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Hakara: From a Lost-referential Land

Anupam

Oppression and resistance lie in the same body. They are not separate entities. The body that suffers the state/ corporate/ brahminical/ white-supremacist/ imperialist/ islamophobic/ patriarchal repression, also resists and continues to struggle. Therefore, the challenge for an image-maker is to capture that particular moment/ pause/ transcending point where resistance and oppression meet, and being apart or together, it creates the possibility of dissensus.

Working as a propagandist taking notes, making layouts, jotting down, I realise that incomplete observations/ thoughts are important, but it is an invisible process. A poster, a banner, or a leaflet is used as a statement but the layers underneath are always invisible and are more personal in nature. Therefore, a diary is a place where one can express one’s failures, incompleteness, vagueness, inarticulateness and throughout the time-lapse all of these internal conflicts unknowingly creating ‘excess’. Excess can be understood as an amalgamation of multiple contradictions and it proposes different traces of history and I believe today a propagandist’s task is to compile an inventory of the traces that history has left in us.

Media: Ink, marker, graphite, watercolour, gouache, masking tape, matchbox cover, sticker, cloth, leaflet, Nepali handmade paper and burned paper, on a diary

Size: 6 in x 8.5 in (each, close view); 2017-2019

Read entire article here: http://www.hakara.in/anupam/