Waste as our witness: Making art out of industrial debris

Navjot Altaf’s Waste Archives as Landscape at Mumbai’s CSMVS explores landfills, human cost, biodiversity loss, and the intersection of art, society, and ecological degradation through intricate paintings and installations.

There are many big ideas in Navjot Altaf‘s exhibition, Waste Archives as Landscape, curated by Puja Vaish, which opened at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Gallery at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai recently. Navjot has had a deep interest in the imminent stresses and strains of development and the hideous social inequities, as well as the ecological and human cost that continues to accrue in a relentless pursuit of growth.

The current exhibition comprises detailed, intricate paintings of industrial waste and debris that we have learnt to unsee. The genesis for these lay in Navjot’s numerous visits to and collection of photos of landfills in Deonar, Kanjur Marg (in Mumbai), Pirana (Ahmedabad), and Citizen Nagar (outskirts of Ahmedabad). People from the lowest social orders have lived in these hellish surroundings with hills of heaving waste only becoming bigger for more than five decades, surrounded by contaminated water, poor air and stench. But sometimes when the midday sun falls on them, the “shimmer of a toffee wrapper reflects the iridescence of a dragonfly wing, which is fragile and endangered”, says Navjot.

A few of the works on display at the exhibition.

There are hundreds of cut images from photos of electronic components falling over one another, as in the installation titled Take Make Waste. The images of disorderly waste, of PVC pipes, computer cables and screens and the detritus of urban living in the digital age seem photographic at first glance but have subtle enough alterations to remind us that they have been mediated.

Painterliness slips in an occasional incongruous element with a close-up of flowers that have, against all odds, still survived. Painting flowers is a first for her, and she says she wanted to suggest “that natural waste enhances biodiversity, whereas machine waste depletes it”.

Courtesy: Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation

This is an exhibition that a visitor would better understand with some foreknowledge of Navjot’s previous work and her enduring interest in finding connections between life, migration, travel, debris, society and culture.

Since 1997, Navjot has divided her time between Bastar in Chhattisgarh and Mumbai. In Bastar, she has grown her arts practice with indigenous artists, anchoring herself in people’s movements and the learnings that living in these communities offers. This exhibition, then, is a distinct part of a larger enquiry into the fraught relationship between land, profit and endless cycles of production and consumption.

She follows the trail of industrial waste products, debris, and their alarming appearance in villages and interiors of the state that were once considered remote and therefore protected. From seeing coal mines and ash dykes in the forests of Central India for years, it was her repeated travels in Raigarh and Korba in North West Chhattisgarh that provided the kernel for her earlier video Soul Breath Wind and this series of works.  

On one occasion in 2016, while travelling with a group of activist friends, they stopped by a serene forest setting on the banks of the Hasdeo River (a tributary of the Mahanadi), only to find a pit with two truckloads of industrial waste. Villages had been leased for the dumping of industrial waste, she says with a measure of wonder.

Courtesy: Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation

“That’s when I started looking at this kind of waste a little more seriously and attentively, and that’s how I see it, it is a continuation of my earlier works”, she says.

The artist who graduated from JJ School of Art in Mumbai says she almost stopped painting in 1991 and has been attracted to multimedia as she was always interested in working with diverse mediums and perspectives.

The form also offers her the ability to find fluid narrative connections. She refers to fragments of many stories that come together in the works. For instance, there are broken down pieces of a ship named Khian that started out of Philadelphia and called itself a cargo ship, looking for a place it could dump the waste it was carrying. It changed its name and finally dumped the waste between Singapore and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.  

Meanwhile, in the gallery, a motor and sound-based installation with pipes that signify a movement of material from one place to another, reminiscent of her experiences with landfills, continues to work.

Closer home to the CSMVS Museum’s own past and the many kinds of art and artefacts that have found a home there, the artist identified an old Baobab tree native to Africa that has stood in its premises since the 1930s.

Drawing parallels with the propagation of plant species from native to new lands, Navjot’s ideas and practice coalesce in her photographic montage of the Baobab tree. Following the style of a botanical drawing, the artist is able to reference the tradition of painting landscapes and plant varieties as part of a colonial project of staking claim on nature and all it had to offer.

To Navjot, the painting and the museum also speak of the centuries-old culture of travel, migration, dislocation and the uprooting of communities by colonisers who also removed objects and installed them elsewhere to populate collections in museums far from their source cultures.