What would be a common sense of a world in the absence of context? Does contextual information dictate our sensory experience? Is It possible to understand an action or an utterance in the absence of context? It’s more of an inquiry than a question, an inquiry that I am compelled to do through my research and practice because relying on the existing context might lead me away from my subjective understanding, which presently monitors the world. But my primary focus is on the contextual information concerning the marginalized and deprived body which gets fabricated, modified, and circulated in order to create an identity such as laborer, proletariat, or machine whose only existence is for work. That body becomes an object for science, history and politics and gets dissected with different tools and techniques.
Various mediums that have been utilized to delineate the condition of marginalized people such as Archives, science, academy, news and art which operate in the authority of privileged upper caste people hence affecting the construction of contextual information. Detecting other possibilities to challenge the existing contextual information is my primary motive, for which i consider empirical knowledge to be the evidence, as well as attempting to comprehend an act or an utterance without relativism, by using alternative and pseudo-scientific approaches and generating subjective contextual information as a counter-argument.
Recently I participated in a residency that took place in Mumbai an urban city which keeps transforming into Something else each day through the work of immigrant laborers. People from every corner of rural India come to this city for work. Endless research and speculation has been done on this figure - so many facts have been collected - this information builds a wall between onlookers and workers. The research and writing that is accumulated on the immigrant laborer mostly gives information regarding their living condition and the ignorance of the State. This material and knowledge travels only to the other side as a piece of contextual information which limits their identity as a skilled labour body who is living to work and how that body should be preserved properly.
An act of collecting evidence
I am an onlooker and a friend to a person who works at a construction site. I became a “transferrer” and he became a “messenger”, who sent photographs of the city and the construction site. Observing those images my curiosity and greed grew; which led me to preserve and turn it into a book, that will compel the onlooker to see the city from his lens, a flight view, a view while sitting on the scaffold, around the construction site. Is it a vision study?
Phots transfer on sketchbook
Marks resulting from an Action itself is an Evidence
Action which causes various transformations and changes the very idea of space, a body that is capable of crawling on the wall, digging a surface, layering a surface, and there are various ways of gathering these evidences. I visited the construction site multiple times and collected different forms of marks, light, dust, organs, tools and attempted to preserve it.
Drawing, impression of wall and cement,
The transformation of a construction site is an evidence
Plaster walls are becoming his skin, and the worker's body is leaving behind its scaffold and radiating like an invisible light. It was a radiating body after all.
A body becoming a wall or a wall becoming skin.
screen print on fabric and performance
Act of transference
Creating a particular action to see how radiation travels from one object to another, i studied the skin texture of my friend on the acrylic sheet which i have installed in a dark space in order to be seen through a torch light which moves according to body's movement.
engraving on acrylic sheet and installation
Contextual information that I am developing
Why it is radiating?
Mumbai isn’t new to heatwaves, rising temperatures, and skin-pinching sun rays, there are certain work systems that invite people to work in and around this environment, and construction workers have adapted to high temperatures in the summer months, accepting this as normal. (from a news article)
The body that spends its entire day at a construction site could be one of the reasons why it is radiating. Bodies who have no choice but to work while being directly exposed to the sun, will that body radiate if it works in rain or any other season, or at night, would the body become something else? Being exposed to fumes, gases, and vapors from construction material might be making that body radiate.
A photograph taken by a friend who works at construction sites.
like this flight view most photographs are from and around the construction sites. Observing this particular Image I am developing a diorama, in which I am following the traditional method of freezing a particular life, action, and time. A speculation of a diorama on a person by implicating his way of looking at the surroundings not how he should be seen by others.
Some images from the process of making a diorama
woodcut
Transferring the image onto wood, for which i am using the traditional method of
Printmaking to mass-produce an image, which I am printing on fabric and which will turn into a screen, a backdrop for the frozen radiating body.
woodcut prints on fabric