This is how Kochi based artist Upendranath describes his works- as an outcome of questioning the current world order and his rebellion against the mainstream. A self taught artist, a close observer of human conditions with a broader understanding of Kerala’s cultural history, he engaged with several mediums and started exhibiting in Kerala from 1994 onwards and deliberately moved towards experimenting with collage as his primary method of engagement. He produced an extensive body of work filled with social sarcasm and humor and maintained an uncanny order as an art practitioner. The works he showed at the inaugural edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale titled From Keralam with Love, a text based work as collage with images taken from international art magazines reflected his views on the global socio-political order and questioned art making and the symbolic meanings that are held up and touted as identity. These works specially produced for the Biennale opened up a discourse and projected light on an artist’s ability to survey Kerala’s deeper history of human explorations through juxtaposition of images.
Upendranath’s work in Mattancherry (2017) was an invitation for him to re-look at the same site, a port city, as a trace of the glorious past. Mattancherry, an exhibition curated by me was invitation for artists, poets, researchers, to explore the contemporary spatial, social, historical, and temporal shifts of the location by way of investigating the history of labourers and working class, internal migrations, traceable pasts, intangible cultures, stories, and memories. While much has been written and made of Mattancherry, a multicultural site where more than 40 communities living together in four kilometre square in the shadow of its glorious past and unreliable present, little has been said of the actual people who inhabit the land. At every instance of representation, they fade into the dark abyss of silence and temporal narratives that furthered specific agendas as these explorations remained strictly within the ‘gaze of the tourist’ and fail to account for the spirit of Mattancherry built over centuries through trade, cultural exchanges, and ideas of coexistence that lie beyond the facts of mere cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.
After spending almost 10 years in the this ancient trade hub I realized that it is the entwined cohesion that allows the people of Mattancherry to live and die together, especially at a time when the world is divided into throes of cultural incomprehension and forcible homogenisation. The enduring resilience amidst discontentment of lives in Mattancherry allows for it to remain unashamedly itself, to steadfastly support and maintain its social life, networks, and support systems unbroken by institutions of capital and anchor it together as a place, people, and community. Perhaps it’s this rootedness, this resilience against odds of everyday life that ignited a certain fear in authorities who have, at various points in time, attempted to designate it as a slum, annihilate its inhabitant’s sense of belonging to the place, and establish modern apparatuses for social, spatial, and cultural division. It’s not as if their marginalisation (from politics, progress, civil liberties, civic functioning, basic amenities) is entirely in the past but as a result of certain imagination of politics of place making.
As an artist who used a camera to capture these eleven images , morphed sites, situated around this historic beings carries the past in its architectural character, and colonialism is present in manners proximate as well as remote, Mattancherry for Upendranath, like many other artists who were part of the exhibition became a source of energy for a wandering spirit that has outlasted the forces of tourism and urbanisation. Upendranath attempts from within our social and political present to understand this location by engaging and re-imagining men and women who are occupied in the toil of survival. There are many anecdotes shared and archived of these human settlements produced in recent times, but Upendranath is attempting to understand the soul of Mattancherry from within this uncertainty of people’s life. The works remind us of a site of sweat and blood, conflict and fear through this memorial architecture discarded worldwide of humans who have been pushed to the margins. Darkness is deliberate and experienced as a meta-narrative and invites us to consider the outstanding problems facing humankind today because of unrest marketed through enmity, a historic site presented as an orphan.
The memories that Upendranath’s work provoke allowed me to reflect on Mattancherry once more in these times of human crisis in the form of viral outbreak. This place as one of the most densely populated settlements of Kerala unsettles me when I think of the nature of this disease and its impact therein. Bereft of occupation, for the people of this dark landscape, catch of the day from the estuary provides meals to most of the families. Also, most of them engage in different kinds of labour to survive and a huge percentage do not own homes, pushes them to live in difficult conditions. This place overlooked through epochs, itself without hope, has offered through its silences, narratives to the artist to live by in the frame of their lives. The same place that lacks everything that support a decent life has yet offered vision to historians, gaze to photographers, and a material form to many of the contemporary artists of our time. Mattancherry did not ask anything in return. It is here, in the vast horizon of an used up place, Upendranth’s work makes visible to us as what lies inside the cramped space of matter staring at us in the current atmosphere of search for work that would give them food in the time of viral authoritarianism.
As I mentioned earlier, Upendranath’s works and process are generally rebellious. His work is perhaps also a referendum for other artists whose works while being political and philosophical are always positively portrayed but fail to locate the anxiety of the people within. Upendranath’s works, to put it at the end offers us this insight of humanity as the hapless wanderer, always brings with itself, against insurmountable odds, its wonderful side, its capacity for hope, resilience,dreams and love. Even in their darkest moments, uncertain and fragile times, Upendrananth’s figures remain at work without losing their audacity to be and remain humans.
