Fieldnotes from Begumpura

Family Vacation, Rahee Punyashloka

500 years ago Bhakti poet Ravidas imagined a casteless city, Begumpura– the first recorded utopia in South Asian history. Today artist Rahee Punyashloka brings us his Fiednotes from Begumpura, a creative repository of communal and personal inquiries and histories. Join Rahee in this talk where he will engage in discussions around his work’s thematic concerns, processes and the mediums that he works with. In his research-based, multi-medium series, Rahee fashions himself as an ethnographer of Begumpura, recording chronicles of its people and everyday life.

In another series, Family Vacation, he explores through the absence of photographs imagined memories that were never made. The series, in the absence of bodies eludes to the experiences of Dalit persons torn apart from their family through exile and displacement, shared grief and solitary hiding, public censures and forced promises, and the perpetual lack that makes family vacation impossible. Washed in shades of deep blue and full of motifs that commemorate the anti-caste movement, Rahee Punyashloka’s work speaks of the anti-caste struggle. He builds a creative repository that exposes us to both communal and personal inquiries and histories – one that challenges colonial ethnographers and archives aided by extant Brahmanical ideas around caste.

The artist talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Join us to listen to and engage with the artist’s works and processes centred around social justice.

This event is conceptualised under our permanent exhibition VISIBLE/INVISIBLE: Representation of Women in Art through the MAP Collection.