CHRONICLES of SILENCE (Khamoshi ki Dastaan)

B.V. SURESH

1 CHRONICLES of SILENCE (Khamoshi ki Dastaan)

B.V. SURESH

Curated by Pushpamala N.

December 2015 - January 2016 VADEHRA ART GALLERY D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi

2 3 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Curatorial Essay Pushpamala N.

It is a curiosity in the art world that I, as an artist peer and friend of B.V. Suresh, should call myself the curator of his solo exhibition, Chronicles of Silence. The notion of curating comes not from selecting his works, or endorsing his works, but in facilitating this show by somewhat arm-twisting him to make these works still in his thoughts - reflecting my own preoccupations with how artists could express our feelings about the world today.

Sometimes, an artist’s work addresses directly and precisely the crises of the age that we live in. For more than a decade, B.V. Suresh has been making works marked by an artistic integrity and conceptual clarity around several concerns that many of us are grappling with, which have strangely escaped the central place and critical attention that they should have in the Indian art world. They are not documents, but poetic and metaphorical works: intense, severe and shocking in their impact.

A cacophony of sounds, images and objects hits the viewer in the stomach in this body of work ironically titledChronicles of Silence. The silence is the “silence of the lambs” - of the majority of people in the country, strangely considered a “minority” - the farmers, the labourers, the tribals, the religious groups, or the simple and ingenious citizen next door, who live in the margins facing the violence of a grand notion of progress and development, struggling to survive.

Suresh transforms the gallery space into a spectacular if dystopian landscape of the contemporary, creating an Animal Farm of grunting and snuffling pig noises, radio

4 speeches, kinetic machines, crashing weights, radars and laser beams. The sculpture of an albino peacock presides over the whole thing, a beautiful but blanched version of the national bird: the picture of an outsider whose body is washed by hypnotically flickering video images while bits of cotton and feathers fly around.

Mechanised cotton gins, cotton beaters, torn garden nets, and modified versions of agricultural grain separators filled with chicken feathers tumble, beat and rotate, casting great shadows on the walls. A hundred old radios placed on a bed of cotton blare forth the Mann ki Baat of the Leader, alternating with interviews of farmers. The old fashioned transistor, famously close to the farmer and historically known to broadcast agricultural programmes chatters on its own, activated by sensors, oblivious of distress. Scarecrow-like figures fitted with speakers make obscene porcine noises. A laser beam tracks the walls and objects. Brilliant landslides of cotton heaps overwhelm the white peacock repeatedly, while weights crash down with raucous shrieks. The installation pulsates like a satirical “sound and light show” about darkness.

Since more than a decade, Suresh has engaged himself in reflecting on the place of the minorities, the dispossessed and the marginalized in his paintings, videos and installations. Some of the burnt bread loaves made nine years ago in a local bakery as a poignant reference to the burning of the Best Bakery in Baroda, are preserved in resin in little glass houses and hung up with other miniature houses with landslides of florescent saffron. Aggressive projects of religious re-conversion make grotesque even the comforts of “home” and “homecoming”. Suresh as “artist-chronicler” collects and distils these memories of the unspeakable.

Like many artists in the country, Suresh comes from an artisanal family that he describes as a background of self-reliance and tinkering. His father was a tailor, his grandfather a furniture maker who also carved wood, and his uncles were farmers who had powerloom workshops. His childhood home was in an old

5 part of Bangalore, which was at the time a sort of semi-rural vatara or mohalla surrounded by neighbours who practiced various trades. Suresh’s grandfather often made small toys and furniture for them in their home. Later, as a teacher in the Faculty of Fine arts in Baroda, he has chosen to live in a lower middle class area where people engage in different small trades and occupations. Opposite to his home lives a carpenter and a cement and paint shop owner; another neighbour runs a tractor-cum-water tanker, and next door, is a tile cutter. He has seen most of them physically building their homes from scratch. Though part of a larger suburb populated by artists, this kind of community does not exist beyond the street, he says - the class changes.

Suresh has been working in the city of Baroda/Vadodara in the state of Gujarat, which we know as the laboratory of “Hindutva” or the ideology of a theocratic Hindu state. Shocked by the state supported pogrom against Muslims in 2002 following the death of Hindu pilgrims at Godhra station in a train compartment fire, his ruminations on the aftermath culminated in a major exhibition,Facilitating the Beast, at Vadehra Art Gallery in 2006. Rows of charred bread loaves, invoking the mob attack on the Best Bakery when saffron mobs burnt down a Muslim bakery with its owner’s family and employees, acted as the central image in his show.

The Sangh Parivar has always been suspicious of the internationally known Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda - where we were students and Suresh teaches - for being a progressive, intellectually influential and secular space. There is constant surveillance and attempts to destroy this independence. The infamous Chandramohan case in 2007 dealt a body blow. A mob led by a local Bharatiya Janata Party activist invaded the art school because they claimed to be offended by a work exhibited in the final examination show by a graphic art student Chandramohan, and attacked the students. The Dean and Head of Art History who defended the students was sacked, which resulted in the effective destruction of the active Art History Department in the school. The teachers and students

6 still work in an embattled atmosphere, forming a fragile island surrounded by censorious fascist forces.

The artist’s experience of marginalisation begins with the feeling of the art community itself being the target of attack, not only by religious fundamentalists, but also in having to battle disregard in a globalising profit driven world. His own sense of alienation and memories of his humble childhood leads him to identify with other groups relegated to the fringes. The albino peacock, a pale shadow of the national bird is perhaps the artist himself, an outsider pushed to the edge of society. While the bird’s statuesque figure expresses the refined practice that he developed as an artist, he cuts off the peacock’s tail to signal the conscious disabling of that very craft.

Essentially, the problem was all about how he could discard his skills to get to the basics. That the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa could let go of his meticulous craft in Dreams, to create a simple story like a folktale using a mysterious dream- like language to put together contemporary subjects of war and disaster (almost casually), was an inspiration. This was really so much to do with the practice of teaching, where you inculcate ways of seeing and bringing meaning to things that we see, common things. As a teacher, one had to prove it as an example that making art is not one thing - it has layers of intentions, of obeservations.

The artistic vocabulary that he uses in Chronicles develops out of the locale that he lives in - from the different trades and professions around his home in Baroda - where people use ingenious multi-purpose machines, and a tractor can become a borewell rig one day and turn into a water carrier the next. These makeshift and indigenous machines could be used for farming as well: one thing turns into another. The roughly put together structures are all familiar to people, quite different from creating a painting which is not so easily readable and which is from the artist’s private vision. His life as a teacher too, allowed him to work collaboratively with a number of his former students who live in the large artist colony in Baroda. These

7 younger artist friends helped him to collect material (like ordering 20 cotton gins from a Muslim community in Kolkata, or looking for a 100 radios over two months at the Baroda Friday market), assisted him to make the kinetic sculptures, and worked on designing the sound installations, besides being vocal partners in many conversations around the work.

A loosening of language and shift in form and material into a kind of extreme theatricality came after theatre director Anuradha Kapur invited him in 2004 to work collaboratively with Nilima Sheikh and Sumant Jayakrishnan on the design of a Hindi play, Navlakha, in Delhi. Given complete freedom to innovate, the artist- designers decided to make a number of props like body parts, wings, animals, plants - which were open ended and had nothing directly to do with the story of a puppeteer. They came to life and meaning when the actors used them in various ways in the rehearsals, dragging them about, eating with them, talking to them and forming relationships with them, adding a surreal richness and complexity to the work. The experience opened up a freer way of working where you could throw disparate things together to form strange new meanings.

Formally, Suresh uses two different kinds of tactics in this exhibition. In the chaos of sounds and images, there is a certain minimalistic colour scheme of white and black and saffron throughout the installation, in the collaboratively constructed objects, and in the series of small paintings called Cowshed. In contrast to these are the brilliant palettes of the videos. The artist creates these films in a solitary state, editing and designing the animations and music by himself over time, layering drawing, painting, photography and found footage. Lush and painterly, these short animation videos made in earlier years use all his artistic skills while telling harsh stories. They appear as a preamble or history to the demonic machines that populate Chronicles.

The earliest video Golden Quadrilateral (2008) is a composite of sketchy video shots and pictures: of windmills, express highway, snail, newspaper/media images of

8 state politicians, and maggots, juxtaposed against the silhouette of a road worker. The subject is the grandiose project of building the national highway network. In Albino (2011), the white peacock first appears as a symbol of disregarded groups. Suppressed by religious fanaticism and political domination, the peacock keeps twisting its identity in its embattled existence. In the process, what comes together is a shifting series of historical phantasms - cotton ginners, weavers, images of Gandhi spinning, slaves - blurring the lines of the imaginary and the real. Re- fraction(2012) is a portrait of a boatman lost in rowing, a searchlight panning from one end to another on the wall of the Dal Lake, hearing distant sounds of a riot, gun shots, religious chants, and moving nowhere. The latest video, Retakes of the Shadow II (2013), is structured over the aftermath of the 2002 riots in Gujarat. It begins with frames focusing unrelentingly on charred bread and moving shadows of the train (both of which are references to the riots): “the work offers an entry into the nature of violence, its multiple levels and forms, its strategies and tactics and the manner in which everyday life comes to be organised in its terms”.

People are taken aback at the exhibition, finding it powerful and disturbing. The experience is like looking in at the infernal workshops of Mordor from the film series of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The writer Tolkien, in creating his fabulous world, rejects modern industrial society and extols the ideal of a simple, pre-industrial pastoral life exemplified by the Hobbit village, via European medieval imagery. B.V. Suresh however is not a pastoral romantic. His work is not a rejection of the machine or of the industrial revolution, or a retreat into an ideal pre-modern time. Technically clever himself, he is in fact interested in the machine, which could both be diabolic and exploitative, or in a simpler form illustrative of human ingenuity with tool making. He is decidedly critical of the project of retrieving a so-called golden past by the religious nationalists. Perhaps he holds the hope that economic policies in the future will be from the bottom up, developed from the creativity of the common citizen, and a society which includes and celebrates everyone.

9 The development of these recent works had begun with the thought of “cotton” as an “object/as material/ as subject” that got spilled over when working on his last solo show Facilitating the Beast, which framed the dilemmas of post- 2002 Gujarat. Indeed, this process, he says, “has slowly taken a gigantic form like a cotton load set up at a warehouse against the proportions and forms of weights.” He has “woven it as a discontented metaphor” while developing his new body of works, to chronicle the lives of the vulnerable under constant surveillance and voyeurism. The history of cotton is indeed the history of the world: of its earliest craft and commodity; of trade and colonialism; of the industrial revolution and the mills of Lancashire; of slave ships and the cotton plantations of the American South; of khadi and the Indian Nationalist Movement and the boycott of Lancashire cloth. It continues today into the neo-colonialism of biotech companies and the bankruptcy and suicide of small farmers, in the Asian sweatshops of multinational clothing brands. The poetry of the weaver Kabir and black slave music too came out of this epic story. Suresh sees the cotton farmers’ crisis as symptomatic of the rejection of those at the edge of “development” who do not fit into the elite mainstream of the advantaged. His focus here is on a particular community of our society associated with cotton for many centuries, the Muslims: as cultivators, as skilled producers of cotton products, or as merchants between the two, whose identities sadly, “have been twisted beyond anyone’s imagination in the contemporary times.” Against this background, he questions whether Gandhi’s khadi movement was really a movement at all, or a strategic hijacking of this history for political mileage.

The filmmaker Kumar Shahani, who has been researching for long the civilizational and political history of cotton, writes that it is the versatility of cotton textiles that has brought them so close to speech. In the weaving of B.V. Suresh’s language, the white of the cotton is the white of the albino peacock, and the story of the marginal subject is closely bound together with them. Yet the fragility of the innocent, “the silence of the lambs”, could even become an insurgent force as illustrated in an old saying the artist likes to quote – “the butterfly getting the better of a rogue…”

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 READINGS IN THE MARGINS (Some Notes from the Chronicles of Silence) Rakhi Peswani

The residual images of violence – not just the hysterical violence of mob tyranny or riots, but the larger, state sponsored machinery of the development project, the pro-corporate anti-poor era of liberalisation and privatisation – is the meta-terrain that B.V. Suresh is gnawing at. Over the last two decades, he has been recording and revealing this social violence of the modernising project, its repercussions, its politics of blatant homogenisation along the lines of religion and organised elimination of underrepresented cultures. These recordings bear testimony to the social events, not as footage of news, but as physical, visceral, optical and aural citations to the cultural. Words are insufficient to represent the immersive, theatrical space, with its various materials, sights, sounds, moving and still images. Since words can only scrape the surface of such experiences, this essay will reveal fragments of thoughts about the mise-en-scène that B V Suresh refers to as Chronicles of Silence.

The Field of Silence: Apathy of the State and the Arts Silence is a loaded precinct. Its social and cultural meanings vary. In its literary and visual forms, the discourse of Silence is also rooted in the histories of amnesia, forgetfulness, marginalisation, misinterpretations, disrespect, omissions to neglect, destruction and death. The writing of history is the arduous task of creating a narration of past. Often, the language and methods of historiography fail to meaningfully represent the discursive proponents of Silence. For marginalised communities, the making of histories is a complex process of fact finding, registering, recording and vocalising the circumstances, situations, experiences,

26 humiliations and intimacies in the most unwavering manner. Chronicling, in such intimate and subjective manner often has been relegated to art and literature. Historiography has kept itself away from the activity of chronicling because the latter is seen as an idiosyncratic process, sometimes frivolous, self-indulgent, and far removed from empirical “truth telling.” The writing of histories, most often, has been officially undertaken by experts trained to objectively analyse and write.

More recently, even the legitimacy of experts has been forsaken in an effort to conjure a glorious history of a great nation.1 Such play of power manufactures histories that exclude voices not endorsed by the hegemonic social, political or economic forces that systematise control. This fails to produce the voices of social justice. The omissions include appalling devastations like wars, famines, homicides, massacres, pogroms or riots. It is only our imagination or by turning to art and literature that we grasp the ramifications and enormity of such events. Art, in this capacity, produces a mode of telling, stirring certain quiet strings of our emotions that History writing fails to move.

The languages of arts, in a way, are also mute.2 Their codes of interpretation are often embedded in their language and histories, requiring specialised knowledge to decipher. The age of reproduction of arts, has produced varying contexts in the viewing of a work.3 The diverse ways in which art can be experienced today also makes the Arts obscure, and in a way, silent. Therefore, reception of contemporary art needs a grasp of its context, its media form and its modes of circulation. Who sees it, where and how it is presented become important in the conceptualising and reception of any art work today.

Breaking the Silence – Methods, Materiality and Language In such context, Suresh’s oeuvre of intermedia assemblages provide certain tactics to contextualise the object of art in contemporary India. As a reflective study of Indian urbanising societies, the works point to certain overlooked trajectories of material

27 and technological cultures prevalent here. Marginalised communities, though a large number, are scattered geographically and lack constituent representation in the modern nation state.4 Historically severed from both land holding and modern forms of knowledge production, they are mostly dependent on their craft and agrarian skills. Over centuries of unhindered practices, these crafts have become languages, though largely ignored or mildly acknowledged in society. The codes of these languages are vastly undocumented, and reading, in this expanded sense, is a matter of analysing the systemic knowledge associated with the communities. Also, the form of chronicling or accounting of life of communities is sporadically articulated in contemporary India. To Chronicle as such, in this context, becomes a process of making a form of historiography.

An object or material carries associations ingrained in its physicality. Like language, a material is a comprehensive system of signs expressing narratives about its origin, histories, ownership, form, make and technology. It also holds associations of geography, climate, geology, and various natural forces that enrich its stories.5 Unlike the arbitrariness of verbal languages, the language of objects and materiality is a reciprocal reflection or representation of a ‘real’; a physical response towards the world around us. The nature of materials and objects in Chronicles of Silence implicate a reality, especially for those familiar with contemporary India and its social and cultural situations. Suresh utilises the found and the readymade matter, creating an indication of materials as ciphers of a residue. These are held as metaphors of the contemporary. Unlike the Readymade in the language of the modern, Suresh’s use of the readymade as the residual, produces certain thoughts about the state of our modernity, its relationship with the culture of recycling and reusing, and its intimate association with the life of the subaltern.

The spectre of object-sculptures, as kinetic assemblages, are meticulously fabricated or assembled from scavenged and found things, seemingly from mundane urban detritus. When seen in isolated entities, these are recognisable

28 as accruals from flea markets, poultry farms, old hardware markets, farm sheds, or small street corner garages. These places, holding our material culture, exude street machismo and blatant virility. There are various kinds of ambiguities – of religious and political affiliations, codes of informal brotherhood and parochial identity politics. To decode this language, the signs are discrete and often dubious. As one navigates in Suresh’s labyrinthine assemblage, these codes become evident; independent forms hinged interdependently with the material culture of streets, all cogs in a farcical narration, conjoined.

The works, taking cues from our street life, possess bare, open construction, showing bolts, clogs, motors and structural undertones of the mechanism. This formal character lends an undertone of morbidity – a symphony of spatial and material imagery in their skeletal structure. The works are designed to reveal the anatomy of their construction, reminiscent of the popular and folk character of Indian modernity, its resourcefulness in the oblique application of material culture. The production techniques and inventiveness are visible in the informal but coherent usage of old and new technologies.

From associations with flea markets, second hand appliances’ bazaars, paan corners and greasy mechanic’s shops, they create suggestions and reminders of the humdrum. The representations create a hall of “laughing mirrors” as in a carnival, producing a parallel likeness of analogous real characters. The ideological framing of these everyday vignettes is distorted with middle class beliefs of normalcy, polite conversations, the din of “peaceful” coexistence, or television. The works unplug bourgeois silence in a white cube.

Thus, certain important questions need to be asked. What has been the status and role of art and its language in our context? Questions about materials and objects, their spaces and sites when they are pronounced as Art. What is the status of knowledge systems that have provided resilient identities to various communities?

29 These knowledge systems stand at a crucial juncture of being fractured or becoming hollow signs: either for a euro-centric gaze, or for mute appropriations in the identity wars of nationalism.

As the Indian state vastly circulates the oriental imagery of the nation towards a Western audience6, the nature of arts, crafts, and agrarian identities is diminished into aesthetic fixity. Within the realm of contemporary art, practitioners have been appropriating the visual and material languages of marginalised artists and artisans. Often, the nuances of what constitutes handmade, or the explorative unrepeatable gesturality in material processes, is flattened or easily passed off under the authorship of a “contemporary artist”. There has been a continued fracturing of the body of the artist figure, of the head and hands, or thinking and laboring, that is in continuity with industrial era of Modernity. Here onwards began the industry of outsourcing the crafting or making in a work, the physical and aesthetic labour of art production, without legitimate authorship or without economic acknowledgements. This became a common practice of (Post)modern artist under the legitimate guise of critique of originality.

Often, ‘orders’ are created by an upwardly mobile artist/image maker, for handmade replica production of an established readymade/digital image. The skills and language of an economically weaker section of artist/craftsman, are usurped unacknowledged, much in the vein of caste practice of relegating laborious aspect of material/cutural production to the subservient section. This section has also been stripped off their occupational identities in the fight for electoral constituencies. Major political parties, in their formulaic populist juggernauts, have created religious identity as a defining force to win constituent numbers. The act of stripping one identity, to project an armour for another; of being enfolded into mainstream Hindutva to fight fundamentalist wars much like the medieval Christian crusades, or current Islamic jihadists, seems ironic and wretched at the same time. Stripping the occupational identity and leaving a hollow, seemingly

30 muscular (and masculine) identity, has helped most political parties to usurp the masses either as industrial labor or religious mobs; thus detracting from core civic issues while keeping the majority impoverished and below any standards of scarcities and insufficiencies.

In this larger field of anomalies, let us delve into some images that The Chronicles of Silence holds.

Imaging the Silence – Formations for Speech

*Small glass houses are engulfed in saffron flames. Positioned in clusters of neat rows, some bear charred bread loaves submerged in viscous solution, others holding smaller houses within. These houses appear as a leitmotif on the walls, as images on a horizon.

*In the foreground, four, hefty iron weights establish a central space, as suspended kinetic pillars playing havoc with the space. Their mechanical ascending and descending movement crushes the frail cotton cushions underneath them. The repetitive and brutal movement of the weights reminds us of the economic failures that have accompanied every change in the national political regimes. From colonial to post-independence socialism, the first and second waves of neo-liberal capitalism, the State’s active stances have disempowered various forms of labour, of agriculture, crafts, and other self-sustaining professions.

*In another section, a tall working ladder towers over the setting, with a horizontal, gyrating flag pole. A burnt and tattered viridian green flag encircles the entire space. The fabric is often used in houses and farms as bulwark for vulnerable plants, or as fencing material to protect greenhouses. Its color further creates associations of a chador used in funerary rites of various Indian Muslim sects. The flag tenderly touches the viewer’s body while creating a mournful impact with its frayed

31 condition. Its horizontality, and slow pace, frames the space with its breadth, while its movement maps the passage of time.

*Next, an ingeniously crafted neon light beam produces an effect of reconnaissance and surveillance. An LED torch attached on an old table fan’s motor, creates a beamer circumscribing a semi-circular space. The rotating light shaft produces an underlying effect of a surveillance apparatus grazing the continuity of space. Its roving movement, covers everything around but is barely discernible to the eye of the bystander/viewer. Its speed of movement slips past the viewer’s bodies and surfaces in an even, unfluctuating gesture.

*While these installations of movement, tactility and light immerse the viewer, another bulky apparatus violates the spectator’s viewing bubble. Two iron-mesh elliptical fabrications in the guise of ginning mills rotate with chicken feathers and papier-mâché pebbles set in them. With their weight and movement, these noisy sculptures submerge the viewer in a fragmented physical experience of industrial work. The space is scattered with chicken feathers hovering and strewn from these contraptions.

*At the heart of these visual and spatial quips, a central protagonist casts a theatrical setting. Perched on a rickety wooden crate, a poignant, life-size sculpture of an albino peacock stands motionless. Its plumage cut from the body, stamped under another heavy iron weight.

*This entire space is interpolated with sounds: a screeching national bird in a duet with the Prime Minister, expressing his mann ki baat7 in a repetitive monotone. These dominant sounds are commingled with interviews from farmers expressing their plight in a neo global capitalist world.

*The soundscape is heavily punctuated with the early morning tune8 of Vividh

32 Bharati9 adding a layer of nostalgia to the whole assemblage. The peacock casts a shadow on a projection, and the projection provides a multitude of faded colours to the body of the albino. The stark white body is illuminated with the transient quality of light-pixels. The video projection behind, casts image-quotes from the ongoing aftermaths of carnage at Babri, Godhra and Kashmir, in the guise of elegies that constitute much of Suresh’s language.10 The moving silhouettes postulate ephemeral impressions along the body of the peacock. A dignified icon of the National, the bird, a mute, symbolic spectator, casts a shadow on the projection while a video of a rotating iron weight spins.

Amongst these spatial and acoustic images, two miniature screens display videos running in unbroken continuity: a queue of labourers visible inside an upscale atrium of a newly constructed airport. Their silhouettes reveal tired bodies, repeatedly lugging voluminous construction material. The screen becomes a palimpsest11 showing polished glass, in cyan tones; silhouettes of men, clad in helmets and improperly fitted clothes against layers of glass reflections. The representation of these men, like their “real” space, embraces their fragile bodies as apparitions, protected by the framing device of the camera.

These two screens are accompanied by more images on the walls. Graphic, white, inscribed images of cows frame the space. Smeared with blinding saffron-neon patches, their banal eyes stare out of the two-dimensionality. These images, spread across the spatial walls, like marginalia in a manuscript, create an ancillary intertextual presence. The expressionistic drawings convey an urgency to read this chronicle with the ongoing discourse around cultural and social vigilantism across the nation. “Protection” of the cow12 is the latest, systematically organised13 excuse for Hindu state and non-state actors to regulate and corner Muslims.

On another wall, thorny, prickly branches, cast ominous shadows. Their forms appear limp and feeble, as bodies tethered on ropes. These vignettes are the events

33 that comprise the Chronicles of Silence. The installed space, in its magnitude and intensities, incites visceral responses towards pogroms and systemic mass violence encountered in post-independence India.

The Residue of Language

Suresh’s use of materials opens a field of inquiry. The syntax of a material is not limited to its immediate capacities or what it can phenomenologically evoke. Its implications extend to the social, political, economic and cultural. In this capacity, Suresh utilises cotton as that marker of global trade and exploitative policies of colonial regimes, of nationalistic fervor, of creating mass constituency (charkha and khadi14), and then the post-independence era of free trade of cotton. The usage of expended, old cotton, strewn in a field as leftovers along with an equally provocative symbol, the radio; as a field of defunct objects.

The radio, an exemplary tool of communication and socialist revolution, sits dead in a field of cotton. Instead, what we hear is the blaring sound from cosmetically placed local speakers, projected in the soundscape of the space. These pronounce a contemporary event: a democratically elected right wing Prime Minister deploying a tool of socialist communication as a cultural sign of rhetoric. Contemporary spaces of popular culture have become complex terrain where truth and fiction merge and are often manipulated. Mass media and all other media forms often owned, controlled and governed by the ruling elite, deliberately blur the demarcations between the real and the make-believe, producing a cultural amnesia in the mass imagination. Suresh utilises these cultural tropes and the artifice of language in its most unswerving deliberation, creating dissonance of sounds to keep the make- believe aspect as the only real device of association with reality.

For this, he fabricates a system of signs and associations, much near the

34 representative modes, as reminders, but also equally steeped in abstraction that keeps the make believe alive. Charred bread loaves, reminders of the infamous Best Bakery Case15 during the 2002 Gujarat carnage, amplify the history of mob violence against Muslim minorities. This is the sacrosanct space of archiving the dead, or keeping account of that which the state, in its most astute mode, tries to erase. The bread loaves are embedded inside fragile glass houses preserved individually in resin. The visible remnants, though artificially created, carry an embalming effect from another time and place. They appear as signs, of very old and very recent wounds from victimisation of minorities. They sensitise a space of reflection, where news or information becomes a rendition of individual pain and suffocation.

There are also other aspects of materiality that come to the fore in relation with Suresh’s concerns with process based practice. Unlike the idea oftraditional crafts and arts, his works thwart any easy categorisation into “high”, “popular”, or the “vernacular”.

He conjures the entirety of the craftsman, be it a carpenter, mechanic, electrician, metal fabricator, a bore-well repairer, or a tractor mechanic, or a software coder; Suresh draws consistently from their modes of practices, either through informal tinkering, self-learning or informal collaborative exchanges. Through repetitive tasking, this learning on-the-job, lends a quality of ingenuity and resourcefulness.

This world, on the streets from where Suresh draws his work, is a world of men, machinery and machismo. These are the streets the subaltern inhabit, as open workshops, where they live, make, occupy, possess and exist. It is also a world where occasionally, men learn the artful disguise of duplicity. They make and scrutinise; they reason and subvert. Here, the dreams of the masses are raised. An engine that runs a flying carpet will be made here; the drill that reaches the other end of the earth will be made here. This is the world of excesses and mirages, conjured into realities. Images get made here, by laboriousdoing . Oil, grease, rpm,

35 lathe, jigger, all get utilised into innovative production. Suresh’s engagement with this world creates a series of signs about the material and technological culture in urban India. This culture consumes every batch of imported technology and regurgitates hybrids. This modernity hinges on the bastardisation, creating replicas as innovative originals.

The labour of making these works, circumvents the precincts of high/low or art/ craft binaries of readings. In their production and execution, the works show organic evolution from materiality, tinkering and informal collaborations as processes in its making. Contesting aestheticisation of forms, they direct us to the simplicity of everyday life in a bustling street, its migrant workforce and its silent majority. The encounter these communities face, their methodical eviction, distress, destruction, and systemic marginalisation are the refrains elaborated through these works.

Viewers move through the farcical and fictitious space, confused and astonished, mute voyeurs in a colossal drama. Stick-like, emasculated figures occupy street corners, some as mouthpieces of repetitive media rhetoric; others, denuded of their identities, appropriated in a cultural war of fundamentalism. The unpredictable nature of these streets is overwrought with crass masculinity and at other times in its humane simplicity. Suresh’s signs spin ironies, spoofing the masculine obsession with technology, replete with desolation and melancholia. Other residual materials occupy the space: bird feathers, tattered, strewn and flying about, chemical and pesticide bottles, defunct tools, wooden dumbbells, broken wooden crates.

Suresh stipulates a paradigmatic position through these works. In the choice of materials and processes, the works seem to emanate from an ‘older’ system of production, namely hand-painted, hand-made, or manually assembled. However, by interweaving newer media forms, Suresh makes the works difficult to reproduce as documents and difficult to procure in the institutionalised art market. Instead, he critically punctures the role of an artist as a mere object or image maker. He

36 extends the capacities of this image maker to that of a knowledge scriber or preserver. He also extends the role further to that of an architect, who further utilises that knowledge to fabricate meaningful spaces.

Conserving the Forms: Seizing the Silence

An archivist hand-picks and records, to reinstate a value to social and cultural phenomena. Archiving is a process that requires intrinsic empathy towards the historical context in which a knowledge system was created or used. It widens the possibilities and access of knowledge systems by creating newer and broader roles and meanings. Suresh, as an artist-archivist, creates a system of arrangements and description, facilitating possibilities of enriching and creating value, or rigorously expanding the meaning of the social and the cultural. In this capacity, he writes microhistories, to express meaningful narratives absent within the official canons.

Suresh’s framing in a gallery space, provides certain positions about unacknowledged histories of practice that segregate pure and impure materials and create exclusionary production of spaces; parts of towns, villages and cities that are fractured in their very structure. Even the spatial aspects of the physical human body, or its capacities to implement various kinds of labour, has been divided on the lines of purity and pollution. Historically, materials and spaces, through the practice of caste, are segregated within a social body.

The Sacred as Silent: Constructing Spaces of Subversion

Suresh addresses these fractured spaces through an elaborate metamorphosis of a white cube16 into a grove of concentrated absurdities. He breaks the space- spectator codes of conduct17 and creates a spectacle ensnaring the physical

37 body of a nonchalant spectator. Disemboweling the alienated eye and body of the spectator, he encodes the assemblage with layers of abstraction and reality: bare, geometric, dark, recognisable in their visual and aural surfaces. By bringing the impure, the contaminated and polluted inside the sanctified atmosphere of the institutions of art galleries, the works provoke the seemingly secular face of modern institutions like museums and galleries that have discrete extensions of age old practices of space segregation.18

Here, taking a re-tour of the exhibition space, it will help to review the conceptual map that Suresh has juxtaposed on the site. The secular, sanctified nature of a gallery site is superimposed with the sacred character of a temple site. The constructed space mirrors the architectonic space of an ancient Hindu temple, its coded associations with the anthropomorphic body of the divinity. The structure of the body of the divine god is segregated into various systematic spaces. These call for certain rituals and conventions, all implicit in the architectural structure and ritualistic practices that are barely known to most people today. The conceptual mapping of the entire assemblage of the Chronicles and its semblance to this temple space, satirically desecrates the idea of blind following, ritualisation of obscure practices and fractured nature of sacred and profane spaces.

At the entrance of the gallery, the Gopuram, or the feet of the divinity, is where the Sthulalingam is created. Here, at the entrance are the four wood sculptures, in the form of stick figures with curious mechanical contraption attached to them. A cane stick is attached with a rather ingenious motorised mechanical contraption. It is tied where two wooden planks or the “legs” of the sculpture meet. At the lose end of the stick is tied a saffron powder potli which dusts/ bursts out a subtle sprinkle of saffron at every terse bang of the stick on the wooden plank. The stick tensely rises and palpably falls every few seconds. With a synchronous rising and falling of the cane batons, these four dvarapala figures greet the entrant. They exhibit a

38 sardonic illumination on a form of masculinity that is comic and somewhat intrinsic to the character.

The, dhwajasthambham, or the consecrated god’s phallus is the slowly gyrating, rickety stepladder with a tattered horizontal flag. With a stepladder and a rotating machine on the high point, it produces associations of the Panopticon19. The dhwajasthambham, or the ‘divine phallus’, becomes a metaphoric surveillance machine. The towering device, allegorically holds the horizontal, emerald flag, in half-mast.

The space between the mahamandapam and dhawajasthambham, the space of swadhishthana chakra (the chakra of creativity in Tantra), below the navel, or the lower abdomen, is where the peacock’s glorious plumage is pitched, separated from its body, it is harshly crushed under a heavy, iron weight, used to weigh farm goods in wholesale markets.

Just along the periphery of this space are the four ‘pillars’ that hold the inner plinth of the temple sanctuary. The four pillars, in the modern Indian democracy, namely, justice, equality, freedom and representation, are absent. Instead, in a Sisyphean take, four decrepit ropes, in four corners, meekly carry the heavy weights up only to let them plunge at the behest of gravity. The shock of the fall is crushingly met with old, crumbling cotton swabs, creating a physical metaphor of destitution. The only “pillars” that this system seems to be resting on, are volatile market forces, rising and plummeting repeatedly. These weights are the peripheral precincts of the mahamandapam. In the mahamandapam, or the main hall, the “chest” and “abdomen”, in their materiality, are represented with cotton, broken transistors, dumbbells, broken tools, and ephemera almost comprising the viscera of the body. At the entryway to the porch, on either side, are two agile hands, the ginning machines robustly and rigorously rotating; they consistently churn feathers and stones.

39 In the garbhagriha, the sanctum, the ideological, immaterial, aspects of conceptual images are offered. Forms of video projections, moving images, shadow and light in their formal aspects, and the immaterial idea of nationalism are introduced. The sacrosanct aspect of nationalism – its majesty – is critically punctured. The national bird ironically presents the current values of our State. The only colours the peacock are the colours projected on to it, like a melancholic lunar surface.

The periphery of the garbhagriha is occupied with numerous stick figures, like “devotees”, with “cotton-heads” that work like speakers for the voices of farmers’ interviews. These toy like, emaciated figures are in the same vein and visual character as the four dvarapalas at the entryway, but without the phallic cane baton. The entire assemblage marks the hollowness of all ideological signs. It replaces the sanctified body of a Hindu deity with urban viscera and everyday profanity.

There are also other references to rituals or modes of operation in a temple: circumambulation, or the going round in circles; either around the temple, or around the dhwajasthambham. Or, rotating one’s own body while keeping the location of the divine within the eyes. These are all rituals that were perhaps symbolic codes. Their encryption is not just lost but was never revealed to the larger populace. Suresh subverts the tendency and utilises the formal aspects of these rituals; rotations, or circumambulations in space, as metaphors of heaviness and unending labour.

Operating as an immense, integrated apparatus, with smaller constituent parts, the Chronicle remains untranslatable into other media forms. It mends the fractured modern institutional spaces of bodies and sites, and thus becomes an inter-textual field in the guise of virtual escape rooms, where individual works and spaces are conceptually impossible to isolate as images or objects in the Marxist sense of the word.

40 Some Syntactic Strategies

Keeping a very refined balance of figural and gestural aspects of representation, Suresh delicately helps us navigate a highwire of information and evocations. There are various motifs holding variations within repetitions. Movements and sounds of rotating, gyrating, spinning, lifting, dropping, whirring, create physical sensations of dizziness, heaviness, fear, centripetal strain, or certain mediation on irretrievable and countless aspects of the everyday.

As forms, many project a recognisable likeness towards certain objecthood, though intrinsically removed from their mundane syntax and reproduced into a lexicon of visual, spatial, tactile and auditory forms. The realism inherent in the works reflect the social and political climate of an entire nation, fervently chugging at the fruits of globalisation, flexing itself with a violent, chimeric pitch. The visual and kinetic pointers in these works transcend the physicality of forms, yet keep their stout corporality. They simultaneously play with our associations from past and present, mind and body; between what one knows and what one has experienced, on urban streets.

Light and sound trespass. Their properties to transgress spaces have been utilised earlier by religious and state machineries. The recent increase in volume of music blaring from religious institutions, the increased frequency of celebrations and processions, these are conscious intrusions of spaces. Suresh’s subversive assemblage, as a mirror reflection, uses both light and sound elements to produce a critique of the fundamentalist nature of current religious and state mechanisms.

41 END NOTE

As a reassessment of the contemporary, works of art, like poetry, produce other syntactical sounds to express that which has been lacking in articulation. To express an absence, an artist investigates and yields a new form of language. In this capacity, formally, art, like poetry, helps broaden the paradigmatic scope of languages. Critical revisions challenge the prevalent and dominant paradigms within a system. This Chronicle, in its vastness, is an instrument for politics but does not hold a typical form. It is held in a passionate form to provoke viewers to think and consider their individual identities within a larger social body.

A subtle but powerful image from these spatial pages comes to mind. Scratched onto saffron pigment, on the inside walls of a glass house, the words: “NASREEN NOT THERE; NOT THEN NOT NOW”, are imprisoned within the confines of a house sculpture. A saffron flame surrounds the smaller white house inside. The words are unevenly written and appear to have come out of a scorching throat or a speech bubble, splattered on the insides of this larger fragile home/city. The sentence, in its usage of the name, Nasreen20, in its double denial, becomes an expression of an immense loss: of a cherished and esteemed teacher, and the intimately perceived loss of a secular and democratic climate. The name also represents the past and present status of Muslim communities. Her demise before the 2002 Gujarat riots21 and before the intrinsic shifts in the social, political and economic climate of India22, has been expressed in melancholic undertones of both distress and release.

The systematic elimination of communities who are not part of the Hindutva brigade, the denial of justice for bereaved families, and the unending marginalisation of minority communities become the personal testaments of loss and mourning. As an epilogue image, the suspended iron weight spins endlessly.

42 1 Visweswaran, Kamala, Michael Witzel, Nandini Manjrenkar, Dipta Bhog, and Uma Chakravarti. 2009. The Hindutva view of history: rewriting textbooks in India and the United States. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 10(1):101-112 2 Berger, John (1973). Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. ISBN 9780563122449. 3 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968 4 Categorised as Scheduled Castes/ Tribes, Other Backward Castes, Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists etc. by the Indian Constitution, the fixity of their identities, lives and professions in our social context has been either due to their family lineage, their birth, or their upbringing in the age old system. Most, of these castes were segregated along the lines of professions, relegated to specific kinds of labour and work. Leather tanners, weavers, dyers, cotton ginners and spinners, ironsmiths and tool makers, wood cutters and carpenters, farm labourers, miners, bread makers, poultry keepers, cleaners, butchers, builders and many other social professions assigned certain material production in the older social system. With the rise of modern modes of production, and capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, many of these professions are becoming extinct due to the neo liberal policies of the Indian State. The machinery of mass unemployment has produced other modes of appropriation- that of communal and religious identity politics that most Indian governments have resorted to post independence. 5 An iron chair feels different from a cane chair. Its design develops from its materiality, the prevalent technology, its cultural evolution, its function, its usability, ownership and innumerable other impetus’ at force. The stability that an iron chair accredits also lends it the qualities of permanence, immovability, and a kind of longevity. The abstraction of these felt adjectives, is another form of language that an object carries. 6 There have been innumerable instances of this since Independence. Festival of India taken abroad, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, tourism brochures, Incredible India Campaign, or the more recent declaration of International Yoga Day. 7 Mann ki baat, literally translated as ‘Talk of/from the Heart’, is an Indian radio programme hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which he addresses the people of the nation on All India Radio (AIR), and the state owned television channel, Doordarshan (DD National) 8 All India Radio’s signature tune was composed by Walter Kauffman, in 1936. Nostalgically etched on the minds of a whole generation of citizens born or brought up before or during the Emergency, the tune carries certain echoes of unification of a diverse country as one nation, and has certain reverberations of melancholy and absences. http://scroll.in/article/685009/remembering-the-jewish-refugee-who-composed-the-all-india-radio-caller- tune 9 Vividh Bharati, (lit.Diverse India), is the name of a major popular channel of All India Radio, launched in 1957, to unify a diverse nation state. The name stands as an antithesis to monolithic Hindurashtra that the current party in power is trying to create. 10 For a succinct reference to B V Suresh’s earlier body of works, see Deeptha Achar: Negotiating Visual Fields of the Contemporary, (cat text.) Fecilitating the Beast, B V Suresh, 2006, Pub: Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. 11 In architecture, as where an older layer is juxtaposed with a newer layer of representation. In Augmented

43 Reality, it can be used to describe the melding of layers of material places and their virtual representation. 12 The Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal (lit. ‘Indian Cow Protection Organisation’) is an Indian right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation based on the ideology of cow protection movement and Hindutva. It was founded in 2012. 13 See Adithya Nigam, Cow gangs of Akhand Bharat and the Dalit revolt- Hindutva Unravels. August 03, 2016, www.kafila.org https://kafila.org/2016/08/03/cow-gangs-of-akhand-bharat-and-the-dalit-revolt-hindutva-unravels/ 14 Gandhi created these iconic national symbols during the Nationalist Movement. These symbols stood for swraj, or independence from economic and political dependency. The Charkha is a wheel to spin yarn manually and Khadi is cloth handwoven from the handspun yarn. 15 On March 1, 2002, communal frenzy enveloped Vadodara. Best Bakery, a small outlet in the Hanuman Tekri area of Vadodara, Gujarat, was attacked by a mob, which burned down the bakery, killing 14 people. This attack was part of the 2002 Gujarat violence. 16 Brian O’Doherty 1999 (1976) Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space.Expanded edition. Berkely, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press 17 Brian O’Doherty ibid. (Page 38-42) 18 For a detailed understanding of construction of social space from traditional to modern, see Gopal Guru’s Experience, Space, Justice, in Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarrukai, The Cracked Mirror, An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, Oxford University Press, 2012. 19 A type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Michel Foucault viewed the panopticon as a symbol of the disciplinary society of surveillance, and an experimental laboratory of power in which behaviour could be modified. 20 Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) was an Indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and today considered one of the most outstanding modern artists from India. From 19 to she was part of the teaching staff at the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University, Vadodara, Gujarat. 21 The 2002 Gujarat riots, also known as the 2002 Gujarat violence and the Gujarat pogrom, was a three-day period of inter-communal violence in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Following the initial incident there were further outbreaks of violence in Ahmedabad for three weeks; statewide, there were further outbreaks of communal riots against the minority Muslim population for three months. The burning of a train in Godhra on 27 February 2002, which caused the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, is believed to have triggered the violence 22 For a succinct understanding of the economic and political correlation in India, see: Raghavan Srinivasan, demolition of Babri Masjid – A Turning Point for the Indian Polity. 09 December 2012. www.countercurrents. org http://www.countercurrents.org/srinivasan091212.htm

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 B.V. SURESH

1960 Born in Bangalore 1978 Ken School of Arts, Bangalore 1985 Diploma and Post Diploma in Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda 1987 MA in Painting at Royal College of Arts, London

SOLO SHOWS 2016 ‘Khamoshi ki Daastan’ Samukha Art Gallery, Bangalore 2016 ‘Chronicles of Silence’ Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi 2006 ‘Facilitating the Beast’, Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi 1998 ‘Recent Works’, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai 1992 Gallery 7, Mumbai 1991 Venkatappa Art Gallery, Bangalore, Karnataka 1988 Gallery 7, Mumbai

INTERNATIONAL PARTICIPATION 2009 Hong Kong Art Fair, China 2008 “Destination Asia: Non-Strict Correspondence”, Almaty, Kazakhstan 2005 Video Art, Durban, South Africa 2000 International Theatre Festival, Tokyo

GROUP SHOWS 2016 “Imagined Futures Reconstructed Pasts”, Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi 2014 “Aesthetic Bind, Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer”, Chemould Gallery, Mumbai 2013 “Irreversible”, video installation, Site Gallery, GIDC Baroda 2012 “Re-Fraction”, 5.12 min video, White Wash, Baroda 2011 “Albino”, 5.20 min video, Tao Gallery, Mumbai 2009 “Sin Drom”, India Art Summit, New Delhi 2008 “Golden Quadrilateral, Mechanisms of Motion”, Anant Art, New Delhi 2008 “Golden Quadrilateral”, 3 min video, “Time Transcendent”, Tamarind Art Gallery, New York 2008 “Shadows”, 3 min video. “New Media Workshop”, Uttrayan, Baroda 2008 “Retakes of the Shadow”, 3 min video, “Destination Asia: Non-Strict Correspondence”, Almaty, Kazakhstan 2005 “The Tale of the Talking Face”, 5 min video, Durban, South Africa

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHILDREN’S BOOK 1991 “Gadbad Ghotala”, Story by Safdar Hashmi 2008 “Untold School Stories - Three fourth, Half Price, Bajji, Bajji”, Story by Kadir Babu 2015 “The Walking Stick”, Picture Book by B.V. Suresh

1992-2017 Taught at the Painting Dept., Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda. Presently teaching at the Fine Arts Department, S.N. School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad

62 PUSHPAMALA N. has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”. As one of the pioneers of conceptual art in India and a leading figure in the feminist experiments with sculpture, photography, video and performance, her inventive work uses humour and wit to subvert the dominant discourse. She exhibits widely in India and abroad in solo shows, biennales and museum shows. She often speaks at conferences and her writing has been published in journals and books internationally. In 1996 she created a fictional institute Somberikatte (Idler’s Platform) through which she conducts talks and seminars. Pushpamala completed her BA in Psychology, Economics and English from Bangalore University and studied BFA and MFA in sculpture at M.S. University, Baroda. She has received the National Award (1984), Gold Medal at the VI Triennale India (1986), Karnataka Rajyothsava Award (1986) and the Jakanachari Award (2015). She lives in Bangalore. www.pushpamala.com

RAKHI PESWANI is a practicing artist and Higher Education teacher living between Delhi and Bangalore. Her areas of interest hinge between labor, craft and contemporaneity. She has held solo exhibitions in Mumbai ( 2013, 2007 and 2006), Delhi (2015, 2009), and Hong Kong (2011). Along with practice of art, she takes interest in art education and has earlier worked at University of Hyderabad, (2004 – 2012), Srishti School of Arts and Design, Bangalore (2012-2014). Recently she has been working as Visiting Associate Professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi (since 2016). Rakhi completed her MFA and BFA degrees from M.S.University, Baroda and qualified for UGC NET in the year 2003. She has participated in various group and museum exhibitions and has conducted workshops in various institutions of higher education in India and abroad.

63 © Vadehra Art Gallery, 2017 © Artworks: B.V. Suresh © Text: Pushpamala N. and Rakhi Peswani

Design: Suhani Arora Sen

D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India T +91 11 46103550/51 | E [email protected] | W www.vadehraart.com

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