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| City lights | | ARTWALK |
| Bharati Chaturvedi / New Delhi Sep 12, 2009, 00:51 IST |
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Atul Bhalla’s photography reveals water as an invisible chemical, an inhabitant of pipes and pumps.
It comes alive in its absence, as a scarcity rather than as an essential all-pervasive commodity. His newest body of work, In Another Sweat, re-visits this present-absent dichotomy through quotidian images from the city that also serves as his home — Delhi.
From the broader notion of water in his previous work, Bhalla has now worked on a containment of it — the 25 kilometer-long Western embankment of the Yamuna, Delhi’s life-stream. Germane to this series is the existence not only of a life-giving substance, but also of life nourished by it. One of his finest works, Real Water, comprising images of 48 pumping stations, becomes performative. He walks along the embankment, taking images along a pre-researched and planned route. With this act, he stands as witness to these humble, dilapidated slivers of infrastructure that try to manoeuvre a giant river. Placing them one next to the other, he forces a viewer to compare each one, spot the differences in these near-identical structures. In its visual structure, the work gestures at the Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs.
In a second set of works, Ek Rupaya Bara Gilas, Atul turns his attention to aluminum-cased water carts all over the city, quenching thirst on the road with one rupee-a-glass water, pumped up manually by a human operator. Using his previous strategy, he photographs several images, each different, each comparable, setting up a game, as it were. It is not possible to take in his work in a glance because of the several levels it works at. In these images, water is everywhere — in the business of its supply, in the advertising, in the bodies that inhabit the work, but, rarely ever, directly flowing in the frame. Atul, therefore, maps the city as a site of thousands of containers — human and non-human — sustaining life on the streets. It is, in fact, an unlikely waterscape.
These mechanical manoeuvres are divorced from water itself just twice. Once, when it is sold, rarified, as bottled water, supposedly from fresh springs. Atul doesn’t refer to this in this show (he has previously) although he mimics advertising strategies, used to sell, amongst others, bottled water and cold drinks, in his light box works.
And second, when it is mined directly and manually from the Yamuna, as we see in a set of Kanwaria images here. If Bhalla is trying to reinvent and rescue the image of a religious person in a holy river from the Incredible India campaign and its spawns, he is less than successful. One cannot but help experiencing an overdose. If anything, it lacks the tenderness and reflection of his other images because it morphs into a pre-coded product. An allied sculpture from waste wood — a giant water can — is also overpowered by its own size. Perhaps Atul has laboured too hard to underscore that privileged moment when water and body merge after a circuitous journey.
Although water is now a contentious political issue, Atul’s work resists lending itself to the activist arena. In fact, if there is a one scaffold Atul refuses to climb, it is that of an activist. Although this show is quite directly a paean to the Yamuna, he consciously chooses to cajole a more complex engagement with the image.
In Another Sweat is a middle-of-the-arc section from a longer journey, when Atul produced some of the finest watercolours of the tools that plumbers use locally. His sheer, gossamer, vishwa-karmic rendering of hard lead and metal pipes and washers was akin to karigari — an artistic production created in synergy with and built upon on the craftsmanship of other skilled workers. From those works, and across several others, mostly all related to the multiple presence of water, Atul has reached, somewhat deliberatively, this present framework, with himself as the sutradhar, exploring a narrative that is simultaneously quotidian and grand.
(bharati@chintan-india.org)
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