"Navjot At Work"
Unique among her peers, Navjot’s practice includes community engagement in the largely Adivasi region of Bastar, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. She works in and around the district town of Kondagaon, specifically the neighbourhood of Kopaweda, where the collectively initiated centre DIAA (Dialogue Interactive Artists Association) is located. This engagement goes back more than two decades, to 1997. Here, Navjot has pursued projects that set up dialogues on issues of ‘craft’ and contemporary art, ecology, gendered labour and children’s curricula. The dialogue evolves through workshops, exhibitions, pedagogy and construction of planned facilities for community use. Through the decades she has been thus engaged, the region’s resource-laden lands, including the commons, have been exposed to the hectic manoeuvres of corporate entities with State backing. State and Capital have formed a nexus that is now openly exploitative. Navjot’s recent video works allegorize this terrain of predatory extraction.
Navjot’s purpose as an artist appears quite plain. Her projects are premised on ordinary and productive lives; they are also premised on social deprivation that amounts, at times, to life’s annulment. But if her purpose is plain, her method is not. Navjot’s projects stretch across several epistemological alternatives: anthropology, aesthetics, ethics, politics. She reckons with the problematic antecedents of ethnographic enquiry; she recognizes the difficulty of a dialogue across economies and cultures. She therefore speaks less the language of ethics and more of practice, where formal solutions and semiotic notation qualify moral certitude.
Navjot is correctly seen to be engaged with the discourse generated in the public sphere. Yet she is conscious of the contradiction: that her grounded colleagues and interlocutors may in fact be only marginally positioned in that discourse.22 We focus, therefore, on Navjot’s material practice through which she can translate her concerns into what Susie Tharu calls the ‘Right to the Aesthetic’.23 By this right the subaltern protagonists, her colleagues in Kondagaon, position themselves within a putatively democratic space sought to be further transformed by agonistic forms of emancipatory practice that we electively call the aesthetic. It is fitting, then, that Navjot’s aspiration is to democratize the regime of the aesthetic to which she determinedly belongs and from which position she seeks an agential role. Understanding the distributive requirements of subjectivity, she contributes to the potential immanent in community life. Here, then, is a redistributive rendering of a singular into a plural experience whereby she, as an artist-activist, supports art’s own praxiological remit matching (but not imitating) other recognized forms of radical practice.
