SILVERTOWN
The Silvertown project was conceived by Allan Parker and facilitiated by Allan Parker and Chinar Shah for the Srishti Interim Semester.
The project was supported by JSW Steel Ltd. and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology.
SILVERTOWN
SILVERTOWN
Industrial sites and ruins have inspired film makers and artists for generations with their ability to suggest dystopian landscapes and uncertain futures.
The SILVERTOWN project was inspired by a vast industrial complex which operated from the 1870’s to the 1960’s on the banks of the Thames in East London. As is common in Victorian architecture, the site was littered with architectural features plagiarised from a wide range of styles; Italian cherubs decorated buildings where toxic chemicals such as Naphtha and Toluene were once refined from coal. The early days of the site coincided with the Arts and Crafts movement championed by William Morris whih flourished at this time, motivated partly by a reaction against the rise of industry, and advocating a return to craft and to individual practice. Paradoxically perhaps, the movement was much patronised by the industrial leaders of the day.
The area was severely bombed during the war and for many years after its closure it remained a spectacular ruin, attracting film makers such as Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket) and Michael Radford (George Orwell’s 1984).
The Silvertown site has now utterly vanished under shopping malls and gated communities and no longer registers on present day maps of the area. It is now a place that exists only in the imagination and in the films and artworks it inspired. The memory of the site and its representations reiterate how stories and histories of all kinds attach themselves to specific locations over time, re-appearing as the fragments which form our collective memory of the past.
The complicated exchange between art and commerce has continued down the years and is perhaps echoed in JSW’s generous offer to Srishti students to visit the biggest steelworks in India - interspersed with trips to Hampi. This trip has formed the basis of this current incarnation of the project. The extreme contrast between these two locations has inspired students to produce some engaging and original work. After the initial impulse to document everything these two dramatic locations have to offer with photographs, video and sound recordings; more developed and considered work has emerged, with varied and original presentations adding new layers of meaning.
The currency of art is and its relation to business and heritage is perfectly rendered by Natasha Ranganath and Nandini Bhotika’s scrap metal medallions which bear their illustrations of the story of Sugreeva and Vali’s battle as described in the Ramayana. JSW are currently supporting the restoration the Hanuman Temple on the banks of the Tungubadra river, the location of Hanuman and Rama’s first meeting. Identification with great empires and myths of the past bestow authenticity and gravitas on organisations, aligning them with
treasured national narratives, adding a more colourful and evocative persona to descendants of the Industrial revolution.
Much of the work in this exhibition reflects a renewed and widespread interest in the use of historical photographic processes, such as salt prints, cyanotypes and liquid emulsion by practitioners keen to capitalise on the expressive capabilities and abstract potential of these processes.
Nitya Balakrishna and Mokshaa Vohra’s decision to print stock library images of Hampi using liquid emulsion on 5x4 glass plates, rather than using their own photographs, highlights the relationship between redundant technologies and present day cameras which come primed with the expectation that tourists will ‘consume’ historical sites through photographing them, despite of an almost inexhaustible supply of similar images..
Other works employ digital technologies such as Utkarsh’s evocative film which foregrounds the use of the still image in video combining industrial footage with a soundtrack featuring a group of chanting women recorded at Hampi, mixed with the ambient sounds of the area.
Sanjana Raju’s book Mismatched offers acutely observed details from the two locations demonstrating a measured interest in both - a personal vision more concerned with image making than with merely recording the surroundings.
Sohini Mukhergee and Shyamolie Kate’s book focuses on tourists and workers by removing them from the backgrounds in which they were photographed - a strategy which emphasises their existence as individuals rather than as a part of the environment in which they are encountered.
Param and Madhulika’s display of chemical prints offer a vision of the two locations which is at once contemporary and historical. This presentation offers a tactile and expressive print quality ver distinct from the products of multi-national imaging companies, committed to promoting more precise but perhaps more anodyne renderings of the world in which we live.
Through these impressions Silvertown becomes an imaginary atlas - an image of the world we hold in our imaginations, built from personal memory, history and myth and viewed through the lense of current concerns.
Allan F. Parker - Dec 2014
MIHIKA ROW
Total History
Digital prints
So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. from the film Matilda (1996) adaptated from Roald Dahl’s book
I have grown up around books, using them to feed my imagination just as Matilda did in Roald Dahl’s story.
So it was only fitting that I should use books for this project, as they are also a primary source of knowledge.
Total History is about knowledge and the different sources of knowledge. The knowledge of and about the past is revered but not all the works in the Bangalore Club library, from which these titles are taken, can be said to have withstood the test of time.
NATASHA RANGANATH & NANDINI BHOTIKA
Relics of Kishkinda
Liquid emulsion on metal discs treated with acrylic paint with bronze spray enamel
“According to the pieces of evidence that have been painstakingly gathered, many a story that has been waved off as mythology literally shows that they have relevance in today’s time. In this gallery, the main artefacts discovered are what we believe to be several medallions that, when placed in a certain sequence, depict the story of Vali and Sugreev, Vanara kings who once ruled Kishkinda. As explained in the Ramayana, Vali and Sugreev were brothers, and Vali ruled the land while Sugreev was his close confidant and advisor. However, this changed when Vali rushed off to fight a demon who threatened the peace of his kingdom. Before taking the fight into a cave, Vali instructed Sugreev to block its entrance if he did not return by dawn, for surely he would be dead.
Dawn came and went, and with a heavy heart, Sugreev returned to Kishkinda and assumed Vali’s role as king. We are well aware that Vali had not died, and when he found that the entrance of the cave was blocked, he believed that Sugreev had betrayed him and wanted the throne for himself. This belief was further fuelled when he saw Sugreev as king. Vali attacked, and Sugeev was forced to flee the kingdom. Eventually Sugreev encountered Lord Ram, who agreed to help him regain the throne. Ram shot Vali with an arrow while Sugreev fought him, and so Sugreev became king again.
This at least was the story that has been passed down over the ages. What was also discovered were medallions that depicted events that were slightly changed. One such piece showed Vali as the victor of their fight, and Sugriva dead. Researchers now believe that this is pointing a finger at the fact that history can be manipulated or rewritten by the victor and that these were two possible outcomes of the story. A more mind boggling discovery – the scenes where the story takes place has a remarkably modern setting. It has been tentatively assumed that those who forged these medallions knew what would come up in the land that was once Kishkinda.
As an ancient seat of power, a capital of the Vijayanagara empire, Hampi, was established in the 14th century. Now, though all that is left of the grandeur are remnants of ruins, several groups and companies of people have provided efforts to restore several of those ruins. One such group, like the JSW Steel Ltd., has been an enormous help to maintaining tourism relations to Hampi. Looking at how history repeats itself, it was discussed upon that perhaps Vali and Sugreev still exist, in form of their qualities, and that they inhabit places that exude power, something akin to what they once wielded.”
MOAKSHAA VOHRA & NITYA BALAKRISHNA
Silverstock
Liquid emulsion on 5x4 glass panes
The city is redundant: It repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind
-Italo Calvino
How long can a place last in your mind, what do you remember of it eventually?
A part of the experience of visiting a place is taking photographs. It is through creating images we hold on to an experience and thus a place. Who owns an image and who owns the experience? What does it mean to put a watermark on your image and claim that image to be yours?
Here, we are using shutterstock images to illustrate the idea of one generic experience.
UTKARSH
Fruits and Flowers of Construction
Video projection, sound
This film takes the form of a journey through both remote and familiar spaces. The imagery alternates between the serene and the utterly chaotic, the sound acting as counterpoint to the images as it transports the audience seemlessly though a range of constructed worlds.
SHYAMOLIE KATE & SOHINI MUKHERJEE
Clockwork
Arists book, 8 gatefold pages
In this rat race of a life, we have become victims of our circumstances, whether it is at our place of work or when we are touring a place. In both cases there is a schedule to be followed, time to be kept and tasks to be done. We humans, take on the character similar to that of a mindless flock of sheep, going wherever directed, doing what we are told, in a way it starts seeming mechanical. As tourists with limited time we follow a guide, photograph the same things that every other tourist photographs, have a fixed path of course and limited time. The worker too has a fixed job, a fixed schedule and a fixed duration in which a task must be completed. Even we, photographing the spaces we visited had a specific concept and a specific task to be done within a given time. By stripping the workers and tourist figures of their backgrounds we have tried to show the conditioning of human beings by their surroundings. Hence, we have put these images in the midst of the “nothingness” of digital media to exaggerate their postures and hence discover the mechanical aspect of these otherwise independant figures.
ROSHNI BHATIA
View
Digital prints
The photographic representation I chose to pursue is an amalgam of the spaces between which I alternated; the JSW Steelworks and the Vijayanagara ruins of Hampi. The dreariness of modern day industrial architecture has earned itself a certain feel/ texture through all the factual information that predisposes it. But against the serenity of once populated historcal sites, I feel the difference, though stark, is more engaging than first impressions would allow.
ISHA VORA
Beneath the Rocks
Artist’s Book, 48pp
From a king’s land to a land of small venders and tourists, the Vijayanagar Empire has transformed over the years and adapted to the modern day influences of todays world. The strange juxtaposition of modern day means and objects against the ruins of Hampi create a stark contrast between different time periods. I have represented my journey through a photographic series, which amalgamates the influences of modern day life with the pre-existing ruins of Hampi. Underlying the overpowering beauty of the place, run many small narratives, which are still changing over time.
Nothing is made, nothing disappears.
The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.
- Dejan Stojanovic
PURVAI RAI
Text In Context
Concertina book
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
- Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Many things excite us with the idea of traveling to somewhere new. The reality of travel very rarely matches our preconceived mindset about the place itself. We’ve heard about the place, we’ve read about the place, does that alter our experience from the reality of its existence now? I travelled through texts, guides and then finally through myself.
MADHULIKA MOHAN & PARAM JAIN
I NEFFaB le
Salt prints and Cyanotype prints
Of old and new, to those who were once, have now found a way of being. Places, people and things were, are and will be.
Thoughts have been thought, years ago.
Yesterday’s stone stands today. Will today’s steel be tomorrow?
Looking back, I saw the same, structures I see today.
Destruction took away from thee, what the future could have been.
Yet I find beauty, abundant in destruction.
Yet I find beauty, plenty in construction.
What will it be for me, when stillness engulfs me?
KHUSHBOO AGARWAL
Scrap
Liquid emulsion on metal and plastic scrap
Ruins represent the disorderly space. A place pre-existing as a work place or a regularized institution now dilapidated, dysfunctional and chaotic. In the ruins most objects share a common status, whether it’s industrial ruins or the ancient archeological artefacts. To these remains we attach new meanings, creating new spaces for leisure and often for socially proscribed activities. Ruins are categorized as waste or trash and become colonized by plants and wildlife. They reference the useless and worn out.
Through the usefulness and uselessness of things, redundancy arises, essentially referring to the unnecessary excess. Redundancy is part of life. Its absence is rare and contradictory to change.
The ruins serve as an active demonstration of their own obsolescence. In case of recent industrial ruins, the individual can see their their own marginality refelected in redundant workspaces and production centers. They bring out the way in which these ruins are linked to the people with whom they are associated as well as to the place itself.
SANJANA RAJU
Mismatch
Artists Book, 54 pages
Nothing is anything by itself, only in relation to other things.
- Robert Levers
Mismatch shows two completely distinct spaces that we would usually not see as one. But when we look at these different images together we form a connection between them and forget their distinctive nature.
DEEPANSHU OHRI
Ghost of Yali
Digital prints
One fine day in JSW, one of the workers was said to have spotted a ghostly image outside the window of his office. He ran back to fetch his camera and capture the image of this intriguing creature. He followed its movement through and along the dusty windows till it finally vanished.
He recalled being afraid at the first glance of this ‘animal’, but a second look had made him realise that the creature somewhat resembled the famous mythological ‘Yali’: a being said to be a gruesome combination of a lion and an elephant and an eagle, a guard of the temples during the glory days of The Vijayanagara empire.
Rumour has it, that the ghost of Yali visits the landscape of Hampi every 200 years to honour his duties as a protector of his homeland.
AMRUTHA BUSHAN
Polarities
Inkjet and Cyanotype prints
*Are the feelings and complexities behind caution and fear inter-linked?
*How do we make peace with what we feel - whether its overwhelming fear or overwhelming awe?
These questions may sound interrogative but the purpose of these is to help in probing answers that are more than obvious. Finding better and deeper ways of understanding and dealing with discomfort, fear, caution and other worrisome emotions.
The photographs seek to visually communicate personal fears of heights and fire approached with the sense of caution and awe that the Artist experienced during her visit to the steel industries and The Hampi Precinct - and also how the camera assisted her in facing challenging fears, re-defining the language of fear and capturing new ways of communication.
HOSHEDAR SHROFF
The Story in Boots
Safety Boots, Benzine transfer on cotton cloth
On our trip to Hampi the first place we visited was the JSW Steel Plant, where I noticed that all the workers were wearing these really cool looking boots, for safety of course. Although they all were wearing the same boots made by the same company, they looked completely different to me. It was as if each pair had a story to say, a story about where they come from. Hence, I wanted to say a story of my own, about where I had been on this trip. And after a lot of R&D and a lot of trial and error I finally got it right . On this pair of boots, one boot depicts the JSW Steel Works and the other depicts Hampi. Both of them equally awe inspiring.
