Starting from Scrap

In Delhi en route to Germany,artist Chintan Upadhyay shares how burning a car is an anti-establishment act in Europe. “I started by burning and trashing old cars only because it was an act of defiance against prevailing laws. In India,anything can happen to an object once it is in the scrapyard. In Europe,everything requires the sanction of the law,” says Upadhyay,a Mumbai-based artist who is holding a solo in Taipei and an artist residency in Germany. “After a while,I did not find this act productive. Now my plan is to find cars that have been junked and transform them into memorials by filling them with earth and planting flowers.” When he returns from Germany in September,Upadhyay will create these car gardens across India’s Metros. Don’t be surprised if you come across an old car with pink carnations growing out of it in your neighbourhood. It is a tool for the artist’s critique our culture of use-and-throw,“It’s bad for the ecology and the economy,” he adds.

Artists like Delhi-based Vivan Sundaram and visiting from Beijing,China,artist Han Bing,who recently showed at Gallery Espace,are interested in reclaiming discarded objects. Sundaram created and filmed an entire “city” made from old tetra-packs,toothbrushes and discarded wrappers for his solo “Trash”,which showed in the Capital and in Mumbai in 2008. Bing,on the other hand,simulated the act of love-making with sanitised trash at a performance titled Mating Season at Khoj in Khirkee,Delhi,in March 2010.

“This project suggests that the urban middle and upper classes,rather than turn away from the garbage they generate,must face the reality of the urbanscape and the people outside of their gated colonies,” says Sundaram. Bing adds that he intended to “create a love and sensitivity for displaced objects and people through the act of embracing them” in Mating Season.

Los Angeles-based performance artist Neha Choksi and a group of “actors” handpicked the leaves off a dying peepul tree for her 2008 video work titled Leaf Fall. “These works speak of loss followed by renewal,” says Choksi,who had also created a stir with Petting Zoo in 2008 at Khoj Delhi,where she sedated herself and several farm animals to experiment with the abdication of will. For her 2009 work at the Frieze Art Fair in,Regent’s Park London, A Child’s Grove,she moved with the idea in a direction that did not involve actual trees but sculptures that interacted with the environment. Her latest sculptures resemble a child’s scribble on a landscape. The “trees” are hollow in the center and one can see through them to the landscape behind. Their stainless steel surface catches the colour and reflection of actual trees—the final effect,in the artists words “was to tease out the tragic-comic nature of our relations with the natural environment.”

Though unconventional,these acts spring from an urge to create environmentally conscious art. The artists are plugging into the growing unease born from our denuding natural resources,and ringing the warning bells about the planet going to waste.