Synergies of a Site: Tracing Dharmendra Prasad’s Imagination of the Agrarian

Dharmendra Prasad’s artistic practice reads the agrarian landscape, its conflicts and cultural contexts through anthropological, folkloric and ecological vocabularies. Prasad has worked to establish an interdisciplinary sensitivity to conditions of the postcolonial agrarian state. His early years (2006–10) entailed attempts to reconcile experiments with the material remnants of the harvest site with a fledgling art practice.

From 2010 onwards, working at home in Guwahati and Bihar, Prasad’s performances and installations involved collecting, camouflaging and arranging objects from houses in the villages. He started taking these material explorations further into philosophies addressing community, occupational histories, indigenous knowledge systems and societal categories. Meanwhile, his other experiments with objects, bodies and residual material of the harvest site continued to develop over the years. These fluctuated depending on the kinds of interactions he would have, given that Prasad centralises dialogue as his primary mode of collecting. As a result, several of these conversations morphed into works that incorporated commentaries on labour, gender and inequality.

In 2017, Prasad was invited to work on-site in a village in Majuli, Assam to create architectural structures that would host seminars as part of Assembly of Desire, a multidisciplinary symposium and festival by the Desire Machine Collective. Designed to function as platforms, the works—Granary (Difficult Times) and Germination (For Future)—were constituted of Prasad’s usual material foundation: hay, crop residue, bamboo and jute. Prasad saw this opportunity as one that produced a specific collaborative practice and production, where the act of making was a rung closer to formulating a pedagogy outside the fetters of an institutional aegis. However, as an artist, Prasad acknowledges that he is wary of a tendency to parachute philosophies onto a site, an inclination that often alienates both community and context. Instead, he advocates for a sensitive reorientation of the site-specific, hoping that the term will eventually be deployed to recognise the potential in artistic exchange.

As part of the Pepper House Residency in Kochi in 2018, Prasad directed his installations as acts of recreation, continuing to widen his experiments with what he calls “…a conceptual export process.” The work relocated the tangibility of fields in Assam and Bihar to the site in Kochi. As a result, it offered rich contrasts of affect and portability in conjunction with Prasad’s concept of site-specificity. The work exhibited at the end of the residency period created a spatial reality of the harvest far removed from any ceremonial festivity. Prasad reiterates his respect for what the site commanded and how the work eventually occupied it. Interestingly, the second iteration of the work during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 was different in scale, nature and media. For the biennale, Prasad chose to incorporate video as well as new formations with rice, mud and his images of village fields in Assam.

Straddling contradictions in 2019, Prasad occupied a simultaneity across two sites: Akar Prakar Contemporary’s white cube space as part of a show curated by Pranamita Borgohain and Vikash N Kumar of the Zero Gravity Collective and the basement residency space at Serendipity Arts Foundation as part of Dharti Arts Residency. At Akar Prakar, the work included a crop-painting, videos that he took on his way from Guwahati to Bihar, sketchbooks from Assam and books on indigenous knowledge systems from the North-East. A spontaneous combination of materials from the corpus of his practice, Prasad explains his decision to display the work in a corner in the gallery with a simple yet poetic statement, “You cannot imagine the archive without corners.”

Prasad’s time at the Dharti Arts Residency involved a longer duration of dwelling on modes of thinking and conversing. Working with the movements of water inspired by hydraulic systems in Japanese farming, Prasad sought to convey a functionality around the idea of water as energy. Mobilising images and videos that he had taken at different agrarian sites over the years, Prasad used projections to simulate their expanses onto tin trays filled with water. The purpose of the work was to present propositions and provoke imaginations in the suffocation of a basement as well as excite a portability of ideas, personhood and immersion.

Characterising the past year as one of deeper observations on care and palliation, in a recent conversation with me, Prasad shared insights from his project, Carebiosphere. Supported by the Emerging Artist Award 2019, the project is fuelled by the necessity of care in the midst of what he terms a growing “fear psychosis” around the pandemic. Carebiosphere is a project that exemplifies Prasad’s preoccupation with non-human philosophies and sustaining a long-term collectivity of pedagogy and people. The artist admits that he views his practice from outside the linearities of mainstream art history. In attempting to articulate what this allows him, he states,

“The realms of memory, genealogy and occupational history become a means of thinking about the kinds of forms that germinate in ecological sites. If we think of corners and basements as places of possibility, the idea of scale becomes fluid, and concepts of art can then lead us to a material realisation of multiple specificities—of site, orality and storytelling.” 

To read more about Dharmendra Prasad’s work, please click here.

All works by Dharmendra Prasad. Images courtesy of the artist.