The strong smell of varnish and wood greet me, as if I have entered a workshop and not the quiet, pristine white premises of Art Houz on Kasturi Rangan Road. And as I look around the gallery, I wonder if the smell is part of the experience, a multi-sensorial tribute to labour. Shinod Akkaraparambil, a city-based illustrator, worked on this collection, called Chora: The Tools for over four years. Chora is a Greek word and a philosophical term used by Plato that refers to an interval between being and non-being and the theme has been explored by the likes of Jacques Derrida and other philosophers.
What drew Shinod to explore Chora using tools? “I am myself a labourer, aren’t I?” he says with a laugh. On the floor at the gallery is an installation that holds together this entire collection — it is of a man lying on the floor with shavings of wood winding out of his back. Next to him a carpenter’s plane and strewn around are more wood shavings… The same image finds a space on canvas too with layers of shavings leaping out of the frame and dancing in the air. Perfect round shavings framed here and there dot the exhibition too…
A message at the gallery about the collection reads: Here is it; an opening, a space which cordially invites everything to co-exist, a primordial sensorium of preliminary tools and techniques that manually connects and reconstructs the sensible world. The pain of labour has been re-inscribed throughout… The tools that borrowed from the body itself having the potential to break limits, and that in turn carry the corporal into transcendence... Chora is conceived as an attempt at redemption by revisiting the basics of hand and tools, back to foreground the footprints, a harking back to the identity.”
In his world, the tools reign larger than the human. And, at a time, when more and more workers in the handicraft industry are leaving behind their craft to migrate to cities in search of better prospects, Shinod’s works make even greater sense. The overwhelming feelings of alienation and pain that the carpenter goes through to serve someone else defines the times we live in and that is the reigning theme of this collection.
Chora: The Tools is on display until this evening, 7 p.m. at Art Houz, Kasturi Rangan Road, Alwarpet.
