An evocation of a pause

A virtual platform, which seeks to archive artistic expressions around the theme of the pandemic, is hosting its first exhibition.

Shikha Patel was visiting Delhi to teach in the Delhi College of Art in 2020 when the lockdown was announced. The Varanasi-based artist found herself stuck in an apartment in East Delhi for months. Without much art material in stock, Patel began thinking differently. Her output shifted from murals and large canvases to intimate works using the medium of performance photography.

The works — hazy blurry images of the artist herself, shot in the house — are now being exhibited as part of “To Heal We Must Remember” on a virtual platform, ‘The Environmental Situation Room’ (ESR), 2020.

Not just Patel, eight more artists have responded to the current situation with their art, in the show. Through metaphor and memory, directly and subtly, artists Ekta Singha, Harmeet Rattan, Prabhakar Singha, Mainaz Bano, Suman Kabiraj, Kiran Mungekar, Durgadas Garai and Preya Bhagat, engage with the theme in their distinct style. “Their work responds to the long suspended pause that we have all lived (and are living) through. It asks us to sit with this experience, for the world will never be the same again. The artists in this exhibition experienced a personal sense of grief, interruption, fear and confusion as they confronted their losses. At the same time, they found something during this time of upheaval. Perhaps a new connection with themselves, or with each other, in sharing a collective trauma,” says Tara Sabharwal, a US-based painter and printmaker, who has curated the show.

Cathartic experience

For Chhattisgarh-based Durgadas Garai, making art is cathartic. As Garai comments on tragedies — be it the Kerala floods or the Bhopal gas tragedy — he finds succour in his artistic expression. One of his works, ‘Truth and Reality’, shows a young pensive boy with a thought bubble above him, which depicts burning frames. “I wasn’t even born when the Bhopal gas tragedy happened, but as an artist, I feel compelled to respond to these happenings. We have ideas for our future, but then they are struck down by the reality of that time, just like what happened with Covid-19,” expresses Garai.

Growing up in Lucknow, Mainaz Bano developed a reverence for the Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb, a phrase used for the seamless blend of Hindu and Muslim cultures in the Northern plains. In her panel work, canvases of varying sizes depict the last nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, his wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, a wooden horse, nature, chikankari, and architectural forms inspired from the bygone era. A pair of scissors between two humans indicates the communal divide. “I am very appreciative of the way the nawabs of Awadh encouraged syncretism. For me, it is about learning from this rich past when there was harmony and peace and to move forward, we must remember this,” explains Bano.

According to Sabharwal, the invited artists were asked to contemplate on how they adjusted and focused their narratives during their isolation. “I realised that I could create with whatever I have or find. From the terrace, I started collecting stones, found objects. I would gaze at these stones for a long time and after a while, I started finding faces in the stones; maybe because, I was missing my family. I went into a meditative space,” says Patel.

A call to artists

The ESR 2020 is an initiative of Kala Chaupal Trust, a Gurugram-based non-profit organisation promoting art and culture. The virtual platform emerged from the need to archive the responses of the artists to the pandemic. “There is no archive of the Spanish flu of the 1920s. We don’t have any archives of the artists who worked during that time. What were their thoughts? I realised that it is very critical to archive right from day one,” says Leenika Jacob, Managing Trustee of The Kala Chaupal Trust.

Together with Kala Chaupal’s curator Helen Frederick, Jacob set up ESR’s handle on Instagram. “It was initiated as a call to artists worldwide, for their works that reflected their concerns about their immediate environment. That could mean climate change, migration, identity, gender and race issues, economic, political and social concerns and more,” explains Frederick.

The Instagram handle received hundreds of responses on feminism, migration and urban development. The show was curated from the entries received. As the curator of the show Tara Sabharwal sifted through the works rendered in diverse mediums — wash on paper, watercolour on acid-free paper, drypoint and etching, performance photography, mixed media on linen cloth, wasli, archival print on paper — she realised the common thread running through them.

She says, “The works have an open-ended universality, and yet, are specific to each artist’s own private truth. The works have been carefully executed with attention to detail and nuance, without resorting to clichés.”