The above images are works of Manasi Bhatt from the show 'I Am Sutradhar' conceptualized by Archana Hande together with artists Sachin Kondhalkar, Gayatri Kodikal and Mansi Bhatt. The project was installed at the Guild Gallery, Alibaug. It was one of my favourite installations amongst all others, for its subtle surreal quality. It alludes the cultivation of body parts for a variety of consumptive purposes. One sees hair, skin, noses, eyes, fingers in different shapes and sizes for different needs grown in the kitchen garden of a house in alibaug along with other vegetables. The works need to be nurtured, cared and cured for those to whom it may deem fit. On one hand the relationship between body and burial are inversed whereas on the other, the reality and artificiality of life are simultaneously invoked.
In its installation, several themes of performance, cultivation of the body, appearance, issues of race, colour, biology, growth and debates around life get invariably enmeshed. The different body organs are left overs from the artist's earlier performances within which she alters her body through the application of artificial skins, membranes that are given characteristics of human flesh through artificial solutions like latex or silicon. These chemicals have lately come to embody a lot of new age machinic bodies that are made to not simply think like humans, but also appear like the species. Thus, artificial intelligence fed into machines are enveloped into human skins through such processes. The experiments of creating life artificially, through non reproductive logics have been of modern scientific interest for some time now. The construction of tissues, cells, skins and organs are said to lend new life for those in medical need. We must all remember the successful demonstration of Dolly sheep through cloning human cell growth during mid '90s - one of the first experiments on developing a mammal bio-technologically. Subsequently, several experiments were undertaken to (re)produce several mammals from history and the present.
While cloning has continued to remain a scientific pursuit (posing much debate for humanity itself), there are several other aspects that seem to be in proximity of such thinking. The face is the most cultured part of the human body, and in recent times, certain standard ideas of "perfect" beauty has been mobilized within all cultures to push people to take steps to transform their biological selves. Cosmetic surgeries have only seen a rise in the last few decades towards achieving this universalised ideals of beauty by women, and men. Beauty products, skin lightening products, fairness creams - that showed a rise in consumption over the '90s became ways in which people imagined to appropriate the benefits of racial superiority. Only recently, has serious concern been drawn to such induced attitudes and misplaced aspirations. In such a background, Mansi Bhatt's cultivation of organs in the frontyard of the farmhouse in Alibaug begs a deeper discussion. Can we harvest our own body parts and also have the means to alter ourselves? Is it possible to choose one's skin colour, or body type? How has media influenced our sense of beauty, how has it lead to the fragmentation of the physical self, and thereby the mental self? These are questions that grow in Mansi's field of thoughts.
The human hair growing from the ground is one of the most subtle, yet compelling aspects of the installation. In the overall scheme of "organ" farming, it seems the most palpable because of its allusion to grass. In assuming its utility, it makes us wonder about the men (and women?) concerned with premature hairfall and balding (even due to medications), for whom, wigs, transplants and other kinds of treatments may be temporary or permanent solutions for fixing their social image. For many public figures who have significantly shaped the imagination of personal appearance in the sphere of everyday, such makeovers are compulsive, and even naturalised. Such adaptations defy natural course of body growth, and embrace a reality frozen over the projected social space. In the bio-technologised world of vegetal growth, could the cultivation of "organic" farming of body-parts produce a new pattern of consumption? But artistically considered, the hair growth makes us wonder if earth itself is bald!
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