Remains of the Nation

Our century has been deemed the Asian century, such a diagnosis propelled by the dramatic transformations undergone in recent decades by two nations founded back-to-back in 1947 and 1949. What remains of the founding figures of these nations—and of men like them—in the aftermath of such fundamental makeovers? 

 

Raise Your Hands Those Who Have Touched Him
2007
Single channel video, 33 minutes

Scaria’s first artistic engagement with the figure of Gandhi began with a 50-minute video work cast in a didactic and documentary mode, and screened in 2007 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK. Growing up in the south Indian state of Kerala known for its long history of Leftist politics, Gandhi was not in the forefront of the artist’s mind or work until he moved north to New Delhi, the nation’s capital, in 1995.  By then, a lot had begun to change in India’s political and cultural landscape including the beginning of a sharp retreat from many of the Mahatma’s core values around non-violence, religious pluralism, and civic engagement.  Many such values are recollected with great affection by elderly men and women, eighteen ordinary residents of Delhi, whose paths crossed Gandhi’s as they were growing up in the city. The artist himself recedes into the background to let the last generation that came in touch with Gandhi recall when they first laid eyes on him, what he looked like, their reaction to the news of his assassination, and more.

 

Raise Your Hands Those Who Spoke to Him
2010
Single channel video, 50 minutes

In 2010, a group of contemporary Chinese and Indian artists collaborated for the first time in a curated show in Shanghai titled Place.Time.Play that sought to spark artistic conversation across borders ‘between the irreducibly intimate and the irretrievably alien.’[3] Scaria produced for the exhibit an ethnographic film on memories of Mao as recalled by four ordinary citizens who he encountered in the course of his travels in China.  As with his other films, there is a deliberate eschewal of narrative in Raise Your Hands Those Who Spoke to Him, and the adoption of a format that is also didactic and documentary.  In its title and subject matter, the film mirrors Scaria’s earlier film on Gandhi, Raise Your Hands Those Who Touched Him. Although produced for different shows in different contexts, the two films are consciously juxtaposed in this exhibit to draw attention to the artist’s overall interest in understanding how some founding fathers are recalled in times of rapid social transformation in similar ways by their heirs and inheritors, even as he frames such a recall within an aesthetic of the non-spectacular.

 

Political Realism
2009
Video installation, single channel with sound, 3.35 minutes


The fragile impermanence of public icons in our disenchanted times is ‘realistically’ invoked in this work set against the background of a city—any city, perhaps even the artist’s own—as doors open and close, and we witness the toppling over of the public statues of great men, one after the other.  ‘My mind works in film mode, I don’t shift the scenes, the framework is set, that is where the movement should happen.’[4] Here the movement that happens is the end of eras and the death of iconic heroes, a literal bulldozing of the past to which we are cued from the opening moment, as history speeds on at the pace of a millennial metro.

Touch My Wound
2007/8
Inkjet print on Epson enhanced matte paper, 49 x 44 inches

Touch My Wound by Gigi ScariaFor Scaria, the capital city of the nation that has been his home since 1995 is also the city that witnessed the assassination of the father of the nation at the dawn of dusk on January 30, 1948.  The political murder of the Mahatma is also one of the lenses through which he has over time come to view New Delhi, as that city has undergone dramatic, even irreversible, change.  When Scaria’s Raise Your Hands Those Who Have Touched Him was first screened in 2007, it was accompanied by an installation piece that brought into slow focus Gandhi’s bullet-ridden corpse bathed in a pool of red light, using a historical black-and-white photograph that has frequently been attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to India’s female photojournalist Homai Vyarwalla. In 2008 Scaria resurrected his earlier work as a digital print for a show in London titled Who Knows Mr. Gandhi? the red-hued collage a bloody reminder of the violent end faced by the father of the nation.  It is now on exhibit under a newly bestowed title that starkly reminds us that ‘Gandhi is the body of a nation who was shot thrice in the wake of its own freedom.’

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