First published on 26th February 2024
On an evening in November 1965, Ebrahim Alkazi lent his dramatic aura to a reading of acclaimed English poet T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at the then Triveni Garden Theatre in New Delhi, surrounded by music, lantern slides, and selected works by painter Henry Moore. In tribute to that event and performance, New Delhi’s Art Heritage Gallery and curator Jesal Thacker have returned to the legendary poem almost 50 years later, exploring its ideas in the present day through the works of five contemporary Indian artists.
The exhibition commences with Benitha Perciyal’s Xenophora, a series of works referring to the poem’s first section, “The Burial of the Dead”. Perciyal places five open books containing organic objects, such as plants with medicinal and spiritual significance, to fuse the devastating nature of death with the reviving acts of the soil.
Ratna Gupta’s Contain Me includes abstract works that address the poem’s second section, “A Game of Chess”, and Eliot’s notions of synthesis and antithesis in social dynamics and femininity. Gupta’s command over play extends to the way in which she experiments with time and form, using contrasting techniques such as stitching and scratching, heating and freezing, moulding and melting.
Atul Bhalla’s Under the Brown Fog of Any Day engages with the poem’s fourth section, “Death by Water”. Parallel to Eliot’s tragic description of a drowning man, Bhalla considers the gradually disappearing waters of the river Yamuna. His large-scale image of the river stream, surrounded by cylindrical objects made of residues taken directly from its banks and kept in two open cabinets, attempts to use art to preserve traces of a fast changing landscape.
Ishita Chakraborty also focuses on ecological concerns and socio-political narratives around waterbodies in Ebb Goes, Tide Arrives, which comprises of cyanotypes marked by the transient movements of water. In Zwischen ¦ Between ¦ ????????, she archives the struggles of neglected subaltern voices by scratching geographical boundaries and words from different languages on to paper. Her sound project, We Are the Bodies of Water, brings together accounts of migration and the relationship between various species that inhabit fragile riverine ecosystems.
Raqs Media Collective’s Autoluminous delves into the omnipresence of energy and how an entity can be its own source of light and consciousness. The work connects with Eliot’s use of fire imagery in “The Waste Land”, which stands as a symbol of the hellish nature of modern life but also brings with it the hope of purification and redemption. Raqs’s piece revolves around a live technological intervention: satin-coated papers carry laser-engraved images of a seated Buddha, with the words “Everything is Burning” (Sabbam Adittam) from The Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya Sutta), a message that oscillates between the ideas of transcendence and immanence.
While “The Waste Land” includes drastic shifts through time, space, cultures and narrators in its five sections, it retains as a common thread the sentiment of human loss and brokenness. The poem’s melancholia is reinvoked by artists at the exhibition, especially as they explore the fraught ties between man and nature on a depleting planet, and draw in sensory experiences of primary natural elements to drive home all that remains precious and in urgent need of rescue. The only bone of criticism remains the lack of enough text and captions to contextualize the displays: given the dense nature of the source literature and the complex layers behind many of these contemporary artworks, more notes and details would have gone a long way in better guiding the viewer.
Reimagining the Waste Land is on at Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi, from January 20 to February 29, 2024.