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Journalism of Courage
Staring out of his window during lockdown, Birender Kumar Yadav watched the endless streams of migrant workers and noticed that they were carrying their tools on their heads. This pressed a personal trigger.
Yadav’s father, an ironsmith in the mines of Dhanbad in Bihar, used to make tools for workers. Even after an accident with his tools, his father could not bring himself to give these up. In a drawing that is on display at VHC art gallery in Koregaon Park, Yadav shares with art lovers of Pune the emotive attachment of workers and their equipment that he has grown up witnessing.
Stories from hidden corners of the country, expressed through the lived realities of four artists — Anshu Singh, Richa Arya, Thamshangpha Maku and Yadav— make the exhibition, ‘Scratch Beneath the Surface’, a platform where creativity meets reporting from the margins. The show is on till December 31 at VHC.
Anshu Singh, who lives in Varanasi, grew up surrounded by weavers who frequented her mother’s boutique. A recipient of the Young Artist Scholarship in Visual Art from the Ministry of Human Resources in 2014-15, Singh brings alive the challenges of the marginalised community of weavers in her works. One of the works ‘Hand Work’ is a drawing of two hands of women workers, done with beads and zardozdi entirely in red, “to show their struggle and pain”.
It is from her immediate surroundings that even Arya finds her heroines, who are the women who use stitching as a means of livelihood but also of empowerment.
“I am from Haryana and I have seen my own mother use the needle as a power tool. Panipat’s handloom factory is famous for recycling clothes, but women don’t get paid so much. It is their lives on which my art project is based,” says Arya.
She uses stitching and iron as metaphors and one of her works at the show ‘Threaded Lives’ is hand stitched with iron sheet and brass wires.
Maku, who was born in Chandel, Manipur, and has lived in Delhi and Baroda for his graduation and post-graduation, respectively, reveals the positions of the Naga community, who are “on the periphery to the centre, i.e. the rule makers”. “It is these encountered experiences as well as the notion of living on the periphery that has created a dialogue within his artistic process,” says a statement from VHC.
