Soil and toil

Artist Kiran Chandra fills a gallery with earth to highlight the urban-rural disconnect.

Driving along the lanes of the posh Friends Colony, it takes a while to locate Shrine Empire gallery. Without any signage to mark it, it takes several minutes to find the gallery in the basement of one of the larger bungalows in the area. In the gallery, an unusual sight meets the eye. Mounds of soil cover the floor. The walls are covered with a silk-screened cotton fabric, whose pattern echoes paddy fields. In a smaller room, the floor is completely covered with soil, while newspaper cut-outs have been laid out to spell the words “IN DENIAL”.

Kiran Chandra walks in wearing an exhausted smile. The artist, who has been busy transforming the gallery into what she hopes will resemble the “farmer’s domain”, has much work still to do. Invited to participate in the gallery’s new “Pro.ject” series — proposed to be held twice a year, with young artists creating an exhibition that utilises the entire gallery space — Chandra is preparing for her debut solo show in the city, titled “Pro.ject 2012.01”.

For the show, she wishes to “create a place in the gallery which feels different yet familiar… a diorama of the rural landscapes which inhabit the urban mind”.

This somewhat inconspicuous gallery, she feels, is perfect for her show and vision. “There is an intimacy here since it’s not a massive, sprawling space. I want people to come in and explore one idea.”

In her case, the idea is a complex one, revolving around land, resources and their distribution as well as what she calls the urban-rural disconnect. She also hopes to raise questions about the rising number of farmer suicides. But although “farmer suicides are an important concern and an element of the show, I don’t want to make it the USP of the show”, she says.

Born in Kolkata and living in Brooklyn, New York, the changes in India in the last decade, namely the “mall-ification” of cities and small towns as well as the rapid pace of development have left their imprint on her work, she says. In summer 2011, she wrote to friends as well as several journalists, asking where she should go for her research. Chandra visited Chhattisgarh and stayed in Rajnandgaon for three days. There she met Bhan Sahu, a widow who invited Chandra to stay with her, helping her interact with the villagers. While Chandra was wary of asking sensitive questions, Sahu encouraged her.

She did not want to be a “disaster tourist”. “I didn’t want to go knocking on doors of widows demanding them to tell me about their lives... I didn’t want them to be a mere resource for my art, but to have a voice,” she stresses.

Chandra’s show will include a video, a choreographed piece in which a man begins to tie a turban on another man’s head. The turban becomes a limitless piece of fabric, which after being wrapped around the head of the seated man, slowly continues down to his body, eventually becoming his shroud.

Though she has not collected any statistics to support her findings in Chhattisgarh, she plays audio files of her interviews with the farmers in the area. While a baby wails in the backgrounds, a small voice complains of bad roads and the lack of hospitals, and of paddy fields which have not been irrigated because river water has been channelled away for industrial use. The rise and fall of these voices is electronically translated into jagged oscillating lines that are projected onto the fabric that covers the gallery walls.

Chandra ordered a truckload of soil for her show. It came in from Haryana. Soon the soil will cover the floor, contouring the gallery. Chandra emphasises that the exhibition is a “stand-alone installation”, not a documentary. “I’m not a journalist, nor an economist,” she says. “This is just my way of showing interest in world issues.”

“Pro.ject 2012.01”, at Shrine Empire Gallery, Friends Colony, January 18-February 18