‘Dilli bohot hi khatarnak sheher hai. Yahaan kuch bhi ho sakta hai,’ Niroj whispers excitedly, when I ask him about an archaic Gorkha dagger that one of his otherworldly sculptures wields. Occupied by fur-lined creatures and six-feet tall prometheans, the doors to his studio apartment swivel open onto the threshold of a forever war between visible ghosts and invisible cities; it is the liminal point-of-no-return where the inaudible growls of primaeval beings assembled out of everyday objects feel at home with the whistling shrill of a tea kettle. And amidst this imperium of mystical creatures, expressive drawings, sharp-eyed photographs of forbidden sites on the sly, and innumerable objects, lies the very fabric of Niroj’s reality, his share of a trepid night that began almost a decade ago when he came to Delhi and started working in the city’s landfills.
Niroj’s visual practice is informed by a methodical understanding of dealing with waste materials and discarded objects that inhabit overflowing junkyards and innocuous dumps all around us. At these landfills or dhalav, he becomes the vivisector, peeling away the rugged, superficial layers of everyday usage and incises into the very heart of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘the equipmental being of equipment.’ This is what makes his enquiry magical, for landfills, according to Niroj, are altars of rebirth where objects find a life renewed, where new meanings are associated with everyday items, where the value of an equipment far exceeds what it may have been used for before.
However, it is a mediated magic. In creating the stupefying assemblages that have inhabited his world, Niroj has spent years collecting artefacts and documenting evidence at landfills and waste-management sites. The artist-provocateur, in disrupting our everyday realities with his works, is also the artist-archivist building a monumental cabinet of curiosities that stands in remembrance of things past. From obsolete technology to fifty-year old wooden toys and figurines, it is this persisting engagement with object collection—which began as early as when he was 15 years old—that allows Niroj to contrive towards a unique execution of unimaginable assemblages. In the alchemical symphony of the beautiful and the grotesque, we glimpse the making of a mythology that acknowledges the far-reaching implications of life coming out of a landfill. In his totemic drawings and collages, we see the coming of an ethereal and complex race of objects and beings that cut through Niroj’s lived experience. These are entities that transcend the politics of the wasteland, where the machineries of the State keep digging, hiding, and (often deliberately) destroying objects throughout the night; it is a macabre spectacle that Niroj absorbed every night as he laboured at these landfills. Today, when we see his ruminations on paper, it is hard to imagine and relate with the eyes that witnessed cover-ups, deaths, scandals, and a mortal peril of existence—yet they are always there, lurking.
When Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction short story The Evitable Conflict was published, it presented an anxious world where humanity’s fateful decisions were in the hands of robots so advanced that humans could not even recognise them, let alone exercise any control over them. A similar Hydra rears its several heads from Niroj’s artworks today. It is a paracausal entity, free from the shackles of our physical world and its rules, slowly spreading its tentacular form all around us. It bulges on our nonchalance towards waste and waste disposal, quietly becoming unreasonably out of control. These artworks may leave you amused with their outlandish drama, but make no mistake, in their grisly presence we are witnessing the symptoms of a rot that could eclipse the horizon, lest we mend our follies.
Text@Shankar Tripathi