Ishita Sharma

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate fieldwork, research and public programming to create an exhibition and booklet or zine that challenges the dominant environmental, administrative and social categorisation of Rann of Kutch and its inhabitants – human and non -human, living and inanimate objects. Different materials from Kutch, observations and research findings gathered over the years through archival research and fieldwork will be opened up and expanded in conversation with the programmes, projects, materials that are at Conflictorium. This project is in collaboration with Conflictorium, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Conflictorium - Museum of Conflict, is a participatory museum centred on conversations of conflict—social, political, cultural, and personal. Established in 2013, the Conflictorium resides in the erstwhile Gool Lodge in Ahmedabad. With emphasis on art, audience and archives, where intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to peace and conflict are explored, the museum tries to acknowledge the phenomenon of “conflict” as a key move in imagining a peaceful society. Ishita Sharma is the Coordinator of this project. 

Ishita Sharma is a researcher and writer working at the intersection of geography, ecology and human and non-human inhabitants of Rann of Kutch and the coastal landscape of Gujarat. Through research, visual narratives, storytelling and cartography her work offers a serious critique of the dominant developmental narratives of Kutch and coastal Gujarat. Ishita is a Doctoral Candidate, Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft, Netherlands. She has a MA in Human Rights Studies Programme from Columbia University and a BA in History from University of Delhi. In addition, she has worked as Programme Associate and Researcher, Programme for Social Action (PSA), Delhi, India. Her research and writing on Kutch have been published across national and international publications like Journal of Visual Cultures by Sage. She has also written for Himal South Asia, The Wire, India Resists and Hind Kisan. Apart from her formal academic scholarship, she also extended her inquiry through artistic and curatorial works. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition Weaving Worlds at the New Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. In collaboration with artist Varun Kurtkoti, she created Book of records, a visual glossary of displacement in the Kandla Port and Trust, which was exhibited at the Istanbul Biennale, 2023 as part of joint exhibition between Arazi Assembly, Turkey and Topological Atlas, London. Given her primary research interest, experience in research, writing and artistic work, Ishita is best suited to be Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

While the idea of conflict conventionally refers to overt violences like war, the Conflictorium in Ahmedabad understands conflict as everyday tensions and disruptions that often manufacture and reveal the larger fears, shame and guilt operating to build miscommunications and boundaries between people. This premise transmits across the museum space through various interactive, immersive and sensorial experiences. Situating the project within this framework presented by the museum, Ishita aims to expand her key questions from the context of Kutch. Tentatively titled Salty vocabularies of the rann ground, the project responds to the call by IFA and Conflictorium to activate the museum as a “parliament.” The Project Coordinator interprets parliament as an assembly, a space for dialogue and debate, which functions without a singular authority and allows for histories and stories that are layered and gathers not only people, but objects, materials, non-humans and humans. 

Building around the long engagement and research in the coastal and intertidal geographies of Kutch, Gujarat with the archives and work of Conflictorium, Ishita aims to create the exhibition which questions what is the rann? To set a context, the fisher and pastoral groups in Kutch call the Rann or salt desert of Kutch as well as its intertidal areas, the rann. The exhibition seeks to challenge the dominant notion of simply seeing Rann as a distinct environmental, administrative and social category by unpacking how the watery and intertidal territories are complex places that hold lives and have their own economic and social histories. The focus of the exhibition will be on layering together the geological, environmental and social relations, rather than seeing them as separate categories. Rather than offering complete and fully-explained ideas, the Project Coordinator will use the exhibition as a mechanism offering clues, and nudge thinking towards these points of overlaps and entanglements as alternatives to the dominant imaginations. 

In order to create the exhibition, Ishita will draw from her long-standing research work. She has identified few key figures from her research like “Memory: Photographs by Abdullah Turk”, a well-known and respected individual, who documented the social and environmental history of Kutch, from its culture, its shrines, to people’s movements against large infrastructure projects in Kutch; “mangrove (grounds)”, a move that gestures towards the difficulty of making distinctions between mangroves and other saline plants, which are interconnected through their root systems, salt, soil, water, bacteria and other myriad inhabitants; “Whale Fossil” that was found in a Lignite mine in central Kutch, exploring what is considered waste and value in certain grounds. It also points to history as material remain and heritage; “Surajbari Prawn,” a unique prawn species endemic to the Gulf of Kutch, fished by the Miyana prawn fishers who live in temporary settlements near the intersection of the little rann of Kutch with the gulf. The prawn represents both the mixing of waters, the importance of water circulation, as well as the histories of fishing and the fisher community in the region, that are currently being displaced. These figures will be accompanied by materials from the archives or rooms at the museum that address similar issues, like that of love and intimacy, water and the environment, of surveillance and authority, constitutional values, of diversity, of what community can mean, etc. 

The Project Coordinator has designed the project as a space where mediums and forms of research can be used to generate discussion and dialogue, raise questions around documentation and representation, and that can hold conversations on processes as part of the creation of outcomes. To achieve this, Ishita will organise various public programming – public lectures, workshops – with individuals from the community, historians and scholars. Positioning herself as a facilitator as opposed to a creator of these outcomes, the Project Coordinator will also create a document or zine to assemble the research processes. 

The Archives and Museums programme at IFA intends to activate museums and archives through scholarly and creative intervention with the intention to understand how they can emerge as sites of discourses and new narratives. This project raises crucial questions regarding archives and archival practices by pointing out the need for awareness about how and what is being constructed as discourses and how structuring of information in itself tends to define “normal.” By situating herself as a co-creator along with the community, Ishita attempts to rise beyond the binaries of “recovery” and “hidden” that often plagues the study of communities, people and places that have been primarily examined through the lens of backwardness and marginality, as is the case of Kutch.

The Project Coordinator has divided the project tenure into four phases. The first phase will involve thorough study of the archive and materials on display at the museum to make links and select materials that relate to her overarching theme. This phase will yield into creating an index of the exhibition, identifying speakers or artists to commission additional work. The second phase will move into production for the exhibition. The following phase will be the exhibition and public programming. The concluding phase will be dedicated to assembling feedback and experiences of the exhibition, and reflections from the process as a zine/booklet for dissemination and for the museum as a record. 

The primary outcome of this project will be an exhibition, a small series of public programmes – public workshops, sessions and talks – along with a booklet or zine that reflects on the processes and explorations of the project. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the images from the exhibition, proceedings from the public programmes and copies of the booklet or the zines. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Tata Trusts.