KiranBhai

ARTIST’S STATEMENTAs Immanuel Wallerstein put it, “if all humans have equal rights, and all the peoples have equal rights, then we cannot maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world economy has always been and always will be.”The story on rags stitches deeper insight into the conditions prevalent in many developing nation like India, Brazil, China etc..Where effects of neoliberal capitalism have brought in greater downfall on the population living below the poverty line. Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit.Capitalism today has predominantly assumed the form of global neoliberalism. Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions. Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating theconcept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.”Neoliberalism’s rigid emphasis on unfettered individualism, competitiveness and flexibility displaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the welfare of others. In doing so, it dissolves crucial social bonds and undermines the profound nature of social responsibility and its ensuing concern for others. In removing individuals from broader social obligations, it not only tears up social solidarities, it also promotes a kind of individualism that is almost pathological in its disdain for public goods, community, social provisions, and public values. Neoliberalism is the antithesis of democracy.Indeed, the successive crises and re-arrangements of neoliberal capitalism lead to dispossession and displacement of family farming by agribusiness, to forced migration and urbanization. These processes expand the number of people without skills, status, or the basics for existence. They become human debris, the waste-life, the bottom billions.Here the story of that bottom billions from the streets becomes my subject, whom most would like toforget as that is the truth we are in denial with. The representation of these unskilled migrant population who formerly had farm in a village today have become the faceless unemployed/daily labour of metropolis/city, their children beg for living, forced to sleep on the streets, the urban poor who is getting poorer by the consumerist capitalist economy which trives on urbanization. my canvas gunny bags, to my subject and object installation weaves the narrative of the population which I confronted every night on the streets of a peaceful city with good economic progress and developing real estate. Are we questioning ourselves of what this capitalist economy is dragging us into?