Old Cassette covers and hand painted and scratched drawings, Year: 2020 to ongoing.
The work has started as a response to a show, "Hermes Trismegistos Dreams of Futures within Futures," a curatorial note by the art historian Damian Christinger. The exhibition was situated in Zürich Langstrasse; a long street carries the history of drug dealing, prostitution, sex clubs, diaspora and recently, a lot of gentrification. My take on the dream for a better future can only be achieved through resistance against inequality.
The work Protest Songs contain a variety of songs about historical events about citizenship, colonialism, exclusion, and resistance. It is a series of drawing installations that examine how songs, typography, speech, and poetry amplify voices that would not otherwise be heard. In general, the Protest songs are the songs of resistance against class, caste, gender, race, capitalism, war, police brutality, and unequal power distribution.
My artistic process interests me to look at how musicians of different times wrote songs to be part of a movement for cultural or political change and galvanized that movement by drawing people together and inspiring them to act or reflect. I choose to display the artwork in empty cassette cases that hold the archive of a time when social media was nonexistent and the act of protest had a different form.
I thought of my father, who had an old deck and hundreds of popular Hindi song cassettes. During his travel, he was a collector of popular songs in many different Indian languages. Drawing from that experience, I was keen on collecting the titles of the popular tunes of resistance from the last hundred years from other countries and languages for my project. I used cut-up techniques to conjure the distinct title of the songs and put them together as a form of a poem.