QUOTIDIAN REVOLUTIONS

Arushi Vats shows how Rajyashri Goody is remaking the public sphere by addressing Dalit identity and history.

- Arushi Vats

I first saw Rajyashri Goody at a performance site a few months ago in Kochi. The venue was hosting many performances which ran simultaneously and was extremely crowded – it was difficult to discern whether it was a space for the viewing of live acts or a social gathering. There were performances which had elaborate set pieces, there were performances which were situated in odd places, and there were installations without a performer. Between this din and clamour, a small group of people had gathered around a figure crouching on the ground dressed simply in jeans and a t-shirt, repeating, ad infinitum, the act of turning an assortment of bowls upside down.

Goody’s performance Turn Your Bowl Into A Stupa (2022) was premised on transforming a simple, replicable, everyday act of flipping over a functional and universal object such as a bowl into a symbol for revolutionary thinking – the hemispherical form recalling the structure of a stupa, a sacred site in the Buddhist tradition. As Goody turned over bowls through the evening, she read out excerpts of poetry, and held conversations with those gathered around, the domed shape of the bowl and stupa providing inlets to think of Buddhism and its tenets of equal moral worth of all persons. In the overwhelming extravagance of mega art events, I was struck by the power of intimacy and contact a performance like this could evoke. Weeks later, standing in my own kitchen, I found myself turning bowls upside down and realising how seamlessly Goody had united the ten thousand ceramic forms that made her installation Is the water chavdar? with the ubiquitous, ordinary bowls she upturned at Kochi.