Apathy to archiving in the domain of art

A symposium along with an event ‘Another Life: The Digitised Personal Archive’ of Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur was held at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in February.
An exhibit held earlier this year at LKA in Delhi, entitled ‘Against All Odds: A Contemporary Response to the Historiography of Archiving, Collecting and Museums in India’ was another recent example of archiving as a theme. It was comprised of photos, sculptures, installations, paintings, and new media works by several leading contemporary Indian artists.

A fine blend of fantasy and fact was in evidence in the show. According to its curator Arshiya Lokhandwala, the title denoted the fact that art practice and artists have survived and thrived in India against all odds, in spite a poor maintenance of running museums, archives and public art collections.

Sarnath Banerjee, in spotlight for his graphic novel ‘The Harappa Files’, states that he sees himself as an archivist who authors his reality but who also records. Another instance is Bose Krishnamachari’s ‘LaVA: Laboratory of Visual Arts’ that comprised his personal library of audiovisual material and books, DVD players, lifted whole—shelves etc.

Subodh Gupta’s installation presented in all its grimy glory was another apparent jab at the bureaucracy. Other works explored the deeper link existing between memory - individual and collective - and different ways in which they can be preserved. Pushpamala N.’s tableaux ‘Motherland: Where Angels Fear to Tread…’ was inspired by museum dioramas. She termed the work as an ‘archive of images of Bharat Mata or Mother India

The show was interpretation of archives, the whole process and its form as opposed to the content. A very stark comment was Vivan Sundaram’s ‘if one were to fall’. For him, the idea (behind private archives) is to inform a certain location as well as a historical period that transforms it into an island of data. The crux of such initiatives is to remove the prevailing apathy to archiving in the domain of art. A beginning has already been made…