HIGHWAY ROMANTICISM

IN the white wooden interiors of Vadehra Gallery, usually home to India's modernists, there is, this month, a bit of a disruption.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

Tractors piled up with well-worn blankets; a bamboo shell of a structure from which a door and a window have been hived out; barricades used to anchor a trailer with a rope so that it does not drift — these are some of the frames hanging solo, or in twos, triptychs or clusters, and entire walls have been given over to them across two floors of the gallery. Common to all of them is the image of home and the attempt to keep it together from possible collapse perhaps a metaphor of farmers' lives buttressed by the temporariness of tarpaulin, thermocol, bamboo, rope, and hope.

One way of looking at it is, you give these structures a push, and they will come down.

Another way of looking at it is, they can easily be made to stand again.

Three years after the farmers' protests—November 2020 to December-2021—stormed the national capital, the work of photo-artist Gauri Gill hanging at Vadehra Gallery till March 8, shows the farmers' 'homes' that enabled the farmers' protests.