Multidisciplinary artist Anamika Singh’s short documentary on leftist Indian newspaper Jan Morcha screens twice at the Chazen in June alongside her multimedia gallery exhibition “Corpus.”
Among Madison cinephiles, the Chazen Museum of Art auditorium is not typically thought of as a space reserved for screening short documentary work. But that is slowly changing. This past April, the Wisconsin Film Festival chose the venue to present two programs of shorts with local ties: “Fire, Water, Stickball, and Dinosaurs.”
On April 20, multidisciplinary artist and recent MFA graduate of UW–Madison, Wednesday, June 25, at 5 p.m.—before the closure of Singh’s exhibition on July 13.
Sheetla is really only a short in of duration. The real-life stories it chronicles in the twin cities of Faizabad and Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh (in Northern India, with a population of 240 million) have the weight of a feature film. Titled after Singh’s late grand-uncle, Sheetla Singh, a Writing With Fire, about a female collective of journalists in Uttar Pradesh.)
Singh’s artist statement on the left-hand wall of the duskily lit Chazen gallery entrance cites Jan Morcha‘s role in recalling “the historiography of communal violence.” The act of documentation in itself has the power to break propagandist narratives. Here, it’s the December 1992 desecration and demolition of the Babri Mosque by ring-wing Hindu nationalists, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). They believed the Mosque itself was erected on the birth site of the deity Rama, and thus the historic Muslim site of worship needed to be leveled for a Hindu temple by any means necessary. The nationalists incited riots and widespread violence.
However, Singh’s work is not about professorially retracing all this context for Westerners distanced from these events. Archival footage of this demolition is not shown in Sheetla, though it was obviously an inspiration for the artistic process. Rather, Singh records her own footage from this decade of “ongoing construction and temple megaprojects taken up by the state and their historical implications in revising the complex history of the Indian subcontinent,” she explains in an email response to Tone Madison.
Taken together, the Sheetla film and Corpus exhibition that grew out of a four-year production process, are about the philosophical reflection of how “authority over history becomes a means to control the future.” Whether it’s audible in the words of the reporters and figures in Singh’s film or seen in the tactility of the sculptures in the gallery—primarily constructed with hunks of concrete and rails of steel (on tables built from cinder blocks and polished wooden slabs)—Singh’s work s the spirit of the journalists at the Jan Morcha and “their witnessing,” as her artist statement protests.
Of Sheetla‘s most striking aspects as documentary work are its resistance to simple scrutinies and the experimental approach to voiceover itself. The first 90 seconds of the film feature a series of shots in the open streets of Faizabad and Ayodhya followed by a disembodied voice proclaiming how “a free and unbiased journalism is necessary.” But several more minutes before Singh formally introduces the figure attached to that voice, Dr. Suman Gupta, who is the current chief editor of the Faizabad and Lucknow editions of Jan Morcha. The illusion is broken; Gupta is not the prescient narrator, but a prominent subject.
On this stylistic choice, Singh stresses the significance of allowing audiences to comprehend “through the voice of people who had deep-rooted connections and had experienced the major political upheavals and violence that transformed” those cities. By embracing this idea and opposing a lone guiding voiceover, even her own, Singh frames a conversation that “unfold[s] between her images and their perspectives and stories. That’s when you really understand the relationship between knowledge, memory and physical sites and spaces,” Singh says.
The low frequencies of its score sustain that relationship. A far cry from any treacly music bed, and more like a seismic work of minimalism by Éliane Radigue, the relentlessness of its sinister drone by X Medianoche, another MFA graduate of UW–Madison, “draw out really physical and bodily responses, introducing a tension that exists in contrast to the kinds of sounds audiences might expect or associate to a place like [Uttar Pradesh],” Singh explains. Her field recordings mixed with Medianoche’s low-pitched electronic audio design that ascends into a miasmic haze resonate with the specter of violence in conscious and subconscious ways. And most significantly, it “betrays the beauty of the images at times to remind [viewers] that ‘beautification’ itself is a tool or weapon,” Singh writes, expanding the initial framing of her artist statement.
Others who appear in Sheetla—from the Samajwadi (or Socialist) Party worker Jay Shankar Pandey to lawyer and journalist Tirjuk Narayan Tiwari—are not disillusioned either, and they wouldn’t refute the concept of “beautification” as a propagandist utility as it relates to photo-journalistic principles. But, removed from the context of Singh’s artistic presentation, these figures of resistance in Uttar Pradesh are most concerned with providing testimony for the singularity and independence of Jan Morcha. Of the 247 cooperative newspapers started in India, only it now remains.
In the last half of Sheetla, Gupta spells out the dire state of journalism in her native country since Jan Morcha‘s reporting on the events of 1992 and ’90s decade, which mirrors the decline in democracy in India and throughout the world. The U.S. is not exempt, as the consolidation of parent companies and publishers has resulted in a narrower breadth of reporting and fewer resources to go around at the mercy of the “free market” and corporate hand (à la billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post, et al.). The work and the words of Gupta and her colleagues ring true, especially, for any independent journalistic outlet.
For Sheetla to reach its peak of impact beyond the world of journalist activism, it should be experienced in tandem with the two Chazen galleries housing Singh’s sculpture, photography, and videography. While Sheetla challenges the traditional grammar and form of a standalone film, it shouldn’t be taken solely as a video installation either (that would be saved for the second gallery’s projection of B-roll footage from Singh’s visits to Faizabad and Ayodhya). Sheetla is something else in between those definitions—a work distinctly reciprocating its sister exhibition. Effectively, Corpus wouldn’t exist without the genesis project of Sheetla, but in experiencing what Singh has set up in a physical space, the inverse reads just as valid.
Sheetla presents the integral voices to the exposé of violence and events surrounding the Babri Mosque’s demolition over 30 years ago; Corpus arranges framed photographic fragments and literal ruins, as if removed from that nationalist violence that Faizabad experienced itself. The latter, concrete debris and steel barbs, are mounted and moulded into new pointed objects that resemble puncturing weapons. Both require a degree of inference and context, where the meanings and overlapping visuals fold into each other in the proper setting.
The same can be said of the galleries’ sound design, an extension of the tinnitus-like drone that Medianoche mixed for Sheetla, on a loop from a single Yamaha shelf speaker mounted inside the doorway of the first gallery. The sound reverberates through the more spacious second gallery that contains a window overlooking part of East Campus Mall, creating an even more haunting effect. The ghosts of history are still with us, conjuring and quelling those aforementioned notions of “beautification” in Singh’s sculpting—with her hands and eyes, heart and mind.
While it’s fair to concur with The Badger Herald‘s Declan McDonnell, who writes that “Singh’s core message is difficult to capture in one medium or project,” that is part of the intrigue inherent in her roaming art—the desire to know. History can be penetrated in more peripheral and abstract ways that are more disarming and meaningful than a lecture or text on the course of history. As a pair of works, Sheetla and Corpus interrogate fascistic means of control, and excavate what it means for people to survive but, as meaningfully, their stories to endure—and, irrevocably entangled, those who are writing the stories under threat of persecution. Here’s to seeing more demanding work in Madison theaters and galleries that adopt that ethos.
Editor’s note: Dr. Gupta’s editorial role has been corrected, as she serves as chief editor for both the Faizabad and Lucknow editions of Jan Morcha. Additionally, references to field recordings are now correctly attributed to Anamika Singh.
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