Atrocities Exhibition: The Art Exhibition Documenting India’s Wildest Decades of Political Chaos | Art

IIndia is the largest democracy in the world. Nearly 650 million voters cast their votes in this year’s national elections, which were held in seven phases from April to June. Democratic rituals, for all their flaws, seem to be so deeply embedded in India’s political landscape that it is easy to overlook the country’s experiences with brutal authoritarian rule. Narendra Modi’s erosion of democratic institutions is less a novelty than an informal repeat of Indira Gandhi’s rule less than half a century ago.

In 1975, faced with ongoing labor strikes, mass street protests and a court ruling that disqualified her from holding public office, Mrs. Gandhi suspended the constitution and declared an internal state of emergency. Their opponents were thrown in prison and the press was censored. This was the soft aspect of their rule. The truly harrowing story unfolded in the villages and towns where the prime minister’s son, Sanjay, fixated on containing India’s population, launched a mass sterilization program. More than six million men underwent forced surgery in one year, some were mutilated. Sanjay’s drive to beautify India’s cities led to the displacement of countless people. In Delhi, police opened fire on residents of a slum who tried to peacefully resist. The memory of the “Emergency”, as this time is generally remembered, still makes people shudder today.

The Imaginary Institution of India, opening at the Barbican in London, uses the 1975 Emergency Declaration as a starting point for the story of India’s journey through decades of political turmoil, culminating in the country’s successful nuclear test in 1998 – an event that… In more detail Condemned by Western powers that have vast nuclear arsenals of their own, India has been described as an “emerging great power”. The artworks on display – created at a time of social instability, sectarian strife, state-sanctioned violence, the worst industrial disaster in history in Bhopal, followed by economic liberalization, increasing wealth and intense urbanization – enliven India’s extraordinary metamorphosis.

This change gave the artists new impulses. The show powerfully illuminates the civic engagement of artists and Indian society as they, shaken by the Gandhi family’s abuse of power, reckoned with the reality of their nation’s conditions. Indira Gandhi’s attack on the Constitution resulted in an increase in individual and collective activism, challenging the establishment subtly from the studio and stridently from the streets.

Artist and poet Gulammohammed Sheikh painted one of his first political artworks, Speechless City, in response to the excesses of the Emergency. In his post-apocalyptic vision, India’s urban landscape, normally awash with all life forms, is emptied. Stacks of ostentatious modernist apartment buildings draped in a menacing shade of saffron show no trace of their residents. Doors and windows remain open and wild dogs and flocks of birds search the cityscape.

The picture from 1975 seems remarkably prescient today. The fiery pigment, a color associated with the Hindu right, appears to emit a warning of the coming communal violence that would erupt violently in the 1980s and early 1990s. The 1980s were a particularly violent decade. The combination of crises – militant separatist movements, militaristic state responses, the assassination of Mrs Gandhi in 1984 and the subsequent Sikh pogrom in Delhi – seemed to destroy the cultural and religious syncretism of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi as a fundamental principle of modern India Republic.

Artistic concerns went beyond the religious divide and addressed the dangerous status of India’s marginalized groups. The experiences of queer communities criminalized by law and stigmatized by society were powerfully evoked in Bhupen Khakhar’s vivid paintings, in which early Renaissance perspectives were assembled into miniature surfaces, and in delicate photographs by Sunil Gupta. Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan looked at day laborers, while others, like Jangarh Singh Shyam, foregrounded and renewed indigenous visual culture. When these displays were displayed, they sometimes tended to evoke the very forms of oppression they sought to expose. Khakhar’s depictions of intimate same-sex embraces, for example, had to be hidden to keep the peace.

Savindra Sawarkar not only addressed India’s caste system, but also brought Dalit (formerly untouchables) communities into focus – making him a pioneer in an art world still dominated by the upper castes. In his mid-’80s etchings, Dalit figures, forged from a scratchy matrix of black lines so dense that they seemed to erase the individuals they gave form to, were shown with brooms that left their footprints swept away, and attached to the pots They wear them around their necks to catch their saliva, which is considered a pollutant by the upper castes.

The plight of India’s oppressed communities was further highlighted by the prison rape of a teenage Adivasi girl named Mathura in 1972. The protests sparked by the acquittal of the police officers who raped her also sparked the women’s movement that emerged at the end of the decade. The anti-dowry rallies, sit-ins and street theater that erupted in Delhi launched Sheba Chhachhi’s long-term photography project, chronicling the activism of seven women between 1980 and 1991. “These women moved from their personal tragedies into the larger realm of changing conditions for women,” Chhachhi tells me. “Many of them are no longer with us. They were friends, but they live on in the work and offer the possibility of resistance and change.”

Sathyarani – Staged Portrait, a photograph of a mother seeking justice for her daughter burnt for her dowry, encapsulates the ongoing campaign for legal reform. The elderly woman, draped in a sari, sits on the steps of the Delhi High Court. The stacks of files scattered in front of her testify to her stubbornness and the dullness of the system.

The exhibition’s curator, Shanay Jhaveri, has attempted to track the development of each artist over the period covered by the exhibition. The works he selected show aesthetic changes and realignments of practices in response to the events between 1975 and 1998.

December 6, 1992, when the Babri Mosque was razed by Hindu supremacists in front of the authorities, is often seen as a rupture moment in the history of Indian art. Just as there was a before and after model of the Duchamp Fountain, Indian art can also be divided into periods before and after this catastrophic event. The unrest that erupted across the country was widely covered by a media culture that had changed exponentially following the opening of India’s economy the year before. Sheela Gowda, an eminent artist from Bangalore, questioned her practice after seeing a photo of deadly religious clashes in Hyderabad, central India. “I couldn’t carry on like this,” Gowda told me. “The political was not reflected in the pictures that I painted.” The artist Rummana Hussain gave up painting completely and devoted herself to performances and object-based installations that, among other things, alluded to the disruption of civil society using shards of broken terracotta pots.

In search of something “immediate and meaningful,” Gowda used a new material, cow dung, formed installations out of it, and applied it to paper. Mist, a material of useful and spiritual value in India, also highlighted the contradictions in an increasingly fragmented country. A surge in foreign investment led to explosive consumption patterns in what Indian economist Jean Drèze called “the islands of California,” while most of the rest of India remained “a sub-Saharan sea”; Most Indians struggled to make ends meet as food prices rose and the government scaled back public investment to offset generous tax breaks for businesses.

The show’s chronology allows the audience to move through the themes, but it would be wrong to view the isolated period as artistically unique. Art has long been inextricably linked to politics in India, and there is a strong artistic tradition of engaging with social upheavals, not only at home but also abroad. In 1971, many Indian artists, including Khakhar, reacted strongly to the war in Bangladesh and the atrocities that sparked it. The drawings of Vivan Sundaram, another artist featured in this exhibition, are among the sharpest artistic responses to the 1991 Gulf War.

Despair, disillusionment and defiance can be found in many works. The timing of the show, coming just as India begins to settle into the third consecutive term of Modi’s strongman rule, seems fitting. India has been the scene of some of the largest democratic protests in its history in recent years – from the women-led sit-in against the government’s introduction of a religious citizenship test to the farmers’ revolt that forced Modi to change course. to the demonstrations by unemployed youth in a country where economic inequality has probably become worse in recent decades than under the British Raj. The exhibition is a reminder that the fight for human dignity is indeed a never-ending struggle.