Sez Who?_Catalogue Essay

1 Sez Who?: Beyond the Voice: an essay Sez who is a collaborative and community based art project between Justin Ponmany, Prajakta Potnis, Sharmila Samant , Uday Shanbagh, and Tushar Joag, who also happens to be the curator for it. SEZ lands have been ‘hyped as our pathway to prosperity’ but it turns out to be only a promise in hypothesis, triggering several questions. Are the lands bought from the people who sold them off willingly, or is it that they are coerced to abandon their lands? To find out the answer, the group of five artists, ‘formed a fact finding team’ that worked for a period of five months ‘traveling, researching and interacting with locals in areas around Mumbai that have been proposed to be demarcated as SEZ’s’. On their way the team has documented notes, interviews, events, protests and attended several rallies. Encroachment on land has been an inextricable part of the history of India since its inception. The 1930s mark the Dandi March by Gandhiji for salt manufacturing as a part of the Non-cooperation Movement, a way to retain our rights to our own lands against the British colonizers. Today it is the Government of the country that declares arable lands as SEZ to back up the capitalists within the country, to promote industrial areas on the SEZ declared lands. Quite a population around the ports in Mumbai is salt manufacturers. Setting up industries on their lands would eventually mean impoverishment of the landholders, despite the government’s promises. A similar encroachment on land catapulted to a state sponsored genocide at the villages of Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal. SEZ Who? explores the nature of encroachment upon land over the centuries and the change in role of the givers and takers of land.

The space within: White, coarse granular sea-salt embraces the gallery floor. It is everywhere that one steps onto. It stretches out to every nook and cranny of the gallery space. A pair of rather small iron cauldrons, placed on two kerosene driven stoves, containing salt water, keep bubbling as they are heated. They will be heated till the end, till the water evaporates completely, leaving behind only the salt. Small glass vials poked inside the heaped salt at one end of the gallery will be carried away by the audience as a means of protest. Kept aside are a pile of empty sacks, which will be gradually filled with grains in the following thirty days, as the area occupied by the salt will cease to exist. The process of one area getting diminished – virtually ceasing to exist, helping another to gain mass and becoming omnipotent – justifiably speaks of the metaphorical relationship between land and property; the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ A three page questionnaire derived from a government form is given out to the audience. It asks for personal information supported by photocopies of the actual documents in a bureaucratic ritual that questioned the idea of what defined citizenship. Visitors are expected to fill out and return these forms. A lucky winner drawn from these would get the art object (that remains undisclosed till the draw) as the prize.

2 A sound piece (in Marathi) of various bytes recorded during the visits to the place of the chaos is played in the gallery while a transcript of the same in English is projected on one of the walls. On two opposite walls of the gallery are pasted drawings on papers. One has drawings of rats of a varied style and pose on post-card sized papers pasted all over it. Every day twenty-five rats, drawn by the artists were sent via the internet, and populated the walls for the first seven days. The rats grow in number for a week, till the whole wall is occupied. As the sacks get filled, they will finally feast on the grains. On the other wall what gains shape for the following seven days saw the appearance of a scarecrow (emblematic of the people’s opposition) in a random jigsaw of 48 pieces – a life size, grotesque cartoon in black and white having the eerie mood of Goya’s etching series – Capriccio. A scarecrow keeps unwanted pests out of the farms – in this case the SEZ developers. The changes take place very slowly, every day for nearly a month, almost stealthily. The slow development certainly does avoid visual jerks, but what it reveals is a dismal, eerie picture of capitalism.

Representation of the impossible: An attempt to reconstruct the site of chaos within the gallery space, Sez Who? is a representation of death, horror, trauma and destruction, taking into consideration the impossibility of representing the traumatic experiences of communities – whose lands are at stake – dwelling at the fringes of the city, bringing them into an urban space – a city based gallery. It whets up questions including the dilemma of representation and the resistance to closure; recalling the past and providing new responses to the future; reinstating the function of memory and bringing in the memories of the periphery to the center, seeking attention.

A mobile chronology: The month-long project keeps changing every day taking into account the prime factor – time – demanding the audience revisit the site/ studio. The audience thus becomes part of a chronological exercise and not a one-time visitor. Time freezes, and expands; there is virtual time, and real time. However, their definitions blur. The incorporation of real time videos through social networking sites such as Skype and the use of video- telephone via the internet, enabling a live dialogue between the residents and activists from Gorai and the assembled public at the gallery, is a reference that real time can be directly felt through the employment of mediatic representation which is an equivalent of the real time event. The incorporation of interactive sessions makes the audience thereby to negotiate a different time and space.

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The use of newspaper clippings as supportive documents is an intention to set the event in the present time; paradoxically, though, with each day passing, the event becomes, past; history.

A pluralism of media: Sacks, salt, grain, interactive telephonic conversations, newspaper clippings, questionnaire, interactive sessions, live videos, drawings, photographs, statistical representation that make the Salt Pan, the Chat Room, the Cinema Hall and the Granary,destroy the putative clinical atmosphere of a gallery. Also the use of the real time video, questionnaire and telephones on which the audience chooses pre-recorded voices by pressing the buttons of their choice, breaks its impassivity.

Questioning the role of the witness: “To bear witness is a way of seeing and listening that requires an acceptance of vulnerability”. This poses several questions as regards to the modes of representation. How can an artist, therefore make room to those others who cannot speak? – Those others, whose trauma is beyond comprehension; those who appear to be an enigma? True, the witness cannot represent the trauma of the victim. Despite it all, the artist/s occupy ‘a place of distance’ (referred to as ‘ethical differal’ by Julian Bonder), transforming it from a place of recollections to a place of action; shedding lights on a limited set of truths; attempting to represent presences, coming out of themselves, with the ethics of deference to these others – through language, space and materiality, beyond them all. -

Oindrilla Maity Surai Kolkata February 2010

References: 1 Sez Who? – a collaboarative project/ Source: Tushar Joag 2.On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments and Memorials/ Julian Bonder/ 3. Art Since 1900/ Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh/ Thames and Hudson/2007 4. Voiced Out/ Oindrilla Maity Surai/http:// www.artconcerns.com / August 2010

Oindrilla Maity Surai is an Independent Curator, Art Historian and Critic. She is currently engaged as a Guest Faculty at the Faculty of Visual Arts in the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, where she teaches Art History.

© Oindrilla Maity Surai 2010

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