Pandemic Diary

On March 12th, 2020, I had the opening of a solo exhibition Return to Sender at Frist Art Museum, Nashville, US. I flew back to India (as the US was making a much-delayed health emergency announcement) and arrived on March 14th to then spend the next fortnight in self-quarantine at my studio in Pali Hill in Bandra, Mumbai, just across the street from my home. When some of my neighbours heard that I had voluntarily quarantined myself, they sent me appreciative text messages but three days later every inbound traveller was compulsorily being quarantined. A week later the entire nation was headed for a lockdown. Such were the shifting protocols during the unprecedented weeks of March 2020.

In the studio staying in isolation, I was witness to a whole series of new intuitions, ideas and impulses. Since 2013, I hadn’t tended to this studio all on my own the way that I could during that fortnight, whether it was watering plants on the terrace or in the backyard. It was during this time that I began to make drawings, which were essentially tracings of fallen stems on the terrace. While I would wait for water to fill the buckets, I would pick a stem and draw. Some of the trees in the studio backyard were shedding. The gulmohar tree and the mango trees were constantly dropping twigs. In the months that followed, these tracings became more elaborate. And they developed into a series of drawings titled Circadian Study (contact tracing) [seen above]. These were simple registrations of a moving shadow, capturing the changing relative positions of sun and earth across a passage of time.

Since the middle of 2020, the homepages on my computers have been websites that algorithmically calculate the population of planet Earth, at any given point. As I switch on my computer, the first thing that appears is a ticking number of how many of us are constantly being added on the planet. I did not do this with any high seriousness. I just felt this is what I’d like to see every morning. Watching the numbers change every second gives rise to some existential questions that might mutate into an ecological one. These numbers are powerful abstractions that collapse many, many ideas into a single integer.

On January 1st, I came into the studio after my typical morning routine of going for a run. As I opened the computer, looking at the ever-changing numbers I had the impulse to make a drawing. Over the course of the next few weeks, it has become a daily ritual of making these drawings that I call Integer Studies Drawing From Life.

It has been several months of not travelling, which is in sharp contrast to my usual itinerary over the last two decades. At the same time, I’ve not felt any need to travel and have been very content with the silence and relative isolation of the last several months. It is the same with Reena [the artist Reena Saini Kallat]. As artists, we live a very ritualised kind of life. I’m an early riser. I have some morning routine followed by a studio routine and I love to return to a certain environment at home. I might even step out again for a night walk, and then I’m in bed very early. And for all of 2020, this rhythm has been beautifully harmonised and undisturbed, as there is no other travel or social interruption. It’s actually been an extremely creative 12 months.

In April, May and June of 2020 I also remember feeling a deep turbulence, because at a personal level I was feeling very fulfilled and content—and yet it was the most complex time for much of humanity. We knew what was happening in our country, in terms of the migrant crisis. I remember telling a friend that I’m having this acute guilt, and she said, “Listen, do what you are meant to do, and do what else you can.”

We all have experienced a time of intense flux—a time of great many transformations and adaptations even as we were forced into immobility, in some relative state of stillness. But creatively speaking, I think that’s exactly what you need. If you’re constantly moving, you can see the world in illusory inverse motion. You can best watch the world change if you are in one place.

If I look back at the 12 months, the fact that there was a static location with an evacuated diary of minimal external commitments meant that there was a fixed microclimate around oneself, it’s been truly rewarding in many ways.

(As told to Nandini Nair)

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