Objects are the products of history. An object having
an existence without history cannot be called an object. Objects are cursed to
carry history with them. History, in turn is not the lofty stories of those who
had won the battles, established monuments and registered their legacies in
various mediums. History belongs to the people the way streets belong to them.
Bound between leather covers, the annals may contain historical registrations
that look profound. However, the shelves that carry such tomes, the chairs that
are sat in to read those volumes, the accumulated darkness on the hand rest of
those chairs, the inkpot and everything have got histories; nothing can escape
the fate of being converted into a component of history.
Aakshat Sinha knows the relevance of history inscribed
on the objects. For him collecting and accumulating are two different things.
Collecting is practiced by someone whose interest lies in objects with special
connotations that inspire his ideas and the classification that he does based
on chronology or any other mode gives immense satisfaction to his curiosity in
building an understanding about the world. One could call it creating a narrative
universe through objects of worth. Accumulation on the other hand is a practice
that is partially collecting but indiscriminate in nature. What comes into the
hands of the accumulator does not go out only because the accumulator finds a
value that transcends its object-hood and attributes it with a meaning intrinsic
to the narrative universe of his making. Each object stands in association with
the autobiography of the accumulator and by virtue of him being a social being
the objects thus accumulated become the building blocks of a collective
biography of the times that he has lived in. Hence, anyone one who sees the
accumulated objects quickly finds an emotional association with them.
‘Yaad Ghar’ (the House of Remembrance) is an open air installation
with such objects with collective history, accumulated and presented by Aakshat
Sinha, a curator, artist and a mechanical engineer by profession. Museums are
houses of remembrance because the objects collected and displayed in those galleries
remind us of the histories pertaining to them. Those objects are the syllables
of a grand narrative, each waiting for deciphering. The more remote are the
objects in time the more they look distanced, romantic and enveloped by magic.
Though well founded histories are written about those objects the magic of
their detached existence, something separated from the labels, QR Codes, Museum
manuals and the audio guides, goad people to weave their own stories around
them. Museums are methodical and randomness cannot be permitted in its
narrative. In Yaad Ghar, there is madness and randomness, but both presented
with some poetic methods.
Right in the middle of the atrium of the India Habitat
Centre, New Delhi, Yaad Ghar stands like a makeshift place of worship with the
objects arranged there look like parts of an esoteric ritual around the idols created
out of random objects. The sanctum sanctorum is flanked by a two discarded
mannequins salvaged from an old boutique run by Sinha’s mother at some point of
time. Those erstwhile beautiful plastic human forms are now bandaged and
bruised, wearing heavy facemasks worn while a chemical war or fatal pandemic
rampage is underway. The chairs have been there at his home and the beanbags, the
marvel cards and the knick-knacks also have been a part of Sinha’s life at some
point. They are all memory holders; for the viewers, they are memory makers.
Sinha, the self-styled accumulator of things believes
that he is a hoarder. He just cannot throw away things. Hence, his house is full
objects that reminds him of the life that he has lived so far. Imagine anything
that you grew up with since 1970s till date in an urban center, Sinha has them
all. Spring cleaning is the last thing perhaps he does every year and he cleans
only to save those discards from disappearing. Sigmund Freud calls the collectors
and accumulators anal retentive people. Children who are afraid of defecating
because of their fear of losing something of their own are anally retentive
creatures. As they grow up they learn to discharge the refuse and maintain
personal hygiene. Grown-ups showing anal retention is something different; they
know what personal hygiene means but they just cannot throw things away. They
find strength in the materials accumulated; I should say, they find life in the
objects that are capable of invoking exquisite narratives about their lived
lives.
Keeping one’s own life open for the scrutiny of others
is the driving motto behind most of the autobiographies. They use verbal narrative
as a medium of explication. Here in Sinha’s case he uses the accumulated
objects as his medium and interestingly everyone finds a little bit of themselves
in those objects. Art of any kind is supposed to create empathy among the viewers
and reliving the lived memories is the way to cathartic effects that leave the
people relieved of existential burdens. Object based art as well as verbal and
non-verbal aesthetical communications do the same thing to the onlookers. The
installation of Aakshat Sinha too does the same thing; it draws people into the
chaotic randomness of the objects and make them unspool the memories at the very
sight of those objects; a Proustian effect.
Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist
has created a ‘Museum of Innocence’. As he started writing a novel with the
same title in 1990s he felt like collecting all those objects that he has
mentioned in that novel and house them under a single roof. Slowly the novel
and the museum evolved together, objects giving ideas to the novel and novel
making the novelist to look for those objects from his childhood elsewhere.
With the novel he completed the museum and today it is housed in a 19th
century building where the objects speak to the visitors irrespective of their
familiarity with the novel’s plot or not. In Urdu there is a word for Museums, ‘Ajaib
Ghar’, the house of strange things. During the colonial period, museums were
developed as the cabinet of curios where the colonial masters, merchants and
the new gentry collected exotic objects and opened it for their personal
guests.
Detached in and from time, the objects that constitute
Sinha’s installation, Yaad Ghar also transform themselves as exotic things, their
familiarity now shrouded by disuse and decay. They become uncanny objects,
filling in déjà vu with its edges sharpened with unfamiliarity. The decaying objects
impart a magnetic horror, as we see in the termite eaten pulp fictions carefully
stuffed in a plexi-glass vitrine. They could have been confined to flames, erasing
their existence even from the memory, but in Yaad Ghar they stay put with some
kind of stale stubbornness only death can demonstrate. The installation as a
total is a memento mori, a reminder of death and decay, the futility of
accumulation but at the same time the unbearable lightness of being both in
carnal bodies and in memories.
-JohnyML
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