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JAL, JUNGLE AUR ZAMEEN: Recent Paintings
by Rajkumar and Shantibai
Artists Rajkumar and Shantibai articulate
their thoughts through the essential constituents of their world, Jal
(water), Jungle (forest), and Zameen (land) in this
latest series of paintings. Both inherit a deep association with nature
and chose the medium of painting that is not unfamiliar to the cultural
expression of the communities around them. Yet, what they create is
extraordinary of our times. These paintings created during the pandemic
period, on one hand, chronicle the daily life and lived experiences of
the ordinary citizens who are away from the urban centres, as they make
sense of the unprecedented pause brought by it. On the other, they make
us revisit the endearing biosphere through the lens of the pandemic as
the ongoing crisis has forced us to relook at the human-nature
relationship.
The earlier bodies of works by these
artists who have been working together as members of the Dialogue
Interactive Artists Association, an artist-run organisation in Kopaweda
of the Kondagaon district in Chhattisgarh, have strongly responded to
the social struggles and atrocities experienced by the marginalised
communities around them. In these sets of paintings, there is an inward
shift to the artists’ gaze. The invasion of land, water and forests and
the very mechanisms through which it violently takes place – be it the
mining industry, the construction of dams, the eradication of forests
and ecosystems, or the mere presence of giant machines, or the
confrontation between the state machinery and the native citizens. All
are portrayed as a backdrop to the daily lives of the humble people
whose lives are knitted around the land, water, hills, and forests. This
encompasses the lives of Rajkumar and Shantibai too, making these
paintings exceptional. The artists adopt different narrative strategies
to articulate their views. Rajkumar chronicles everyday activities
during the lockdown period, weaving a web of newer symbols and
iconography for revisiting the damage caused by the human interventions
to nature’s order. Shantibai, on the other hand, reconstructs her
journey to the mining heartland introducing us to the chilling
industrial activity in a subversive mode. Put together these paintings
become grounds for self-introspection with a word of caution. These
autobiographical pictorial essays form an important archive of the
pandemic period.
Rajkumar and Shantibai, in their careers
spanning over two decades, have been deploying the techniques, tools and
language of indigenous artistic expressions with newer aesthetics in
order to create a contemporary expression that speaks to the tribal and
non-tribal worlds alike. While the idiom of storytelling remains central
to their creations, they subvert and manipulate the morphology and
semantics of not only the narrative-making but also the image-making.
The current set of paintings can be seen as an expansion of this
artistic journey. |
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