For the forthcoming exhibition at the Shrine Empire Gallery in Delhi, the artist revisits her major work by re-organising her material by adding a series of newer photographic works that explores the vulnerable position of young girls in urban settings as the vulnerable prey of predator males. The new installation, Entropic Sites, marks an important stage for the artist, whose own engagement of social and sexual issues has been deepened recently by the work of NGO’s, including the Apne Aap Women Worldwide organization, which encourages us to revisit the question of our medieval relationship to slavery andprostitution. Alongside the benefits of a city that provides us with shelter, work and pleasure, we still have to consider how we can work together effectively to abolish such types of behavior.
Kejriwal has lived and worked in Kolkata, where the initial avatar of this installation, East City, was installed at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture. Kejriwal’s astute understanding of her city provided an intriguing study of one of our most enriched centres of culture: her eastern city. The installation, East City, allowed us an understanding of how one can study the continuing behaviour of our ancestors and the platitudes of progress. Here, the seams of modernity are encrusted with village idioms and pulsate with revolutionary inventions; the interweaving of religions, languages and the vestiges of colonialismall co-exist in the former capital of British India and the epi-centre of the Bay of Bengal, populated by babus and bibis who slowly begin to question its current dynamics.
For Entropic Sites, a very dark palimpsest is exposed. Often we are arrested by the cat-and-mouse aesthetics of the city’s intent and its contemporary purpose, as the evasive advertising turns the classical into kitsch, and even the mundane into the sordid. Kejriwal’s large scale photographic installation is one of the most honest testaments to this eastern dream of expansion and the rise of a technopolis on the site of the former city’s carcass, embroiling human folly.
