Unfolding a Scene

What do you talk about when you talk about the body? One might say the physical body, its expanse, the politics, the perimeters, the idea of “body,” or perhaps the body in relation to conflict, in all its meanings, in its every reach. What does a body do with and in conflict? The sites that the body occupies—in its multiple, fluid forms—make up the underlying anchor of “Unfolding a Scene,” a tripartite show of artists from India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, curated by Meenakshi Thirukode at New Delhi’s Exhibit 320.

Afghan artist Mariam Ghani’s video work Like Water from a Stone (2014) is a collaboration with performer and choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly, made during a residency in Norway in a coastal city known for its oil rigs. It presents a narrative of the land in its pre-oil-boom days and follows a timeline that includes its German occupation and leads into the present years. The video’s title, a play on the phrase “like getting blood from a stone,” points to the ongoing challenges involved in the extracting of oil from Norway’s unyielding sea, as well as the difficulty of life in its unfriendly land before the start of the modern oil industry. The video is accompanied by a series of Ghani’s photographs originally commissioned for the Rogaland Kunstsenter in Norway, and prints based on the book Afghanistan: A Lexicon (2012), co-written by the artist and her economist father, Ashraf Ghani. Preoccupations on the relationship between place, memory, myths, language, loss and reconstruction in the artist’s work are as applicable to the stray bodies that occupy her photographs as they are to the beautiful, but often stark landscapes she frames within them.