For Shweta Bhattad, art and activism go hand-in-hand. The young artist says she wouldn’t know how exactly to describe her work in Paradsinga in Madhya Pradesh but yes her art can’t be separate from her concerns. Shweta Bhattad’s first solo show at Gallery Latitude 28 quirkily titled “Kabhi Namak Tumhe Kam Laga Kabhi...Kabhi Namak Tumhe Zada Laga Kabhi” has emerged out of her interventions in the village through community art projects and residencies.
In her first solo outing, Shweta, masters in sculpture from MSU, Baroda, expresses her concerns through video works, stainless steel installations, chastity belts, videos of her performances and prints. “The show is an essence of my experiences in the villages of Jaitpur in Rajasthan and Paradsinga,” says the artist from Nagpur where she is based. “The gallery crowd is limited and so is the language of sculpture, the discipline I studied which is why I started doing performances. The purpose of art is not just to decorate our homes,” she adds. Her philosophy is evident in her works which are rooted in a village where people are struggling for bare minimum in life like toilets. Paradsinga faces a major challenge in the form of open defecation. With 70 per cent of homes without toilets, people have to defecate in the open, in vulnerable situations exposing them to pig bites, particularly menstruating women, children and old people who can’t stand up as soon as the pig approaches them. A sculpture featured in the show is based on the experiences of a girl studying in fourth standard. Her experiences (in her writing) of waking up at four in the morning in order to go out to defecate and the difficulties in doing so are etched on a brass plate. The words become legible on the steel plate on which they get reflected.
There are photographs of women from the village dressed up like Bharat Mata, shot inside their homes. The women captured in the pictures are few of the several women who don’t have toilets in their homes. The chastity belts fashioned out of mild steel, also draw on the imagery of toilets and pigs. “It deals with the irony of the whole situation. On the one hand, you want the women to be so chaste, you don’t let them go out to study but on the other it is ok if they go out to defecate. Chastity belts are about chastity of thought,” says the artist. Having a father for a farmer, Shweta grew up being sensitised to the rural world and the problems it faces. Dealing with those challenges is her self-funded Gram Art Project which works on different important issues related to village, through community based national and international art projects by creating the network between the local rural community and artists, social inventors, experts around the world to steer a dialogue.
A video of her performance in the exhibition is from her residency in Taiwan where she interacted with farmers. According to Shweta, issues like gender, rural world, empowerment are interrelated. At the ongoing Vancouver Biennale, Shweta is showing her radical project “I Have a Dream”, where she is inviting artists around the globe to collaborate who can further collaborate with farmers of their respective countries to grow some grains or vegetables in fields or gardens in form of the sentence which means “I have a dream” in their own language and font. “Right now, what is on display is a wooden structure into which will be fitted the recordings of meetings artists have with farmers, local communities, regional groups in different countries across the world. Since farmers don’t necessarily have access to Internet and technology everywhere, we have decided to reach out to them through artists. These documentations would inform us of different kinds of challenges faced by the farmers all over the world,” says Shweta, who also plans to raise funds for toilets through the sale of her works in her ongoing solo at Latitude.
Another thing she is working towards is to help the villagers in Paradsinga get their identity cards so that they get access to ‘Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan’ the government scheme to build toilets in every rural household.
(The show Kabhi Namak Tumhe Kam Laga Kabhi...Kabhi Namak Tumhe Zada Laga Kabhi...is on at Gallery Latitude 28, Lado Sarai till February 27)
