When artist Kush Badhwar was residing in Hyderabad within the early 2010s, his constructing’s caretaker steered he is likely to be all in favour of trying at the private archive of a neighbour who had handed away. Turned out, it belonged to Radha Krishna Sarma, a professor of historical Indian historical past at Osmania University. His household was disposing the stays of his tutorial work saved in the home. This serendipitous occasion occurred at a time when Badhwar was pondering of numerous archival materials within the context of his analysis on the Telangana statehood motion on an India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) archival fellowship.
In the gathering had been VHS tapes, notes, books, and about 1,500 35-mm {photograph} slides. As he started to review them, he found the documentary rushes of the Srisailam dam area and a number of images of the well-known salvage archaeology mission. From the late Nineteen Seventies to the late 80s, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had taken up the transplantation and reconsecration of greater than 100 historical temples in Telangana that had been below risk of submergence.
Further analysis led him to the work of New York-based anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao, whose analysis targeted on the after-effects of the dam development — on the social, cultural and financial lives of the villagers who had been displaced as their houses and lands had been submerged. The collaboration that ensued between Badhwar and Rao from 2021 has resulted in a creative mission that was first featured at the Chicago Architecture Biennale in 2023 as Monumental Returns, and just lately as Beneath the Placid Lake within the prestigious Forum Expanded part of the seventy fifth Berlinale. Now, the duo has been invited to current at the World Around Summit at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City on April 27.
Beneath the Placid Lake
| Photo Credit:
Leo Hugendubel
Forced evictions and a visible set up
The final of the large modernisation tasks of the Nehruvian period, Srisailam dam was sanctioned in 1960 and it took 20 years for the development to be accomplished. The state’s promise of growth and progress demanded the sacrifice of the villagers’ lands and livelihoods, whilst assets had been devoted to salvaging outdated temples — thought of of prime significance to narratives of nationalist historical past. Eventually, greater than 100 villages had been submerged and 1,50,000 folks displaced. But this tragic story has not made a mark within the nation’s cultural reminiscence. In this context, Badhwar and Rao’s mission is a welcome intervention that initiates a brand new dialog, and provokes us to re-evaluate the prevailing discourses of state-led growth.
A photograph from the set up
I noticed Beneath the Placid Lake at the Berlinale. The projection-based set up included a tv monitor on which the documentary rushes had been performed together with curated textual content, and the photographs from the slides had been projected onto the identical display. While the rushes are from Sarma’s archives, the photographs are a combination of the late professor’s documentation of the temples previous to the dam mission and through the salvage archaeology mission, Rao’s discipline analysis within the late Nineties, and maps and drawings from the archives of the French Institute of Pondicherry. The textual content on the display is Rao’s poetic reinterpretation of her discipline notes from a visit to a dargah within the submerged elements of Jetprole village with a couple of native ladies.
Through the superimposition of three differing kinds of analysis materials, the set up urges the viewer to think about the cultural, social and spatial experiences of displacement. Although it doesn’t try to linearly narrate the story of the displacement and the transplantation of greater than 100 temples, the formal act of superimposition of analysis materials of three generations of researchers from completely different disciplines narrates a narrative of assorted information practices in the identical context. As an instructional with a deep curiosity in temple structure, Sarma’s photos deal with the traditional buildings and the archaeological mission; Rao’s textual content — as a researcher and anthropologist — displays on the villagers’ loss of social and materials contexts and the suspended nature of their lives, straddling the stays of the submerged elements and a brand new village.
A slide from the set up
Three generations of analysis
While the viewer can expertise and have interaction with the formal options of the visible set up, the multi-layered thematic issues usually are not instantly obvious — except one is already conscious of the context of the Srisailam dam mission. When I ask the duo about this, Rao shares that their quest has been to seek out new and other ways of approaching such tales of displacement that don’t must be explanatory, however fairly deal with the expertise; she feels that the artwork mission offers a possibility to transcend the representations allowed by tutorial writing or activism, which have been performed advert nauseam within the Srisailam context. Badhwar provides, “We exist in relation to a network of texts and hence, are also limited by the material we have collected.”
A slide from Beneath the Placid Lake
He explains that the journey of the mission has been iterative, nearly rehearsal-like, from the start: it was first introduced as a lecture efficiency on Sarma’s archives at the 2019 Flaherty Festival in Canada earlier than remodeling into an set up with a deal with displacement.
How are they approaching the MOMA occasion, which sounds extra like a symposium than an exhibition? While Rao reveals that they’re planning a lecture efficiency, Badhwar provides that thematically the plan is to interact with two parallel story traces: concerning the assorted information manufacturing strategies of three generations of researchers, and the story of the dam and its aftermath.
The summit can be livestreamed on YouTube on April 27. Registration is through the MOMA web site.
The Bengaluru-based author, filmmaker and educator teaches at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Published – April 23, 2025 05:49 pm IST
