(Vicky Roy)
We live in a world where a majority of us are ‘trigger-happy’;
most of us are equipped with a shooting machine. The irony is that often we
shoot at ourselves; we call it selfie. In that sense selfie is a sort of
semi-suicide, a death that never takes life but make life eternal or we think
so. There was a time when people thought of camera as vile equipment, a click
of which would take a part of us away; again a speck of small death, a
photograph. Yes, photographs anticipate death; it is a preamble to the text
called ‘our death.’ And along with us, our backdrops, our front drops which are
called nature too die a slow death in the act of taking photographs. All of us
do not think of photograph is these terms. When we aim at us or the nature in
front of us, we think we make it eternal but in fact continuous photographing
process also connotes a series of deconstructing the death; a sort of self portrait
by artists to capture the effect of the changing seasons and passing years in
the person. This is what exactly the noted young photographer Vicky Roy does in
his latest solo exhibition titled ‘The Scarred Land: New Mountain-scapes’
curated by Ram Rahman at the Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi.
(from This Scarred Land)
These photographs tell us the stories of the mountain-scapes
in Himachal Pradesh. Understanding about a particular state in India also comes
with a pictorial image or sense. When we talk about Kashmir we visualise it as
the essence of Kashmir’s visual quality filtered into our cultural
consciousness through various sources including calendar pictures, honey moon
photographs and the films that were shot against the heavenly landscapes of
Kashmir before terrorism hit the state and dissent became stony projectiles.
When we talk about West Bengal, despite the over presence of Trinamool
Congress, we imagine it as a place where the Howrah Bridge hangs dissolved in
the mist of Hoogly River like many a bridges across Istanbul’s Bosphorus River.
When we talk about Kerala unnecessarily we think about boat races and Kathakali
masks and a lot of greenery. Similarly when we talk about Himachal Pradesh, the
pictures of huge mountain scapes loom large over our consciousness. Many people
remember the British colonial period, many other remember their annual
vacations, devotees remember the shrines that the state houses and the readers
remember the good old man, Ruskin Bond.
(from This Scarred Land)
Once you see the pictures taken by Vicky Roy and the
predominant greys that cover the images like a layer of dust and their sadness
your idea about Himachal Pradesh definitely would change. This is a scarred
land, obviously the curator likes it to pun with the ‘sacredness’ comes as a
package deal with the name of the state. Behind the folds of the hills and
meadows, along the askew pathways that wind up hill, within the tiered lands
where habitats have been sheltered as well as punished by nature, a new reality
has been in the making for so many years. Earthmovers and biting machines work round
the clock to dig up properties meant for multi-storied buildings, expensive and
highly in demand. The irony is that each building that comes up bring a little
of city along with it, slowly filling the erstwhile sylvan land and the land of
solace and divinity with total urban profanity and changing the land into a
memory which could lovingly turned into wall papers for these apartments.
Though Vicky has not lived in this part of the world continuously like the
Roerichs or the colonial photographer Thomas Bourne or the traditional painter
Nainsukh and several other pahadi miniature artists who are denied their names
despite of the hard work of historians like B.N.Goswamy, whenever he could
visit the state, a trigger-happy artist,
clicked pictures of the spaces which he had seen in the previous visits
but had changed the complexion through external aggression.
(from This Scarred Land)
Human beings are a strange sort. They seek peace and
silence, a bit spirituality supported by ample amount of wealth in the hills
and they make cottages and settle there to lead a simple life. But the flow of
the wealth is not always from up to down; rather it is from down to up. Wealth
moves from the planes to the hills and sea shores and much deep into the
forests. In those places they make Jacuzzi retreats and apartments for
holidays. When you have all these, you need to develop infrastructure. With
infrastructural development, you carry a city into the forest, pushing the
forest further inside or to extreme peripheries. You fill these places with
vehicles and diesel gas. Then you create malls, schools and high end hospitals.
By doing this, you cut forests to make space for these and collapse the
ecological balance. The last point of it is that you complain about the growing
concrete and abstract populations in those sylvan areas. What Vicky documents
is this irony. These pictures taken by him as tell tale evidences to this human
avarice. In way, Vicky’s photographs in this solo exhibition are the
registration of damage that the human beings have inflicted on the body of
nature. And these are also the photographs of the silent cry of the earth. It
is a real time movie documentation of the denuding and tonsuring of the earth’s
head. That too is done with coarse blades, scarring the head with many cut
marks.
(from This Scarred Land)
Vicky makes the portraits of a widow called earth. His works
are not really eco-political alone. It is a stand in metaphor for the women all
over the world; their productivity, their calmness, their sense of happiness
and their right over their bodies are vandalized and they are forced into a
sort of unwilling widowhood. Widowhood of the earth is not defined the death of
her husband. On the contrary it is a collective death of righteousness and
morality of the politicians and policy makers. Each frame in Vicky’s pictures
raises this question: Who allows this vandalism? Hence this body work becomes a
strong political critique raised at the face of the politicians and the land
mafia. May be the curatorial intervention of creating two backdrops with the
images of Roerich’s and Bourne’s works is just to limit this critique which is
sharp enough to incise painful lines on our conscience and contain it within the
artistic/visual discourse itself. But I believe that we need not restrict the
works into that ‘terrible beauty is born’ format. The silent screams of the
land would reverberate in our ears and moral agitation of the artist becomes
palpable when we stand in front of these works. Vicky does not train his camera
at the iron arms that dig the land nor is he focussing on the skeletal concrete
structures that come up at every nook and corner of the mountain scapes of
Himachal Pradesh.
(from This Scarred Land)
When there is an earthquake, a flood, a landslide or a
manmade mishap we wail on the lives that lost. We often say that it was where
this or that building stood. But we never say that it was where once a
beautiful hillock or stood before the building came up there. Our visions are
limited by the existence of concrete and city. Nobody asks what was there
before the malls came, the roads came and the hospitals came. In planes we have
only one answer to it; agricultural fields. We don’t ask what was there before
a resort had come up. The answer is a forest. Where water tanks stand tall
today once ran a stream with crystal clear water. In the hills the answer is
always a piece of beautiful nature. Hence, the works of Vicky are forensic evidences
of immeasurable loss caused human beings. They are visual FIRs that find no
police station to file. Hence they come to a gallery wall. We cannot predict
where these pictures would go. The historical irony could be that these works
would travel in stranger than fictional routes and end up in the walls of
palatial apartments that have just come up in the hills. Vicky Roy as an artist
wouldn’t be able to stop that. But that is the beauty of art; it turns into
silent but beautiful reminders of the human beings who ‘caused’ that art.
Oblivion is strength and an art collection is a confession.
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