BackA woollen garb for faceless people
Chintan Upadhyay uses woollen garments to create installations
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At first it appears to be just a bundle of woollen clothes lying on the floor, perhaps used toys tossed away carelessly. A closer look, and they appear to be headless bodies stacked in a small space.
And that seems to be the aim of the installation, Shramjeevi Express, with the concomitant question—Where were these faceless people? The artist Chintan Upadhyay says: “Anywhere. The facelessness and the anonymity of the journey results in diluted identities of these people."
In his exhibition Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron—Redux, on at the Gallery Espace in New Delhi, Upadhyay has used second-hand, knitted woollen garments to create sculptural installations and photographs of faceless and stuffed figures. The idea, he says, is to create a metaphor for “the faceless people of our city". The result: 12 art installations, including Trophies From a New Empire and By Hook, convert the gallery space into what looks like New Delhi’s Sarojini Nagar market, a hub of bargain and second-hand clothes.
“The theme is to seek a dialogue about the dignity of labour, and about the invisible people who make our roads, clean our cars, and help our cities function. However, we do not notice them in our daily lives," says the 42-year-old, New Delhi-based artist.
Upadhyay started buying the second-hand, woollen garments from Sarojini Nagar Market in 2013, and began work on the installations. “I didn’t want to borrow clothes from people I knew," says Upadhyay, who shifted from Mumbai to New Delhi three years ago, “so that no connections could be traced back to the person who wore them. Doesn’t the city also think like this? Do we ever want to know who these people are who work for us, who live on the streets? I want to talk about the idea of memories attached to objects in these works, and what better material to do it than wool, as it signifies warmth and nostalgia."
And so, be it a wall-mounted installation of a red sweater with an inflated belly, or small boxes stuffed with toy-like woollen shapes, even photographs of a person whose face and body have been concealed with woollen garments—they all appear to be figures sans identity.
Upadhyay presents, then, a social critique of a consumerist society and has a multitude of narratives focusing on the ideas of mass production and mechanical artificiality of modern landscapes.
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron—Redux is on till 31 May, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at Gallery Espace, 16, Community Centre, New Friends Colony, New Delhi (26922947).
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