Shades of Breath & Interplay in Art
‘No, we’re not giving visitors tea and biscuits. We’re giving them food for the soul!’
Akhila was fighting a losing battle. ‘I love these guys, but artists are flaky man,’ she cribbed, temporarily forgetting that she’s one too.
The artists in question are Swarat Ghosh and Saloni Sinha. And when she isn’t being entreated to feed people who come to see art, Akhila is rather fond of the two of them.
Swarat is an award-winning street photographer who has an eye for deep stories and the patience to wait hours for a worthy shot. Saloni is a visual artist and an illustrator with a flair for everything weird and wonderful, the unique gift to see things as they are not and the skill to bring them to life.
Akhila Ramnarayan is a renaissance woman of sorts. She’s one of the founders of the Sahrdaya Foundation. She’s also a writer, a singer, a poet, a dancer, a theatre artist, and an ardent fan of the classical as well as the contemporary.
Together, they were on the cusp of ‘Breath’ — an art exhibit on a shoestring budget.
Limited wherewithal comes with its own challenges. Flight tickets had to be booked, lighting rented, mount boards and prints purchased. There are, too, the bevy of tiny expenses that add up when you’re not looking. Only the space was donated free of charge for the day by Spaces in Besant Nagar.
But the result that we witnessed a week later was nothing less than astoundingly inspirational.
The 15 suspended works of art, a light bulb illuminating each of them, were visual curiosities in themselves.
Snowy white sheets (three in a row — a drawing, a photograph and a poem) succinctly labelled and mounted on black boards set the mood for the exhibit: minimal, almost austere, but also warm and inviting in the yellow glow.
The first image I see is of a sleeping child, curled up in the backseat of an auto rickshaw. Outside, a blur of goats and livestock pass him by — all on their way to breathing their last in a slaughterhouse.
Then there is the boy, looking bang into the lens with a hint of a grim, almost-smile. On his shoulders, a bleating ram — his only friend, perhaps — who will soon cease to be.
I move on. Saloni’s bear catches my eye. He howls in rage and the ground fractures under his feet. A strong wind swirls around him as his body is taken over, slowly but surely, by the trappings and habitats of humanity.
In another drawing, a bird trapped between the high-rises in a city, cries out, and sheds tears that submerge the foot of the buildings and overflow into nothingness.
Akhila’s words are elusive. They’re evocative, but the meaning remains just a little out of grasp, imploring you to work a bit harder to ‘get it’. But when you do, your mouth curves into an involuntary smile of understanding, and something inside you clicks into place.
You have questions?
Don’t ask me, Rumi.
I can read the eyes of this ram
as much as I did
The eyes of that old man in Dohuk.
They’re
as opaque
as the pixellated photograph,
as the news article online,
as the poem I wrote about both.
The bardo state, she says, is a place beyond death. Sneeze, and it’s gone.
Each drawing, photograph and poem was created with nothing but a one-word theme in mind. It was broad enough to find expression in vastly different ways, and it has.
But there was no coalescence of ideas until a few days before the exhibit. It takes an open mind to let go of personal interpretations and let your work find new paths to tread. In the end, the exhibit had a lasting impact as a whole, not just as standalone pieces placed next to each other.
That is why a successful collaboration is rewarding, both for the viewer and the collaborators — it is something more than the sum of its parts.
I watched a promising, nascent art exhibit take shape and the process is anything but abstract or dreamy. Decisions need to be made about the small things and the big things.
Small things like where you’re going to get the fishing lines and the bricks, and how you’re going to string everything up. (It took physics and a fancy rope trick, courtesy of dancer-choreographer Sheejith Krishna who stopped by to help.)
Big things like arranging for a scholar in art to lead the discussion and contribute their wisdom for an evening. They found her in Srilata K, a writer, a poet and an academic with IIT-Madras.
And a lot of things in between like the decision to go public or stay closed. Should you sell your soul for exposure? Or hunker down into obscurity after all that work? At last, the most trying problem of all: overcoming personal fear and self-doubt. Should you bare your thoughts to a crowd who might not understand them? What if it isn’t good enough?
Does that maddest
of mad old men,
Don Quixote,
pause for breath
before charging?
If you know anything about these three young artists, you already know the answer.
If Don Quixote —
Philosopher,
Poet,
Reader,
Madman,
Warrior —
had paused for breath,
you would be reading a different book.
This book was perfect, just the way it was.
