Freeing the junk – Vangmayi Parakala, THE HINDU

Each time Haribaabu Naatesan would walk past the scrapyard near his home in Mumbai, he’d notice heaps and heaps of discarded computer motherboards. A little later, he found out more about them: From Saki Naka in Mumbai, this enormous load of electrical waste would either be transported to Chennai, or further, to Kolkata for recycling.

Even disposal and reprocessing were only adding to the global carbon footprint, he realised, and wondered how he could stop this endless cycle of environmental strain. “I now work with the concept of mukti, of no rebirth,” Naatesan says. Repurposing found-material and electrical waste, he gives their cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation a break, freezing them into installations. This is the underlying theme in the oeuvre of this animation and film-design graduate of NID Ahmedabad.

In Equilibrium, Naatesan’s current solo show, the pieces are diverse in their colour palette as well as form. Cars, abstracts, Nandi figures, and a clock with no hours or minutes, and only seconds ticking away, all range from dystopian brown-and-greys, to beautiful greens and pop-pinks.

“Equilibrium is the condition of a system in which all competing influences are balanced…In my art work, I reuse electronic scraps to create the balance in the polluted environment. I’m balancing or cancelling out of (sic) the influences or processes to which it is subjected,” he declares in his note by the entrance, giving context to the exhibit’ name.

His obvious use of glass and metal aside, Naatesan places mirrors very prominently in his pieces. One, titled, “Lost in thoughts” has a fish-eye mirror, the sort you might find at the blindspot-turn in a narrow lane, right at the centre.

Suddenly, a distorted image of yourself, is surrounded by purple-and-grey electrical innards.

The concept of memory and childhood is strong in all his work, and he draws the viewer into moments of reflection, not just through the placement of mirrors, but also through the scrap he chooses for his pieces.

Floppy disks, discarded toys, parts of fax machines all find place here. It is this quality that makes his art accessible to both older and younger audiences alike. When he exhibited at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in 2015 for instance, he chanced upon a five- or six-year-old child standing by one of the pieces for a very long time, staring. Naatesan recalls asking the child what he found interesting in it. “My toy,” the child had replied, pointing to a plastic water-pistol nestled in the piece.

Collaborating with Volkswagen though, really put a spotlight onto Naatesan’s work. In 2012, he’d built a whole Beetle car out of electronic scrap as part of the carmaker’s then-ongoing Think Blue campaign. In the same year, Naatesan’s car was displayed at the T3 terminal of Delhi’s international airport, and later also at Mumbai’s Colaba Causeway and Kala Ghoda.

But it has, and at times continues to still be, a tough job to convince his commercial clients to use art that’s made of old, discarded, and recycled items, he says. A large section of people is apprehensive of second-hand or discarded items, looking at them as harbingers of negativity — they’d much rather buy something brand new.

“I see death in everything, though. I keep arguing with my clients: furniture is essentially dead trees, and brick is earth that’s been burnt in fire,” he says, adding that people also have a problem with welcoming previously-broken things into their homes or offices. “I tell them I don’t use broken things — these are unused things, which I dismantle and then put to better use,” he stresses.

‘Equilibrium: The Irreversible’ is on till March 5, at Gallery Art Positive, Lado Sarai