Dust
A great sense of agoraphobia arises in Delhi-based artist Gigi Scaria’s current exhibition. Covering three gallery spaces, the exhibition surrounds the viewer with a long line of unending horizons. Comprising video, photography and a painting, the exhibition records Scaria’s research in the Rann of Kutch and the Thar Desert on India’s border with Pakistan; home to the world’s largest salt desert. ‘Dust’ is a departure from Scaria’s previous work, which frequently employed digital manipulation to make futuristic architectural incursions into images of urban India, or comprised sculptural imaginings of a hyper-mechanised society. Nevertheless Scaria’s attention to overdevelopment continues to permeate these new works, many of which record the relics of industrial advances on the land.
In the large format photographs Crushed to the ground, Timeout and Overflow (all 2013) Scaria surveys various signs and ruins of industry. The desert landscape, sparsely scarred by power pylons and drain systems, is unspecific and yet familiar to an Australian eye. India and Australia share a British colonial past, however the colonialism that pervades Scaria’s work emphasises the imposition of humanity on the land since the industrial revolution, particularly in its accelerated contemporary mode.
The insatiable hunger of urban development in India makes an appearance in the photograph Dust in which a segment of an overbuilt Indian neighbourhood is, somewhat comically, digitally spliced into a sand dune. More subtle and ominous are the footprints of long-gone abodes on cracked earth. In Land faded the brick foundations are all that is left of an ill-fated attempt to claim an inhospitable place.
The visual resolve of this new body of work is marked by a pared-back aesthetic and the quiet sophistication of an observatory mode