Sangita Maity’s work emerges across two states - of extraction and dispossession. Through fields visits and conversations with the communities of the Choto Nagpur region, the artist untangles complicated histories and conditions of labour, displacement and changing climates. Maity addresses the seething anxiety that envelopes the region head-on. It emerges from accelerated change and a constant abandonment by the state. This dispossession finds its origins in the colonial practices of extraction, has been used by the state over the years to displace people and acquire mineral-rich territories. The only charge and resistance against these oppressive structures is the body that hosts memories and stories, and thereby a people’s history. These bodies have constantly organized, gathered and protested, but the hard reality about models of ‘development’ is that systems are trained to invisibilize and fail us. Maity attempts to do what we must all be – aware, to hold these stories as histories that must challenge large narratives established by the state. Our complicity must be challenged too and we must see, witness. This holding of memory is an act of resistance in itself.
Trained as a printmaker, both material and technique become narrative devices in Maity’s work. For example, she widely uses serigraphy on surfaces prepared with soil or image transfers on metal, materially referencing both, the landscape, and iron ore mined from them. People and objects glisten against the wide surface through a meticulous process of transfer – a scale she uses perhaps to remind us of the abundance of our lands and how it holds us.
In When they stopped making Granaries, Maity builds a relationship between the people that build a structure of care and nourishment – a granary – and a structure of power like a dam, a road built to transport mined goods and warehouses. There is a double violence here – of dispossession and of employment into turning landscapes they come from. Serigraphy again offers both porosity and ‘opacqueness’ – a metaphor (if we read into) to the hollowness and hypnosis of infrastructural promises. The granary then is a space of coming together, building by hand and of caring as a community – a site of resistance, an inheritance and a mode of preservation. For the granary to anchor Maity’s conversations signals both honesty and a strength that emerges from holding faith.
