Ritvik Khushu

'A Wake for the Apsaras' is an artistic research project that revolves around an artifact that was acquired by the Rijksmuseum during the Dutch colonial era. The artifact, a stone sculpture of an Apsara, was taken from the sacred grounds of the Khajuraho temple complex in Madhya Pradesh, central India. The project seeks to rescue the Apsara from the temporal, epistemological, and aesthetic confines of the ethnographic museum. This sculptural installation marks the start of a larger effort—beginning with a gesture of re-tethering, to bring the Apsara back into our communities. The Apsara, displayed in the permanent collection of the Asia Pavilion at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam is re-captured. Through high-definition 3D scanning, the sculpture is digitally modelled, 3D printed in terracotta, kiln-fired and reassembled - reclaiming her neutralized body. In this multi-media installation, the Apsara is laid to rest within a museum crate, serving as an open casket. The piece invites the viewer to witness the death of an artifact, provoking them to imagine the life she may have lived before her imprisonment. On the other hand, her death signals a transition, where we anticipate her rebirth into our wounded cosmologies. The project was executed in collaboration with Textile Artist Marcos Kueh. The tapestries set in the backdrop of this sculptural installation, are iterations of Mother Mary adopted to local visual contexts of China, India, Malaysia, highlighting the visual tools employed in Christian expansion to the East.

‘Re-Membering the Dispossessed: The Criminal Tribes’ is an artistic research project that resurfaces a tragic yet largely forgotten chapter of British imperialism in South Asia. Taking form as a multi-media installation, the project departs from a campaign film commissioned by the Salvation Army in 1925 on their missionary work in India, Burma and Ceylon. Composed of film, earth, and sound, the multimedia installation seeks to thread back-into-relation cultural objects to the spiritual lives (imaginaries and senses) they are severed from as a consequence of colonial intervention in South Asia. The excerpt used in the installation depicts a Salvation Army officer coercing a tribal nomadic Indian woman to renounce her traditional jewellery in her conversion to Christianity. The brutal amputation of the woman’s ornaments is emblematic of the larger social engineering operations of the British Raj. The project sheds light on the draconian ‘Criminal Tribes Act of 1871’, which enabled the colonial government to survey and exploit hundreds of nomadic communities across South Asia. By branding these tribes as ‘innate criminals’, the Act paved the way for the Salvation Army to relocate and settle the nomads, conduct mass conversions, and subject them to either extortion or enslavement.

The Archive as a Firewall. In navigating the colonial archive, one finds absences, voids and a one-sidedness in the telling of history. The work challenges the archive as a site of radical decontextualization, a site where objects are made to exist severed from the material, spiritual and culture frameworks within which they are embedded. Cultural objects in the ethnographic archive are preserved and enclosed within the vocabularies and humanisms of the West. They are forced to perform from within the knowledges of their imperial captors. The ethnographic collection re-orders logics, cosmologies and materialisms - in their collecting, labelling, defining, categorizing and canonizing of the world. The project contemplates aesthetic strategies of bypassing the archive as a firewall that has made cultural objects inaccessible to their own communal, spiritual and emotional lives. Images of stolen jewellery in digital collections of ethnographic museums in the West, are “illegally” (re)captured. The images are made into 3-D models, printed, made into moulds and casted in aluminium and in earth as a way of recalling the dispossessed objects back into our communities. The performance of transcribing the decontextualized image into an impression on earth gestures the re-grounding of the dispossessed object back into their fractured cosmology.