Atreyee Gupta
Ghar Pe: At Home in the Margins of
Installation View, Ghari/Ghar
Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh
Vidya Mandir High School,
February 25–March 9, 2012,
Dharavi, Mumbai. Photograph
courtesy Society for Nutrition
Education and Health Action,
Mumbai.
Contemporary Art
O
n February 25,
2012, far from the
institutional ambits
of the contemporary art world,
an extraordinary art installation
opened in a hall in the Shree
Ganesh Vidya Mandir high school
in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai
that is now home to more than
a million people who subsist
at the margins of public civic
services. Positioned toward the end of a narrow meandering lane off 90
Feet Road, a road pragmatically named after its alleged width, this was an
atypical location for an art installation. The hall itself had been painted a
luminous monastral turquoise, an equally peculiar choice for a space meant
for the display of art. In Dharavi, however, this very colour served to render
the space familiar to its local viewers and participants, who associated the
colour with the interiors of the many makeshift homes that jostle against
each other in the slum’s narrow alleys.1 Mimicking domestic interiors, the
objects displayed in the hall invoked the domestic in deliberately explicit
terms. This resonated well with the installation’s title, Ghari/Ghar Pe/
At Home. Organized by the Society for Nutrition Education and Health
Action, a Mumbai-based non-profit focusing on women’s health in the
city’s numerous slums, and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a London-
based institution for research in public health, the exhibition marked the
culmination of a yearlong dialogue on art and health that involved nineteen
participants from the low-income communities of Dharavi and Santa Cruz,
Mumbai, and three international artists.
I cite Ghar Pe as a lens through which to interrogate the recent emergence
of multiple, and often competing, exhibitionary networks in South Asia.
These new constellations have engendered new networks of knowledge-
production, new forms of praxis, and new strategies of display. My aim is
to demonstrate how projects such as Ghar Pe, enmeshed as they are within
community-based civil society network models due to the involvement of
non-government organizations with pedagogic and emancipatory aims,
not only demarcate an emergent civic imagination but also intersect with
larger histories of the struggle for democratic representation in India.
Mapping out the processes that accommodated the evolution of Ghar Pe, I
hope to foreground the modes through which certain kinds of knowledge
Vol. 13 No. 2 53
about art seep into contexts marginal to its normative cultural networks
and are, in turn, elaborated through subtle displacements that ultimately
transgress the limits of the very field of contemporary art. As affective sites
of transformation, such projects engender a different knowledge-system,
iterated through an ethics of locality.

At first glance Ghar Pe appears to Visitors to Ghari/Ghar Pe/At

fit well within the paradigms of
community-based art practices that
have now emerged globally. Like
Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School, February
25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi,
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, Mumbai.

most community art projects, the

aesthetics and politics of Ghar Pe
too was molded by the desires and
aspirations of the three primary
groups involved in the project—the
non-profit under whose aegis the
project was organized, the artists, and the volunteers from Dharavi and
Santa Cruz. If the artists—Nandita Kumar, Suzie Vickery, and Sudharak
Olwe—perceived their involvement in Ghar Pe as a principled extension of
prior transnational collaborations with non-government organizations and
a concomitant investment in community-based art, the non-profit hoped
to use the project to access existing non-formal networks of health practices
in the city. In their traditional roles as caregivers, the participating women
from Dharavi and Santa Cruz certainly brought a nuanced perspective
to questions of urban health. But their concerns finally coalesced around
the forms of labour through which their sociocultural identities are
constructed and the impact of these constructions on their understanding
of health. These concerns informed the works that the women produced
in collaboration with the participating artists. Ghar Pe’s re-creation of
the domestic as an immersive environment was thus organic rather than
premeditated, signaling a procedural open-endedness that collaborative
art ventures often necessitate. Equally significantly, the involvement of
international artists and deterritorialized funding networks brought into
sharp focus irrevocable and allegedly post-national entanglements between
local and global conversations on collaborative art and discourses about
sustainable development. Indeed, increasing numbers of artists have turned
toward transnational collaborative community-based art in the recent past.
Broadly, the aim of many of these projects has been to identify specific
social issues within a particular community and to work toward affective
change in the form of sustainable development.

To the extent that collaborative art addresses the political, aesthetic, and
cultural conditions of a globalized world, art scholarship too presents a
range of engagements with the question of radical democracy and plurality
with which any conceptualization of an ethical global citizenship must
contend. In turn, the autonomy of the artist and the ontological status of
contemporary art emerge as a focus of critical enquiry. Think, for instance,
of Claire Bishop, who positions participatory art as premised on invoking
a relational antagonism between the artist and art’s constituencies, Grant

54 Vol. 13 No. 2
 Kester’s understanding of the immateriality of dialogue as the primary
locus of art production in community-based projects, or even Miwon
Kwon’s critical examination of the reconfigured relationship between site,
community, and art practice.2 However, even as Bishop, Kester, and Kwon
re-engage earlier (Western) modernist alignments of the artist, authorial
agency, and art’s audience to foreground the changing nature of artistic
labour and autonomy, the history of modernism in most locations beyond
Europe and North America does not elicit artistic autonomy as either a
privileged or a discursive site of practice.

By adopting a specific genealogy of autonomy internal to twentieth century

art in Europe and North America, we appear to have already committed
ourselves to a certain definition of the artist, a categorical boundary of art,
and a very precise delineation of its political domain. Yet, in the antinomies
of vastly differentiated geo-political cultures that arise out of dispersed
conditions of postcoloniality, a variegated matrix of dissonant practices
operate beyond both the formal infrastructures of art institutions and the
hegemonic apertures of Westernism. What kind of traction, for instance,
does the act of collaboration hold in Dharavi, a sprawling slum in the heart
of India’s cosmopolitan financial capital?

Visitors to Ghari/Ghar Pe/At

Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School, February
25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi,
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, Mumbai.

Ghar Pe unfolded at a time when the local participant’s rights to

habitation had been brought into question through a series of evictions
and dubious promises of resettlement by the government as part of the
Dharavi Redevelopment Project. Indeed, ever since 2004, multinational
corporations, state agencies, and civil society groups have been engaged
in a struggle for bottom-up inclusive development processes in Dharavi.3
For Dharavi’s inhabitants, the right to collaborate, and as an extension, the
right to be at home or ghar pe in Dharavi has thus emerged as the locus
of struggle. Against this backdrop, Ghar Pe’s organizers and participating
artists abandoned prevailing strategies of public art that posits the figure
of the artist as the interlocutor between disenfranchised subjects and the
urban art sphere. Instead, the participants cast themselves as the primary
authors of the installation. During the exhibition, they engaged the
audience in dialogue to negotiate a consensus for change.

Vol. 13 No. 2 55
 Each work displayed in the Sunita D’Souza, detail of
artwork at Ghari/Ghar Pe/At
exhibition foregrounded complex Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School, February
intersectionalities of social and 25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi,
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
aesthetic arrangements. Take, Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, Mumbai.
for instance, Santa Cruz resident
participant Sunita D’Souza’s
ensemble consisting of two steel
vessels placed on a gas stove. The
work drew on D’Souza’s experience as a twenty-five-year-old mother of
two, whose life is lived out through a cycle of repetitive motions associated
with cooking and cleaning, cooking and cleaning again. This rhythm is
interrupted by spurs of domestic violence that she and her daughters
routinely face. On the days her husband abuses her physically, D’Souza
does not cook or clean. Even as her refusal to perform her domestic duties
does not dislodge the hierarchy that structures her home, she nevertheless
disrupts it by withholding her own labour. This disruption becomes a mark
of her resistance. Covered with patterns made of black bindi and thread,
one side of the kitchen stove registers her defiance. Placed on top of the gas
burner, an unadorned aluminum vessel is filled with burnt photographs of
spoiled food. The other side of the stove, one that is layered instead with
brightly coloured bindis and thread, represents days of marital accord. On
these days, D’Souza makes sumptuous meals for her family, photographs of
which can be seen inside the vessel that is placed on this side of the stove.

Sunita D’Souza, detail of

artwork at Ghari/Ghar Pe/At
Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School, February
25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi,
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, Mumbai.

56 Vol. 13 No. 2
Sunita D’Souza, installation
view at Ghari/Ghar Pe/At
Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya
Mandir High School, February
25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi,
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
Society for Nutrition Education
and Health Action, Mumbai.

D’Souza’s work not only bears testimony to the processional nature of

pedagogy and collaboration spread over the twelve months leading up
to Ghar Pe, but also makes obvious crisscrossed trajectories of local and
global conversations that shaped the project. Her association with the
project, for instance, began with a photography workshop led by Mumbai-
based documentary photographer Sudharak Olwe. In certain ways, Olwe’s
involvement in the Dharavi project was a logical expansion of his earlier work
with marginal urban settlements in Mumbai and his photography workshops
with underprivileged youth in Los Angeles during a residency at the Getty
Museum in 2010. Likewise, in Dharavi, Olwe introduced participants like
D’Souza, who had never held a camera, to the techniques of documentary
photography, and the photographs in D’Souza’s installation were part of an
assignment on food and nutrition.

Over subsequent months, the conceptual apparatus that governed D’Souza’s

ensemble gradually emerged out of loosely structured consciousness-raising
sessions facilitated by Nandita Kumar, who lives and works between New
Zealand and India, and the British artist Susie Vickery, whose work in
textile raises critical questions regarding gender and labour. The adoption
of consciousness-raising sessions, a strategy devised during the second wave
feminist movement in America, may indeed seem dated. In praxis, however,
the act of sharing and analyzing personal narratives realigned the terrains
of private experience with the collective and the political in a context where
the question of survival often supersedes any explicit articulation of a
feminist agenda in the local. A nascent feminist politics was thus articulated
and ultimately inflected the works displayed in Ghar Pe.

The seminal 1972 feminist installation Womanhouse, produced and

displayed in an abandoned house in Los Angeles by Judy Chicago, Miriam
Schapiro, and a group of students of the new Feminist Art Program of
the California Institute of the Arts also informed Ghar Pe.4 Certainly,
the involvement of Kumar, a recent graduate of the Cal Arts, may have
facilitated this overlap. Yet the artists could have just as easily turned to
more recent projects that have taken the domestic as a discursive site of art
making. While third wave feminism does make space for more nuanced
interrogations of gender, race, and sexuality, the use of Womanhouse

Vol. 13 No. 2 57
as a model recognized that Ghar Pe’s participants continue to negotiate
essentializing constructions of femininity and domesticity.

Ghar Pe, however, retained certain crucial differences from Womanhouse.

Feminist aesthetics as iterated by Womanhouse were most emphatically
articulated around the female body. This becomes explicit in the Nurturant
Kitchen, where all perceptible surfaces of the kitchen, including the floor,
walls, cabinets, and appliances, were covered with pink paint. Pink plastic
eggs metamorphosed into breasts cascading down from the ceiling, evoking
a fascinating hybridity that was at once poignant and monstrous. One
does not find such an engagement with the gendered body in Ghar Pe. In
D’Souza’s gas stove the physicality of her own body is absent even as her
experience of domestic violence is foregrounded, abstracted as it is from the
body on which marital violence is enacted. Bindis—multicoloured dots with
which women traditionally adorned themselves as markers of marriage—
embellish the gas stove, thus referencing D’Souza’s body only tangentially.

Even in instances when Mridula in collaboration with

Kumar, detail of artwork at
the female body is Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home, Shree
Ganesh Vidya Mandir High
cited directly, the body School, February 25–March
9, 2012, Dharavi, Mumbai.
itself is represented Photograph courtesy Society
for Nutrition Education and
through a network of Health Action, Mumbai.

familial relationships.
Take, for instance,
the bed in Ghar Pe,
which becomes the
canvas upon which
the various stages in a woman’s life are played out. Conceptualized by
Mridula and executed in collaboration with Kumar, the surface of the bed
is layered with a collage of photographs, each image carefully culled from
Mridula’s family photo-albums. In a certain way, the collage functions as
Mridula’s biography, a narrative self-portrait of sorts. In the far left of the
collage, we encounter Mridula as a child with her younger male sibling,
a photograph that all too quickly morphs into an image of Mridula as a
young woman, holding in her arms her own infant daughter. At the far
right, an unidentifiable skeletal body can be seen lying on a bed similar to
the one that frames the collage. Even as the collage appears to synoptically
map out Mridula’s life—childhood, childbirth, future death—with extreme
economy of imagery, there is a certain overflow of forms; the background
of the collage is covered with smaller portraits of Mridula’s family. Tied in
tight clusters, bulging stuffed fabric dolls pinned onto the surface of the
collage completes the mis-en-scene, the colour pink marking out the body of
the artist herself.

The surplus of faces and bodies in Mridula’s self-portrait refers us back to

the collective process through which the work was conceived. The work
was conceptualized during one of the consciousness-raising sessions that
explored the women’s relationship with domestic artifacts. When asked
what the bed represents, sixteen-year old participant Afreen had reportedly

58 Vol. 13 No. 2
Mridula in collaboration observed: A bed is an
with Kumar, clay pots by
Parvati Harjichitroda, detail object upon which
of artwork at Ghari/Ghar Pe/
At Home, Shree Ganesh Vidya one sleeps with many.
Mandir High School, February
25–March 9, 2012, Dharavi, In childhood, the
Mumbai. Photograph courtesy
Society for Nutrition Education bed is shared with
and Health Action, Mumbai.
siblings and parents.
In adulthood the bed
is shared with husband
and progeny, occupied
solitarily only after the body has degenerated and death is impending.5 This
idea receives material form in Mridula’s work. Exceeding the very definition
of a self-portrait, the image is filled with faces that are not Mridula’s own.

This excess is present in a number of other works as well, including a

collection of clay pots made by Parvati Harjichitroda and placed at the foot
of Mridula’s slightly tilted bed. Made during Harjichitroda’s participation
in pottery workshops conducted by the craft activist Anjani Khanna, the
vessels functioned as a metaphor for the womb, the colour red symbolizing
menstrual blood. As many as one hundred such vessels were strewn
throughout the exhibition space, marking one hundred days in a woman’s
life. Collectively, the vessels indicate that a woman menstruates for twenty
days out of every hundred, the days of menstruation marked out by the
number of red vessels.

While Harjichitroda’s work shares an affinity with Judy Chicago’s

Menstruation Bathroom in Womanhouse, especially in terms of the
juxtaposition of red and white as symbols of purity and bodily pollution,
there is an additional aspect to the Dharavi installation that exceeds
the dialogic play between visibility and invisibility so central to the
Menstruation Bathroom. In Dharavi, the question of purity has an
added valence. According to Hindu belief systems, bodily discharges are
considered a source of ritual impurity, menstrual blood especially so.
Ritual observances and social conscriptions vary depending on women’s
class and caste affiliations. But, by and large, women were prohibited from
participating in creative labour, since menstruating women are perceived
to be ritually impure and thus untouchable. The touch of the untouchable
could, in theory, pollute that which has been touched. The traditional
Kumbharwada potters of Dharavi to which Harjichitroda belongs, for
instance, believe that if a menstruating woman touches clay, the vessel will
lack strength and break easily. This ritualized enactment of patriarchal
control over the female body may well be read as a systematic caesura of
menstruating women’s labour.

It is this caesura of labour that concerns Harjichitroda, the first woman

in her community to take up pottery. As the mother of five children and
the primary wage earner in her family, the injunction against productive
labour during menstruation is inimical to Harjichitroda’s mechanics of
survival. For out of every hundred days, she must cease work for twenty
days. Thus, for women like Harjichitroda, the question of gender, labour,

Vol. 13 No. 2 59
and menstrual pollution is irrevocably tied to the economics of survival
for herself and her family, who she supports through her labour. What is
then foregrounded here is the reality of the women’s lack of control over
resources in contexts of extreme material deprivation. Thus, when the
artists involved in Ghar Pe recast the women from Dharavi and Santa Cruz
as the primary authors of the project, the feminist subject that emerged
through the collaborative artistic partnership revealed itself as one that
was not fully comprehensible within the Womanhouse’s Western liberal
feminist paradigm of embodied emancipation. Even as Ghar Pe resembled
the Womanhouse, what transpired, I want to suggest, was a series of subtle
displacements that ultimately served to centralize a politics of locality in
Dharavi, a feminist politics of place.

Installation view, Ghari/Ghar

Pe/At Home, Shree Ganesh
Vidya Mandir High School,
February 25–March 9, 2012,
Dharavi, Mumbai. Photograph
courtesy Society for Nutrition
Education and Health Action,
Mumbai.

Can our conceptual lexicon then transcend the finitude of its intellectual
home? Or do places leave their imprint on purportedly universal concepts in
a way that calls into question purely abstract categories?6 Certainly, when seen
through the lens of a place-specific politics, projects such as Ghar Pe take on
a different consistency, one that is not committed to the vocabulary of artistic
autonomy. Instead, what we have is a certain civic imagination that is also a
claim to democracy, iterated in relation to a named geo-political terrain. How
might we delineate its social, intellectual, and artistic genealogies?

Provisionally, it seems to me that the formation in New Delhi of the Safdar

Hashmi Memorial Trust—Sahmat—in 1989, an anti-sectarian platform
for visual and performing artists, offers a possible entry point for scripting
a situated history of collaborative art in the region. As scholars have
noted, street-theatre artist-activist Safdar Hashmi’s 1989 murder at the
hands of henchmen belonging to the then-ruling party in India generated
an unprecedented momentum, bringing together intellectuals and
cultural workers under the banner of Sahmat, a term that literally means
solidarity.7 At its inception, Sahmat’s primary stakes lay in activating public
consciousness around freedom of expression as a fundamental right. In the
1990s, Sahmat functioned as a civil society group and a non-government
organization with pedagogic and emancipatory aims, and it likewise
had recourse to the funding structures of the state even as it critiqued

60 Vol. 13 No. 2
deficiencies in the state’s democratic apparatus. A new art praxis was
thus incited, which came to be practiced entirely outside the institutional
structures of the contemporary art world and necessarily involved alliances
with a range of local community-based organizations with similar agendas.

Ghar Pe, of course, took place at a time when Sahmat’s initial momentum
had dissipated. Arguably, the new transnational art politics that emerged
in the 2000s was out of step with Sahmat’s claims on the national public
sphere. As Geeta Kapur notes, “[a]s art gains ever-higher visibility through
globalization, the politics of place—community, country, region, nation,
even the margin or exile—tends to lose the privilege of direct address.”8 In
turn, the space vacated by Sahmat appears now to be in process of being
adopted by civil society organizations such as the Society for Nutrition
Education and Health Action for community-based art.

The positive reception of Ghar Pe, not only by Dharavi residents but also
residents of other low-income communities in Mumbai, who reportedly
arrived in buses and trucks to see the exhibition, has even led to the
project’s sequel: the Dharavi Biennial, which will take place in Dharavi in
2015 and will involve local communities and other non-profits working in
the area. Reintroducing the politics of place, such projects then demand that
we reconnect practice to place—not to recover an imagined rootedness, but
to think of a new ethics for transformational art practices that are emerging
through the politics of locality. To use Henri Lefebvre’s words, “space as a
locus of production, as itself product and production, is both the weapon
and the sign of . . . struggle.”9

Notes
1 Typically, houses in Dharavi vary between one hundred and two hundred square feet, and are often
shared by multiple families. Usually, these home are built incrementally over time using a variety of
recycled materials and do not include provisions for running water.
2 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Autumn 2004), 51–79; Grant
H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012); Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational
Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
3 Camillo Boano, Melissa Garcia Lamarca, and William Hunter, “The Frontlines of Contested Urbanism:
Mega-projects and Mega-resistances in Dharavi,” Journal of Developing Societies 27, no. 3–4 (2011),
295–326.
4 For a history, see Paula Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s,” Signs 10, no.
4 (Summer 1985), 762–81.
5 Interview with Nandita Kumar, May 2012, Mumbai.
6 Here I rephrase questions posed by Dipesh Chakrabarty. As Chakrabarty writes, “Can thought
transcend places of origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as to call
into question the idea of purely abstract categories?” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), xiii.
7 As Arindam Dutta notes, “Sahmat’s emergence in 1989 resulted in, numerically speaking,
extraordinary participation by the entire breadth of India’s artists, from academy-style painter to
classical singer, from alternative filmmaker to community theatre enthusiast, from Communist Party
griot to small-town photo-journalist.” Arindam Dutta, “Sahmat, 1989–2004 Liberal Art Practice against
the Liberalized Public Sphere,” Cultural Dynamics 17, no. 2 (2005), 193–226, 199.
8 Geeta Kapur, “subTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold,” Third Text 21, no. 3 (2007), 277–96.
9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 109.

Vol. 13 No. 2 61
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