agat sharma / intimidation tactics

Sperm Stains on Cotton Last Forever!Sperm stains on cotton last forever is conceived as a series of speculative archeology documents. The CRT TV video takes off from the poem ‘Time and truth are sleeping with each other’ about the forensic science myth on the permanency of sperm stains on cotton. The other projected video traces the distraught relationship of two leading archaeologists at the beginning of the 20th century, who are both credited with the discovery of the Indus Valley civilization.

The series as a whole follows the connections between fertility and sexuality of land and people in the Indus Valley around 2500 BCE. It was in 1920's British India that this ancient civilization was discovered. One of the finds was the oldest fragment of woven cotton. There were several contested speculations made by archeologists at the time about the sacred and ritual use of cotton. Based on clay tablets with depictions of cotton cloth and sleeping ithyphallic figures, cotton was believed to be related to fertility rituals involving nocturnal emissions or wet dreams. The prevailing puritanical morals of the British Crown and its imperial intentions to reframe Indian history resulted in deformation of these wild histories. The link between cotton cultivation and the belief of the Indus people in the power of sexual imagination, destabilised the colonial categorical division between man and land, between human fertility and that of the soil.

W139, video installation