Trees are Stranger than Aliens in the Movies, (Video Documentation) 31st August – 22nd September 2018, Videos, Paintings and Text, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.
Gallery-1, Ground Floor, 14’6” x 29’10”, Height 11’2”
Gallery-2, Ground Floor, 14’8” x 11’10”, Height 11’2”
Gallery-1, Ground Floor, 14’6” x 29’10”, Height 11’2”
Gallery-3, Ground Floor, 11’2” x 13’10”, Height 11’2”
Gallery-4, First Floor, 15′ x 23’9”, Height 10’3”
Gallery-5, First Floor, 15’8” x 11’8”, Height 10’3”
Gallery-4, First Floor, 15′ x 23’9”, Height 10’3”
Paribartana Mohanty’s Artist Statement on the exhibition
A Mexican mythology says, ‘We are made of broken bones of Humans’ which implies, we aren’t humans.
The word ‘alien’ can’t be used perhaps, to categorise our kind, as we are already separating, isolating, raping, lynching, and hunting them down, the aliens are within our collectivity; the Dalits, Muslims, Tribals, intellectuals, students, communists, liberals, seculars, women, animals, trees, birds, insects, skies, waters, airs, and earths are all the other radical aliens. I don’t believe that aliens as some sort of ‘extraterritorial’ species can represent our strange diversity. Also the way I see aliens in the movies, with their ugly, sticky half-formed limbs, they appear unskillful labourers who are always in the savage-mood to attack us.
Ours ‘strange’ diversity is not a choice anymore, and the question remains the same, who we are, the self-proclaimed landlords, under the laws of our statues, monuments, and cities, segregating and targeting aliens? Or are we the radical ‘other’ aliens who are still trying to rent or hire a place in this mythological debate on time, memory, identity, and history? In this regard, trees appear more alien, than the aliens, strange in the movies.
My recent body of work, plays with the imagery or spectacle of fall or destruction of statues, monuments and cities. Referencing the childhood story of Kala Pahada destroying Hindu temples in Odisha, to Babri masjid demolition by Hindus, to the destruction of cities elsewhere in Syria and Gaza or the other kind of demolition or fall of morals and laws; the story of the Fall of Icarus, the beef ban and the ‘demonetisation’ declared in an apocalyptic urgency, which made us feel like aliens waiting in front of the ATMs. As if on earth, the ATM machines turned into time machines and we were on this infinite-row, entering with our ATM PINs and 2000 Rupees new note (only), to land on another utopia.
My painting, videos and texts which I have been developing since last four years, focusing on modern architecture, public access, conceptual ideas around dwelling, two dimensionality of a photograph, human scale in architectural photography, the specter of modernism, and utopias, the works fall into the tide of a swing, after the Modi government came to power, demolishing all sort of morals, ethics, and laws. The Aadhar Card demolishes all utopias of the land and its people, where the new born cows after 2014 becomes new humans, the new humans born become the new robots under the corporate and the new trees born, only have to become aliens, and we are all (groups, individual and kinds) swallowed by this replica of a science fiction.
This exhibition is conceived as a chamber outside of time and space continuum where many simultaneities coalesce/weaved together: Sun Ra and the non-humans, a falling astronaut on the back of an antelope, ghosts and the ruins of Raj Path stretched from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan turned into a protest site in the aftermath of the infamous rape, a herd of reindeers and Bhagwati Parsat, the first registered worker, who built the Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan with his wife, I begin to play cricket with a bunch of labourers on the ruins of the modernist grid.
Special Acknowledgements:
Akansha Rastogi, Girish Behera, Jeebesh Bagchi, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Kush Badhwar, Niroj Sathpathy, Parul Vadehra, Ram Rahman, Roobina Karode, Roshni Vadehra, SOMA Summer Group 2018, Staffs of Vadehra Art Gallery, and WALA.
Paribartana Mohanty 