The Work of N.S. Harsha

Courtesy Pavan K.J.

Harsha in his studio

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InIVA’s Tessa Jackson Talks Nations N.S. Harsha’s grand-scale installation encourages global discussion on migrant labor, the Institute of International Visual Arts chief executive tells Modern Painters. One-on-One with N.S. Harsha The Indian artist gives Modern Painters an inside look at the inspiration behind Nations, his grand-scale installation on view at InIVA this month.

At the last Sharjah Biennial, 192 sewing machines — one for every member of the United Nations — were installed in regular rows, each endlessly darning the national flag of the country it represented. Like most of N.S. Harsha’s works, the installation Nations (2007) got straight to the point, forcing symbols of globalization’s great ideal and its harrowing reality to unsettlingly cohabit. Londoners have the chance to experience the piece firsthand this month at the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), where it has been restaged. The size of the exhibition space is much smaller than what was available in the Middle East, but this technical issue has allowed the artist and InIVA’s dynamic interim chief executive, Tessa Jackson, to rethink the piece. "We are going to intensify the installation," Jackson said before the show opened. "It will have a stronger 'sweatshop' feel."

The exhibition coincides with Harsha’s solo presentation at his London gallery, Victoria Miro; together the shows are a perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the practice of this Indian artist, who works readily with installations, large-scale paintings, and community-based projects, effortlessly moving from one medium to the next.

"Sometime back I made a small painting in which a tailor was stitching a flag," says N.S. Harsha when asked about the origin of Nations. "While making this work I visited a few tailors’ shops in Mysore, just to observe the details, and from this experience, thoughts began unfolding into different areas, such as color and its burdens of representation, the relationship between human labor and nation building, sweatshops in my part of the world, and the incredible complexities woven around the idea of nations we have today." Nations was triggered by a personal situation: it directly relates to Harsha’s hometown of Mysore (now called Karnataka), Bangalore, where the artist was born in 1969, and takes stock of the drastic changes from a local to global economy that have occurred over the past two decades.

"I enjoy living here as a permanent tourist," says Harsha, "observing and capturing the trajectories of tensions and transitions." Yet Nations reaches further than the specific, instead gesturing toward the globalized circuit of production and distribution in its entirety, a circuit that often relies on a cheap workforce. It resonated in Sharjah with the textile shops in the vicinity of the arts district; in London Nations seems designed to engage with InIVA’s East End neighborhood, an area traditionally associated with the rag trade and now home to numerous South Asian communities, many members of which are directly involved in the clothing industry. Without making any obvious moral judgment, Nations poignantly addresses the condition of the worldwide majority that doesn’t benefit from but is nevertheless subjected to the new geopolitical order.

Harsha is currently working with just one assistant and a couple of freelancers, but his team sometimes grows to epic proportions — especially when preparing community projects, a crucial part of his practice. "I’ve had all kinds of people as my assistants," he says, "lab technicians, basket makers, civil workers, engineers, carpenters, designers, microscope operators, electricians. One memorable one was a priest who helped me when I was working in a Sri Krishna temple in Singapore."

Harsha’s collaborators can also be schoolchildren; in 2005 he realized a project with the TVS School in Tumkur that involved placing all the pupils on a hill, each child standing on a white fabric flame pasted onto a rock. The images are astonishing, a quiet yet potent take on the idea of the parade: ribbons of sheer energy seem to emanate from the kids. This intervention relates to a whole ensemble of works based on rangoli, the traditional Indian form of decoration involving colored powders arranged on the floor in front of houses as a sign of welcome or celebration. Rangoli’s popular motifs are often taken from nature, and Harsha drew the shadows of branches and grass directly onto country roads, reinserting these patterns into the natural environment. In White Shadow (2002), this process became monumental: a tree’s huge white canvas silhouette was nailed down on the ground in a Japanese public park. The TVS School project went further: his flamelike shapes marked on the hill seemed to emanate from the children’s intimate beings. They linked the natural and the human, the subject and its abstracted representation.