Ground Zero

Artist: Vasudha Thozhur
Discussant: Sasha Altaf

July 18, 2013 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

The Himmat Workshops were a response to external as well as internal conflict, and therefore situated as much without the studio as within. To situate art within a zone of devastation is to test its capacity for survival in extreme conditions, but for the same reason, also gives rise to some rare insights. It provides a framework that enables investigation, and answers questions regarding responsibility, function, and appropriate action within a given context – predicaments that are common to most disciplines and professions.

Perhaps the most fundamental realization is this, that activism is not a field apart but lies at the heart of everything that we do, and that in order to activate the connection, a certain grammar needs to evolve that would cohere intent with its outcome. Language and action become one in a way that reinforces belief in the former – for an artist in a time of crisis, this belief is central to ‘function’. Further, the discovery that art and the nature of the activity that it engenders can create a zone of peace that in turn fosters peace – that art is what violence is not – that art and peace are closely aligned in their relationship to war – is perhaps one reason that one remained an artist in troubled times.

Rather than use this opportunity to talk about the project in terms of its sequential development, which has been done several times earlier, this presentation is an attempt to discover, through discussion, the role of art projects in changing existing equations.

The Himmat Workshops is a research project initiated by Vasudha Thozhur and supported by the India Foundation for the Arts and Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi between 2004 to 2011. It involved collaborating with Himmat, an activist organization based in Vatva, Ahmedabad. The presentation is in conjunction with a comprehensive exhibition of the project at Sakshi Gallery and Project 88.

Vasudha Thozur is an artist, based in Baroda. Besides participation in exhibitions in the country and abroad, institutional work has involved lectures/teaching/workshops as visiting faculty at MS University Baroda, NID Ahmedabad and IICD Jaipur.

Sasha Altaf is an independent curator, art critic and an adjunct professor at the Department of Art and Art History, University of Miami, Florida.