Page 121 - Vogue - India (January 2020)

bility to make earth-conscious art. The
SCOPE OF ART
“Art can show new directions,” says
Agarwal, who works with a variety of
media, though his abiding focus is on
photography. His current project is
called The Desert Of The Anthropo-
cene. “I am exploring the manner in
which the desert, my ancestral home-
land, is being abandoned by humans
but re-inhabited by new signposts of
global capital,” he says, explaining fur-
ther: “Industries such as mining, nu-
clear testing sites, and urbanisation
are replacing more traditional aspects,
like food production, leading to the
loss of human networks and ecological
systems that were for long interde-
pendent in the desert.” With major cit-
ies choking with air pollution and
coastlines sinking,
Indian artists have
an urgent responsi-
country produces over 60 million
tonnes of waste every year, much of it
in the form of non-biodegradable plas-
tic. Given the ubiquity of plastic bot-
tles and bags, these objects have
inevitably acted as the building blocks
of signifi cant artistic projects.
Between 2005 and 2008, Vivan
Sundaram made an entire body of
work using, and appropriately titling
it, Trash. From empty bottles to bro-
ken pipes, he put every conceivable
residue of urban life to creative use.
Sundaram’s younger contemporary
Aaditi Joshi gravitates towards upcy-
cling plastic bags into installations, as
does Manish Nai, who works with
recyclable material—old clothes, news-
papers and cardboard boxes—that are
discarded every day.
LOOKING SIDEWAYS
For artists who use found objects—
either because they cannot afford
expensive material or out of other com-
pulsions—India offers a rich playing
fi eld. Julien Segard, who began his ca-
(Clockwise from the
top:) Untitled (6),
(2018) by Aaditi Joshi;
Extinction Rebellion’s
pink octopus (2019);
The Desert Of
The Anthropocene
(2013-ongoing) by Ravi
Agarwal; Ice Watch by
Olafur Eliasson (2018)
reer in Marseille, France, was drawn to
bricolage, a process of putting together
works using what Indians call ‘jugaad’.
“When you work with whatever ma-
terial is available around you, you’re
taking part in an invitation to continue
a story, instead of starting with a blank
page,” he says. “I’m conscious about
not wasting my resources. I like the
simplicity of my practice.” Segard, who
currently lives in Goa, has made ingen-
ious collages, where the jilted squalor
of life is harnessed into abstract shapes
and structures. It’s as though he picks
up pieces of a broken dream and puts
them together into all-new shapes.
A different kind of dreamscape is
palpable in Himali Singh Soin’s ongo-
ing (since 2017) project, We Are Oppo-
site Like That, based on her research in
the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Win-
ner of the London edition of the Frieze
Artist Award 2019, Soin creates hyp-
notic multidisciplinary works in which
poetry, performance, dance and music
come together seamlessly. Soin says
she “seeks to create fi ctional myths for
the two poles from the non-human
perspective of a melting fossil that has
witnessed the great shifts of epochs:
the ice”. The principal presence in her
otherwise barren settings is “an alien
fi gure, part cyborg, part vessel of some
ancient feminine knowledge”. The
scenario is meant to evoke dread and
premonition, rather than convey
obvious dire warnings.
“I don’t think climate change and
sustainability can be overt narratives
in art, but metaphors can make you
feel things in oblique ways,” Soin con-
cludes. “It is only an oblique approach
to the environmental crisis—one that
involves multiple disciplines and ways
of knowing the world—that can help
us understand the severity of the situ-
ation and the resilience of the earth
post human extinction.” ■
www.vogue.in VOGUE INDIAJANUARY 121