Frieze Art Exhibit Notes

Eco-Art Residency - January 2007
Ravi Agarwal
Marigold Fields

New Delhi based artist / photographer / activist Ravi Agarwal's work on the changing local ecologies/economies of the sweeping acres of flower fields on the banks of the river Yamuna in Delhi explores the contradictions posed by global capital on local sustainabilities, through a series of photographs and a video.
The 'dirty' river is re-imagined as a landscape of marigold flowers which fulfill the city's demand, but now being threatened by city's new hunger for land.

" The 'fertility of capital' overtakes the 'fertility of land.' Land and ecology are inseparable, as is the relationship between the ecology of nature and of the 'self.' The changing ecology of the flower fields is the crumbling ecology of the 'self' in these times. The script seems to be prewritten. The river is timeless. The river is dead."

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Khoj residency Old Delhi “Dilli Dur Ast” (Delhi is Far)- April 2006
’Piaus’ + ‘ Mashk’
Atul Bhalla

Atul Bhalla’s methodology of analyzing and commenting on the human condition by engaging with the formal and site specific nature of various drinking water apparatuses used in urban life is demonstrated in this series of photographs that map his act of slaughtering a goat “halal” in the traditional muslim way. Since he was a non muslim the goat was skinned by a hindu butcher and tanned into a ‘mashk’ – a traditional wter carrier.

"The person who carries the mashk and offers drinking water is called a ‘Bhishti’ which also means life giver, as ‘Bahisht’ means life in Urdu. So to make an object that may give life one had to, in a way take a life."

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Khoj ‘Photography’ residency . 2005
Tales from the City/The Jamuna Series
Sheba Chhachhi

Sheba Chhachhi's installation " Tales from a City/The Jamuna Series"
investigates the interregnum offered by the mechanically moved still image.Neither moving, as in film/video/TV, or still , this work bears an affinity to 19C magic lanterns while appropriating contemporary, globalized, kitsch objects of entertainment.These lightboxes layer digital photographic images of the city and river with a moving loop of images of dispossesion and displacement within the urban metropolis.

“The work explores the bizarre beauty of waste – effluent in the river, garbage on the banks in tension with metaphors of what binds and determines the lives of ordinary women in the city – empty taps, identity papers, increasing urbanization as the grid of the city takes over everything…”

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Gigi Scaria
A day with Sohail and Mariyan
Khoj ‘Environment’ residency - 2004

Gigi Scaria’s video traces a unique cartographic trail with 2 waste pickers who have migrated to the city and make their livelihood from the trash piles in a affluent part of the city. The artist follows the two boys in a tour that somewhat signifies a back door to the world of consumption. Shot in a very rough night vision light for the most part the film is a stark comment on urban conditions where the waste generated by one segment is used for subsistence by the other.

“An immediate reality we all live in has its divergent parallels. It is entirely up to each individual how one confronts these parallels. Parallels are forever in confrontation, whether in geometry, in art or in life.”