Mohit Shelare, Photograph of the artist’s bedroom/studio at Delfina Foundation, 2024. Image courtesy the artist.
02 October 2024
By Kabir Jhala
“What do you see?” asks the multidisciplinary Indian artist Mohit Shelare, gesturing to a series of intricately sketched oil pastel drawings pinned to his bedroom wall at Delfina Foundation, where he recently spent three months in residency. These works, he says, could depict either meteorites or fatbergs—the latter being large lumpen masses of grease and discarded non-biodegradable waste, such as diapers and plastic bags, now commonly found in urban sewer systems. One such fatberg was discovered underneath Victoria, where Delfina is located.
Rarely seen by humans, both meteorites and fatbergs are alien forms, though in differing ways. Meteorites are extraterrestrial, yet also commonly understood, rather lyrically and profoundly, to be composed of the same primordial matter as humans. Meanwhile fatbergs are resolutely of this world; unintentional compositions of our modernity. But they are produced by that which we discard, and so they elicit revulsion.
In drawing parallels between these two subjects—one deemed celestial and mystical, the other toxic and abhorrent—Shelare provides us with a useful entry-point into his materially unconventional and epistemically intrepid artistic practice. He describes himself as an artist of “contamination”, taking the concept of a polluting substance transforming a pure space as a schema within which he produces work. Through drawing, durational performance, text, video essays and found objects that relate to quotidian life and exchanges of labour, Shelare explores how our treatment and conception of “impure” substances can reveal the relational systems and ontological commitments that underpin our lives.
Accordingly, materials and spaces typically associated with waste and toxicity feature heavily in Shelare’s work. In a 2018 performance in a disused and dirty basement room in Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi, Shelare lowered his body to the ground and placed his mouth and nose near the grimy floor. He then proceeded to breathe in deeply while moving in a straight line, suctioning up the dust and breathing out “clean air”, until a long strip had been formed on the floor showing where the dust had been removed. That line simultaneously became a performance documentation, an ephemeral art work of itself, and the invitation to question: who is burdened to breathe dirt, to lower themselves, to clean a space for another?
“Is it hazardous?” I ask him about the work. “Of course it is,” he responds, wryly, adding that simply existing in Delhi—its hazardous air quality now an accepted factor of daily life—runs similar risks. The anthropocene is forcing us to update age-old conceptions of toxicity.
Though Shelare has produced work abroad (in Beirut he documented grease stains on fast food wrappers), the underlying politics of dirt and cleanliness in his work have a specific connotation within India, where they must be understood through closely interlinked politics of caste and class, to which he explicitly refers. The Maharashtra-born Shelare, whose family converted to Buddhism three generations ago, is a student of the philosophies of Ambedkar, the Indian political leader and revolutionary who led India’s anti-caste movement, aiming to abolish the millennia-old system that has historically structured much of Indian life, and which continues to negatively impact much of its population.
In a provocative 2017 performance, the artist took two cups, one empty and the other half full of water, and transferred the water from his mouth back into the cup until the liquid had formed a “stinky”, sludge-like consistency. It draws parallels to a 1927 action by Ambedkar in which he drank water from a public tank in Mahad, Maharashtra to assert the rights of Dalits and other unscheduled castes to use public bodies of water, which they had previously been banned from doing.
Through his materials and subjects, Shelare sets himself apart from a previous generation of Indian artists who came of age in the era of globalism and early neoliberalism. Instead of singling out aspects of India that appeal to the Western gaze—the bright colours of native dress, religious worship, the cinematic chaos of its urban centres, much of which is rooted in a Brahmanical tradition of epic myths—Shelare’s subjects are what is now perhaps most ubiquitous to the subcontinent: waste and pollution. In doing so he draws attention to caste inequality and to fallacies of purity that structure relations in Indian society, such as untouchability—the concept of pollution coming from touch. By extension he questions the inherently Brahminical nature of fine art theory produced across the subcontinent.
Nonetheless, it is necessary to term his work as apart from a rising genre of art termed “Ambedkar Aesthetics”, which uses a more literal and figurative pictorial language to address issues of caste. Rather, we might better term his work as caste abstraction: an attempt to establish a new episteme around contemporary social relations as they relate to concepts of purity.
Take for example that same 2018 Noida basement performance, in which Shelare also picked the dirt off his skin and accumulated it to form a sizable ball. This composition compressed the sweat and dust from his body, succinctly containing a day’s worth of action. It represented both durée and the exertion of moving through a city. How large a ball of dirt might you, a white collar worker, be able to produce by the day’s end compared to a physical labourer, he asked. This performance also highlights another key aspect of Shelare’s practice, his use of the body as not just an agent of expression, but a site upon which structural inequalities are expressed.
Shelare’s performances focus on the body at its most visceral and often involve arduous and unpleasant actions, foregrounding the “lived experience”—experiences dictated by a lack of choice. By doing so he inserts himself into a debate over the experience of caste in South Asian academic (and by extension, artistic) circles, as put forth by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai in a series of dialectic essays (published in full in 2012 as The Cracked Mirror: an Indian Debate on Experience and Theory). In these essays they explain how “the Indian social sciences represent a pernicious divide between theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras,” and critique how formal discussions of untouchability and other caste issues are dominated by upper caste scholars who do not have lived experience of caste oppression.
The title of Shelare’s 2024 exhibition at the Conflictorium Museum in Ahmedabad, Intimacy with waste, is another clue to his overarching thesis. “We cannot escape toxins, they are part of us,” he says. From the polluted air we breathe to the microplastics circulating in our bloodstreams, our relationship to toxicity is indeed one of intimacy rather than separation.
Compellingly, Shelare also challenges the base assumptions of “contamination” as a negative. A thriving ecosystem is reliant on acts of contamination, on the interaction of different elements and components to sustain life. Conversely, to achieve purity is to meet death—to become static or sterile. Such propositions mirror those espoused by Ambedkar in his staunch opposition of endogamy and other practices designed to prevent mixing of castes.
The generative friction found in Shelare’s work is the kind that is necessary to imagine potentials not yet realised. In his tragic, and revelatory suicide letter, the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula wrote: “Never was a man treated as a mind, as a glorious thing made up of stardust”. If we are to accept that we are made up of the celestial matter that hovers above us, we must also understand how we relate to the trash that lurks below. There is great truth in accepting what we reject.