N.S. Harsha. Nations. Installation view at Iniva at Rivington Place. 2009. IMAGE COURTESY INIVA AT RIVINGTON PLACE.

Still Seeing Sewing Machines

Shanay Jhaveri travels from Mumbai to London for N.S. Harsha's three autumn shows but finds the scenery in his ordered universe perturbingly unchanged.

THE LATTER HALF OF 2009 SAW A CONSTELLATION OF SHOWS BY N.S. Harsha. First, a suite of new paintings at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, was displayed from the 9th of September to the 3rd of October. Later - coinciding with the Frieze Art Fair - two galleries in London showcased his work. At Victoria Miro, Harsha presented new paintings and an installation (the public was allowed from the 10th of October to the 14th of November) and Iniva at Rivington Place hosted the third airing of Nations (2007) from the 18th of September to the 21st of November. The latter was a room-filling installation of 192 sewing machines, which did not quite do justice to the expressive potential of the simultaneous displays.

Harsha's work - be it in the form of paintings, sculptures or community-based collaborations - has always been consistent in its concerns: an exploration of humanity en masse.His large-scale canvases are often overly populated with ever-present individuals - lined up one after another in rows, their singularity gives way to the formation of a group identity. His installations, on the other hand, often consist of static assemblages of objects that present instructive totalities. For instance, in Leftovers (2008), an installation with a line of banana leaves topped with plastic rice and vegetables, persons missing were represented only by sets of painted footprints found beside each leaf. Likewise, the static sewing machines of Nations seemed to record the aftermath of an event. In both works, things were left behind - unfinished food in one, flags in the other. They were not ruminations on absence; rather, they sought to define absence.

Showing Nations at Rivington Place, which is situated in London's East End, was a clever acknowledgement of the area's large population of immigrant labourers. The point was also underscored because Harsha's installation was displayed in conjunction with a silent film by Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen. Factory (2003) followed a group of women exploring an abandoned garment plant in Taiwan where they used to work in the 1960s. Chen persuaded them to revisit the place for his film, seven years after it had been shut down. The correlation between the two artworks was obvious: they dealt with forgotten and alienated labourers. The most productive aspect of this enforced association was that it aligned Harsha with other Asian contemporary video artists whose works deal with ordinary labouring lives that have been displaced with no testaments recording their lives. Liu Wei's Hopeless Land (2008) has documented a scene in Beijing where farmers, dislodged in favour of a rubbish dump, have been reduced to becoming scavengers; Cao Fei's Whose Utopia (2006 -2007) has explored the dreams and aspirations of workers at the large OSRAM China Lighting Ltd, a factory in the Pearl River Delta; and Jia Zhangke's 24 City (2008) has focused on Factory 420, a former Communist aeronautics and munitions plant built in 1958, that was demolished to make way for a luxury hotel and apartment block. Jia culled his footage from 130 interviews with five of the plant's former workers, their individual remembrances coalescing into a group portrait, while Cao focused on individual escapist fantasies. Like Harsha, each of these artists has formulated an understanding of the past and the present through an assembly of dispossessed individuals.