Documenting history of labour through art

CHENNAI: What defines labour? Is it the photograph of hands calloused, scarred and dirty or the incessant sounds of stones being broken in a quarry or the sweat-stained, threadbare clothes of a tea seller? The most tangible markers of the life of a daily wage worker make up the exhibition ‘Archiving Labour’ at Spaces, Besant Nagar.


From a farmer tosanitary cleaners and folk dancers, everydayfacesinspired a group of students from the

Government College of Fine Arts

in Chennai and Kumbakonam to explore the idea of labour. Atopicindelibly linked tothe history of thecolleges, which began as colonial industrial schools.




A brick with the engraving, ‘School of Arts Madras’ that opens the show aptly mirrors the past of the college in Chennai, which had a brick kiln, metal design and wood unit, products of which were used to build the Indo-Saracenic structures in the city. The colonial school used crafts and turned them into products for use by the British. “The Industrial Schoolof Arts, 1850, marked the beginning of ‘labour history’ within the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai. The Government College of Kumbakonam, 1887, is an extension of the Chennai college. Though the colleges did turn into a fine arts centre, yet it was not able to fully transform itself into a liberal free thinking space for artists,” says KrishnapriyaC P, an artist who worked with the students to bring together the exhibition for the Students Biennale (2016-17) in Kochi.


Working withseveral parallel layers, the show, on till March 30, has parts of history, contemporary life and stories of people, woven in. “We started by looking at

Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury

’s Triumph of Labour statue, the locked up museum in the college at Chennai and at the evolution of the colleges,” says Krishnapriya. The result was an interpretation of students who critically look at past and present and raise questions like ‘what labour’ and ‘whose triumph’.


Making it real, most of the artists have documented their deep-rooted labour histories through paintings, installations and photographs. Some of them come from traditional craft-based communities that have been associated with the colleges or narratives of people close to them. For instance, an artist uses a portrait of his father, a sign board artist, a profession now lost in the world of posters, while another goes back to his village in Madurai village to record dirge songs by professional mourners.

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