What rubbish!

(Like I often say, sometimes something I write for the paper makes sense online too. Hence this one...)

He uses garbage to create art, to make a statement about life and society in a show called Trash. Artist Vivan Sundaram explains his aesthetic...

In a dimly lit room in the gallery is an array of what seems to be rusty iron cots, their beds sagging, dark with the grime and wear of the years. A closer looks reveals these to be rough frames with the ‘mattress’ made of shoe soles that have indeed seen better days. A light directed on one from above casts intriguing shadows. Vivan Sundaram walks around, examining the soles, adjusting the overhead lamp. Twelve-Bed Ward is one his works on display in Trash, a show that has evolved from his consuming passion: garbage.

Why beds? According to Sundaram, it is a kind of metaphor exploring the relationship between waste and the waste picker, life and the man who “walks morning to evening and then comes to rest – in some sense this is where it could be real or symbolic, as the day starts again for these people.” The space itself, as large as is available to him, or more concentratedly small, is “a place for recuperation, or a night shelter”. It could server as a “stand in for a hospital ward, or a jail, or even concentration camps – the soles of shoes, shoes stacked up”, images that evoke the death camps of the Nazi regime.

Sundaram is almost obsessed with rubbish. In fact, other people’s rejects have fascinated him since 1997 and Trash itself continues with a theme that he worked on with Great Indian Bazaar (1997) and living.it.out.in.delhi (2005). For these he worked with Delhi-based NGO Chintan, involved with attaining the rights of this largely unorganised workforce. His creativity was concentrated on creating a city from the piles of garbage that he painstakingly sorted through; the resultant panorama, on a scale that changed as the work grew, he had photographed to make one large cityscape. Today that work is at the root of others – Sundaram continues to think about the social implications and consequences of social consumption.

For Trash, he conceived the show across two galleries – it is a constraint of space, he says frankly – and in that itself there was a “difference and yet a continuity. The works have a certain mood; Twelve-Bed Ward and the video in Chemould, and the works in Project 88 that are digital photographs combined to make “a different register of visuality.” He selected his pieces in “a curatorial kind of way. It was about a content relationship, the space in each gallery – I was able to articulate it.” Each of his three mediums – photographs, video and installation – has been “positioned in relationship to the other. The thematics have different registers.” Sundaram is pleased with the fact that “private galleries today agree to build whole rooms and walls to create the desired environment”. And as the space changes, so does the show – “in Mumbai, because it is two spaces, it has fullness and completeness. When it is shown in Delhi, it will have what was not seen there earlier and when it moves to New York or Chicago, according to the space available, it will change again.”

Why garbage? The world today is looking at the resuse of waste, of material that can be given new function, perhaps even an aesthetic that is not the obvious representation it could have. As Sundaram explains, “In art, at one level, it obviously foregrounds the subject matter; then it moves into the domain of the visual, the aesthetic.” For the viewer, “questions are raised about the relationship of the work to the waste picker and the audience. It becomes a discussion, and brings to notice things that we like to complain about and look the other way from.” From that point of view, the use of trash in art does arouse some new “awareness of the unorganised sector and raises the question of ecology, the quality of air and health and environment.” And today, the artist believes, “increasing numbers are trying to engage with this vast complex issue of what we live in and what constitutes the urban.”

Trash will move out of the country, too, scheduled to be shown at the Biennale in Sydney next month and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo later on.

Trash, Chemould Prescott Road and Project 88, Mumbai, till May 17