Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu, HI; lives and works in New Haven, CT) is showing a new ongoing body of work titled The Ship as Co-Conspirator (to capitalism and to its undoing).  

90% of the world’s commodities move by sea. The ships that do the moving are beasts. Their sheer scale likens them to untamable, inhuman creatures; but it is their traitorous nature, especially at the “end” of their lives that reinforces the beastliness. Despite being carefully forged, wielded, and tended to by global capitalism, these disloyal vessels refuse to go gentle into the good night after having served their time. Their bodies, capacious, and limber at sea, become leaden and unwieldy once beached. As they are painstakingly dismembered, their blood, guts, and bones rage against their masters; leaking, crashing, spilling, exploding, and violently exposing the truths of the system that fathered them. 

In the Inside-Out series we are presented with 5 portholes from decommissioned ships, but rather than gazing out onto a land- or sea-scape through the windows, we see the ship’s innards. Teetering between abstraction and body horror, these oil paintings provide glimpses into the visceral particularities of a seemingly inert, container ship and reminds us to shift our gaze away from the horizon, and turn inwards to observe the health of the system and mechanics upon which our hasty navigation towards “growth” and “progress” is based. 

More than 85% of all of the world’s ships are broken down on 3 beaches in South Asia: Alang in India, Gadani in Pakistan, and Chittagong in Bangladesh. Once broken, almost every part of the ship, from the engines and motors at its heart, to the steel, wood, fiber, and glass of its body, to the furniture and furnishings it is adorned with, is resold/reused/recycled. But, as with all industrial recycling processes, the work is dirty and dangerous. Although much of the ship does get recycled, the sands of these beaches are littered with plastic scraps, tile fragments, and occasional corpses of dogs, cats, and birds who have finally lost the daily battle against toxins like asbestos, fuels, and heavy metals which ooze out of the dying ships. The works in Notes from the Ship-Breaking Yard document daily life at the ship breaking yards—a saluting uniformed watchman, seagulls sitting atop a boundary wall constructed from ship parts, a dog, all four legs coated with a suspicious black muck, assessing your intentions on her section of the tile-littered beach. These quotidian scenes attest to both the possibilities and the limits of recycling. While much global criticism has centered on the labor practices and environmental impacts of these ship breaking yards, these works focus on the sheer impossibility of the task to begin. Do we, the consumers reliant on a globalized market, take enough responsibility for our part in perpetuating this vicious, inexorable, and inhumane system? 

Based on time spent at the two the largest ship breaking yards in the world (directly referenced in the works High Tide in Alang and Low Tide in Chittagong), these works attempt to annotate the portrayals and betrayals of ships as they transition from carrier /container to deadweight cargo and waste. By not just depicting but also collecting and using the byproducts and debris of the ship breaking process as surface, pigment, and framing device, these works re-materialize neoliberal abstractions of “commodity flows” in order to highlight the decisive failure of the promises of “recycling” as a sufficient antidote to capitalist greed.