Artist Kriti Arora is known for a sustained preoccupation with toiling labor. A case in point is ‘Tools and Boots’ made of Fiberglass, cloth and tar, exhibited at Saatchi Gallery. It contains tools of the trade so organized and arranged as to bring some orderly semblance to the tough task these individuals perform.
The installation is apparently consumed by tar, used to coat the newly laid roads. The arrangement of inanimate objects is akin to a still-life, which highlights the humanity missing from them. Blackened coats and heavy trousers in ‘Coat and Trousers’ again operate as the residual skins of the workforce building the roadsides. Hung out to dry by the artist, the tar is too thick to remove, thus alluding to the combined and inseparable nature of the men and their unfinished labor.
‘Tar Man 5’ is also informed by working men the artist encountered along Kashmir’s mountain routes. Another a sculpture on view is a mummification of one of the men struggling through the state’s war-torn landscape. The figure, which appears rooted to the spot, is coated in a thick skin of tar. This stifles his ability to exhibit any expression or emotion.
As is evident, Kriti Arora views roads as the social arteries, which connect this inaccessible region to the rest of the sub-continent. The struggling allegiance of men who are tirelessly working to re-cultivate the land for profitable redevelopment is the core subject of her artistic investigations. Unlike classical Indian statues or modeled deities, these ordinary men are covered in a suffocating layer of black tar from head to toe as a demonstration of the almost incomprehensible work required for changing the face of India.
The tar-man is emblematic of a continent seeking social and political change and a generation of men striving to execute the thankless job.
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