End of Empire

Abstract

This site specific sculpture was commissioned as a Collateral Project as part of the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Fort Kochi, feral, India. Shown in a public space outside the RDO Office in Fort Kochi between January and March 2015.

Concept Note: The Ambassador car from the late 1940’s became a symbol of India’s independence from a British colonial past, a legacy of a Nehruvian modernizing agenda and a closed economy, only to become a victim of recent economic reforms rendering it suddenly into a curio of this recent past. In May 2014 the maker of India’s Ambassador car have suspended production.

The sculptural artwork is the photographic recording of an abandoned and wrecked Ambassador car found in Delhi in 2012, that is literally ‘returned’ by D’Souza from decline into an object made whole again. This resurrection is achieved by rendering his original photographs into a three dimensional photographic shroud of this deceased vehicle while also capturing the external multiple viewpoints and frozen moments framed as multiple views of India.

The car acts as a lens capturing a rupture in the world its cubist appearance also recognises the multiple viewpoints where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ vie together to make sense of each other and where each vantage point struggles to inhabit a space of the original object. The sculpture here in the Biennale is positioned in a parking bay on a busy street thus returning it as an object into what on first appearances would be it’s natural home, making it’s reading as a sculpture more ambiguous and challenging in the public sphere.

The sculpture not only becomes a form of documentary of an object but absorbs issues of boundaries and space within the political and social complexity of territory in the city also videnced by the graffiti tags on the car of the Delhi based street artist Daku (whose pseudonym is a colloquial expression for ‘bandit’). The abstraction from the original object not only becomes a meditation on the complexity of change and identity in contemporary urban India, but also through the title becomes a clear reminder of a historic and colonial past rendered impotent through recent historic change.

A Chapter titled 'End of Empire' in the publication 'India's Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art', (180-207) locates the critical practices and strategies in the making and installation of this artwork in Fort Kochi by examining models and critiques around participatory modes of artist engagement with locality through social/community practices.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Robert D'souza: orcid.org/0000-0002-0977-0082

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