468, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad - 500 034, Tel: +91-040-66564466 www.kalakriti.in | info@kalakriti.in www.facebook.com/kalakriti Kalakriti Art Gallery Presents Climbing the Hill: Prajakta Palav-Aher’s Peripatetic Encounters Outside The Studio Nancy Adajania Although we are a country whose people think it is their birthright to litter the place where they live and work, it is unusual to ind Indian artists who deal, in their work, with the subject of waste – or, as Prajakta Palav-Aher insists on calling it, kachra. In Hindi and Marathi, the term ‘kachra’ or garbage has an inlection that is quite different from the more civic connotation of ‘waste’. While ‘waste’ suggests something to be managed eficiently by inculcating the right scientiic and environmental values, ‘kachra’ carries far more deep-seated cultural connotations of taboo and proscription. We make copious quantities of kachra but once we have expelled it from our bodies, our meals or our homes, we cannot touch it, because custom teaches us that it can contaminate us. Kachra is imprinted with the pernicious taboo of caste, making those who touch it or work with it socially ‘untouchable’. This attitude persists both in individual conduct and the social imagination, despite the fact that the practice of ‘untouchability’ has been Constitutionally abolished many decades ago in India, and is a legal offence. Palav has often painted vast wastescapes that smoulder like volcanoes of conspicuous consumption. She has also engineered eruptions in the sanitised space of the white cube. In her handling, impeccable gallery walls have been known to experience sudden lare-ups and spew out dirt: lakes and scabs of dried paint. It was as if the subconscious of the gallery space had been awakened and the walls were no longer stable backdrops on which art could be shown, but live surfaces that had a mind of their own. In the recent exhibition ‘It Clots’, held at the Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad, Palav bypassed the gallery walls and instead pegged her paintings on a bamboo scaffolding. The unfettered canvases looked like ish left out to dry on a beach in Bombay. Palav calls them, ‘manzarpat’, the Marathi term for unprimed canvases (incidentally the Marathi word manzarpat has nothing to do with ‘cat stripes’, as it might seem to do at irst glance; rather, the word is a local form of ‘Manchester’, the city whose mills produced the cloth in the 19th century and exported it to Bombay). Devoid of human presence, these paintings breathe life into the inanimate surfaces – asbestos sheets, tarpaulins and tiles – that we associate with slum housing. We sense the intimations of an impending storm: curtains ly, a manic shimmer spreads through a wall of pink tiles, the tarpaulin billows like a sail in unruly waters, and the cement skin gasps and sighs ever so slowly. Somebody has left a dead animal on the asbestos roof. Or is it a broken stuffed toy? These are portents that we ignore only at our own peril. The narrow, claustrophobic spaces that Palav portrays through steep perspectives and extreme close-ups exacerbate the uncanny atmosphere in these paintings. The raw texture of the unprimed manzarpat renders the application of acrylic paint somewhat fuzzy and out of focus, adding to the oneiric feel of the works. From the captions, we infer that we have been presented with glimpses of dwellings in Konkan Nagar and its extensions Jamil Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar in Bombay’s eastern suburb of Bhandup. What indeed is this place? It is anything but a generic slum – or what is termed a slum by the better-heeled citizens of Bombay to describe how the other half lives in this metropolis of extreme contrasts. The place does not show signs of being ‘dirty’ – there is no overtly visible kachra in the manzarpat paintings. It is compact but exhibits a will to order and greenness. A variety of plants grow in discarded paint tins; leaves swirl like emeralds against a window grill. * The Konkan Nagar houses that have inspired Palav’s present paintings have mushroomed organically over half a century. Stacked one on top of the other on the slopes of a hill, they breathe precariously in a craggy topography that is broken by lights of steep stone steps and disperses itself into a labyrinth of narrow pathways. This hilly neighbourhood is named after the eco-rich coastal belt of Konkan. During the 1970s, people migrated from the Konkan belt to work in the then lourishing textile mills of Bombay and made their home in this neighbourhood, to which they gave the name of their original homeland. Palav irst climbed this hill when she was visiting the woman who took care of her little daughter. This chance visit was followed by many more. Since her parents are from the coastal town of Malvan in the Konkan, she felt at home in this hilly terrain. Its paradoxical nature, that of being a proliferating village dotted with wells and plants from the Konkan – haldi, peru, tulsi (turmeric, guava and basil) – in the midst of a bustling city, provoked an affective response in her that she could not and did not want to resist. While this series, aptly titled ‘Floating Images’, combines photographic verisimilitude with Palav’s signature irreal projections, the more abstract manzarpats are liquid-blue phantasies that suck us into their eddying momentum. Are they clouds or varicose veins or water streaked with sunlight? For the blue manzarpats, Palav began to trace lines that followed, organically, the cloth’s textured weave. After applying a few coats, it so happened that there was no water left in the bowl; only clots of blue paint remained. These clots inspired her to paint diffused abstract patterns that project a profound corporeal radiance. In one of the paintings though, the artist chose to work with a primed canvas. Perhaps the chalky surface of a manzarpat was not suitable for a work that had to radiate the plastic sheen of a water drum or a tarpaulin, those quintessential blue objects that are the mainstays of a slum-dweller’s existence. The surface of the painting looks like a skin of congealed water or a plastic wrap. It is a iction, indeed, and the plot thickens unbeknownst to us. * Palav has interspersed the gallery space with small, gelatinous, clotted forms of no ixed description. Lightly suspended from the ceiling or placed on a house painter’s stool splattered with paint marks, these ambiguous forms comprise residues of paint collected from studio loors, her own and sometimes those of other artists. Some of these forms look like tadpoles, others like turds. These forms have emerged as excrescences in previous works of Palav’s, jutting out of the gallery wall when least expected. Now they have taken on a more haptic object-based expression. The artist contaminates the hallowed space of the gallery and indeed the space of high art, by ‘littering’ them with intimate waste from the studio and the street – which, being expelled from the productive system, bereft of clear function or value-in-use or pleasurable worth, is akin to the social kachra that Indians generate and leave for the oppressed to clear up. We may situate Palav in a genealogy of artistic projects that have, since at least as far back as the mid-20th century, sought to profane the clinicality of the exhibition space with the refuse and discards of the throwaway economy, breaking down the demarcation separating art object and bodily experience, viewing experience and social experience at large. A signiicant benchmark in this regard would be Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Street’ (1960) and ‘The Store’ (1961-1964). * A few years ago, Palav felt a deep “physical need”, a visceral calling to work outside the privacy of her studio. She had in the past painted a Photoshopped image combining a mountainscape extracted from Google Earth with the photograph of a mountain covered with slums in Bombay’s eastern suburb of Ghatkopar. [1] This recombinant painting was emblematic of the digital age, where the landscape is no longer a location with speciic regional characteristics. Rather, it is a conceptual terrain that bears the disturbances and disorientations of mediatic manipulation and surveillance technologies, and can be retooled according to the viewer/ user’s preferences. The remote, intangible mediatic realism of Palav’s earlier paintings was replaced by a visceral realism that can be glimpsed in the manzarpats on the scaffolding at Kalakriti. These recent paintings exude something impalpable: a melancholic affection for the site and an acknowledgement of the precarious lives of its residents, without comment or judgement. In her painterly treatment, the slum loses its perceived wretchedness and instead, suggests a will to beauty and a hard-won measure of autonomy. The manzarpats, however, are only one among several outcomes of Palav’s engagement with Konkan Nagar, with an experiential reality in which she has participated robustly. The manzarpats do not reveal the weave of interpersonal relationships that she shared with the residents of Konkan Nagar, in the way that some of the artist’s other interventions in the neighbourhood do. To understand this deeper involvement on Palav’s part, which exceeds the ambit of the art object, we must retrace her itinerary from two years ago, which began with her climbing to the top of the hill with a bundle of tiny pieces of plastic scrap and reels of cotton thread. She perched herself on top of the water tank, overlooking a cityscape carpeted with slum dwellings, and began to thread the plastic shards into a garland, of a kind normally offered to the gods. Plastic is the miracle material of modernity. It has replaced organic materials like earthernware, cloth and paper, to become ubiquitous in our daily lives. But it has also spelled doom for our environment. Being non-biodegradable, it is even more ubiquitous after it has reached its sell-by date – it is monstrously ‘immortal’. Indeed Palav has set herself a challenging task in trying to recycle an obstinate material, light and portable, but also heavy with social and ecological accretions. While the plastic shards look like petals of white mogra or rose from a distance, they eat into her ingers. Why was she conducting this strict penance, or more appropriately a tapasya? I use this Indic term advisedly. While penance in the Catholic sense implies the mortiication of the spirit to absolve oneself of a sin, tapasya is more of an ascetic practice. Derived from the Sanskrit term ‘tapas’ or ‘heat’, it connotes a practice of austerities to strengthen one’s spiritual resolve. Palav may not believe in organised religion, but she believes in the act of meditation to cleanse the spirit. How do we decode the double paradox of the artist’s ascetic exercise conducted in a neighbourhood of strangers, of her painful act made in the hope of a potential healing? To heal what, we might ask? At irst, Palav was not sure what she hoped to ind by extending her solitary studio space to Konkan Nagar. Slowly the people from the neighbourhood joined her in making the garlands or malas. This extended studio had no walls or roof. Open to the sky and to the inquisitive kids and adults who joined her in this act of recycling an unruly material, her solitary studio had become a place of convivial gappa-goshti, the swapping of chit-chat, stories, anecdotes, reminiscences. In ‘Making of Mala’ the camera focuses repeatedly on the performative act of stringing a handful of plastic scrap by a new set of hands each time. The punctuating inter-titles narrate their affective relationship with this prop or meditation aid. From the girl who thinks that grasping a handful of plastic shards is like holding a crab that could suddenly bite, or the boy who likens them to snowballs, which make your hands go numb after a while. Or the woman who compares the colourful, big and small shards to the weaving together of diverse people. And then there is the man who rues that the cow in the marketplace has a bloated belly but an emaciated body because she is forced to eat plastic waste. In the moment of their threading, the shards surreally transform themselves into a rosary, a crab, or make a home in the holy cow’s stomach. Indeed this agnostic garland is made up of the incremental transcendences of everyday life that bind, bite, but can also poison us. * At the end of 2015, along with architecture students Shivani Shah and Revati Shah from KRVIA, Bombay, Palav organised a trek for schoolchildren living in and around Konkan Nagar to explore the hill through its natural and social worlds: its forgotten water sources, its plants, and the lives of its people, and the stories of its aajis, grandmothers, ingenious homemakers, and men who hold impromptu card-playing sessions outside the house. [2] When a few of us from the art community retraced the trail later, we were literally reading the path marked out for us. The participating children’s notes and drawings on the walls of the houses acted like breadcrumbs in the maze that is Konkan Nagar. At the foot of the hill we stand on a slightly raised platform, which becomes an informal gathering place during Diwali or Christmas. This tiled-up space used to be a well in an earlier avatar. As we climb further, we come across wells that are too polluted for daily use, but sometimes have ornamental ish loating in them. It is dificult to imagine that this hill once sprouted jharnas or freshwater springs. As people began to populate the space, the springs were replaced by wells; in turn, the wells were contaminated by jerrybuilt drains, which turned them into septic tanks. On the walls, the children have drawn idyllic village scenes with wells, stand-alone houses and ields. We even spot a tiger on the wall, prowling near a cavernous alleyway. For them, perhaps the hill, despite its crammed houses and contaminated wells, bears a certain resemblance to their low-rise village homes open to the sky. In a city where every bit of space is functionalised and monetised, the terraced levels and free-lowing common spaces that thread the houses of Konkan Nagar together – shading gently between the private and public realms – allow for a conviviality that is not possible in a vertical neighbourhood. Palav correctly fears that the redevelopment of Konkan Nagar will destroy its organic character. However, if we were to play devil’s advocate, we could argue that Palav’s nostalgia for the Konkan colours her perspective on this neighbourhood and the whole community art project. Of course, she is quick to point out that the lower part of the hill gets looded during the monsoon; that lack of proper sewage facilities is cumbersome, and women have to bear the burden of sanitation. Perhaps the lure of a self-organised community in a city of atomised lives brings her back to this hilly neighbourhood. air display before they migrated to Kalakriti, Hyderabad). They share space with an adjacent clothesline and turn out to be a great conversation piece, as the neighbourhood kids argue over their meaning and symbolism. Nearby, another exhibition awaits our presence. To say that the site is unconventional would be an understatement. It is the Sai Baba temple where photographs from the artist’s collaboration with the architecture students of Rachna Sansad, Bombay, are on display. Palav had already held workshops there and when the time came to display works during the trek, it naturally became an exhibition site. The children from the neighbourhood put up the exhibition themselves. To have a workstation in a functioning temple was a major coup for the artist. She had undoubtedly won the trust of the Konkan Nagar denizens. On one of the walls, drafts of the ‘Saap Seedi’ or the ‘Snakes and Ladders’ game designed by Shivani Shah and Revati Shah in response to this site, seize our attention. Here the steps falling sheer are transformed into ‘ladders’ and the drainpipes into ‘snakes’. Even as Shivani and Revati try to create a map of the site, the site hisses back at them and changes contours. Maps are ictions, they seem to say, and the site is an even bigger iction that we arrogantly think we can decode. Our eyes travel across a grid of photographs of two children racing up and down the hill, which brings to mind the protagonist of Abbas Kairostami’s immortal boy protagonist, played by Babak Ahmedpour in ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ Another series plays tricks with our vision, as the visible and the desired crisscross in the twilight zone that is the image: a public tap on the hill morphs into a tactile cat’s tail. The animate and the inanimate are melded together in Meret Openheimesque surreality. Our trek ends on the top of the hill, where Palav’s manzarpats are hanging on a bamboo scaffolding (this was their irst open- Over chai, a fellow artist mumbled his disapproval over Palav’s ending the trek in a temple. “How secular is she?” he insinuated. The usage of the term ‘secular’ has always been vexed in India, but in these parlous times, with a Hindu majoritarian party in power, it takes on an added urgency. However, one wonders whether secularists can also be fundamentalists in their thinking? Has religion not been a source and a context for art, historically, despite the tensions between the artistic and the religious imagination? Do we detect a certain religious impulse in Palav’s accommodation of the notion of the pilgrimage in the trek? Does the trek end at the temple only because it happens to be at the peak; or is there some undeined need at play here, to bridge the cosmic with the profane, the sacred with the secular? These are delicate questions and I would not want to impose a deinite meaning on Palav’s trek and pilgrimage. The trek could well be seen as rifing on certain Situationist strategies to create a ‘psychogeography’ of Konkan Nagar, by tapping into its affective and psychic environment. [3] And the trekpilgrimage could be seen within the genealogy of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational art’ practice, where the accent is on forging interpersonal relationships rather than on the artwork as commodity. [4] While it is plausible to gloss Palav’s practice by reference to Situationist or ‘relational aesthetics’, I would like to think that the more proximate and sustaining afinity lies not with readymade art-historical rubrics [5], but with impulses in the artist’s local ethos. I am thinking, here, of her spiritual afinity with the literature of the Bhakti saint poets and, especially in the case of this project, with the work of the 20th-century saint and reformer Gadge Maharaj, who travelled across the villages of Maharashtra advocating cleanliness; in Gandhian fashion, he cleaned dirty drains himself, setting an example for his followers. We seem to have come full circle, with the notion of kachra and contamination, both social and ecological. At a time when the violent and cruel asymmetries of caste once again dominate the Indian public sphere, Prajakta Palav-Aher’s work compels our attention. Notes: 1. Palav’s ‘A Scenery 2’ (acrylic on canvas, 2009) was shown in ‘The Landscapes of Where’ at Galerie Mirchandani and Steinruecke, 2009. In this exhibition, my curatorial aim was to explore the (im)possibility of reclaiming the landscape in a time of radical dislocation and unbelonging. City as Consumption Site: Bombay/Mumbai’, December 2014-December 2015. 3. See Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Les Lèvres Nues # 6 (September 1955). 4. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002). 5. I have engaged with this question of the readymade arthistorical template versus the organically drafted regional itinerary in my book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Bombay: The Guild Art Gallery, 2016). Especially see Chapter 5, ‘Devolution: The Artist-Citizen Redistributes her Privileges’ (pp. 245-256), where I question the default use of a generic discourse on collaborative art, and instead, ground the evolving practices of Navjot and her artist colleagues, Rajkumar and Shantibai in Bastar, in region-speciic circumstances and choices. Still from video ‘Making of Mala’ (2012 - 2014) * 2. The trek was supported by the Mohile Parekh Centre’s curatorial project, ‘Geographies of Consumption/ The Children looking closely at paintings at konkan nagar bhandup (Oct. 2015) Sahyadri nagar. Bhandup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Sahyadri nagar. Bhandup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Sahyadri nagar. Bhandup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Sahyadri nagar. Bhandup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Jamil nagar. Bhandup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Kokan nagar. Bhadup | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Bloating Blue | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 White on Blue | 24” x 36” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Clotted Blue | 60” x 84” | acrylic on manjarpat | 2015 Gola | dried acrylic color | 2015 Display of Objects Display of Objects, Size variable Collected dried acrylic colours from different artists studio Ayati Aher responds to the object “Doggie’s Potty” Snake & Ladder Game | 2015 Details of game done by Shivani & Revati (Front) Details of game done by Shivani & Revati (Back) Sai Sharan Grade 10 Indus International School Title: “Unique topography of a true home” Madhulika Itha Aqsa Jasmine Grade 10 Indus International School Title: “My home” Terrapong Grade 9 Indus International School Title: “Cloudy with a chance of leaf-fall” Girisha Govil Grade 9 Indus International School Title : ‘A nest within’ Ria Thimmaiahgari Koumodhi Reddy Grade 10 Indus International School Grade 9 Indus International School Title: “A ride through the clouds” Park Su Been Grade 10 Indus International School Raj Aryan Grade 9 Indus International School Title: ‘Welcome all’ Preeti Bellani Grade 9 Indus International School Shravani Khapre Grade 7 Mumbai Title: “Four walls of my dream home” Title: “The Waiting Tree” Manussanun (Fa) Grade 10 Indus International School Park Grade 9 Indus International School Prajakta Palav 2007 ‘Solo II’, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi Born October 9, 1979, Mumbai 2005 ‘Corners’, Gallery Beyond, Mumbai Selected Group Exhibitions Education 28 at Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi; Bose Pacia, Kolkata Joint Exhibitions 2008-09 ‘Hot Shots’, The Viewing Room, Mumbai 2011-12 ‘Palimpsest’, with Rajan Krishnan at Gallery Beyond, Mumbai 2008 ‘Uncovered’, Sans Tache Art Gallery, Mumbai 2007 ‘Split Ends’, with Minal Damani at Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai 2002 Master of Fine Arts (Portraiture), Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai 2015 ‘Being in Her Shoes – Celebrating Women’s creativity’, Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad 2008 ‘Modern and Contemporary Indian Art’, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi 2000 Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting), Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai 2014 ‘Sacred / Scared’, Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi 2007 2013 ‘Peak Shift Effect’, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi ‘Meandering Membranes’, presented by Empire Art & The Shrine Gallery, New Delhi at The Taj Bengal, Kolkata 2012 ‘2012 : A Further Global Encounter’, Grosvenor Vadehra, London ‘Does Size Matter II ?’, Jehangir K S Nicholsan Gallery of Modern Art at National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai ‘Art for Humanity’, Coomaraswamy Hall, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai 2012 2007 2011 ‘Of Gods and Goddesses, Cinema, Cricket: The New Cultural Icons of India’, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 2011 ‘1:3:1- Part III’, W+K Exp, New Delhi 2010 ‘Size Matters or Does it?’, Part 1 at Latitude 28, New Delhi 2009 ‘ARCOmadrid’, Spain represented by Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi Honours and Awards Participations 2005 Future Artist Award, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai 2012 ‘Cynical Love : Life in the Everyday’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi 2007 ‘Urban Similes: Transforming the Cities’, Project 88, Mumbai 2005 Kashi Visual Art Award from Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi 2010 ‘Constructed Realities’, The Guild, Mumbai 2005 2003 Finalist from Fundaco Orient, Panji, Goa 2009 2002 Merit Certificate, State Art Exhibition, Nagpur ‘If I Were A Saint’, presented by The Shrine Empire Gallery at Travancore Gallery, New Delhi ‘Future Artist Show’, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai 2005 ‘Miniature Format Show’, Bajaj Art Gallery , Mumbai 2001 Consolation Prize in Annual Show from Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai 2009 ‘Recycled’, Bose Pacia, Kolkata 2004 Fine Art Competition Fundaco Oriente, Panji , Goa 2009 ‘A New Vanguard: Trends in Contemporary Indian Art’, Saffronart, New York; The Guild, New York 2003 ‘Tongue in Cheek’, Gallery Beyond, Mumbai 2007-08 ‘Kashi 10 Light Years – Anniversary Show’, Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi ‘Women’s Show’, Hacienda Gallery, Mumbai State Art Exhibition, Nagpur ‘The Landscapes of Where’, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai 2002 2002 2009 2002 2001 ‘Monsoon Show ‘, Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 2009 ‘Progressive to Altermodern : 62 Years of Indian Modern Art’, Grosvenor Gallery, London ‘Speed Breaker ‘, organized by Apollo Apparao at Triveni Sangam, New Delhi 1999 2000 ‘Monsoon Show’, Son-et-Lumiere, Mumbai All India Competition by West Zone Culture Centre, Nagpur 2009 ‘Re-Claim/ Re-Cite/ Re-Cycle’, presented by Latitude 1997 50 years of Independence, Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai 1998 All India Camlin Competition, Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai 2000 1999 Best Portrait Award, Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai Best Panel Award, Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai Selected Solo Exhibitions 2010 ‘Sprouting Beads’, Grosvenor Gallery, London 2007 Kitab Mahal, Mumbai