The exhibition, The Last Rust, featuring installations by Archana Hande reassembles detritus from the Gujari flea market, a nomadic Sunday bazaar in India, to create a museum of totemic symbols, and giving the third-hand materials a second life. The once-discarded sickles, dumbbells, sieves, scissors, and knives are brought together to form emblems, insignias, and towers. These monuments subvert symbolic expectations by showcasing a combination of skeletons, corpses, and carapaces—all decomposing and mutating. Carrying their own class, gender, and caste history, embedded within the lives of those existing on the margins of society, these objects impact the ideological proximity of the national monument to power is dislocated; these monuments instead evoke the “Other. The Last Rust, thereby, is both a paean to a world that is quickly disappearing and an embodiment of hope—a possibility where a new future can be assembled out of discarded scraps as a defence against despair.
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