Relics of Grey by Archana Hande

by archana hande 2006 - 2007

Victoria House / White Town 2006 - 2007 Choudhuri House / Grey Town 2006 - 2007 Adarsh Nagar / Black House 2007		Relics of Grey 1970 .A child was born to a Kannadiga Brahmin family; technocrats who were precariously balancing a traditional belief system and the call of cosmopolitanism in a post independent industrial town. Rourkela, the town, with its colonial heritage of hierarchical cityscape, modernist - nationalist zeal for developmental construction and the impending political upheaval of the landless, was bursting at the seams. A White town, Black town, Grey town. 2000s. The memory of the hegemonic cityscape of the childhood refracts through the young artist's haunt for a 'room of her own' through the by lanes of the mega city, 'developing' and 'evolving' with murderous zeal. Desire and memory become one complex pattern of shadows and lines, sepia photos and surveillance images blur into each other, authentic and fake become as indistinguishable as tresses of identities in the Bombay local trains. The city and its stiff graph of citizenry, colonial legacy and post-globalisation race of growth; the topography of the urbanity through the blue plastic of the shanty roofs … get entangled in the mirror which is also our boundary wall, the Lakshmanrekha of the gated community. Madhusree Dutta Madhusree is a filmmaker and executive director of Majlis, a centre for multidisciplinary art practices in Bombay. She currently lives in Bombay.


B & W = GREY? By Paula Sengupta
Squat Rahul Srivastava
Resume Relics of Grey catalouge www.arrangeurownmarriage.com 2005 - 2007

Relics of Grey, was initiated as an investigation into the cultural, social and political attitudes of people in the four colonial port cities and commercial hubs of Bombay/Mumbai where Hande resides, Mangalore where she has her roots, and Calcutta/Kolkata, Madras/Chennai, and the garden city of Bangalore/Bengaluru to which she has attachments. From an intense space of social-political-familial critique, Hande travels across the country probing and unearthing narratives of different castes, classes, communities, and professions, the dust eventually settling in the mega city, Mumbai. Offset by a legacy of haute colonialism, in the post-globalisation race for growth in post-colonial India, Hande is led to question issues of displacement at multiple levels; discrimination based on notions of purity and pollution, authentic and fake; and rights to property that are consistently challenged based on these multiple notions. In the struggle for survival, as basic claims to food, water, shelter and livelihood continue to remain severely challenged, Hande asks, “How do we maintain a culturally enriched life of dignity and empathy?”