Gargi’s site-specific installation called Tehkhana (literally meaning a cellar) is imbued with an aura of a nocturnal past, which instigates the urge to seek a dislocated meaning hidden in the archival debris. It is interesting to encounter her sustained interest with the abstractionist idiom, the minimalistically structured paintings, and the randomly organized three-dimensional space. She chose the dark cellar of the house as an inclusive metaphor to enter into the pitch-dark world and encounter the exclusive and the unpredictable. The presence of torches, hung right in front of the door, is as much a sign of caution as they signal a sense of warning. The door under the Kashmiri embroidered curtains presents itself as a veiled ethnic identity, promising a certain sense of warmness and hospitability.

Descending the grid of the staircase with a torch in hand, the work invites the viewer to enter its intimate space, where the persistence of memory is somewhat challenged as soon as you project the light and objects suddenly appear alive. Under the spell of light, red candle wax alludes to the immediate memory of a life melted into blood while the kangris (wicker covered clay pot containing hot coal) appear cold and abandoned; a few nails tucked on the mud-walls bear the stigma of an empty wardrobe suggestive of the state of being driven homeless, an unpredictable collage of a few black and white photographs pasted on the other wall are suddenly discovered to be the photo-portraits of the disappeared persons in the Valley. Near this is a wooden book lying awkwardly in a vertical position suggesting the inaccessibility to the clues behind the dead and the disappeared. As you move on, you feel the dry chinar leaves whispering beneath your feet to greet the somewhat meditative poise of seven stones piled on one another while the photocopied image of the fasting Siddhartha stands as a testimony to human journey and the worldly wisdom. The seven stones have a symbolic significance to Gargi’s ethnic history referring back to seven generations when her family migrated from Kashmir.

One of the walls displaying a life size charcoal portrait of a middle-aged woman in a firan confronts you as your own shadow-or a shadow of a wandering mother. Another wall is marked with a simple drawing of a flower of the graveyard. Gargi used an array of materials, like nails, torches, candle-wax, photo.copied images, charcoal, drift stones and thread while accommodating the existing space materials in the given site, such as the hanger above the charcoal portrait and the basket beneath it, the lattice, the shelf and the grid of the window. She is able to explore the possibilities inherent in the site-specific medium and create a sense of familiarity by means of her artistic intervention as adaptive strategy.

Her empathic sensibility on the one hand, evokes catharsis and her minimalist-oriented discipline on the other, constructs an alternative space that can be inhabited. The overall ambience has a hypnotic influence on the viewer­quite suggestive of a stream of consciousness experience if given a torch and the entry to the subconscious. This journey, this entering into the cave, bears a testimony of
a spiritual inquiry into the mechanics of time and memory and by aesthetic means she ventures to re-construct a new alternative reality from the archive of absence and silence.