INTO
THE WATER
“I could not just be on the bank all the time,” says Atul Bhalla, a visual artist whose sustained engagement with environmental issues focuses on the politics and aesthetics of water, especially of the Yamuna River. After years of observing ecological deterioration and alienation of the river from urban communities, Bhalla ritualistically submerges himself in the water, alluringly captured in this set of fourteen serial photographs. Before completely disappearing into the water, Bhalla’s head begins to reemerge, alluding to a hope of renewal and rebirth that water may bestow upon us. Kuwait and Puerto Rico-based artist Alia Farid’s film takes us to Chibayish, a marsh in Iraq near her paternal grandmother’s hometown where severe droughts and political instability has caused climate displacement of all species. Working with three young marshland residents, Farid tells stories of a fragile ecosystem on the brink of disappearance due to resource extraction and climate change.
Atul Bhalla
I was not waving but drowning II
Atul Bhalla (Indian, 1964)
2005
Digital pigment photograph face-mounted to plexiglass
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Purchase through the generosity of Jose M. Soriano, ©Atul Bhalla, Photo President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2008.235.1-14.
14 frames, 1 man, 1 river. Atul Bhalla’s I was not waving but drowning II is a seminal photographic series documenting a deceptively simple gesture: Bhalla submerging himself in the Yamuna River, documented in successive moments.
While we are spellbound by the seemingly pristine surface of the Yamuna River in this photographic series, Bhalla’s meditative act of gradual submersion cannot be understood without us recognising the river’s increasingly polluted state. Despite its historical significance as a site of religious and everyday cleansing, the Yamuna has become so filled with industrial and human waste that it is now considered to be ecologically dead. It is with this context that we reassess Bhalla’s otherwise mundane act, recognising his intentional subjugation of his body to the many pollutants in the river.
While Bhalla’s face appears to be serene, trustingly wading deeper into the river with his eyes closed, we can also notice a suspension of breath that suggests a reluctance to fully enter the water. In the last 5 frames of the work, Bhalla has gone so far into the river that the water has risen up to his nose—yet not a single air bubble rises up and interrupts the surface. Neither are there natural ripples indexed on the surface as his body parts it. We sense the trepidation of his movement, Bhalla gingerly and steadily fulfilling this gesture despite potential discomfort. The progression of Bhalla’s body sinking into the river, at chest level up to his very brow, resembles a longitudinal study of moon in its waning and waxing. In the third last frame, Bahlla’s forehead and its reflection form an almost perfect sphere. And if we were to indulge in this allusion to lunar study, Bhalla’s photographic series too does not suggest that the surface impression of a body descending into water represents the full truth—there is always more that lies beneath/behind the reflective sides of the moon.
The work’s title, taking after Stevie Smith’s 1972 poem Not Waving but Drowning, seems to perfectly encapsulate the melancholy of Bhalla’s processual rite. Like Smiths’ poem, there is an immediate expectation of enjoyment, “larking” and delight by being in Yamuna, but Bhalla allows us to partake in his contemplation of how far gone pollution of the river has become. This living body of water is dying, Bhalla’s act of submergence no longer a waypoint for many more years of the same rite, but rather marked as a historical instance before complete death. [TW]
Alia Farid
Chibayish (stills), 2022
Alia Farid (Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican, 1985)
UHD video (color, sound)
20 min 18 s
Commissioned by the Whitney Biennial on the occasion of the 2022 Whitney Biennial “Quiet as it’s kept”, NY, USA.
Courtesy of the artist
Chibayish (stills), 2023
Alia Farid (Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican, 1985)
UHD video (color, sound)
15 min 03 s
Commissioned by The Vega Foundation and Doha Film Institute
Courtesy of the artist
Alia Farid’s two-part video work Chibayish (2022-23) captures the thick present of Southern Iraq marshlands in the city of Al-Chibayish. Dwelling within this community of Marsh Arabs for weeks at a time, Farid lingers within the movement of these historic and living environs, at the convergence between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Farid contests the flattening of these locales as static, endless repositories of natural resources, refusing to document the river’s place as merely subservient to the larger infrastructures of water supply to neighboring cities, such as her home country of Kuwait, and rampant industrial oil production.
The environmental urgency of Farid’s Al-Chibayish portrait is decidedly against further desiccation of the landscape through her artwork. Al-Chibayish has been plagued by desertification through (post-Gulf War) retaliative marsh draining and (Turkish) dam building, resulting in higher soil salinity, loss of animal and rice cultivation, and the displacement of native peoples. While the catastrophic effects of these historical events are dire and shape the lives of her subjects, Farid focuses on the continuity of both human and non-human life that has been sustainable since its inception. Centering the rising generation of Marsh Arabs who will inevitably face even harsher conditions, Farid recognizes the inherently political position her subjects have been placed in, namely in staking the right to their way of life—of cultivation without expansion.
In the first part of Chibayish, 2022, Farid follows three working male teenagers in Chibayish. Farid articulates her experience in the marshes not as a landscape to behold, but a continuous attunement to the rhythms of water buffalo rearing and the flow of the river ways. For the majority of the video, we do not experience the river as a water body, but rather a concomitant partner of daily life. Farid’s camera glides through the Qasab (giant tall grass), allowing us to see how the teen boys (Riad Samir, Jassim and Qassim Mohammed) and their water buffalo alike flit through its density, their inter-species herding calls ringing through the reeds. Life in the Chibayish marsh is in constant motion, the teen boys eclipsed in height by the Qasab growth yet expertly navigating the waterways in their mashoofs (long and narrow canoes). Farid’s entrancing cinematography of their habitual motions are not just a camera tracking the singular human subject, but the unfolding of a psycho-geographic landscape. We sense this even more strongly as the boys collaboratively recall the network of waterways and homes from memory, a reciprocal conversation overlaid on fluid shots of the boys traversing these otherwise nondescript river passages. The boys seem to allude to the displacement of old neighbors due to climate change, but an argument is never fully put forth—they process it first through the emptying of houses along the waters.
Farid does not over-articulate the environmental degradation, simply directing our gaze to the behemoth-like industrial drain feeding into the river. This singular shot creeps into the seemingly endless gushing of wastewater, erect and obtuse in its imposing presence. Farid associates this end of infrastructure to the logics of empire, juxtaposing footage of the Neo-Babylonian Ziggurat of Ur temple with digitally superimposed 3-D scans of Aquafina bottles found on-site by the artist. Comparing the surviving remains of civilization through the architectural monument with the non-biodegradable human waste of plastic bottles in Chiabyish’s thick present is bitingly sardonic—the floating bottles tumbling through atemporal space and time is also a direct reference to Chibayish’s increasing dependence on imported bottled water.
In the second video (2023), Farid delves deeper into the area to present an ecological portrait of Chibayish, a dawn to dusk and centrifugal rendering of vibrant life from their single material mudhif homes. Made entirely from local reeds, in bundles and ropes, this sustainable cultivation is not only in the physical structure of the home, but in the very construction of its foundations and the creation of artificial islands. We see more clearly along the banks of the river, with marshland fenced and filled with reeds and mud till there is distinct land from water, Riad and his friends effortlessly living in between these terrains with their dance, song, cooking, and unadulterated playing. [TW]
