The Rice House (left) & Death, The River and Me (right)

(left) Six inverted wooden ploughs are tied together to make the skeleton of a storage house for rice. With no land to till and no rice to harvest, ploughs no longer in use are used to make a memorial that is intended to disturb our willful amnesia..This work derives from Probir Gupta’s long-term engagement with human rights groups concerned with those who are displaced by development. Rice House reminds us of the forced dislocation, the loss of indigenous knowledge systems, the threat to the agrarian economy, and the deep, pervasive violence that underwrite our modernity and progress.

(right) Death, the River and Me consists of 63photo¬graphs that form a single, coherent narrative. In them, Atul Bhalla is seen on the banks of the Yamuna, marking the river’s death by having his head shaved in a mourning ritual practiced throughout India. In these images the camera is not static, and the cameraman clearly moves around the place of the ritual, recording the loss of hair. The changing angles of the camera prevent the photographs from being monotonous, and at the same time break the axis of viewing. This seems to give the viewer free and unhampered access to the event. As a result, the photographs appear to be the documentation of an event that occurred in a specific place and time, rather than a performance enacted especially for the camera.

Every photograph in this series shows Bhalla’s face in a tight close up but he never looks directly into the camera. His solemnity and unobtrusiveness allow us to see beyond him to what he mourns – pollution, decay and the death of the river. Hence, although all that the viewer sees in the photographs is a physical transformation of the artist, he becomes invisible against the magnitude of the issues evoked. Along with the photographs, Bhalla has chosen to preserve the razor used during the ritual enactment, making it a relic object, thus museumizing the performance.