CAG 2018-19
SURKHEE
Birender Yadav
Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh
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Birender led a year-long series of workshops with children at the brick kiln sites, Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh.
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Workers families at brick kilns stay in make-shift houses without proper arrangement of electricity, sanitation, water supply, school and health centre facilities. These make-shift houses are broken after every working session and those bricks are sold. Working season is from November - June, workers migrate after it. Working conditions are extremely harsh and mortality rates are high.
In these conditions, children usually have very low level of literacy and no recreation or playing facilities - they are always at the construction site, slowly learning the work that adults are doing, till one day they also start being part of the labour force. There are no toys, books, place to play or activities for them to be engaged with at all.
Along with Birender, children at the brick kiln sites created sculptures from the materials found around the site, building a sense of play and ownership. Together they explored questions of identity, home and belonging, through art, storytelling and games.
Birender taught children to make their very first toys, by coiling clay, at the brick kiln sites in Mirzapur.
Participants made cups, vases, toy animals, carts, and kept everything they produced in these workshops.
For them it was not only a process of learning to create something, but having a small window of time to call their own, and having a few objects in this harsh life, that gave them joy.
Children played with their clay toys after firing them in the kilns, and then painted and drew together.
About the grantee
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Birender Yadav was born in Ballia district, predominantly a rural province of Uttar Pradesh in a coal miners family. He grew up in Jharkhand as his father worked as a blacksmith for the coal mining industry. He is the first in his family to step out of the house to pursue formal higher education. Birender completed his undergraduate studies in fine arts from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi in 2013 and completed his graduation in painting from Delhi College Of Arts Delhi in 2015.
His experience of working as an artist has a deep rooted understanding of the life of brick kiln workers due to his own upbringing in Jharkhand. He can easily mix with them as friends.
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