Narrating the Body in/as Data: WOUNDING, an Episode by Amitesh Grover
In 2018, MASH India and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) instituted the MASH FICA Award: Supporting New Media Art Practice to promote and encourage critical perspectives on new media art, working to emphasise the expansiveness of the term. One of the main objectives behind this collaboration was to foreground a redefinition of form, process and subjectivity specific to the intersections of art, media and technology. Artist Amitesh Grover, an interdisciplinary practitioner working with theatre, visual art, film, installation, digital art and text-based art, was the first recipient of the award. His proposed project, Missing Bodies | Quantified Self, outlined an exploration of the relationship between notions of the body and manifestations of technology in an age of institutional surveillance.
The project, which began with the intention of studying the conflict between the body as data and the body as subject, has since grown to accommodate political and philosophical understandings of technology. It highlights the complexities of memory, personal archives and the ways in which the body is (mis)remembered, complicated, and acts as both the disrupted and disrupter. As part of the award, Grover worked with wearable technologies (smart watches, chest straps, FitBits, glucose and blood sugar monitoring devices, etc.,) as a means of producing an alternate knowledge of the self, the body and the states of being that it occupies over a period of time. In confronting this data, Grover found himself questioning the kinds of alienations that occur—during sleep, during extreme forms of activity and interaction—and how they affect what we know and recognise of ourselves. Due to the uncertainties of the pandemic and the nature of his research, Grover decided to implement a more fluid, staggered format for the display and set up a series of interventions positioned as “episodes” in order to present the work he undertook as part of this award.
A section of the display with the images on adjacent walls. The visual on the extreme right depicts the artist’s maternal grandfather, surrounded by his students of history. In what is possibly the largest work in the display, the portrait of the artist’s paternal grandmother (second image from left) depicts her in a pre-Partition photograph, sitting on a tanga, eating a pomegranate. (Image credit: Shambhavi Gairola, FICA.)
The first episode, titled “WOUNDING,” opened at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room on 18 August 2021. For this, Grover chose to work with photographs from his family archive, each containing personal stories of the Partition. Continuing his considerations with the idea of the body as a genealogy, Episode #1 showcases works that represent an attempt to reproduce and translate his family’s experiences of the Partition of India. Approaching this endeavour through a multidisciplinary lens, the first episode assimilates Grover’s experiments with archives, microhistories and family photography, incorporating interviews that he conducted with members of his family, especially with his maternal and paternal grandparents. Talking about the process of archiving, Grover hints at the underlying paradox that persists at the heart of rewriting such a difficult history. Grover found that his grandparents’ hesitation in speaking about their experiences of Partition typified a kind of resistance that counters the pain accompanying such an act of recollection. However, in the case of his parents, there was a near total absence of association to memories of Partition, something Grover believes represents not only the fallibility of an intergenerational transfer but also the preoccupations of having to inhabit the newness of a young nation.
A close up of the code file plastered on the wall. (Image credit: Shambhavi Gairola, FICA.)
Having selected a set of analogue photographs from his family's collection and scanned them to ensure their preservation, Grover was struck by the impersonality of the alphanumeric nature of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) that these digital images produced. While family photographs accrue value over time and are imbued with deeply subjective meanings, data is incomprehensible and devoid of any emotion. Drawn to its sheer unsentimentality, Grover intervened in these images of his family by breaking their ASCII code with memories and excerpts from the interviews he had been conducting. By introducing these fragments into the code, he was able to produce “wounds” in the surface of the photograph that appeared as glitches and cracks in the resulting image. In “partitioning” the original photographs, he destabilises them as images that carried with them the weight of a violent history and the bodies that stood witness to it.
The works, printed on canvas, are hung against the code files on the wall. Recognisable amid the gibberish of code are words like “young,” “belonging,” “justice,” and “vanishing” that form one kind of insertion that Grover has made into the ASCII code of the images themselves. Additionally, sections of the code have large rolling paragraphs of memories written into them, enacting the glitch both within and without the frame.
The physical display at Project_Space was mapped in a manner that implemented the contrasts the artist wished to emphasise between his “wounded” images and the fragmented ASCII code. The images on display cascaded across the walls in thematic clusters: Grover spotlights the women of his family on one wall, with an adjacent section centralising a narrative of his maternal grandfather’s life and aspirations. Associations with food, culture, religion and regional identity emerged in the stories behind the selection of each photograph as well as in the audio interview playing in the space. The final wall of the space traced the differences between the two sides of his family, their varying predispositions towards love and belonging, and their proximities to each other. By suspending the images over the code plastered onto the walls of the exhibition, Grover orchestrates an affective environment, with the display alternating between specific memories associated with the photographs and the stoic illegibility of the code mounted behind them. However, the memories manually inserted by Grover into the code appear as flashes of sudden coherence from around the frames of the images, creating a strange disbalance of perceptibility where viewers are forced to reconsider their distance—physical and otherwise—from what they see.
All works by Amitesh Grover. Images courtesy of the artist and FICA.
