Working Practices: a collaboration with Clark House Initiative

Working Practices: a collaboration with Clark House Initiative

At The Showroom, London, UK


Let's clean the hand

In this work, a holographic video is displayed in a clean glass full of drinking water. Where a person is cleaning himself. This work is inspired by one of the renowned protests in Chavdar tale, India held in 1927. The protest named ‘Mahad Satyagraha’ was a road rally initiated by Dalit intellectual and writer?Ambedkar.  

 

Chavdar tale is a river that was open to the public but higher caste people restrict entrances for lower caste to consume the water. In some cases, lower caste people were being physically harmed on the violation of the restriction. Ironically the higher caste purified the water after being touched by the lower caste people. They threw a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, ash and herbs into the river to make the water drinkable again.


Reading one of the scripts written by Amol's theatre activist father,  which he wrote in 1989 about one sanitation worker. who cleans the road in the grant road area and asked for drinking water from a nearby hotel. They refused to serve the water considering his caste. At this point, he was refused to ride the bus due to the smell he has for the cleaning job. Sadly they are the people who clean and protect the city but are not allowed to consume fundamental rights from the city.