You always step into the same river

Photographs: Atul Bhalla
Text:
Publisher: Vadehra Art Gallery/sepiaEYE
128 pages
With illustrations throughout
Year: 2014
ISBN: 9789380001722
Price: $60
Hardcover, 9 x 12 in

This book was published alongside Atul Bhalla's exhibition of the same name - an immersion into the knowledge that water imparts, and concerns the politics and aesthetics of water in a global field. For the past decade, Atul Bhalla's art has addressed the socio-historical importance of water in urban environments around the world. Bhalla’s sustained preoccupation with water in his home of Delhi resulted in ‘Yamuna Walk’ and ‘I Was Not Waving But Drowning’, both executed on or around the same site on the western Yamuna bank, which forms the basis of my diverse practice leading to questions of distribution, regulation, commodification, and pollution. Over the years, Bhalla has attempted to explore the river bank’s physical, historical, spiritual, and political significance in relation to the population it sustains. Attempting the political through the poetical, his attempt is to understand water as a repository of history, meaning and myth: the way I perceive it, feel it, drink it, swim in it, and sink in it, or will drown in it.

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