• (Artist's note and book) Immersion.Emergence, 2006
Work on the river, 2004-2006, with text. ISBN, Pubished by Youthreach, 2006
Price USD 25 - international. Postage on actuals.
Rs 300 - for India only
Can be ordered by writing to me.
Public Art? Activating the Agoratic Condition
Cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator, Nancy Adajania 's paper presented at the symposium linked to 48° C – the Public Art Ecology Festival, New Delhi, December 2008
“……I now come to the environmentalist and photographer Ravi Agarwal who has made the reverse journey from the arena of activism and cause-related work to the context of the gallery. Agarwal was designated as an artist in 2002 when he was chosen by Okwui Enwezor to show his photographs at Documenta 11. At Enwezor's path-breaking Documenta, he was represented by images from his projects on work, labour and urban environment in the era of globalisation. Since then, Agarwal has used this special ascriptive status as an artist constructively, to explore what he calls his ‘personal ecology' to implicate the self with all its philosophical disquietudes onto an environment that is being ripped apart by rapacious consumerism. His work is a good example of how an artist can aestheticise the political and politicise the aesthetic in the same gesture, one without the other would make an inadequate impact. This predicament is expressed in his set of performance photographs from the series ‘Immersion/Emergence' where he appears covered in a shroud on the banks of a river. This is an elegy for the displacement of thousands of shantytown-dwellers who were expelled from the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi, by State authorities, in a bid to “clean up” the waterway and “beautify” it, ahead of the forthcoming Commonwealth Games – and with a view to handing over this land to the developer lobby. This powerful protest could be read as an expression of the idea that ‘ecocide is suicide', that is the murder of the ecology is suicide. At another level, it is also an enactment of the Hindu belief in reincarnation. The remains of the dead body are immersed in the holy Ganga to achieve salvation. [5] In a true sense, Agarwal's photographs and diary notes are productions of what Heine once called the ‘experimental self'.”
• (Artist's note and comment received) Impossibility of Being Feminine, 2007
Note of work and comment received on work
• (Artist's note) Alien Waters, 2006
note on work and comments
• (Artist's note) Dead Wood, 2007
Notes on work
• (Artist's note) Down and Out, Labouring under Globalisation, 2000
Book on migrant labour, in South Gujarat, India. In colloboration with Prof. Jan Breman, Amsterdam.
Oxford University Press and Amsterdam, University Press, 2000
• (Artist's note) Have you seen the flowers on the river? 2007
note on work
• (Artist's note) Imagined Landscapes, 2008
Work shown in Nature of the City show, December 2008, Religare gallery, New Delhi curated Alexender Keefe and Nitin Mukul
• An Other Place, 2008
Catalogue essay from the solo exhibition, An Other Place, Gallery Espace, October, 2008