When the graphic novel ‘Harappa Files’ was released in 2011, Sarnath Banerjee’s commentaries on the post-liberalised country had felt like a searingly ironic albeit humorous statement, a satirical look on what was a plausible future. He had imagined a Greater Harappa Rehabilitation, Reclamation and Redevelopment Committee that was commissioned to conduct a survey of the existing ethnography and urban mythology of a nation teetering on the edges of seismic transformations, and its far-reaching ramifications affecting the fate of every man.
Recently, when 24 Jorbagh, an art space belonging to the Gujral Foundation, was heading for demolition, Sarnath was commissioned to recreate the ‘Harappa Files’ in this rambling space, bringing alive the narrative that had invoked a time when the modernisation of India was imminent. The artist-novelist effectively captured those times through evocative vignettes, like the ‘Nirma’ years when people everywhere were humming the washing powder’s advertising jingle. Time is textured into material, and through repositioning the narratives, Sarnath questions the measure of time, making viewers witnesses to the ebb and flow of the passing years.
The dialogue of the artist navigating personal and public spaces from within the walls of a transitory studio brings William Kentridge’s recent project to mind. In ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, for the recent Venice Biennale, Kentridge explores how our identities are defined by human emotions and memory. Across different perspectives, it is fascinating to see two art practitioners respond to their personal circumstances by making use of a lived-in space, achieving very different ends. “These are the fragments,” says Kentridge, “that are allowed to swirl around the studio and then rearrange, before being sent back out into the world as drawing, as a film, as a story.”
