Toxic Waters
Toxic Liquid
Solo Show
Canvas Gallery
14th November, 2023
The body of work takes us through a fable without a beginning or an ending. Exploring bodies of water manned, cut and destroyed by infrastructure made by power for power generation, it alludes to beastly bodies of crocodiles who are rulers of waters and govern hierarchies. While our complex water system with its five rivers were altered and re-shaped to build a nation, they also left out many others from benefitting from it. Our rivers and bodies of water today, through neglect and mis-management, have become a part of the sewage system and have turned into a slurry of toxic liquid. Complex piles of files, bureaus and desks make a labyrinth of operators. The work also refers back to the fieldwork done in my previous work and the use of uniforms that signals at colonial girl guides and state aircraft’s airhostesses, who were mostly women left at the peripheries of the modernity project. While searching for literature on water, the fable is drawn and expanded from writer Aamir Hussein’s book ‘Another Gulmohar Tree’ where in order to survive the toxic environment, people voluntarily jump into rivers to turn into thick-skinned crocodiles.