Salik Ansari

Originally trained as a painter, Salik Ansari has welcomed influences from design and the digital realm, as his work has shifted towards more sociopolitical themes. His video series Home Barricades (2020), for example, looked at the increasingly prevalent encroachment of barricades onto public life in India, particularly during times of protest. Ansari’s work refused to normalize this arbitrary exclusion of the public from public space.

For his project Altar of Absences, the artist takes up another intrusion into public life. Last year, India’s top court ruled against “bulldozer justice,” the practice of retributive demolition under the pretense of governance. In the case of India, many of these instances of so-called “justice” were levied at individuals based on caste, religion, or political beliefs. Targeted structures were often summarily declared as “illegally constructed,” with their owners given little time or recourse to appeal the decision.

Similar acts of punitive (and frequently extrajudicial) destruction can be found across the globe. Altar of Absences embraces this ubiquity in its depictions of unspecified demolitions, completing their violence by concealing the targets. Instead, the artist focuses on the jaws of excavators amid the rubble, with the kind of irregular framing suggestive of newspaper reportage or shots by casual observers. The emphasis on absence serves as what Ansari calls a “living, shapeshifting scar”; Even if these walls were to be reconstructed exactly as they were, the site would always carry the memory of this violence. With the title of the series, the artist nurtures a kind of devotion to these memories, delivering a firm rebuke to the political amnesia that weaponizes the regulation of public space.

Text: Kate Sutton