The opressed act as dehumanized pawns in a propaganda that oppresses them— Like monkey shaped dustbins with USE ME signs, a monkey-fied aboriginal god mobilises the oppressed caste folks to do the dirty criminal work for their vedic-aryan master.  

Found in public places and cermonial halls, the Monkey Dustbin is the sudraverse expressing itself.



The work, finds such a dustbin and animates its text—


USE ME

Found Fibreglass Monkey Dustbin, Text Projection
2022

The phrase ‘USE ME’ is found written on anthropomorphic dustbins— In this scene, a uniform wearing civilian monkey holds between their legs, a container, which is to be filled with garbage by a higher (human) jati.

The Hindustani word jati, at once means, caste and species. While the literality of caste as species is stupid, it is exactly how caste laws anchor their dehumanization via Epics such as Ramayana: a mythic construction whose oldest parts date back to 8th century BCE, but which occupies a central position in current Hindutva Fascism.

From the Epic— the devotional-total-servitude of a monkey soldier (an aboriginal) towards his human-master (a vedic-brahmanical avatar), symbolises in the present, the participation of oppressed jatis (or castes) as pawns in a propaganda which oppresses them.

Like the charecterised garbage-bins, the dehumanised people of oppressed castes, often carry an invisible sign on themselves which reads ‘USE-ME’.

In the work— as more words appear to replace USE ME, the Sudra-subject struggles to express their complicated story, in the restricted space of 10 characters, which is all the textual space available on this body.

Installation developed at Serendipity Arts Residency 2022
Shown at Serendipity, Delhi and Goa, 2022