On a small round table flanked by four chairs, a tomato placed on a velvet-shrouded stand gleams dully under a glass cloche, an unlikely gemstone. Around this is scattered an eclectic collection of objects: a small white vase, a sketchbook, headphones, a stand filled with pencils, a recipe book and an immovable red plate.
“This installation encapsulates the story of food from the field to the breakfast table,” says Pragya Bhargava, one of the three artists behind the recently launched ‘Breakfast Table’, a multi-sensory exhibition at the Archives at NCBS. She adds that engaging with the artwork by sitting down at this table is a way to facilitate a conversation through food.
Aparajitha Vaasudev, Pragya Bhargava, and Nausheen Khan | Photo Credit: Ravi Kumar Boyapati
Take, for instance, the tomato whose presence at the table is a nod to a very contemporary event: the recent tomato crisis in the country. “The team wanted to keep it as a really precious object because at some point it was,” says Aparajitha Vaasudev, one of the other artists (filmmaker Nausheen Khan is the third).
Similarly, the placement of the red plate – it faces the gallery’s exit, disallowing access to the rest of the exhibition – intends to start a conversation about the lack of access to amenities and opportunities faced by people who belong to marginalised communities. “Just by sitting at this spot, you don’t have access to one big part of the show,” says Vaasudev, pointing out that this sort of marginalisation continues at different levels throughout India. “It could be segregation in housing or being excluded from certain types of jobs…basically the denial of various things,” she adds.
Inspiration and themes
Breakfast Table was launched in the city on February 17 as part of the event that marked the five-year anniversary of the Archives. The team responded to and won the Archive’s annual proposal call for exhibitions, which broadly fit the theme ‘Grow’, lay at the intersection of history, design, culture and science and used material from its collection. This year, the exhibition focused on two of the Archives collections that pertain specifically to Indian agriculture: the M.S. Swaminathan Papers and Leslie Coleman Papers. “We looked at the Archives and began thinking about what we could pull out from it,” says Bhargava, who, along with the other two artists, spent months immersed in these collections. “The works are influenced by us reading specific papers and getting inspired,” she says, pointing out ideas about plants and food converged in them. “We wanted to explore how science and agriculture are applied to the raw and natural state of food to make it a cultural signifier. How the story of food unfolds, and what can food tell us through this journey. “
According to the exhibition’s catalogue, the exhibition attempts to explore different ways of harnessing the energy and symbolism of food as it transitions from raw to cooked. “Food is the carrier of energy that helps sustain the vital operations and growth of living organisms. Synchronously, it functions as a powerful semiotic device that is reflective of societal conditions and collective representation,” states the catalogue.
At the exhibition
Three juxtaposed videos depicting very different landscapes – the lush expanse of Dachigam National Park in Kashmir, a dairy farm in Punjab and a sugar factory in Uttar Pradesh – run in a loop in the corner of a gallery. “I wanted to capture the essence of growth in different ways,” says Khan, the artist behind this artwork, titled Contrasting Understandings of Growth. Each video, she says, depicts a different interpretation of growth. “In this convergence of natural serenity, agrarian toil, and industrial pragmatism, I am reminded of the profound interdependence of humanity and nature, prompting me to reconsider the true essence of progress in a world driven by material pursuits and technological advancements,” she says. According to her, a viewer’s reaction to this visual essay is likely to vary depending on their location, life experiences and culture. “It is for you to see and ask yourself which one you relate to the most.”
Some other interesting artworks on display include a cloth installation representing paddy fields, an interactive game illustrating ring disease in potatoes, a series of photographs shot in various kitchens across India, as well as an interactive audio experiment based on a 1911 research paper by Dr. Coleman. “The interactive grasshopper audio is a reading of a research paper to offer a tactile understanding of the process of hybridisation and scientific research and to build a new drawing archive of fantastical grasshoppers,” explains Bhargava, who is also behind a series of unusual artworks, which directly draws from the Leslie Coleman collection. “I trace the words written to Dr. Leslie Coleman as a method of research to understand how different events across industries, like the malaria outbreak, the share price of the Mysore Sugar Company, the widespread use of DDT, and heavier taxation, were linked to the story of food,” says Bhargava, who contributed to these archival objects by summarising them with interpretative drawings overlaid on the text.
Diverse media
Despite the diversity of the media, which includes film, photographs, games, patchwork, recipes, sculptures, painting, and embroidery, they all essentially draw on the various functions of food, whether political, scientific, cultural, societal or economic.
Khan, who shot the photographs depicting diverse people in kitchens across Kashmir, Delhi, Punjab and Karnataka, talks about how the process of making that food and how we look at it differs from household to household, with elements of gender and caste often shaping this narrative. “Hopefully, when you see these photographs, you can make these connections and think about your own stories related to kitchen and food and question these constructs that we are ingrained in us,” she says.
Vaasudev, in turn, talks about the fabric installation she has created, using patchwork to represent paddy fields, a crop that was talked about extensively in the show. “Basically, it is an aerial view of paddy fields…the majesty and visual drama of seeing a landscape from a height,” she says of the artwork.
She also explains why she chose this medium to represent these varicoloured fields. “It has played a role in preserving cultural heritage…a way of telling a story, recording history, expressing identity,” she says, adding the pieces of cloth that went into the quilt were all donated. “It was important to us to have interactivity and collaboration,” she says. After all, “food has the potential to bring us together,” she firmly believes.
Breakfast Table will be exhibited at the Archives at NCBS till December 2024
