This article discusses collaborative art projects in India between artists and workers and working communities where the art projects do not just utilise the labour of workers but are also thematically centred around the topic of labour. Some of these artists and collectives have been working on labour since the 1990s and have moved away from depicting exploitation (which can be accused of being parasitic on the suffering of others), to develop a different method of working in which the artist invites a collaboration with the workers, to either participate in a process-oriented work with an open-ended outcome or to produce an art project together. It will shed light on the nature of this collaboration, taking into consideration the stark class difference the relationship between the artist and worker. Often the work aims to improve the working or living conditions of the collaborator, which poses the question on how work made with artists is differentiated from the work of NGOs where also the objective is to elevate the workers’ living conditions. 

From the very start, many of these art projects then take on board the issues of guilt due to the stark class difference between the collaborators. To build an equal relationship takes time and is often not possible if the project is a commissioned work and needs to be produced within a specific time frame. It also brings up the question whether creating a work that is based on others’ misery is just another form of exploitation – and often the artist consciously looks for another role for themselves and the intervention that they can make. 

Some art projects have been successful in the past, often based on a long-standing relationship with the worker or working community, with artists supporting the community beyond the boundaries of the project. But what are the elements that constitute good or bad practice, where are the boundaries to be drawn? Which role do institutions and funding systems play that often only allow for a certain duration to work on a project? What is the ethical way to produce socially engaged artworks within an art market system that is profit-oriented?

Socially Engaged Practises in the Arts

Internationally collaborative practice emerged out of the conceptualism of the 1960s in the United States of America [1]. The occurrence of collaborative practice can be understood as a token of the transition from modernism to postmodernism in the west inseparable.

From free-market capitalism and the neoliberal shift in at first Europe and northern America. This shift brought about political change through privatisation and austerity, free trade and a wide-spread general faith in the market. Economic growth is valued higher than labour rights and the conditions that allow for this growth, which promotes exploitation and social injustice are justified as necessary. The results were and still are felt not just in the reduction of public services such as education and healthcare but also through eroding of democracies all over the world. New forms of resistance and protest invited new formations and gatherings and a growing interest in collectivity and cooperation resulted in a new understanding of what ‘public’ meant, but also how this togetherness is navigated across class.

This also affected the cultural sector. Apart from artist’s protests and political movements, a new sensibility for community and care as an antidote to the capitalist forces became popular. Creating together as a mode of artistic production initiated a paradigm shift away from the myth of aesthetic autonomy, which was not just mirrored in the content of a work but also the mode of artistic production. Artistic mediums that demanded the help of many hands came into existence: installation and conceptual art, multimedia and particularly video art. The emergence of these practices suggests we reconsider the autonomy of the artists and artistic authorship. The lone figure of the studio artist, embodying both idea and the making of the work became obsolete, the myth of the artistic genius [2], was increasingly replaced by joint efforts of artist collectives, artist studios, collaborations, practices that sought to ‘expand the field’ with relational practices through a transdisciplinary interest in collective knowledge production. Art’s primary role became that of critique and negotiation and became increasingly radical. While the latest phase of capitalism influenced western societies, globalisation carried these changes into other parts of the world and here too, it impacted artistic practice. This causes a call for a reconsideration of the artist’s identity. The artist as a worker in service of society, protest as an art form, community-based art and political engagement were at the base of these new avatars of the artist and art. Simultaneously it appears that the dematerialisation of labour in the 21st century and the move of artistic practice away from object-based artworks go hand in hand too. As the new age of automation is beginning and technology allows for the internet-enabled outsourcing of labour or its elimination, artists respond by embracing digital and dialogical practices. As they watch social bonds and interpersonal relationships loosen and our ‘being together’ in a mutual space become marginalised, it becomes even more important for art to resist this tendency.

French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud describes this connection of artists and communities working together as a ‘social glue.’ This approach to making art is an invitation to the perception that we all share the same world and that artworks can be judged based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce, or prompt [2]. According to his theory of Relational Aesthetics, a relational artist is serving the community, whether through creating a social environment or though inviting participants to engage in a social activity: “The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to find ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.” Bonding through art, according to Bourriaud, cannot be analysed by aesthetic categories, but the relationship between humans and art, interactiveness, communication and open-endedness, a social experiment as an art form.

Relational Aesthetics was critiqued for an elitist approach by several scholars, for preserving the status quo of class rather than addressing the problems in the post-modern global society. Many artists labelled as ‘relational’ never embraced the term, while others declared this theory as revolutionary. 

There has been extensive research on collaborative practises and especially in response to Relational Aesthetics, or the alternative terminology suggested by the critics: The Social Turn in the arts since the 1990s. In The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents [3], British art historian Claire Bishop, who has contributed multiple publications to this discourse, describes a strong push for participatory art projects giving a historical and theoretic overview on socially engaged art. This monograph subsumes an essay which was earlier published in 2006 in Artforum [4], in which she emphasised that the social turn in the arts privileged the process of making a work over the product, to oppose the forces in dominant capitalist culture. Bishop critiqued earlier observations and writings on socially engaged art, for turning away from talking about aesthetics and failure. This approach had been propagated by Bourriaud whose work supported the assumption that all relational art is ‘good’, as long as it is ethical. 

Dutch art educator Erik Hagoort looks at works that do not lead to a formal product, but moments of social contact in Good Intentions. Judging the Art of Encounter [5]. He too critiques Relational Aesthetics as a driving force in making art and states that socially engaged works in collaboration with communities are often closer to community work, social counselling, social activism, and, therefore, to ‘soft’ forms of ‘do-goodery’ rather than art. Taking the Social Turn as a starting point, curator Maria Lind took up the issue from Claire Bishop’s writing. The collaborative Turn [6], argues against the supposedly support-worthy categories of collaboration and critically looks at positives values, such as “loyalty, flexibility, altruism and solidarity, which for her are baked into the concept of collaboration, but collaboration can also stand for the opposite, for treachery and ethical instability. A collaborator can be a traitor, someone serving the enemy, a person not to be trusted.” 

Collaborative practice in contemporary art is one manifestation of the shift away from a textual artistic production (an object) to a participatory, process-based mode of making art. Socially engaged artworks have been in the public sphere for a long time and have been written about extensively. Responding to this, Charles Esche’s Art and Social Change [7], is a compendium of several writers on socially engaged works, manifestos and writings by artists starting with Gustav Courbet, the Paris Commune, the socialist art theory of William Morris and political commitments of Modernist avant-gardes until the early 2000s and serves as a collection of different positions from all over the world.  

In the one and the Many [8], Grant Kester describes detailed the terms and conditions of collaborating and collective efforts in art-making through different projects from around the world. He points out the intersections between collaborative art projects with the activities of NGOs, activists and urban planners. Kester argues that these parallels are symptomatic of an important transition in contemporary art practice, as conventional notions of aesthetic autonomy are being redefined and renegotiated. He describes a shift from a concept of art as something envisioned beforehand by the artist and placed before the viewer, to the concept of art as a process of reciprocal creative labour. This has arisen to resist the currently powerful neoliberal economic order, dedicated to eliminating all forms of collective or public resistance to the primacy of capital state, civil society, corporate power.

In India, the writings of art critic and curator Geeta Kapur and cultural theorist Nancy Adajania have contributed to building a frame-work around these practices. It is essential to mention here The Khoj Book of Contemporary Indian Art: 1997-2007 [9] and Nancy Adajania’s monograph The 

Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf [10], in which Adajania highlights the feminist approach in Navjot’s process-oriented way of making art, rather than an object-centred and therefore product-focused approach. A dedicated contribution to the field is the dissertation of a fellow student at my school, the School of Arts and Aesthetics, scholar Rajashree Biswal. A spatial turn in contemporary Indian Art: Politics and Aesthetics of community-based art practice [11]. This is an extensive account of the works of Navjot Altaf, KP Soman and Sanchayan Ghosh and observes aspect of community-based art practice and issues of politics of space, place and the life of a community. Biswal focusses on the viewership, audience and participants and especially the space the actors share, her research is based on observations and fieldwork, while my research focused on the aspects of art projects as social interventions, the relationship between artist and worker and more broadly on the politics of collaborative practices.

Public Art in the Metropolis

In December 2008 the public art event 48°C Public. Art. Ecology, a combined initiative of Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan and GTZ/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit [12], brought together a vast number of artists who through their work responded to natural and humanmade ecological disasters, urban planning, privatisation of the public sector and particularly climate change. The artistic director and curator for the project was Pooja Sood, who is also the director of Khoj International Artists’ Association.

The title, 48°C Public. Art. Ecology, hinted at the national capital’s scorching temperatures in summers. At that time, the maximum temperatures in the national capital were about 42° degrees and the ‘48°’ of the title became a frightening prediction of the effects of climate change. Twenty-five artists and artist collectives were part of this art event, often referred to as India’s first public art festival. Among them were filmmaker and artist Shaina Anand and architect and artist Ashok Sukumaran, who co-founded and organised the collaborative project CAMP [13], in Mumbai since 2007, a trans-disciplinary space that loosely arranges itself around ideas of networks: digital, human relational or any other form. The artists do not identify as a collective, but as the organisers of a space, that they speak about in the third person, as a space that goes beyond the “individual vs institutional will” [14]. Apart from having founded CAMP, Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand are also part of the Gulf Labor Coalition, an international group of artists and activists working to ensure that migrant worker’s rights are being protected at the construction sites of museums and other institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Ashok is one of the three members, together with Walid Raad and Andrew Ross, whose visa has been denied to the UAE on the grounds of ‘security’. Ashok had been very vocal about the working conditions on Saadiyat Island. In his presentations, he was able to reveal the film material on previous trips to the UAE, showing the workers being forced to stay in labour camps.

CAMP’s project for 48°, Motornama Roshanara, was site-specific, participatory and aimed at bringing local residents, residents of the city of Delhi and a community of local workers together in the form of a collaboration between artists, a theatre director and rickshaw pullers from West Delhi. 

The idea of using lived experiences for artworks is central here. In this project, however, the experiences are not the artist’s personal or the artist family’s experiences, but rather the lived experiences of a group of workers which become the content for the artist’s work. Equally, it was not just Ashok and Shaina facilitating the project Motornama Roshanara, they involved theatre practitioner M. Azam Quadri assisted by Ankur Taneja to rehearse with a group of 25 cycle rickshaw pullers [15], who typically perform their duty in West Delhi, on Roshanara Road. In a series of theatre practice-based workshops over a few days, the group developed a narrative of sites of labour that then was worked into a tour. 

Rickshaw pullers in West Delhi are all male and mostly migrants from Bihar. They are largely dependent on a network of local knowledge about police, sleeping places, money lenders, cheap food and any kind of informal support structures. Homeless, with no access to health care and constant exposure to pollution, they are extremely vulnerable to violence and sickness. At the same time, through transporting people and goods for short distances in a specific part of town, they are the bearer not only of local knowledge and the history of the space but also gossip that helps them to survive. All this was brought together for this project (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Rickshaw Puller Ajay with Audience: MP3 Players and Headphones with Selected Audio Passages and Songs Aided the Journey. The Audience was Instructed by the Rickshaw Puller About What to Listen to and when, Courtesy of CAMP

Source: https://studio.camp/photologue/gallery/motornama/#12

Through the theatre workshop, the group (joined by Ashok) developed a narrative that combined storytelling, touristy cycle tour elements, sound recordings and a great degree of improvisation through the cyclists. The guided rickshaw tours could be booked beforehand through the 48°C Public. Art. Ecology public art festival. Rickshaw cyclists were to pick up the visitors from the Pul Bangash metro station and take them on a 45-minute tour through one of West Delhi’s industrial areas. The rickshaw pullers handed over headphones to the participants and instructed them to listen to an audio track with old Bollywood movie songs, while the tour guide/rickshaw puller would pedal and then stop at different sites that had been chosen in the workshop phase. The songs were all of women pining for their lovers who had gone to “pardes” (abroad) “and on hearing it one realised that the other side of the relationship in these songs, so aestheticised and romanticised and you realise that this man who is pulling the rickshaw, moving you with his own muscle power–is the migrant “piya”, it was a startling realisation for me [16].”

Many of these sites were industries that had undergone massive change due to modernisation, among them a threading factory, a motor repair shop, the Delhi Flour Mill, the Baraf Khana a 100-year-old ice block factory- the Sri Laxmi Printing Press but also the Palace Cinema, which used to be a hangout place for audiences from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, like the rickshaw pullers. You could not enter the cinema, but you could stand outside and watch a video of “a projection motor under the banyan tree with commentary by the cigarette stand, Mochi and watchman. Palace cinema was Asia's largest seater (800) when it was built in the ’40s. It was also the first to get a license under the new Republic of India in 1948. It has been lying closed for eight years due to a family dispute [17].” Other sites of leisure of the workers included the Siddharth Dhaba, Gurudev’s Chai stall and Indra Beej (seed) Market, where trunks are stored in which the Rickshaw cyclists keep their belongings. This last stop was optional depending on how engaging the relationship between the rickshaw puller and his audience was (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Palace Cinema, Courtesy Camp

Source: https://studio.camp/photologue/gallery/motornama/#20

Among the participants were students and artists but of course also the more privileged South Delhi art crowd, to whom the neighbourhood was not too alien.

Many of those wealthy today and living in posher parts of the city have lived initially in West Delhi and have their history with the place that they then in return shared with the cycle rickshaw pullers. These were narratives from a different time and class than the workers, but it underlines how a city can be read through multiple voices that share the same space (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Rickshaw Puller Peddling Through West Delhi, Courtesy of CAMP

Source: https://studio.camp/photologue/gallery/motornama/#20

I also want to stress that critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary and new media were a significant concern at that time. The interdisciplinary research platform Sarai was at its peak in terms of attention and programming at that time, which primarily dealt with the transformation of urban space and data, law and media infrastructures. In one of the photos from the documentation Ravi Sundaram is visible, who would be the editor of the book The Cities of Everyday Life [18], a few years later, a compendium which reflects on the contemporary urban condition of globalised cities and examines the politics of information and digital urbanism. It is important to embed this project in the interests and burning questions of the intellectual class of that time in Delhi. CAMP, as outsiders from Bombay, were friends with many of the people working with Sarai.

The tour narrated the labour history of that particular part of town, highlighting sites of rapidly changing industries, old industries still intact like the factory that manufactures thread and new industries like the car part manufactures. The cinema, the dhabas and tea stalls represent a place for leisure time for the workers.

Simultaneously the ‘tour’ drew attention to the legal struggle of rickshaw cyclists. A petition [19], with the Delhi High Court in 2007, the result of which was still awaited at the time of the public art event, had sought to strike down the licence cap (number of legally permitted rickshaws) imposed by the city. The license cap allowed 99,000 rickshaws while there were about 4.5 lakhs rickshaw pullers in the city and the cap was pushing them into illegality. This circumstance had been the driving force for CAMP to work with the rickshaw pullers and to create public attention to the issue. Two months after the project, the cap was lifted. 

Delhi’s ever-increasing levels of air pollution cause a health emergency every year. The toxic particles to a large extent are due to vehicular emissions on Delhi’s roads. In these circumstances, people have been pointing out that cycle rickshaws were the environment friendliest vehicle to travel short distances in the city. Undeniably a cycle rickshaw has zero emissions, but this statement does not take into account the fact that the cyclist is breathing all the toxic air for the entire time of his shift. Furthermore, through this project, the rickshaw cyclists were given the opportunity to claim their agency to narrate the “invisible” sections of their workday routine.

“People say that rickshaws don’t cause pollution but in Delhi alone more than 9 lakh people are rickshaw pullers. You see them pulling rickshaws during the day but don’t know where they disappear or what they do in the evening. On Roshanara road alone, more than 20 thousand men from the same district, Gonda in UP, are rickshaw pullers. If you also include people pulling handcarts here, I don’t even know how big the count will be!” [20]. Translated from the introduction of the audio recording that was played to the audience of Motornama Roshanara.

But as a participatory event, it created experiences on both sides, that of the worker and that of the visitor. What was crucial about the work was the degree to which the rickshaw pullers were the authorial force behind their narrations and the extent of the agency they could claim. 

While historical periodisation and the random and erratic division of visual culture into named stylistic groupings continue to operate as what Michel Foucault has termed ‘dividing practices through which the institutional organisation of knowledge gains both its power and its internal coherence’, both market values and interpretative values have continued to depend on the undisputed centrality of the author. In mobilising cultural practices for political struggle Walter Benjamin decreed that “the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can be identified, or better chosen, only based on his position in the processes of production [21].”

The collaborative efforts between artists and workers to create artworks are mostly defined as naturally site-specific and based on an extended interaction between the worker and the artist. The engagement between the artists, a local team of a theatre practitioner, a researcher, the rickshaw pullers and then the audience was within the space of the workers, who shared not only their workspace but also the knowledge that mattered to their survival and CAMP took on the role of facilitator of their creativity. At the same time, they were free not to share their knowledge or alter the narrative if they had the desire to not share with the audience. The engagement between the audience and the rickshaw pullers cut across class. The audience comprised mainly students, academics, journalists, artists and curators all from superior financial backgrounds. While the rickshaw pullers were labouring to transport their audiences, they were also performing their labour. The aim of the journey was not to reach a certain point but to share some time and some knowledge across the tremendous social gaps that generally separate the rickshaw pullers and their fares, as they became performer and audience. 

The artists collective CAMP did not make any profit from this work. They had been given a grant to realise the work and they chose not to produce a physical artwork, but an experience. I would argue that it created an experience for the audience, the visitor but also for the rickshaw puller, to tell his story. Storytelling, theatrical practice is also at the heart of the next work I would like to discuss, but from an anthropological point of view.

An Anthropological Approach

In many ways, contemporary art has absorbed methodological strategies from anthropology and reformulates the collaborative interaction between the artist and a local community group. Hal Foster describes this phenomenon as the artists positioning themselves as outsiders in a community but bringing with them the institutional authority and the aim of artistic self-representation.

Dissemination seems to be the key when it comes to collaborative practice in India or any country with a gap between the rich and poor. Dissemination of privilege, access and also money. There is no recipe for socially engaged art, that if applied correctly will produce good work, but from these observations, I would like to underline that there needs to be equality in making, a politically engaged and non-hierarchical in structure.

The intersectionality of issues of class, caste and gender is overpowering in a country like India. Exploitation and appropriation weigh so heavy that I wish to stress that western concepts of collaborative and community-based practices need to be rethought when worked with here. In a developing country, socially engaged art projects are needed, but perhaps not if created for a market or the institution but rather as a learning experience. Too often, the politics of representation decide who gets to tell which story in what way and who controls the narrative of what is being shared with an audience. Artworks that attempt to alter structures need to be observed closely and only the developments after the encounter between the artist and the artwork can show results whether it was a fruitful and helpful intervention. Some of the examples seen underline the fact that artists have not been a service to the community, but made the community serve them. A social experiment is a failure when it takes the form of exploitation in favour of a white cube exhibit.

The relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work and the ‘exceptionality’ of art merge in collaborative projects between artists and workers. Unfortunately, in India in socially engaged art, it seems that the artist uses the worker to the bridge the gap that privilege has created. Most of the collaborative works in India become social experiments, exposing vulnerabilities and feeding off the experiences of the workers, treating themselves as a medium and material of expression, rather than engaging with them or empowering them. Some have even come to appropriate local forms of production and the lower the worker is in the class and caste hierarchy, the more we find a lack of power to contest the appropriation. A successful collaboration or a working together is marked through successful empowerment of the community of workers, either in acknowledging their skill or in material or financial sustainability in which the artists become a catalyst and not a maker with a plan. 

Lastly, I wish to point out that a lack of critique and debate in India towards socially engaged projects has enabled many of the projects from the last two decades seem so exploitative, or ethically unjust. Academics and critics are from the same class as most artists and it is challenging to build a culture of debate when one’s guilt comes in the way. Perhaps we need to pay close attention to support academics, critics and curators as much as artists from disenfranchised backgrounds to go to the fore and enable them to speak back.

Bio

Arnika Ahldag is the associate curator at MAP. As an art historian, she investigates the representation of labour in Indian contemporary art. Her curatorial projects include the public programme for IAF 2020 and Mapping Gender: Bodies and Sexualities in the Global South at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. As an artist she works in video and performance and her recent projects were shown at the Bhubaneswar Art Trail, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art and Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. She co-founded the Feminist Syllabus, which is part of the workshop series Pact of Silence, How to break it, a programme for intersectional feminist discourses in the arts. Over the past years she lectured at the National School of Drama and OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi. She is a PhD candidate at JNU and holds an MA from University College in London, UK and Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany.

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2. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Réel, 2002, pp. 112.

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19. Manushi Sangathan. Manushi Sangathan, Delhi vs Government of Delhi & Ors. WP(C) No. 4572/2007. Delhi High Court, February 2010.

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