘Ablutions,’, represented a series of wazoo khanas, spaces of cleaning and ablution in Delhi’s mosques, as an invitation to the viewer to enter and mull over these spaces where individuals cleanse themselves. Mansi Bhatt, who works with performance photography, explores her relationship to her surrounding urban space by slipping into the body of a scarecrow in ‘Scare (d) Crow,’ watching the redevelopment. In another series, ‘Three Cool Guys,’ Bhatt enacts the role of three men inhabiting different spaces in the city, rupturing the concept of gender. Although visually interesting, these images could have worked better with a small explanation of their context.
Perhaps the most lasting impressions of the exhibition came from the works which seek to draw the viewer into them as a participant. Some of these link themselves to others in an intangible and fluid manner, such as Shilpa Gupta’s simple yet thought-provoking work, ‘Memory.’ Viewers are invited to take a sheet of paper from a stack of identical sheets with the word MEMORY cut out on each of them. The fragile and mobile nature of this takeaway work allows the viewer to contemplate the delicate relationship between memory and identity. Like some of her earlier work, the distributive nature of ‘Memory’ enables the viewer to ascribe newer meanings to the work. It also elicits connections with the functioning of collective memories, expressed in the works on the Northeast.
‘An Exercise in Trust,’ a live performance by Tejal Shah, is another work that lives up to the participatory and experiential nature of the exhibition. For a couple of days, viewers were invited to take the blindfolded artist for a walk in the neighbourhood. This allowed the artist as well as the participants to use the body in an experiential way to understand trust, but the conditionality of requiring the participants to submit a photo ID beforehand also hinted at the near ubiquitous connection between trust and identity documents. Although time-bound, the photographs and audio recordings of these walks remained on display through November.
The exhibition also featured Amsterdam-based artist Praneet Soi, who worked on two life-sized murals on the walls of the gallery to explore the changing nature of urban space. The second mural represents a man carrying another, playing upon ideas of trust and dependence between the two bodies.
While the engagement with varied and wide-ranging themes creates multiple dimensions for viewing the exhi-bition, it can also give it a meandering flow. These are artists’ personalised expressions of politics, but it can also be confusing for the viewer, as it diffuses the thematic intent and political framework within which the exhibition defines itself. Recent debates in art criticism point to the problems of judging the artistic merit of works only on the basis of their being labelled political, and of ‘compulsively privileging political themes in art.’ These questions are concerned not only with subject matter, but also with the language of artistic practice and how it locates itself vis-à-vis the viewer. The multitude of intersecting practices, perspectives and concerns imply that responses can only be provisional. The open-ended nature of the exhibition becomes a relevant take-off point for thinking about the engagement between art and politics.