sharmila samant

Alongside Sharmila Samant's widely exhibited Handmade saree (1999) fabricated from Coca-cola bottle caps, during Shanghai Contemporary, in the curated section, called, "Best of Discoveries," Samant presented her 'custom-made' sarees at her booth from a preset list of patterns and bottlecap options. The original Handmade Saree in white, off-white, and red, a unique design, based on the Tangail saree pattern popularly worn by women in Calcutta at the time of puja. Unlike the earlier saree, assembled by the artist's hand while she participated in a long-term residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, the sarees available on order at Shanghai were to be manufactured as cloned factory pieces.

Samant's project emphasizes the irony of customized work manufactured from ready-made, disposable bottlecaps, and couples criticism of commercial marketing and exploitative labor with precise attention to formal, aesthetic detail. It draws on historical consciousness of recent consumerism and branding in India, as after a 30-year ban, Coca-Cola was only reintroduced into India following the liberalization of the country's economy in 1991. Samant's sarees further engage a play between the original and the ready-made, as a culturally specific, contemporary critique of a modern discourse originally initiated by Marcel Duchamp. Alongside her sarees, Samant presents three explanatory texts, outlining "the handmade," "the saree," and the "coca and cola trees" native to Africa and the Americas that are thought to have addictive properties.

Samant's fabrication and installation of these sarees dovetail with related projects that question practices of exploitative labor and consumerism in contemporary culture. In 2003, the artist executed an installation of "Handpicked Rejects," for which she selected designer label articles of clothing that would have been sewn in sweat-shops, then sold street-side in Mumbai after being 'rejected' by their manufacturers. She located their imperfections and marked them by embroidering those spots, then reselling the articles with artist-produced 'authenticity' certificates at European prices. While her goods were presented in a sleek, mock-Western store setting, Samant played in the background a looped sound piece that relayed the interaction of hawking on the street. Samant has explained that "the 'hand picked rejects' is in a utopian sense a nemesis where the premium is placed not on the designer label but on the fact that I, a third world artist, by embroidering 'This is an original' and placing it within 'The House of Culture,' have re-authenticated a REJECT and sublimated it to be an Art-work, and thereby also plagiarized and hacked (interfered) the REJECT - to raise it to the status of an original."

In 2000, Samant branded "Loca Cola," a vending cart that sold local drinks from various countries in Coca Cola bottles. Samant noted that while Coca-cola is ubiquitous, "on closer observation the coke bottle in every country is distinct and though they all seem identical, they are in fact simulacral." In this way, the artist's homemade 'local' bottled drinks questioned the idea of a universal, critiquing how global marketing can subsume local products and tastes.

In "Shifts," executed while at the Rijksakademie, Samant further engaged a dialogue between global and local by plotting three land routes from Mumbai to Amsterdam that overlapped the traditional Silk Road. Attempting to understand the experience of geographical displacement by mapping this physical journey, Samant sourced traditional shoes from a total of 19 countries to represent the culture of that place. Explaining her use of footwear as the primary visual symbol in this project, Samant noted that "footwear, an object which implies journeys, would stand as a metaphor for the respective countries along these routes. The traditional footwear would also be an ethnographic marker, as it would reflect local characteristics, interests, quality of life, as well as migrations that have taken place centuries ago." The resulting installation presented a darkened room sunk in blacklight, with projections of international branded logos in neon superimposed onto a proportionate world map. As spotlights drew attention to individual shoes and countries, Samant illuminated the competing tensions of historical and contemporary globalization.

While developing ongoing themes in her artistic practice that interlink individual projects, much of Samant's work in the past decade has been executed in distinct, discrete projects while participating in international residencies. Commenting on the process of creating work in this context, Samant has noted that "much of my praxis has been executed in residencies outside my geographical context, and thus deals with transition. Working within the frameworks of artist residencies, I am faced with the dichotomy of being the outsider/inside. I like to describe this as I am here now, but I am going home."

Besides her independent art practice, Samant leads Open Circle, an artist-led initiative in Mumbai that uses artwork and activism to probe local contemporary politics.

Beth Citron