I n one of the radio advertisements, a person recollects how, many years ago, a man had cured his ‘face cancer’ by rubbing few leaves from the rich forest of Chamba, in the Tehri Gahrwal region of Uttarakhand. “His face was spewing puss and it was incredible to see how he had cured himself of the disease by applying magical leaves. This is why we call our forests magical,” narrates a man in the audio recording. This advertisement, however, isn’t aired on any of the mainstream radio stations, but on Henvalvani community radio station in the Chamba valley.
There are around 30 such clips in which local people from seven different villages in the neighbourhood of Chamba talk about magical qualities of the surrounding forests, and how home remedies were once the most dependable and reliable way of addressing any health problem. These clips are part of a radio programme titled ‘Gharelu Nuskhe and Muft ki Salah’ (home remedies and free advice), which is conceptualised by Aastha Chauhan. It, basically, is part of a larger project that aims to examine how pharmaceutical medicines have hijacked the popularity of herbal remedies.
“I have always been interested in exploring how the popularity and usage of local medicinal plants and herbs have been lost in the haze of middle-class aspiration products that are being sold on TV. For instance, why will people use neem or walnut shells to clean their teeth when a popular superstar is endorsing toothpaste,” says Aastha.
“And, it is not only restricted to this. People have started believing that getting treated at a hospital is much better than using traditional herbs for medication. We are losing out on our handed-down traditional knowledge and are ignoring long-lasting ill effects of using pharmaceutical medicines,” she says, adding that she started working on the project in 2010.
These narratives have now travelled all the way from the mountainous region to the narrow alleys of Khirkee Extension and have stationed themselves at one of the rooms of the Khoj Studios to be part of the ongoing exhibition “Evidence Room: A Retrospective of Negotiating Routes” that tries to understand what development means in real sense, and how humans are exploiting and ignoring ecology in the name of development.
The exhibition is a culmination of a thoughtfully executed idea for which 12 different projects that covered semi-urban and rural areas as diverse as Chungthang in Sikkim and Wadhwana Wetlands in Gujarat to Jakkur Lake in Bangalore, Chilika Lake in Odisha and Najibabad in Uttar Pradesh were selected to highlight ecological issues through works spreading across different mediums, and artists were encouraged to work closely with community people.
“We have been working on ecology for over 10 years now, so we were extremely interested in understanding how artists view gross ecological changes occurring around them and how they are responding to these changes. So, we chose 12 projects and started giving out grants from 2012 to 2014 to artists who were already documenting such ecological changes. We wanted them to remain on the site for at least six months to a year to collect factual evidence of the damage being done to the environment and work closely with the community,” says Mario D’Souza, curator, Khoj studio.
“After the grant stopped in 2014, we met the artists and that is where the seed of this exhibition was sown. So, we went through the entire archive of their documentation and decided a common thread to divide the exhibition in such a way it addresses multiple ecological issues and struggles,” he adds.
The artists, Mario says, were asked to recreate their works which could be easily been shown at the studio. As a result of this, multiple rooms at Khoj have transformed into site-specific installations where each space addresses a specific issue. For instance, visual artist Jyoti Ranjan Jena has created a wooden boat projecting shadows and images about the bio-diversity of the Chilika Lake by using an indigenous but dying art form called ‘Ravan Chaya’. Through the visual narrative, he highlights how migratory birds and livelihood of fishermen has been affected around the lake. He worked with the local community to revitalise the tradition of folk theatre as a tool to re-imagine Chilika.
Textile artist Priya Ravish Mehra through her project ‘Making the Invisible Visible’ is aiming to acknowledge the practice of ‘rafoogari’, a traditional skill of darning used in the maintenance and preservation of textiles by the rafoogar community in India. She began her research in 2003 by documenting the work of the rafoogars from her hometown Najibabad, in Bijnor district — the most important but unheard shawl repair centre in the country. So, for the project, she worked along with them to create a collection of contemporary works, using their traditional darning skills, and also to bring their invisible craft to the forefront.
“The rafoogars basically repair a damaged piece and give it a new lease of life. This is one of the most important works in craftsmanship, but they usually get ignored. So, I wanted their journey to be seen and their work to be recognised,” says the Delhi-based artist.
Another projects include works by Asim Waqif and Vaibhav Dimri, Frame Works, Jyotiranjan Jena; Namrata Mehta, Alex White-Mazzarella and Soaib Grewal; Sanyukta Sharma, Shilpa Joglekar, Shweta and Aditi Bhattad, Sunandita Mehrotra, Surekha and Varsha Nair.
(On till March 15 at Khoj Studios, Khirkee Extension)
