written by Sabrina Citra
‘It actually started because I was really, really angry looking at this constructed wall,’ says Anshika Varma. ‘I began asking myself “Why am I feeling so foul? Why am I feeling so restricted and constrained?” And that brought me to understanding and realising that I had lost my time and my relationship [with the forest] by just being a passive viewer.’
We’re discussing The Wall, Varma’s work on the Sanjay Van Ride Reserve in New Delhi, which is included in the Photoworks Festival 2022. The reserve is a forest which was once a sanctuary for the artist, but is now surrounded by a physical barrier, and policed and guarded by the state. The series is a testimony to reclaiming memory, and Varma began it by photographing the native trees, the Ronjh, Hingot, Bistendu, Juliflora, and Jal, plus what was left of the local flora, such as Bamboo, Dhak and Neem, as well as fragments of the wall. Accompanying these images are collages of foliage, which pay homage to Varma’s childhood hobby of collecting leaves and flowers, and pasting them into her notebook.
The project also includes a text depicting a child wandering through the forest which, on first read, I took to be Varma herself, inviting her audience to see the woods as she once did – partly as a real place, and partly as a fantasy world. She beams with joy when I mention this. ‘I’m so happy to hear that!’ she says. ‘I mean this [series] is for kids, that’s what you do in the forest, you just sit and fantasize. I wanted it to be that….I wanted to feel the world that exists in the forest as what you, as a child, have made it to be.’