J ust last week, Carnatic vocalist T.M. Krishna’s rendering of ‘Chennai Poramboku Padal’ went viral on social media. Shot at different spots across the Ennore creek — the backwaters located in Ennore, along the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal — the video was an attempt to throw light on the burgeoning issue of pollution, in what is considered nobody’s land. Re-sparking the same issue is artist Parvathi Nayar’s exhibition at DakshinaChitra, in conjunction with the recently-concluded seminar ‘Environmental Consciousness in Current Indian Art – Explorations in art, architecture, heritage, and community engagement’. Titled ‘Haunted by Waters’, the artist has brought out both the beauty and the ugly side of the creek through a series of photographs and a three-part video (also titled Haunted by Waters ).
Parvathi was one among a bunch of artists, filmmakers, musicians and journalists who made a trip to the creek along with activist Nityanand Jayaraman in August 2016. While she had read about the encroachment along the creek that is surrounded by oil refineries, coal-fired power plants, coal ash dykes and residential areas (that disgorge effluents into the wetland), and come across photos of the mound of garbage in the area, seeing all of it in person was more impactful. “While the first reaction was a surge of emotions, eventually, it transformed into the thought: what can I bring out from this in an artistic way and share the information with the public?” she says. So after taking over 600 photos and videos at the spot, Parvathi got back to her studio and started working on the raw data. “I wanted to bring out a visual response rather than an academic or literary response to what I saw,” says Parvathi, who was also part of the team which was taken by the Goethe-Institut to Germany to study water management, and also exhibited a public art project along with two other architects, at the Kochi Biennale.
The juxtaposition of photographic heterotopias, lens work and videos are studio responses to her exposure to the ongoing crisis of water as a threatened resource, according to the curator Kathryn Myers. For instance, there is a large installation of nine photographs (three by four feet) which conveys the idea of encroachment on water bodies. There is a photo of the sunrise as seen from a gap in the mound of garbage. This suggests that beauty exists all the time, and the only thing that keeps man from enjoying it is man himself, she says. Yet another shows a line of colourful buckets. “Earlier, women here used to fill water from a river nearby, which is too polluted to be used now,” she says.
Parvathi’s works have always involved water in some sense, “in both subtle and immediate ways: as a substance that is a major component of our bodies, as a precious and increasingly contested resource, as the water bodies in our land, as an element that is transformative, as a point of meditative reflection, and as the carrier of ideas.”
Her earliest recollection is of painting bright blue oceans, but over the years, they have changed to reflect contemporary topics. For instance, as part of the current show, a frame called Black Water captures the velvety black-and-white photo of the river, which though it looks inviting, is highly toxic for any living organism. “The show continues the queries into our philosophies of existence, and the search for reimaginings and reinterpretations of the spaces in which we live. Counterbalancing the intermittent pessimism of such a quest is the reminder that… all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy,” she says.
The exhibition is on Varija Art Gallery, DakshinaChitra, East Coast Road, Muttukadu, till January 31, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. (Tuesday holiday).
