Keynote Presentation: Akshay Raj Singh Rathore

Akshay Raj Singh Rathore
Keynote Presentation
Heritage Seeds and City Farming: Linking the Rural and the Urban in India, An Artist’s Perspective
October 12, 2013 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM
SAIC LeRoy Neiman Center.

The closing of the exhibition Rooting: Regional Networks, Global Concerns at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries culminated with a Keynote Presentation from New Delhi-based artist Akshay Raj Singh Rathore. Curated and presented through contemporary concerns of extreme environmental and social changes, the work and input from Akshay was an important addition and detail to the exhibited works and project responses.

Palayan - Akshay Raj Singh Rathore (from the artist's website)

It is Friday, October 12, at 37 South Wabash and the first floor of the LeRoy Neiman Center provides a venue of visibility, during a mild, Autumn afternoon in the Chicago Loop. This is advantageous in most artistic forums, but with the contextual affairs of environmental health, food distribution, and sustainable community , it was important for this artist and his audience to possibly gain viewership and to remember their own.

The artist introduced himself by speaking of the places he had come from, revealing a childhood in a farming family in rural India. As sower, seeder, and resident of one of the numerous Indian farming communities, it is appropriate that Akshay states that he has maintained a strong connection to soil and clay. As the presentation continues, it is curious that the artist does not provide titles as he works through his project slides, but there is a very large, webbed story connecting each work and the world separate from the art community he speaks with. The lecture time is an allotted 60 minutes.

The story told begins with his installation, Murmur (titles from artist website, http://akshayrajsinghrathore.blogspot.com/) an important work that the artist shares as a grounding point, in that the work is a site-specific installation made with hand-made earthen pots, rope, and audio. The slide offered in its chain form. The artist details that it can be a physical embodiment of recorded prayers, wishes, thoughts, and interactions that the artist offers as audio. The next work that demonstrates the artist’s collaborative approach (one of many approaches), is Palayan, created during a residency in the town of Partapur in Rajasthan, India. The work is a performance, where the artist asked the residents of two divided communities to walk with him on a contested street. 20 minutes into the lecture required fast talking and elaboration from Beyond Pressure magazine, “It was very complex to make them engage with each other, as three decades of religious politics had nurtured between them sentiments of fear and created a big divide. My performance consisted in asking the daily users of this street-marker of the divide to cross it with me, while leaving a foot- print on the ground, thus forming a trail of footprints. At the end of the day, the whole street ended up covered with thousands of foot prints. It was impossible to single out each footprint individually, thus nullifying any individual or communities claim to that part of street.” The footprints would eventually fade due to traffic, a clear demonstration of our ephemeral existence. This is the part in the lecture where yours truly began to look around at the audience, at the empty seats, at the possibility of a full house.

Rai ka Pahad is a sculpture from Akshay’s studio practice, a mountain of mustard seeds atop a fiber glass and iron structure. Akshay begins to engage his audience on charged manners about Indigenous mountain cultures whose land is seized and sold by government operations for the purposes of land development and resource extraction. As an attempt at solidarity through an artistic message, the artist addresses resistance and the cultures who are able to fight back for their home. Unfortunately, the artist seems rush and I am longing for more information. He continues and shares a site-specific iteration of a similar approach in the work Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, a three dimensional installation of raw clay bricks, a direct reference to Tolstoy Farm, founded by Mahatma Gandhi before his influential time in India. This is a reference to history and time through shaping of raw earthen materials to demonstrate layered time and societal, utopian mythologies.

The presentation takes its form as a projected digital slideshow on a large screen with the artist before his audience at stage left. While seemingly ambiguous, this standard format seems to have provided Akshay with an advantage. He is one human being who has seen enough of what the contemporary industrialized systems has to offer the majority of life on this planet and as an artist he possesses the ability to express his concerns and implementation of counter, artist means for life.

Through exquisite photographic documentation, the present day state of the village of Aulinjaa is expressed through an internet blog written and recorded by the artist. In the artist's version of Aulinjaa, the town is a site for investigation of a rural farming community in India that is surrounded by systems of industrialized agriculture, and where seed-saving has grown ever more urgent and water conservation is the every day.

An excerpted post by the artist (http://aulinjaamp.blogspot.com):

“February and March are tender months in Madhya Pradesh. Wherever we've travelled so far, which ever land we stopped at and in which we walked through, the crops were all vibrant and green. They are very attractive. The wheat's ears are fleshy. This year looks quite promising, the harvest should be good.

But those same ears are misleading and not as beautiful as they look. All around, one can only find genetically modified crops. That's maybe why they look so beautiful and perfect. 

And when I asked the farmers the reason why they go for genetically modified crops, their first answer is straightforward: 'look how beautiful those crops are' in other words the indigenous crops in comparison are far less sexy than those hybrids.

It's actually (or was because times are changing) the same in super markets in Europe...I remember a time when as consumers we would never buy an apple which wouldn't look superbly green or red. 

Today, you would actually find a perfect vegetable suspicious, and to the extreme, the environment friendly consumer would rather go for the nearly rotten tomato.”

The following question and answer session revealed a negotiation between the artist as researcher, maker, and benefactor to the complicated and dark implications that his research and art practice calls to attention. Part activist and yet hardly fitting in to a high artistic market, Akshay Raj Singh Rathore offers his perspective to an audience in a city almost opposite to the sites in his work, while the suggested stories of origin and collapse remain the same.