Our Time for a Future Caring primarily brings together the work of
eight artists, from different generations, who have reflected on the Gandhian
legacy of decolonization.
Skye Thomas
Jitish Kallat, “Covering Letter” (2012) (all images courtesy India
Pavilion Archive)
VENICE, Italy — National pavilions are legitimized by a set of
dead-end propositions. The first is that of nationhood itself, and then,
trickier still, the promise of a comprehensive representation of the discourse
of the nation state in question. The only logical recourse, as many have taken
in the 58th Venice Biennale (as well as in editions previous), is to
deconstruct the premise of the nation state. To do so requires a leap of faith,
because to acknowledge the death of the nation state, as Rana Dasgupta wrote
for The Guardian last year, “is to acknowledge the end of politics.”
This end of politics, or that of political discourse as we know it,
is often handled as a purposeful new approach to old debates. This is
especially true of nation states that have a rare presence at the Biennale.
Since the first national pavilion in the Giardini (which was Belgium in 1907),
only 29 others have a permanent (and specially designed) venue in the biennale
gardens. Others must apply and pay a fee to participate in each edition. The
national pavilions remain independent from the biennale itself, and require the
participating countries to assume all funding, curatorial, and production
responsibilities. The pavilions thus become a place to draw out contemporary
resonance with bold strokes. The burden of representation is total, and towers
over the scene. For this year’s Our Time for a Future Caring — the second-ever
India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, curated by Roobina Karode and the Kiran
Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) — Karode takes a poetic approach, one that is made
up of small, precise gestures.
The theme takes Gandhi to be its central protagonist, as dictated
by the Indian Ministry of Culture, in light of 2019 being 150 years since his
birth. As such, “two acts run simultaneously through the works exhibited at the
pavilion,” Karode told Hyperallergic, “the first, is one of resistance, and the
second, an act of recuperation, which is really the need of our time.”
The show begins with the 1939 “Haripura Panels” by Nandanlal Bose,
which were commissioned by Gandhi in 1938 to decorate the pavilions for an
Indian National Congress Assembly meeting in his home state of Gujarat, nine
years before Indian independence. Bose was perhaps the only artist Gandhi ever
worked with (for the panels, and also to illustrate pages of the Indian
constitution). Gandhi advised Bose to typify a “village republic,” as he
imagined the new nation state of India would be, and to use simple materials.
“Gandhi wanted Bose to represent the dignity of labor, which was a
way to get out of the inferiority complex that came from colonial rule,” said
Karode. It was also a way to resist British industrialization, which, by the
20th century, had begun forcing Indians to purchase machine-made textiles from
British manufacturing companies. Bose painted scenes of women splitting husks
of grain and pounding rice, potters at their wheels, and farmers out in the
paddy fields. He used natural pigments from crushed vegetable and stone, and
made the panels from thatch, bamboo, and hand-spun cotton. The artist’s turn to
the pastoral was a defiant act of decolonization.
At the center of the pavilion, and opposite the “Haripura Panels,”
is a dark room with the immersive work “Covering Letter” (2012) by Jitish
Kallat. In July 1939, Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler. Germany had just
occupied Czechoslovakia, and it was about five weeks before the start of the
second World War. The letter, which is only seven lines long, reads “almost
like a haiku” says Kallat, who makes it the protagonist of “Covering Letter,”
where he projects the text onto a thick layer of mist.
In fact, Gandhi wrote a second letter to Hitler in December 1940,
in which he decries the “humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and
the swallowing of Denmark” and makes an astonishing parallel: “But ours [in
India] is a unique position. We resist British Imperialism no less than Nazism.
If there is a difference, it is in degree.” Gandhi is at his best when he is
unflinching. Both letters were intercepted by British authorities, and never
reached their intended recipient. Regardless, “like a typically Gandhian
gesture,” says Kallat, the letters “convey a freight of provocations” and move
beyond their initial purpose. “Covering Letter” allows us a moment to steep in
this history: the mist shimmers before us, fragile and diaphanous.
As the results of the Indian general election 2019 have just been
declared — with Narendra Modi’s Hindu right-wing party, the BJP, securing
another term — the contemporary moment is more ready than ever for a critical
investigation of Gandhi’s legacy. Mob violence, warmongering propaganda,
casteism and religious discrimination continue to tear through our contemporary
discourse, fracturing the national politic. Rummana Hussain’s “Fragments”
(1993) sets up a tableau of five sculptural installations that bring together
pulverized terracotta, dirt, charcoal, painted mirrors, and pigment. In one of
the five sculptures, a brick-red powder tips over from a large clay pot,
spilling to the ground. The work serves well as metaphor: the materials of our
everyday objects lay smashed on the floor as we struggle to reclaim meaning
from the debris.
Similarly, in a series of small acrylic and sindoor (red lead
pigment) paintings on postage stamps — “Rashtra Pita” (2004), “Harijan” (2004),
“Farmers” (2003), “Gandhi/Man without Specs X” (2003) and “Holy Water” (2003) —
Ashim Purkayastha repeatedly redraws Gandhian iconography, reimagining Gandhi’s
ubiquitous image by infusing it with a critique of the violence of contemporary
India. We see symbols that gesture towards farmers’ suicides and discrimination
against minorities. Purkayastha’s work does the most to reflect concerns of a
contemporary India, where he “shifts our focus to the marginalized and the
dispossessed stakeholders in a modern nation-state,” as described by Karode.
Purkayastha is especially concerned with those at the edges of legitimized citizenship
(like indigenous people and Dalit people), who are compromised or manipulated
by national population registers. This is Purkayastha’s clear critique of the
nation state: Especially in the world’s largest democracy, it is becoming
increasingly important to question the legitimizing mechanisms used by the
democratic method.
Here, the pavilion misses an opportunity to reflect on the legacy
of B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, lawyer and revolutionary who also played an
instrumental role in writing the Indian constitution. Contemporary discourse
has come to show us that Ambedkar has just as much importance in the history of
India as does Gandhi. As Arundhati Roy writes in her essay The Doctor and The
Saint, “Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not
just politically or intellectually, but also morally. To have excised Ambedkar
from Gandhi’s story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a travesty.”
Our Time for a Future Caring primarily brings together the work of
eight artists, from different generations, who have reflected on the Gandhian
legacy of decolonization. This also includes M. F. Husain’s rolling,
frieze-like, oil on canvas “Zamin” (1975), which sets the tone with its
symbolic references to nation building and secular politics; Atul Dodiya’s nine
wooden cabinets as part of “Broken Branches” (2002), which are delicately
arranged with found objects like tools, prosthetic limbs, billboard paintings,
and hand-painted photographs; Shakuntala Kulkarni’s cane armor and accessories
from “Of Bodies, Armour and Cages” (2010–2012) in which she takes to the
streets as a statement against the objectification of femme bodies; and the
photographs of Gandhi’s grandnephew Kanu Gandhi, who lived with him for many
years and intimately chronicled that time.
With the quiet reflection required by each of the works on display,
Our Time for a Future Caring is a thoughtful dialogue on resistance and
nonviolence. In this regard, GR Iranna’s “Naavu (We Together)” (2012) fills up
a wall with undulating sets of padukas (slippers made from wood) in order to
signify Gandhi’s long walks across the villages of India. They act as testament
to his most successful form of collective mass action: the march. This
contemporary moment does well to reflect on the spirit of this collective action,
and the potential of the nonviolent protest.
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