Practicing Representational Impossibility

 

My more than a decade-old career as a figurative painter associated with many radical leftist groups in India led me to an understanding of the human body as ‘witnessing body’, where bodily wounds and bruises would provide testimonies of exploitation and the violence that the individual underwent. As the bodies of the oppressed, especially 
when they are from the global South, often turn to be mere laboratory rats of artistic experimentation as they enter the art industries of the global North, I find it extremely important to self-reflectively approach my earlier art practice. 

My present artistic investigations conceptually address the limits of contemporary politics of representation in visual culture, focusing on subaltern subjects and their precarious condition in the contemporary capitalist system. In opposition to this dominant system of representation where the other is often demonised, I try to re present the traces of history that accounts for the existence of and resistance by subaltern subjects. Self-reflectively mapping the inherent contradictions of the dominant representational system, my attempt is to create an archival inventory based on what I would like to call ‘representational impossibilities’. This idea refers to the contradiction between my relatively privileged social identity as an upper-caste and lower-middle-class artist, and my understanding of the political reality of the outcaste, working-class subaltern communities. As this class-caste based contradiction makes it impossible for me to embody the experience of the marginalised – the content of my artistic representations – I find a need to critique the existing notions of artistic creativity and productivity, embracing my own impotentiality to be an artist in its conventional sense. (The term ‘impotentiality’, borrowed from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, refers to the “potentiality to not-be”, as different from being in a simple state of deprivation and destitution.) 

 

There has been a tendency, over the centuries, to dehumanise the bodies of ‘Bahujan’ and ‘Adivasi’ people (India’s ‘lower caste’ and ‘outcaste’ masses respectively), as numerous mythological and folkloric stories from the Indian subcontinent testify to. The body of the subaltern has been represented with animalistic and demonic characteristics, an aesthetic which has been propagated by a hegemonic system which is elitist, casteist, fundamentalist, patriarchal and imperialist at its core. Though rehumanisation of the subaltern appears to be an immediate alternative, I feel that one needs to begin from rethinking the man-animal binary, and its “politics of alternativism” (the idea that one cannot politically exist without the other). Instead of alternating between the figures of the man and the animal, and letting myself caught in the endless the cycle of dehumanisation and rehumanisation, of which the ultimate victim is subaltern herself, I try to focus on the liminal and threshold space between such oppositions, to find a place beyond simplistic binaries.        

Based on my participation in numerous political struggles across the hinterlands of India, I have come to the understanding that oppression and resistance are mutually constitutive, and one is directly proportional to the other. In other words, the more one resists, the more she or he is oppressed. This also means that oppression and resistance lie in the same body politic. Therefore, I believe, the challenge in front of a propagandist is to capture that liminal point where the double-bind of resistance and oppression is suspended, creating the possibility of dissensus (which, following Jacques Ranciere should be understood as a critical entity that undermines the binary opposition between oppression and resistance). 

 

Within my understanding of contemporary society and the profound historical crisis the world is undergoing, I am unable to imagine any specific political articulation that can visualize a path to a non-hierarchical society where each individual can realise her or his freedom, and each collective their liberation. In the face of this impossibility, I can only use my skills to expose the rottenness of the present regime of power. My practice is nothing but an acknowledgement of my limits as an artist and an articulation of the difficulties that make most of the contemporary political mobilisations ultimately immobile. However, I am also convinced that the oppressed is oppressed not because she or he is powerless, but for the very opposite reason: that is, for the oppressor’s fear for the oppressed’s power which puts the existing economic and cultural system at serious risk. In other words, this experience of political and artistic impotentiality – which is central to my notion of representational impossibility – is, in fact, an idea about a radically different, dissensual form of potentiality that is yet to be actualised: the potential of the oppressed to create a world truly egalitarian and free.