Chintan Upadhyay’s latest works use second-hand knitted garments as a metaphor for ‘faceless people of our city.’ He tells Divya Kaushik how his present installations are similar to his baby series
At a first glance, woollen structures with extensions that appear like limbs of a shapeless form remind of hand-stitched stuffed dolls that are rarity in the commercial world now. While some simply appear like a heap of old clothes tied together, there are art pieces that take a form of a human figure minus the face. Woollen garments tied like a turban give the impression of face to these forms. These dolls or faceless forms and figures in stuffed woollen garments are Chintan Upadhyay’s recent medium to convey his thoughts on migration and changing face of the city and its people. Though the artist insists “that there is no specific interpretation that he wants to convey or force on the viewers” once you will be face-to-face with these forms, you will be forced to think about societal changes that you see around on day-to-day basis.
The artist, who is known for his baby series and for adding a quirky element, is a known name in Indian contemporary art. The last one of his ‘baby artwork’ was a 10-feet-high fibreglass head at India Art Fair earlier this year. However, Upadhyay is currently on a different trajectory. For his latest solo art show, titled Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron-Redux at Gallery Espace, Upadhyay has used second-hand knitted garments to create a metaphor for “the faceless people of our city.” For the show beginning tomorrow, the gallery space has been converted into what looks like Sarojini Nagar market, the walls and floor of the gallery replete with sculptural installations and photographs of faceless forms and figures in stuffed woollen garments. “Certain garments have been bought from the Sarojini Nagar market from the shop selling second-hand stuff. I didn’t want to take clothes from someone as I was avoiding any sort of association in these artworks. I did not want any connections to be traced back to the person who wore them. Doesn’t the city also think like thisIJ Do we ever want to know who these people are who work for us, who live on the streetsIJ I want to talk about the idea of memories attached to objects in these works. These are also narratives about domestic and public spaces — people we meet and see but don’t care to know. These forms have been used as a metaphor to describe the people who migrate to other cities with certain dreams. The transformation that takes place in people is reflected in these pieces,” shares Upadhyay and on why wool as a medium, he adds, “First, wool is a medium that can be stretched easily. Second, when it is old wool develops a certain texture that lends a desired kind of look to the installations. Wool also has a personal connection as I remember my mother knitting sweaters. The other important thing is that wool is related to each one of us, it is easy with the material to imagine a personality, totally stranger to us, someone we might see but do not recognise.”
Upadhyay’s art practice has remained focussed on ideas of mass production, production of desires and colossal wastes and mechanical artificiality of modern landscapes. These themes have found echoes in both his gallery bound and site-specific works. “I have been working with site-specific projects since over a decade. In 2010/11, I was working in El Salvador on a residency project where I asked residents to give me their second-hand clothes. The works made with this cloth and filled with sand were installed on the beach and soon the entire area looks like a land inundated with bodies. There has always been a sense of ‘death’ in my work, though not in a morbid way. Even my babies are never alive, they will never talk and they are genetically controlled but there is so much life going around them. The idea of working with second hand clothes came from there and when Renu Modi asked me to work on a show last year, I knew I could create another site-specific story,” says Upadhyay.
Just like his baby sculptures which have a multitude of narratives imprinted on them, his present works too are multi-layered. On one hand, Upadhyay seeks to talk about the dignity of labour, and “about those invisible people we do not notice in our daily lives.” And on the other, he questions the faceless façade of an urban space and city life where we are all strangers scared of “each other’s strangeness.” Whether it is a wall-mounted installations created by stitching dozens of woollen clothes together or photographs of a person whose face and entire body has been concealed with a woollen garment, or small boxes stuffed with toy-like woollen shapes, there is a sense of both the bizarre and the obvious.
The title of the exhibition signifies the popular attitude, “let it be!” The artist says that the title also opens a window towards Bollywood, which has depicted many stories of how people move from one place to the other with dreams and desires. The exhibition will continue till May 31.