Indian artist Jangarh Singh Shyam pioneered a style of painting that visualised the forest folklore sung by his community of traditional balladeers and spiritualists. Primarily composed of dots and dashes, his art became popular and internationally well-known during the 1980s. During an artist residency in Japan in 2001, Jangarh ended his life by suicide. After his death, the people of his native community started considering Jangarh as an avatar of their divine deity. The circumstances of his suicide remain unclear often resulting in a narrative that refers to it as a “mystery”, while Jangarh’s art continues to be widely traded and collected internationally.
This project reflects on what the death of an artist reveals of the lived history of the modern world. It reviews Jangarh’s history by analysing his art, videos, writings, letters, music, and memorabilia, probing his suicide as a moment of art-historical and sociological urgency. Exploring the dynamics of art and its institutionalisation, it traces the construction of Jangarh’s “tribal” identity, mapping his creative ascent and eventual demise in the context of the global modernization during the 1980s and 90s. In so doing, it searches for new modes and methodologies to reflect on the explorations of his archives, devising artistic iterations that can potentially help deconstruct the paradigms of biographical, investigative, ethnographic, and verité filmmaking.
The research at this stage will be guided by questions such as: are indigenous artists categorised and defined differently from modern and contemporary artists? Does such categorisation reduce indigenous cultures to the status of subalterns of the modern society, which further fetishizes them inside its museums? What affect does that have on the psyche of an artist?
The project culminates in a written dissertation, a series of essayistic films, performative readings, and a video installation. Furthermore, with the archival and documentary materials, a critical art archive centred on Jangarh Singh Shyam will be developed that can potentially offer alternate readings of art history by reassessing the postcolonial museum’s gaze and the western dominant discourses on contemporary art.
Tusharr Madhavv (1985, IN) works at the convergence of documentary film, photography, archival research, and performance-making. He studied M.A. Mass Communication at AJK MCRC Jamia Millia Islamia University and Master of Film: Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy.
Madhavv seeks to voice lived histories and investigate the gaze-regimes in modern culture and contemporary society. His first film ‘A Ballad of Maladies’ (2016) explores the history of Kashmir conflict through oral accounts recorded in the region’s art and poetry. During the 2020 pandemic, he co-wrote and performed for ‘The Lonely Hearts Club’ – a documentary theatre show exploring queer desire in the context of social distancing. Performed online on Zoom to a live interactive audience, the show premiered at Goethe Institut Mumbai.
He received the 64th National Film Award of India for his debut film and his projects have been awarded grants and fellowships from Catapult Film Fund, DMZ Docs, India Foundation for the Arts, KNAW Netherlands, Cité Internationale des Arts, Goethe Institut, Field of Vision and Emergence Magazine.