Paris, France —India, the world’s largest democracy and a patchwork of peoples. One of these peoples is the Bo Tribe of the Andaman Islands. The last speaker of their language, the Aka-bo language, which is also known as the language of birds, Boa Sr. passed away in 2010. A monumental and poetic installation work by the Indian artist Manish Pushkale is on display at the Musée Guimet in Paris underscoring the inexorable disappearance of indigenous cultures in India. Created by the artist upon the invitation of the Guimet to create a carte blanche, the installation, entitled “To Whom the Bird Should Speak?”, has been designed as a discovery voyage in writing, archeology and fleeting memories of this heartbreaking yet all too true story. And it serves to remind us of the difficulties of preserving intangible heritage and a culture’s vulnerability as it is confronted with rapid global change. 

The work, spread out in the museum’s spectacular 4th floor rotunda, represents the disappearance of the Great Andaman indigenous people through natural disasters, tourism and globalisation. The visitor can discover the now extinct language of birds with hidden « birds » singing within the installation, a figurative substitution for the absent voice of Boa Sr and his bird song. On an external wall sit two eggs in a nest of paper twigs, evoking the hope of renewal or the reincarnation of the Bo Tribe. The paper used by the artist is natural, irregular, ill-treated, repaired and coated with several layers and it is covered in mineral pigments from rocks taken from various geological layers in the Andamans.  The open or closed lines on the work represent the question faced by the native populations of the Andaman Islands, should they open up to the world or isolate themselves from it. 

Manish Pushkale  was born in 1973 and is a self-taught artist who, after studies in geology and archaeology, enrolled in the Bharat Bhavan multi-arts complex in Bhopal in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It was in this fertile, intellectual and creative environment that he honed his artistic style and sensibility as an abstract artist. Founded in 1889, the Guimet is devoted to the arts of Asia and presents the largest collection of Asian art in the world and Europe. The installation work by Mr. Pushkale will be the museum’s last Carte Blanche and is on display until March 5th. ©Trish Valicenti for The Gourmet Gazette. 6 Pl. d’Iéna, 75116 Paris. Tel: + 33 (0)1 56 52 54 33. https://www.guimet.fr/fr