Diamond’ made of 10,000 blood slides

Artist Prashant Pandey’s installation at Biennale seduces and shocks viewers

Kochi, Mar 22: It is seductive and shocking, mesmerizing and unsettling — in equal measure.  It seduces your senses from a distance and shocks your sensibility as you near it — a huge sparkling diamond made of 10,000 discarded blood slides strung together by stainless steel thread and neatly stacked in a brick-like manner.

Artist Prashant Pandey’s installation, ‘Artha’, at the Kochi Muziris Biennale (KMB) site Aspinwall House, is conceptually a phenomenal artwork with multilayered connotations. The Sanskrit word Artha refers both to the pursuit of material wealth and the quest for meaning while diamond is a universal symbol of wealth, power and vanity, he says.

Explaining the central theme of his work, he says ‘Artha’ recalls and recounts the countless sacrifices made during successive colonizations and the quest for land, domination, wealth and power. It hints at the way in which colonialism intertwined religion with economics. It raises question about the price of progress and the relationship between worldly possessions and the purpose of life.

Using discarded materials as a medium to form art objects may appear a bit of oddity as Pandey hails from a Rajasthan family of sculptors, who chisel out gods and goddesses from marble.

“As I hail from a family of marble sculptors in Jaipur, I used to play with blast stones and waste marble chips after the sculptures were chiselled. This is how my fascination for discarded materials was born,” says the 1984-born artist.

“My desire has always been to work on the changing ideologies of human emotions. Looking at how we transition from love to hate and back to love again - a philosophy which I often follow in my oeuvre. I feel it is my responsibility as an artist to look at byproducts of human activity and to regenerate that waste in order to create something new.”

Prashant Pandey, Arth at Aspinwall House

For his KMB installation, Pandey says he went to Pattanam as part of his research trip to Kochi and observed people digging and trying to find traces of ancient history. “My interest lies in working with memories and reminiscences of the past. I wanted to use this to represent the history of this beautiful site which is why I used waste blood slides. Blood signifies both life and death, glory and sacrifices in the history of Kochi. ‘Artha’ is an effort at recollecting all memories together in one form.” 

The artist collected discarded blood slides from unknown people, mostly from Rajasthan. “It contains some of my blood slides too,” he points out. “I chose a sculptural installation in the shape of a diamond, as the form depicts age-old history, excavation and material wealth.” 

KMB’14 curator Jitish Kallat says, “In stark contrast to his family tradition of chipping away at stone to create (sacred) statues of gods and goddesses, Pandey works with that which is discarded and often ostensibly ‘impure’. He is known for recycling objects that are past their use value — from marble blast and chunks of tar to visceral rejects like urine, sweat and blood — to create artworks that question cultural notions of utility and waste.”

Prashant Pandey, Arth at Aspinwall House

In creating a likeness of one of the most precious commodities in the world in blood slides brickwork, Pandey creates a juxtaposition that evokes multiple connections between money, violence and mortality. The work acts as an unsettling interruption, forcing a confrontation with the sheer corporeality of our existence, he notes.

Pandey says the Kochi Muziris Biennale is one of the best things to have happened to him so far. “It is the means for any artist to express himself or herself freely without any boundaries or commercial constraints. It is a vehicle to reach a larger audience; it has helped artists to express their ideologies in an unrestrained manner. I feel proud to be a part of this historical event and thank everyone who rallied behind to make this possible.”