Conceptual art gives art practitioners more possibilities, equipping ambiguous space for arranging visual arguments and setting them into a ‘laboratory’ to encounter the audience freely. Khaal Gaon is an art project of Anga Art Collective, designed as a laboratory for the collectivity of ideas, individual practices and observations, displayed in Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as part of a group show titled ‘Very Small Feelings’, as part of a fourth exhibition of the Young Artists of Our Times series.
Anga Art Collective (f. 2010) is an initiative of artists, writers and researchers from the North-East Part of India, which was founded for engrossed in critical reflections about visuality culture and materiality based on Assam’s geographic and social terrain. Anga Art Collective started the Khaal Gaon art project as part of their evolved project displayed in the Dhaka edition of the exhibition. In this project, the Anga team brought many elements from the Northeast, such as interactive vehicles, seeds, books, dried fruits and fish, drawings and drawing materials, dried chilly and many others.
In Khaal Gaon, Anga Art Collective invites the audience’s interactions towards these objects and materials, which tell about North-Eastern life, nature, and art practice. Creating a sense interlinkage of visual and sensory stories, the Anga team conceptually developed this project to document a visual memory of their societal settings. When this project evolved, that interactive language and vocabulary of engagement between the audience and the object displayed in the show ripened.
Khaal Gaon is an Assamese word intertwined with Assamese culture and geography; Khaal means low land or a small water body around a village settlement, and Gaon is a village. Flood is the invisible reason for this project. Anga Art Collective brought the calamities of flood happening in North- Eastern part of India, especially in the Rahmariya region of upper Assam, since the 1970s.
Floods concerned this Rahmariya territory continually and erased the water bodies, fertile fields, wetlands, vegetation, and a cluster of 35 villages, leading to villages eviction and resettlement in faraway villages. Khaal Gaon, placed in a broad visual language, overcome with an oral history of its people and their life, merged with stories of another kind.
People lost their geography and territory due to floods caused by the endless flows of the river Brahmaputra; Khaal Gaon brings that pain and sorrow through this project. Through this project, Anga Art Collective depicts the arena of community feasts and fishing festivals full of rural energies. The present-day’s stories are not only portraying the present-day society. Why does the Anga team use the elderly generation to tell the story of a landscape that brings many layers of cultural-political history of landscapes? Because those stories are more decisive than anything to know about the collective memories of its displaced inhabitants.
Climate migration is not a new word to surprise us. But that migration’s impact is evolved and divulged to us without intention. People from the lower class community are usually affected by climate change misfortunes first. Then only other upper categories of people get involved. Anga Art Collective portrays the subject from the people’s side, and they think about what moulds childhood; stories or the experience? Members of the Collective harboured the lineage of childhood memories of its dwellers as a lens to rethink the child’s figure as part of a depleting landscape in an ecologically and politically turbulent context.
The ethnographic study of the Anga Art Collective members invokes the immersive place loaded with the barter system practice and the playfulness associated with materials, architecture and performance. What we are seeing in the gallery is a painful, same time stimulating memory of a generation.
We didn’t understand the displaced community and their life. How can they manage their memory with lost objects and materials? This installation tries to navigate the question posed in displacement, how this affects the collective psyche of the displaced community, and how they explore affinities connecting age and ecology, artistic language and memory, playfulness and elderliness.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad.
