Pangana, Himachal Pradesh

Pangana is a small town in the state of Himachal Pradesh. I visited it as a part of the settlement studies program with students. The place is about 5 hours away from Shimla and 10 hours away from Chandigarh. We were put up at the HPTDC Mamleshwar hotel which accommodated about 49 of us. 

The most interesting part about this place was the warm hearted people - the pahadis - who were so giving and caring. For the 6 days that we spent there, they opened their hearts out to us, making space for us in their homes, preparing us beverages, serving us fruits, telling us about the place, singing for us, dancing with us. Some of them even gave gifts that they knitted out of wool over the days we were there. 

The overall town used to be organized around the fort-temple tower just adjoining the fort walls. The king patroned a few people to establish their shops along the old market street that branched to the temple. This market street however, is hardly active. A new market street has emerged in the town that caters to vehicular traffic and new enterprises.

The primary occupation of the people here is agriculture - they grow apples, peas and other vegetables that are exported as well as consumed in the village. The more recent enterprises people have began are transport and local departmental stores. The centre of the village is occupied by the upper caste population, while the lower caste people are on the upper margins of the village. Geographical proximity is the primary indicator of caste difference in the village.

The built form of the town is fast transforming from older shingle / slate roof houses to concrete construction primarily because it is the image of the modern and easier to maintain. Maintenance of the house was also primarily a female activity, hence women are generally invested into new construction techniques. Older houses are planned around courtyards and wrapped through verandahs. Walls are made up of slate and floors are made in wood.

The entire town winds around the temple. Most roads lead to the temple fort, and it is the focus of the town - visually as well as organizationally. Houses are nestled in their landscapes. Most houses have fruit plantations like berries or pomegranate. People have an innate knowledge about every grass that grows around them. They understand their properties for different everyday purposes - from construction to medicine. There are some commonly owned fruit trees which are not claimed by any one from the town in particular. Roses grow in abundance, along with a variety of succulents that erupt from the crevices of the mountain embankments. 

The fort temple is the most complex and rigorous building demonstrating the traditional kaat-koni method of construction. While spatially simple, it weaves around numerous myths and history around which the village rhythm revolves. There is nothing more to take away that the old school slow timeless charm that one can only enjoy in the quietude of this town and its people. 

Accidental Landscapes

 

A Garden from Himachal

Chandigarh Trees

No one talks about these large trees that may be as old as the designed city of Chandigarh. In the scorching months of summer, these trees are the solace for the concrete-ridden city. The foliage of these trees span anywhere between 25 to 30 metres. Many of these are fruit trees, bearing black berries or such other fruits. The city swims in a soft smell of the foliage.

 

Domestic Fragilities

concept note for an exhibition curated by Farah Siddiqui and Natasha Mehta as an extension to the project 'Life with Objects'

Domestic Fragilities

More often than not, we seek that our homes have permanent fixes - in the furniture we build, in the fixtures we install or even in the finishings we invest in. Our domestic landscape in large parts comes to be defined by the mantra of durability. It might however be misleading to think of homes as places that accommodate mere permanence. In fact, they are the spaces that hold the very transitory and gradually depreciating physicality of life. We create the myth of permanence around us only to hold the escaping fragile human condition. In living with objects then, it is the fragile wares that mirror our state of being. Our investigations on life with objects extends into exploring this very condition of domestic fragilities which brings us to consider objects with care, attentiveness and sensitivity while they continue to silently serve their function with utmost artfulness.

The notion of ‘domestic fragilities’ is particularly relevant at the cusp of coming out of a pandemic. The present times have resulted in increased attention to our bodies and considered contact with the world around us. Ceramic is one material that expresses the precarity of this lived phenomenon more intimately than any other. Historically, baked clay and earthenware allowed humanity to store grains preparing them towards eventualities of droughts and floods. Across many cultures, earthen vessels are symbolically instituted and broken in order to mark life and death. Ceramics have remained principal objects of exchange that record lives and landscapes of their times. As objects that may be broken, damaged or destroyed more easily than others, engaging with delicate wares like ceramics within our domestic spaces quietly inculcate within us values of caution, attention and sensitivity.

In quietly sitting and serving our everyday needs, ceramic wares allow us to reflect on our gently transforming selves. They sit in different corners of our homes - on tables, in chests, our bedsides, showcases, kitchen racks – creating new equations with our bodies, reminding us to approach things with tenderness. Different cycles of time are embedded in their usage. They may be used to preserve and protect perishables over long months, hold flowers or fragrances for weeks or insulate us to the heat of the moment while sipping our morning tea or coffee. Ceramic wares may not be timeless, rather they respond to time in different ways. In being brittle, ceramics demonstrate the unique quality of holding toughness and weakness together in its materiality. The subconscious consideration of these contrasting aspects is what makes ceramics artful. It is in the realisation of such domestic fragilities that we become more human.

 

Screened Selves: The printmaking practice of Shivangi Ladha

Published in Art Review India

Screened Selves: The printmaking practice of Shivangi Ladha

by Anuj Daga

March 27, 2022

Printing through the screen constantly takes new meanings in the practice of visual artist Shivangi Ladha. One of Ladha’s earliest screen print series, Self Portrait shows a single body repeated over and over itself into acts of sleeping-waking up. In every subsequent registration, the printed body displaces and decentres itself from its earlier position. Looping into the above acts signifying inaction and action, the body appears to be suspended in a hallucinatory dream alluding to escape itself. A frantic performance of layering takes place in the following frames where in these bodies riot and render the canvas opaque. The screened selves camouflage and contest with each other, thereby transforming the body itself into a screen.

Self Portrait 2017, Screen Print, Ink, Masking Tape on Japanese Paper; 102 x 143 cm; Unique Print; Acquired by Anant Art Gallery, India.


Screening here is not merely the artistic technique through which the body makes itself apparent in Ladha’s works. Rather, the screen could be a metaphor for the body – the interface through which the world outside gets perceived and performed. In screen printing, the silk screen hides the figurative body only to make it appear again to the printer’s act. In the countless acts of iterative printing, the artist attempts answers to her feeling of placelessness and unbelonging during her time spent in a distant land. She says, “the act of repetition changes oneself from within rather than the thing outside”. In this repetitious performance thus, Ladha meditates upon herself, her displacement, identification and orientation with the world at large. It is a means through which she comes to terms with the existential questions engendered within her material presence while being away from home.

Screen Print 2018, Screen Print on Japanese Paper; 102 x 143 cm; Unique Print; Acquired by The Mead Museum, Massachusetts, USA.


If the body is the primary physical interface through which the self comes to interact with the external world, then its close observation becomes imperative in its artistic practice. At this juncture, Ladha raises the problematic of the anthropometric gaze in her print titled Body in Space. In its specific corporeal construct, the human eyes do not reveal to us its physical entirety of our body at once. Rather, the gaze makes us focus on a single part - the body’s contours and construct in the grain and texture of the flesh. These microscopic details of the flesh are enlarged as fine lines printed onto the surface of suede leather. In doing so, the artist collapses different scales of autopsied skins onto each other in their representational reality. Both dissected and detached from their original sources, the juxtaposition of the human skin on suede leather reminds us of our masked existence merely held together in bodily flesh.

Body In Space 2017, Screen Print on Fake Suede, 100 x 70 cm.


It is such preoccupations that led the artist naturally towards her Acid Attack Survivor series. Questions of material, body and flesh took a new rendering in her practice on her unplanned encounter with the employed acid attack survivors at a café in Agra, India. Ladha was deeply moved when she met these survivors in person for the first time, and found herself delving deeper into their stories. Although acid attacks are reported in many countries across the world, their numbers are particularly high in South Asia. The violent assaults via acid attacks not just leave the victims with permanent physical damage, but also cause tremendous psychological damage. Disfiguration caused via such vitriolic attacks often are irreparable despite repeated plastic surgeries.

Acid Attack Survivor, 2018; Etching, Chine-colle’ on Hahnemuhle Paper; 41.91 x 31.73 cm each; 1/8;
Unique Print; Acquired by The British Museum, London.


In order to respond to the above realisation through her print practice, Ladha decided to adopt the process of etching so as to record and embed the victims’ experience in her artistic process. As one may note, etching is a method of making prints from a metal plate into which the design has been incised by acid. The ruptured faces of the survivors are freshly created onto metal plates through an acid bath in order to be eventually printed onto the paper. While on the one hand, the aberration on the metal surface is analogous to the blemishing of human flesh, it is also the stage one must arrive in order to realise a work of art. In this vein, Ladha confirms, “Rather than a destructive agent, I use acid to create and celebrate the acid victims’ very struggles of everyday survival.” The resultant works are a series of eight unique prints that hold the gaze of the viewers to faces that have lost their original bodily outlines.

Acid Attack Survivor, 2018; Etching, Chine-colle’ on Hahnemuhle Paper; 41.91 x 31.73 cm each; 1/8;
Unique Print; Acquired by The British Museum, London


The etched lines in the portraits of the acid attack survivors de-map the conventional contours of the body and emphasize its morphing it into its new geography. These distortions challenge the viewer to rethink the normalised gestural language of the body. The horror and shock endured by the victims is transposed upon the onlooker towards interrogating the limits of facial expression. Further, the artist layers parts of these etched faces with coloured registrations in a manner of turning the tissues inside out. These red patches allude plasmatic cells that seek their own redefinition within the etched facial geographies. In tensioning these values of the inherited and the acquired, natural and morphed, silence and violence, Ladha coaxes a quiet neuroaesthetics of alienation.

Issues of body and gender recur in Ladha’s practice rather subconsciously. These underlying preoccupations get foregrounded yet again in her Oneness series inspired by a socio-environmental experiment practiced since 2006 in the Piplantri village of Rajasthan. In the memory of the village-head’s daughter who passed away due to illness, the villagers of Piplantri plant 111 trees every time a girl child is born. As she moved around the village, she found the women preparing the designated areas in the village for next plantation. “I imagined the entire village to be green,” exclaimed the artist.

 

Becoming Tree Series, Oneness, 2020; Watercolour on Hahnemuhle Paper; Monoprint; Supported by Experimenter Production Grant 2020; Acquired by Reliance Foundation.


The above environmental approach may also be to regenerate the original landscapes around the village lost to excessive mining. Ladha maps this historical transformation of the village from an arid desert into an oasis of a variety of trees through the method of monoprinting. Unlike other techniques of printmaking which allow multiple originals, in monoprint, the image can be transferred only once. This precarity invites the viewers to think deeply about erasure – of the girl child and the forest – alarming us to the regenerative uncertainty of our social and environmental futures.


In Ladha’s rendering of Piplantri, the forest and girl children create and care for one another. The chiaroscuro of the foliage reveals as well as covers their naked bodies. The vulnerability of their survival and existence is expressed in the one-time act of transferring the image onto the paper. “The results of printing are always uncertain – one doesn’t know which parts will appear or disappear…”, Ladha contemplates. It is in these acts of making that Ladha locates the meaning of her artworks through techniques of screen printing. The endeavour in every subsequent iteration of her practice is to unveil the screened selves, one at a time.

After her trip to Piplantri village near Udaipur, Ladha accidentally met Aditi, an artist who noticed her engagements with stories of the village on social media, and invited Ladha to her studio. As Ladha shared her experience of the forest and trees with her, Aditi visually imagined the structure of a book in her mind. It is here that they decided to collaborate and create a book. Ladha decided to use the aquatint technique a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines in order to create a fountain of flowers spurting out from the nodal point of the book. The printed pleats and petals of the flowers in different degrees of shades invite new readings into their folded forms, that also play with the folds of the book. All of these emerge as well as converge into the delicate fold of the yoni – the womb at the centre that produces and reproduces the world. Seen thus, the book soon appears as a mysterious tree of secret knowledge that unfolds into the various shades and forms of nature.

Becoming Tree, 2021; Artist Book In Collaboration with Aditi Babel.


Ladha sums up the above project as a part of the Becoming Trees series in recalling the words of appreciation and acceptance by spiritual teacher Ram Dass through which she validates and seeks her own meanings in turning people into trees. Ram Dass says:

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”


***

ABOUT

Shivangi Ladha graduated from Royal College of Art London, in 2016 with specialization in MA Printmaking. Prior to this she pursued MFA in Fine art from Wimbledon College of Art, London and BFA In Painting from College of Art, Delhi University. She has undertaken many residencies internationally in the UK, Spain, Canada and the USA and consistently exhibited works which have entered prestigious collections such as the V&A Museum, the British Museum, London; Mead Museum, Massachusetts; the Reliance Foundation, Mumbai; Anant Art Gallery, Delhi; and many private collections.

This year she was nominated for the Queen Sonja Print Award, a major international print prize. She is also receipt of the Taf Emerging Artist South Asia Award 2021; New Prints Artist Development Award, International Print Centre New York (IPCNY), USA 2018; Anthony Dawson Young Printmaker Award, (Royal Society of Painters - Printmakers RE) 2017 and Jerwood Drawing Prize 2014, UK to name a few.

She has also created a space for other artists to show and make work by initiating India Printmaker House, a platform to facilitate workshops, exhibitions, prizes and residencies. She has taught widely in Delhi, across all ages and in different contexts.

www.shivangiladha.com
www.indiaprintmakerhouse.com


Anuj Daga is an architect, writer and curator based in Mumbai. His practice is informed by diverse engagements in fields of design, research and academia that have resulted in numerous roles as writer, critic, commentator, theorist or interlocutor in the cultural field. Anuj has worked with several cultural institutions including Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, MoMA – New York, CAMP – Mumbai, Godrej Innovation Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation in different capacities. Currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment & Architecture, Mumbai, Anuj has a keen interest in studying the processes of visual culture and meaning-making in the contemporary built environment in South Asia.

Artwork by Apurva Talpade

This is a piece of work by artist Apurva Talpade. Apurva has been toying with blocks for a long time. 

For this work, she collected a variety of figures from miniature paintings, and brought them together to create a world of their own. Each figure enjoys its own space while being self absorbed. None of them require the other necessarily. They exist in their own company, happy and joyous. The horse, the elephant, the peacock, the fist, or even the tree, flower cloud and umbrella - precisely know where they have to be. There is no expectation from any other creature to be anywhere else. In their gentle dispositions, they create and inhabit their own worlds. 

Block prints are more often than not conceived in a manner of repetition, and regularity. Apurva has pinned this work on her wall, which I kept gazing for a long time. What glued me to the work is the tension created between these figures through the white space left between them. The strategic distribution of empty space allows each object to be within their own world. To be sure, there is no larger world within Apruva's canvas. This clever balance of disparate figures co-existing within the same frame is the perhaps the success of the work. My note here is very underdeveloped, precisely because I am still trying to figure out why I am enjoying this work so much.

Until I find answers, please do look at Apurva Talpade's other works.