go to landing page

ANNOTATIONS

PRE-OCCUPATIONS

Umesh Singh


Currently, I am a PhD candidate at Banaras Hindu University where my research aims to look at how various art practitioners have dealt with agrarian crisis in their works. Since I have been involved in the process of documenting and collecting data around various kinds of crops , this data sheet best represents my concerns and approaches.

It’s a folio document from the archives at BHU with porcupine’s quills on it. Porcupines are slowly becoming an endangered species in the University campus.These natural objects and documents form a part of my larger practice where I explore materiality by looking at them historically and socially while coming in terms with conditions prevalent in my village. Coming from a family of farmers, I am interested in their memories and I document the disturbances, despair, and uncertainties encountered by farming communities.

The AgriForum Blog

16 October,2021:

'Preoccupations' looks at questions and concerns raised by the participants. It highlights keywords and reflections shared in one-on-one conversations as well as those that arise during the reading sessions and on WhatsApp group. ‘Preoccupations’ allows us as a group to outline starting points and overlaps, especially as our first phase is geared towards developing a practice of reading around the agrarian and its vocabularies while tracing a trajectory of enquiries.


In the introductory session, objects became a way for all the participants to represent themselves, their concerns, and their practices. The images below can be clicked to further know what the respective objects mean to each of them. Ranging from chopsticks to shipping containers, maps to folio documents, seed firecrackers to fish containers, termite mounds to ritualistic objects, and as broad as trees to laterite soil, each object pushes one to further reconsider the field of agriculture today, alongside processes, methods, and interventions at grassroots level.

31 October,2021:

Post the reading session on Tim Ingold's 'Making things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children' on 30th October,2021,an interesting conversation began on the common group around the fishing trap usually used in farms.

Following is an excerpt from the conversation that helps one further engage with the way Ingold speaks of production, collection, domestication, making, growing and one's relationship with surroundings as mediated by simple objects such as the humble fishing traps. Tracing the changes in the way the trap comes to be built over time, makes us further reconsider human transformation of nature in terms of needs, indulgences, and co-dependencies.

Anga Art Collective

Rashmi Kaleka

Ankan Dutta

Arunkumar H.G

Blaise Joseph

Gram Art Collective

C.F John

Maksud Mondal

Gyanwant Yadav

Gopa Roy

Sujit Mallik

Umesh Singh

( Kindly click on the images to know more )

/