6 February – 7 March, 2009
Opening 5 February, 2009 6.30 – 9.00
‘Poetic Documentary’ presents the work of three artists; Kriti Arora, Jeet Chowdhury and Gigi Scaria, all of whom present work that is rooted in documentary but suffused with a very subjective aesthetic.
Kriti Arora presents a series of photographs that are part of an ongoing series initially
inspired by a trip in 2004 to Jammu and Kashmir, her ancestral home. Arora has
described the journey as an “intimately personal pilgrimage to this conflict torn region.”
For Arora, Kashmir is a land of contrast with an idyllic landscape being destroyed by
conflict or development. A number of the women portrayed in Arora’s photographs can be described as the intelligentsia of the region, but instead of assuming that social
position, have instead had to face the consequences of the ongoing violence. On the one
hand they are the repositories of traditional knowledge such as Kashmir Shavism, on the other hand many had to become refugees. That they often hold family portraits and are pictured in antique interiors is testament to lives lived in the shadow of a grandiose past that is being increasingly lost. For Arora, “these images offer a link with the past and provide a silent prayer for a peaceful future.”
Jeet Chowdhury’s photographic and film works explore the significance of meat in
India’s cultural history. The film work references texts through Indian history that have talked about meat-eating; from the Rig Veda on what meats can and cannot be eaten to recipes attesting to the influence of Islamic culture through to diagrams of British meat cuts which were introduced to India during the Raj. His photographs are set in the New Market in Kolkata which was for a time named the Sir Stuart Hogg Market in honour of the Calcutta Corporation’s chairman. The market was founded to allow the city’s growing English population to shop by themselves, away from the city’s native residents. After the British left it became known as a place where one could purchase almost anything but now it is a symbol of decaying grandeur. Traditions remain – particularly in the meat section of the market where the workers continue to kill and cut meat in the tradition of British butchery that is the legacy of Empire. Chowdhury’s works meditate on the ways in the which the past filters into and informs the present in the most unexpected, everyday ways, and also how something as seemingly neutral as what we eat is filled with cultural history and significance.
Gigi Scaria explores the levels of authorship that are often hidden by the term
‘documentary’ with his film works ‘A Day With Sohail and Mariyan’ (2004) and’Search’ (2006), both of which follow the lives of young workers in the streets of Delhi. Scaria met Sohail and Mariyan at a community centre and gradually built up a relationship with them. Eventually they asked him to accompany him over the course of a night collecting waste, and Scaria produced a film that is partly observational, partly loosely-scripted in order to create what he has described as “a fictional documentary but not exactly following the documentary mode.” By consciously acknowledging a level of scripting, Scaria undermines the traditional notion of documentary and suggests that our need to know these previously unknowable subjects is always dependent on authorial construction. Moreover both Sohail and Mariyan were involved in decision-making processes as to what would be filmed – so the work can be read as testifying to Sohail and Mariyan’s self-fashioning. A subsequent film, ‘Search’ follows a young boy who uses a powerful magnet to find iron hidden amongst the debris in the city – but in this wordless film it is not clear what, if anything, is scripted. Thematically in both works, Scaria returns to a theme that runs through all his oeuvre; that of how the migrant and the worker re-make and re-map the city according to the needs of their own lives.
