Can you ever order a river to do your bidding? Toronto-based artist Shahana Rajani asks this question in the film, Lines that World a River. This new iteration of her moving image work, Four Acts of Recovery, offers criticism of colonial cartography around the Indus. Every year, the river could change its course, and each year the British had to revise their maps. Eventually they used hydraulic technologies, irrigation infrastructure and civil engineering so that the Indus stayed its course. This exercise was carried out in other parts of the subcontinent as well.
Over time, the formation of new nation states, followed by the rise of hydroelectric ambitions and the ongoing threat of climate change have destabilised the rhythm of the river and that of the fishing communities that live along it. The drying of creeks and rising sea levels that threaten to engulf the delta are also accompanied by flooding and submerging of sacred shrines and sites that were of spiritual and mystical significance to the communities.
Through her work, Rajani looks at alternate ways of mapping the shape-shifting landscape through the intergenerational transfer of knowledge within the fisherfolk, many of whom are already displaced or are at the risk of it. Their wisdom and traditions form a bridge between “between ecologies erstwhile and those critically endangered at present”. The moving image work is part of the new exhibition, The Wall is Water, curated by Anushka Rajendran at the Prameya Art Foundation (PRAF)—a nomadic institutional framework for the arts working out of New Delhi. It has emerged from the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant offered by the Han Nefkens Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation based out of Barcelona, in collaboration with the PRAF and other partners like the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan.
This is Rajani’s first solo presentation in India, and includes artworks by Ustad Abdul Aziz, Abdul Sattar and Aziza Ahmad. Besides the film, Rajani is showing an animation of drawings created by children from the fishing communities during workshops conducted by the artist and Aziza Ahmad. Also on showcase is a map of the river done by a community elder. Three new publications, Charm Books for Shifting Landscapes 1, 2 and 3, have been created especially for the show.
One of the highlights is the focus on drawings made of lines and dots, representing the cosmos, which are considered as talisman by the fishing communities from the delta. Rajendran, in her curatorial note, describes a critical moment in Lines That World a River when two women on a boat toss a talisman wrapped in green cloth from a boat into the river. “The drawing melts in the water and becomes one with it, endowing the water with the power of its prayer. This meeting of drawing, river and the divine gives way to Samandari paintings of forcibly disappeared land and water ecologies as remembered by the elders of the community,” she writes. “Through these murals, which assert longing and belonging, those who have been removed from their land are able to access worlds that are no longer accessible…”
This exhibition, on view at PRAF, Delhi, till 8 August, carries forth Rajani’s community and research-based approach to art. Working across moving images, installation and printed matter, she looks at the intersection of development and ecological resistance. Even though the exhibition looks at highly localised research around the Indus delta, there is a certain universality to its appeal. For instance, you can perceive a similar sense of loss of intangible and tangible memory within indigenous communities in the Sunderbans as well.
“Work such as Shahana’s prompts us to talk about accountability around the active role of industrial capital in climate collapse. And then it shines the spotlight on marginalized mystical practices and testimonies that emerge indigenously that resists this kind of collapse by remembering what has been erased. The Wall is Water puts local experience of climate calamities firmly in focus,” adds Rajendran.