A Fate's Brief Memoir
Paribartana Mohanty
A Fate's Brief Memoir initiates an investigation to locate, observe, and document the missing Nolias community of Podampeta and study 'traces' that the fisher folks, as climate migrants, leave behind.
While the repeated environmental disaster in Odisha has turned the idea of ‘home’ into an inferior and temporary concept, Nolias fisher folks (a unique marine fisher community classified as ‘scheduled-caste’ living at the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Odisha) have become eternal climate migrants, and are now surviving through ‘transits’. Transits that encompass inter-state borders, transportation, rehabilitation/shelter homes, new communication technologies etc. Time and again, this transit apparatus seems to be erasing traces that the Nolias leave behind. Traces that are manifestations or the only surviving register/evidence of this marginal community’s existence on this unstable surface of planet earth.
The work follows their trail – a constant back-and-forth movement from the site of disaster to the shelter homes and other migratory/temporary spaces. A Fate's Brief Memoir attempts to re-create the climate migration story as an ‘event’ by juxtaposing the before and after-image of the disaster.
Biography
Paribartana Mohanty
Paribartana Mohanty, born in Odisha in 1982, is a visual artist and storyteller based in Delhi. He earned a BFA from Dhauli College of Art and Craft, Bhubaneswar (2004) and an MA in History of Art from the National Museum Institute, New Delhi (2006). He has received several fellowships, awards and residencies. His work has featured in many group exhibitions and festivals, including film screenings at New Museum, New York (2022); Chennai Photo Biennale 3 (2022); 35th European Media Art Festival at Osnabrück (2022); Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (2022), among others. His last two solo exhibitions were organised by Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2012 and 2018. He is a member of the artist collective WALA and worked as one of the curators for the Kochi Students’ Biennale, which was part of the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2016).
Mohanty has presented and performed at March Meeting: Active Forms (2018); Goethe Institute New Delhi; South Asia Institute at Harvard University, Boston, among others.