Anomaly – Water
Anomaly – Fire
Anomaly – Air
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Photograph © Parthiv Shah
Anomaly
I juxtapose awe-inspiring grandeur, vastness and beauty, with a derangement that is located in denial; a reflection of detachment from the historic legacies, one that condenses our lived contradictions into perplexing, confusing coexistence in the three one-minute video loop.
In this landscape, the plastic bag creates an aberration, a disturbance I feel in the spaces around me, literally. My photographs in the videos, which celebrate the beauty of the monument, remain static, and the bag is the anti-aesthetic intervention. The static and the moving image are from different worlds, differently occupy our conscious, until they come together in the same frame, creating an anomalous discordance; where representations of beauty collide with anxieties about consumerism. At a metaphoric level, I have used soundtrack representing the five elements evoking water, fire, and wind that fuse to define the affect.
This series engages with the memories, metaphors, and symbols that present day communities create and evolve, thrive, and cope with.
Home Gone: In a Box
Home Gone: In a Box is a response to a participatory workshop, facilitated by Parthiv Shah in Kakrana with primary school children, in a village that lies between the borders of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, on the banks of the Narmada.
In displacement, identities are heightened, spaces shrink; the practice of everyday is the only means of generating a lasting exactitude. Landscapes are vital; so is reality, and perched within this polemics of territory and the self is a collection of mimetic artifacts photographed by me. I choose a medium: the photograph, which interrogates a vital point on the real or inversely the simulated, affording the viewer an encounter with the surface alone, but the recesses are still absent.
My work, intermittently, has been a remembrance of the relationship between time, narrative, the margins of the modern state and its inhabitants, is timely in this day where nostalgia even, is a commodity, often subsumed. Displaced homes are rhetorical entities; the remains are mere containers of memory.
I explore a materiality that is embedded in exactly this nostalgia, the tin box ‐ a postindustrial motif runs as a parallel footnote to the Narmada project, which perhaps is the largest example of the modern State's choice of a masculinized development over a fundamental humanism.
What is thus reminiscent is sensual: smell, texture, taste, and sound, as curated by the children, are in transit; charting new entry points simultaneously, marking some hopeful exits.
Rewa
Historically, water has paved paths embedded with memory, history, landscape and these paths stand diverted by powers to reckon with. This series of work attempts to make an inquiry into three categories that the artist has engaged with - the journey (passage), the river (water), and recording (observing / looking). Each circumvents the other, generating a network of complex histories, informed by a geo-politic. Parthiv Shah has been traveling to and along water bodies, rivers, and seas for the past 20 years capturing, investigating, and feeling through the 'photograph.' He culminates these ruminations into this exhibit evoking Rewa, popularly known as the river Narmada.
Engulf
Material - a signifier of its time,
Submerged material - of its economy, of its ideological divergences, of its irrelevance.
The gushing force of water has no idea that it is flowing and submerging not only Jwar seeds, brooms made out of Sirki grass, clay toy cart, thatched roof, printed red cotton odhani, mango tree, white hand prints on mud wall, murals in Shiva temple. The four trays are a photographic homage to those memories diminished by large dams built across India.
Ghat Antar: The River Within
Ghat Antar, first began as a means of examining the poetry of many journeys - Using photographic raw material for this enquiry into the affective realm that water affords, Ghat Antar the photographic into the unphotographic, into that which sheds the virtue of medium.
I have constructed both these images, entitled Ghat Antar, by tracking journey through Google Maps of the river Narmada from Amarkantak in east, to Bharuch in west of India where it merges in to the sea.
Nadi: Naadi
When we stop the flow, everything stops …
Water creatures die, water becomes undrinkable
And yet we dig deep into belly of the River …
In north India, a river is called Nadi. The Sanskrit word Naadi is used for veins in body derives from "Nad" which means flow, motion or vibration. Naadis channelize prana to every cell. When this system flows freely in human body, it gives health, and when the flow becomes weak it denotes sickness. Just like the river.
20 November
