Images that speak

Ravi Agarwal’s repertoire includes video, performance, public art, in situ installations and found objects

Bindu Gopal Rao

He is an artist, curator, writer and photographer, all rolled into one, but not just that. Ravi Agarwal is also an environmental activist. Founder of Toxics Link, he was initially trained as an engineer and has expanded his interests way beyond that.

The beginnings

The artist lives and works in New Delhi and his work explores the turbulent relationship between man and nature through the prism of urban decay and ecological sustainability. “It is central to my work, and I try to explore the causes behind this, which are historical as well as political and philosophical. I started photographing when I was 12 years old. Not wanting to do photojournalism or commercial photography, and there being no photography institutes in India then, I learnt it on my own. I became an engineer but kept photographing all the time. In my late teens, I wanted to pursue this. However, photography was not an option in art schools,” he says.

He started the NGO, Toxics Link, almost 30 years ago, in response to the lack of work on urban environments. “We have helped in bring out five legislations on waste and chemicals and introduced several new ways of managing toxics or replacing them from public use.”

Art of the matter

Ravi works in video, performance, public art, in situ installations and found objects and has held exhibitions at galleries across the globe, including Orto Botanico Museum in Rome, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunstmuseum in Bern and Newark Museum in the US.

“I work on ideas I am interested in and the mediums I use are the ones I know best. I like to challenge my own forms and hence have tried to expand my language and grammar. Public space is special for me since it offers various non-gallery challenges,” says Ravi.

He has participated in reputed international art shows such as the Sharjah Biennial in 2013, Indian Highway in 2009, Horn Please at Berne in 2007, and Documenta XI in 2002 in Kassel, Germany. In 2011, he co-curated Yamuna-Elbe, an Indo-German twin city public art and ecology project in Hamburg and Delhi.

Photo-op

His most recent work, ‘Not Just Another Day’, was showcased at ‘Games of Chance’, a show that encourages artists ‘to force viewers out of the mundane, plunging them into storms of randomness where luck and misfortune go hand-in-hand’ at Sunaparanta—Goa Centre for the Arts. His staged photographic work addresses the subject of the post-Anthropocene. It examines the possibility of a man-made disaster looming as an everyday reality of our lives and shifts the idea of the “normal”.

“I have been thinking of this as a series for some time of what a post-Anthropocene world may look like — where everything seems normal but everything has changed fundamentally. Staged performance is a genre I like to explore owing to its imaginative possibilities. Leandre’s curatorial invitation and note triggered off this work and help kick it off.” Ravi is inspired by the multilayered, understated work where things are left open and unsaid, but are very much present. “It is this subtle balance I think is critical for art to succeed for me.”