Assemblages, nostalgia and the recent administrative history of New Delhi comprise Crash Dig Dwell – the ongoing show at Jhaveri Contemporary, which closes next week. Continuing with the gallery’s penchant for pairing a locally known artist with one our art audiences are not as aware of, the show places sculptures and photographs by Asim Waqif, the architect-artist from NCR, in conversation with New York-based Yamini Nayar’s landscape-like collages.
Waqif, who lives and works in New Delhi, is known for his large site-specific installations that look at discarded spaces, use discarded items and point our thoughts towards a neglected local ecology and place it within the larger context of the Anthropocene. His work often touches upon inadequacies of local municipalities and the destruction left behind by their scramble to re-regulate and get with the times. Nayar on the other hand, internalises the idea of detritus and re-regulations. She doesn’t speak of regulations as much as re-regulate material – such as wood, cardboard, newspaper, paint, glue – items found in your storage closet or the nearest hardware store and re-regulates their purpose. It isn’t the same as repurposing them, though. She builds elaborate sculptural installations with these easy-to-find items, and creates large-scale photographs of them, thereby ‘flattening’ a three-dimensional sculptural object. Once the photograph is done, Nayar often reuses parts of her existing sculpture towards her next work, and then the next. While the act of the photograph puts a stop to a certain process – it also kick-starts another, by allowing Nayar to dismantle, reshape, rebuild.
Of course, Crash Dig Dwell is architectural. Not only because Waqif is trained in the discipline but rather, because his training gives him insight into the Tughlaqian inadequacies of the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) ‘Master Plan for Delhi’. In 2001, the DDA was to announce its plans for Delhi, to be seen through till 2021. The plan originally implemented single-use regulations for properties. In a country like India, more community oriented as it is, this didn’t quite work, and many buildings had residents sharing space with shops, businesses, eating joints. Public Interest Litigations (PILs) were filed – which eventually led to the 2006 Delhi ‘sealing drive’. The courts asked that the disputed buildings be ‘sealed’ while the DDA came up with a solution. The sealing was more than a symbolic lock and key – to ensure complete lack of use, the buildings were carefully broken down on the inside, ensuring structural instabilities to deter usage.
In 2013, the DDA finally came up with an updated Master Plan (12 years late in a 20-year cycle, as Waqif reminds us). However, the sealed, hollowed structures remain as they are – protagonists in various property-related cases – or as homes to New Delhi’s large homeless populace. The photo series ‘6 Unauthorised Buildings’ captures these spaces, left to nature, time and transience via photographs, and the nostalgia that comes with chemical manipulation.
Waqif brings with him a piece of such a building in the sculpture ‘Chrysalis: Famous Studio’. The piece comprises of a UV print of the demolished Kangla Fort in Imphal, on an aluminium panel that once formed a part of one such hollowed-out structure, which he bashed in with a 5kg hammer during a 2014 performance at Mumbai’s Famous Studios, in some ways reliving the destabilising of its parent structure. It was eventually mounted on a piece of bougainvillea trunk retrieved from Waqif’s native Hyderabad, and installed at its current location. Similar stories form the basis of other Waqif sculptures in the show: the effects of government action (or at times inaction) on our ideas of home, memory, space and nature. Waqif’s work happens ‘outside’.
Nayar on the other hand, works within her studio. Every photograph we see transpires entirely inside a space created, controlled by her. Placed next to Waqif’s work, Nayar’s art seems to be about memory, space and transience, but also about controlling the space it is created in, rather than letting the space dictate her material and methods of working. In her photographs, Nayar’s process is completely ambiguous, as all you see are images and layers, lines and textures that will remind you of Indian modernist landscapes of the 60s and 70s, where geographical features began to take on moody turns, and seemed to layer and pile up onto a canvas. It’s hard to remember that Nayar first made sculpture, then she placed it, then she photographed it. And sometimes its with her phone camera. It’s even stranger when you realise Nayar has no idea of the references you just mentioned. Rather it’s your own brain attempting to make sense of what you see, because it transcends its process completely to become a whole new object.
As you walk through Crash Dig Dwell , think about origami. About how, collapsing paper through folding, and folding, and creating a new meaning from paper – a rose, a fish, a crane – doesn’t strip away that it is paper in the end. And that perhaps Nayar and Waqif, through their works, have folded, and folded some more to create a new meaning, and purpose, while delicately holding in each piece its original meaning, should you want to unfold, and find the thing they built each work around.
Crash Dig Dwell is ongoing at Jhaveri Contemporary, Walkeshwar until January 13
