Saturday 2 November 2019 at 7 pm, on the occasion of Artissima, the PAV Parco Arte Vivente inaugurates "Samakaalik: Earth Democracy and Women's Liberation (Earth Democracy and Feminism)", the first Italian solo show of one of the most radical Indian artists, Navjot Altaf (Meerut, 1949). The exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini, represents a new chapter in the investigation of the relationship between artistic practices and ecological thought in the Asian continent.

With Navjot Altaf, the PAV chooses to present the simultaneous intersection (samakaalik in Hindi) of the struggles for environmental protection with the feminist movement, an intersectional form of ecofeminism that Bina Agarwal has defined as “feminist environmentalism”. Altaf's works investigate mining exploitation and intensive agriculture, heavy industry, forest consumption, reflecting on the cultural sovereignty of indigenous peoples.

"Samakaalik" sets itself the complex objective of reconstructing the artist's path since his militancy with the Marxist collective PROYOM: the exhibition opens with some posters of the time, in which we find the presuppositions developed in the following decades. Alongside collaborative practices with indigenous artists and members of the Bastar community, Navjot 's research focused on mining areas in the south of the district and in the north-central part of the country.
The dual-channel video installation Soul Breath Wind investigates the slow violence of mining activities: a narrative conducted thanks to the voice of local communities in struggle. Alongside the video, the small sculptures Patterns which Connect embody the importance of coexistence between species under ecological threat, an aspect already present in 1972, in the Insects Logos cycle of pedagogical drawings. In the How Perfect Perfection Can Be cycle, the architectural dimension functions as a field of investigation of the darkest aspects of the ideologies of progress. The Trail of Impunity video tells us about the violent uprising of the communities of Gujarat in 2002, through countless conversations on the notion of human dignity, criticism of violence and the possibility of justice in the face of a corrupt political system.

The relationship between women's oppression and the capitalist system has been extensively investigated by authors such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Maria Mies, among others, who underline the key role of productive and reproductive processes within capitalist enhancement. In the specificity of the Indian post-colonial context, the different forms of ecofeminist thought know a particular relevance: from the well-known battles of Vandana Shiva, oriented towards an essentialist reading of the relationship between woman and nature , to those of the economist Bina Agarwal, who insists, instead, on the centrality of social relations .

In Agarwal's research, working women in India's rural areas embody a powerful agent of resistance to the "fable of development" imposed by Western capitalism. This perspective also includes the thought of the philosopher of science Meera Nanda, who investigates the relationship between female oppression and the caste system.

Through her works - underlines the most important Indian art historian, critic and curator Geeta Kapur - Navjot conducts a constant deconstruction of those identity conventions (being a woman, being a worker, being a farmer) based on a culturally determined, on a system based on social divisions structurally complicit in patriarchy and capitalism. The forms of identification in the making, mestizo and ultimately simultaneous on which Altaf works, are built instead with the awareness that every identity system is intrinsically exclusive, all categorical identities, all ideological instances are interdependent and that the understanding of the subject's position it is always contingent

The exhibition is organized with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo, the CRT Foundation, the Piedmont Region and the City of Turin.