The Yamuna-Elbe public art project: Making the river part of the creation

The Yamuna-Elbe public art project is a unique idea conceived as part of the India Week celebrations in Hamburg. It aims at making people rethink their sacred and need based relationship with the river and the fragile ecology it supports by making the river part of the art.

Most of the works done by Indian and German artists are to be lined up along the two riverbanks. Signifying the general apathy, artist-environmentalist Ravi Agarwal, a co-curator of the project has been quoted as saying, “While the river Yamuna is really on nobody’s mind in New Delhi, the city of Hamburg has actually maintained the tidal data of the river for the last 100 years for each day.”

The Indian art practitioner along with Till Krause, a Hamburg-based artist, has worked out the contours of the socially and environmentally relevant art project. The latter runs Galerie für Landschaftskunst. According to him, there is now a concerted move to deepen Elbe because of its significance to the city’s economy.

However, such steps do not address the issue of ecology or tell us whether progress development also means sustainability,” the artist duo points out. To underline the importance of the subject, Atul Bhalla has conceived a 12- part series of a photoperformance on Elbe. On the other hand, in the capital city of India, the challenge is of slightly different nature – that of getting people to ‘experience’ Yamuna.

About 42 km of the river flows through Delhi. But for a stretch of 22 km of it, the large parts of it are clean and naturally blue. But nobody probably knows this. The public art project is aimed at taking participants on this ‘Blue River Tour’ for which the state government will operate special buses.

The riverfront will come to life from November 9 to 23 with installations, theatre shows, music concerts, writing workshops, photography competitions, and river walks. Gigi Scaria’s 25-foot-high, fascinating fountain, which has taken nearly a month-and-a-half to be put up, will keep pumping water from the river and purify it as it’s pushed up.

The artist intends to make similar fountains nearby several other polluted rivers of India. “We worship rivers and yet dump sewage in them,” he moans a strange love-hate relationship that we share with our ‘holy’ rivers. Sheba Chhachhi plans to take people across the river in specially-altered boats equipped with video projection.