Gestures Speak:
a one-off take on Brand
Bangalore
A CITY. A map. A reckoning of the
past, present and future. Each can be read, deciphered, decoded by a sensitized
individual ~ with as much insight and intuition as a palmist reads the tracery
on the soft inner spread of a hand.
The hand, thus visualized, can
evoke an individual within a city, a country, a globe. It can trace the
trajectory of a human being, an artist, a poet, an architect, often tantalizingly
on a parallel track to a city like Bangalore.
M. Shanthamani’s current show ~ titled Gestures
Speak ~ brings this home conceptually and visually, pregnant with layered
significance.
On her large, brooding acrylic
canvases, the local and the global, the insider and the outsider battle, collide
and jostle for co-existence, defragmenting life cycles and existential notions
long imbued with history by association with the onlooker and the activist alike.
Shanthamani’s stances stem from her
multiplicity of experiences as a rural-born individual, now an urban being. As
a young woman who made the transition in 1992 from the arts schools of Mysore and Baroda to a burgeoning,
IT-propelled Bangalore.
As a girl rooted in the rustic soil outside Mysore, warding off suitable
matches as a pre-teen, able to identify with the indomitable womenfolk who cared
for their households and 30 cattle, toiled in the fields, committed to life in
a deep, essential sense. As a questing mind enriched by the company of strong,
emancipated woman artists. Even as an artist who once couched herself thus:
“Painting became an important space
for me to get out of all this. It gave me freedom ~ physically, mentally,
financially. My canvas is now a surface that constantly questions and looks for
answers in that space.”
Shanthamani’s questions on Greater Bangalore,
even as Bengalooru, are imbued with reflections from her journey into the
future. To her, it matters that the Garden City is now almost invisible ~ cloaked
in dense vehicular pollution that chokes plant and human life alike. And that the
genteel norms that governed the pensioner’s paradise have been overtaken by a high-speed
youth-centric buzz, as set-back bungalows are gobbled up by high-rises blocks,
gated communities, and malls. Even the fact that the silk-weavers of the old
city have vanished as big brands lure the new, well-heeled customer with global
mantras.
Is the constantly-morphing city redefining
who we are? Is technology creating a rift between those with insider
information, and the tech-deprived? Are our bodies changing as shrinking city
spaces crowd us into personal cocoons not of our making? Perhaps. Through giant
acrylic canvases melded with stencilled photo-verity images, water colours and
body/ hand casts, Shanthamani creates parallel city narratives. Of the migrant street
woman who vends mallige flowers. Or
the labourers who shape the new city.
All those unknown, unseen, unsung stories beyond the hype. Those women who also
work round-the-clock, expressing themselves through their working hands, their
inherited classical postures.
What does the hand stand for within
the big frame, Shantamani wonders. In an age of body-shopping, has it become a
mere appendage? Have we outsourced our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our
culture, in the incessant 24/7/365 rat-race that is the new face of our
globalized city?
These issues are the raison d’etre of Gestures Speak, contextualizing the individual within the city. As
we celebrate the economic boom, are we neglecting a vital angle ~ that former
strategic colonial pawns today provide cheap brainpower to big first-world
players? Why is IT the most visible face of Bangalore today? Within the multinational
marketplace, have we been reduced to invisible working hands, shadowy presences
often unacknowledged?
Questions of identity surge beneath
the rippled cityscape. Is Bangalore
in danger of losing its past inheritance as it speeds towards modernization and
westernization? Why does it so seldom glance back at the riches that migrants
have brought into its cosmopolitan domain over the past 350 years, including
their living skills, rituals, crafts, cuisines and languages? Such as the
Tigalas from Tamil Nadu who set up Lalbagh for Haider Ali, the Devangas from
Andhra Pradesh at the heart of the silk industry, the Bengali karigars who are the mainstay of gold craft.
Or even the Anglo-Indians, the cantonment culture, and missionary schools at
the core of the city’s skill in a global tongue now outsourced. Or the
brilliant scientists who were behind the Bangalore torpedo or India’s first indigenous helicopter.
Other facts, other faces, call for equal attention.
On an average, over 2,500 white-collar IT workers, often with partners in the
same industry, have flocked to Bangalore
every month since the early Nineties. This youth brigade, often dubbed Gen-Next
by the media, heralds new consumer trends, crisscrossing culture, food and housing,
bypassing traditions and local habits. Their lifestyles are buttressed by
invisible lives ~ those of construction labourers
from north Karnataka and Tamilnadu, carpenters from Kerala, Rajasthan and Bihar, and marble workers from Rajasthan and UP. These
migrants, of a transient mindset, identify with little of Bangalore’s culture. Are they a malaise or
migratory beings of benefit to the city, whose population has multiplied
five-fold in just a decade-plus? How do these citizens identify with Kempe
Gowda or the Roman coins once found in the Cauvery?
Shanthamani brings her concentrated
gaze to bear on these inner city issues in Gestures
Speak. Migrant-centric lives need multiple narratives within a city that
lives in different time zones simultaneously. Within the digital landscape, the
hand has assumed the role of a giant cultural element. Growing beyond her
earlier conceptual and metaphorical work, facts and human stories assume a new
centrality. For instance, the fact that in 2004, Bangalore’s
200,000 textile workers contributed approximately a tenth of India’s textile exports of $13.5
billion. The tension between these cities, old and new, underline her explorations.
Beyond these conflicting cities, past
cultural nuances and social conditioning, she once observed, “At Baroda, I
realized I was a very tactile person. My central reference point is always my
body. I believe in doing things with my hands. I want to project myself as a
worker, maybe a painting worker. I like to smear paint with my hands, mould
things.”
The body, a central metaphor in
Shanthamani’s often-autobiographical work, is here symbolically the hand,
representing the many Bangaloreans who seem misplaced, not recognized by global
perceptions of the city in transition. The layered myth-making continues.
Her acrylic diptychs and triptychs,
often billboard-like, evoke the new affluence of glass and metal-facade towers,
but question why those who build these faceless, overnight cities, identified
perhaps by a barcode, are invisible. They summon up the ravages of cultural
imperialism in an age of pixellation, when we allow a Bamiyan Buddha to be
blown up without global protest because we imagine we have the power to create.
Through buttons that spell: Stop. Pause. Rewind. Save. Trash.
What would we trash in an era when every
brown-skinned worker is first regarded as either a wannabe terrorist or a cyber
coolie? Drawing on her experiences during a papermaking workshop in Glasgow with British
expert Jacky Parry in 2004, Shanthamani self-reflects on identity and belonging,
negotiating contemporary art practice.
Veering between the literal and the
symbolic, she invokes the giant creator’s hand from Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel ceiling, looming over call centres, their staff caught in the
cross-hairs of cultural conflict. Against a landscape of beeping electronic
pulses, hands as huge as an adult human being foreground a question: have we
lost our memory of agricultural origins? A yoga-centric canvas, dotted with
stick figure asanas suggesting inner
calm, subverts the inner resonance with the intrusion of itinerant child jugglers/ acrobats who today perform
for a living at traffic lights.
The series, eclectic in its
inspiration, draws on sources as varied as John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero,’ Nina Simone’s soul-rich ‘Four Women, brilliant black-and-white industrial photographs by
economist-turned-photographer Sebastiao Salgado, even encounters with dynamic
young women from Canada, Norway and Ireland during the Parry stint. Like Salgado,
Shanthamani interrogates the eroded status of the manual worker in our age of
technology.
Mating with, often masking, text
with colour, connecting with her earlier painterly and pictorial work, Shanthamani
couches her overview thus: “I’m talking about being reduced to a pair of hands,
constantly working for economic reasons since your product is removed from
personal, cultural and spiritual moorings. We’ve become a cheap market product
to use and throw. But even cheap labour
consumes all that their money can buy
– including cheap microchips or pirated products. Within our city, everything
is for sale, and everyone is a slave. We’re removed from living. We now have
only two mantras: Work and Money.”
Rhetorically, even ironically,
Shanthamani adds: “Is Bangalore,
then, really an urban space? Or a mere conglomeration of overgrown villages?
Let’s face it. Even an IT guy here is not known because he’s a great
programmer, but because of his willingness to work 14 hours a day. As a result,
so much is being sidelined, like our crafts traditions. The city’s only focus
is on construction labour or software labour. I’m consciously trying to accept
that I’m a painting labourer.”
Like her earlier shows in 1994 and
1996, the artist as migrant continues to react to Bangalore, to its manmade objects, its
creation of urban waste, its loss of human touch. Have people become mere
objects en route to the time of the cyborgs?
Shanthamani’s identity reasserts
itself as she opts to paint once more. She highlights almost iconic Indian
gestures: the hand in meditation, mudras,
the outstretched palm that begs. Her choices are buoyed by an almost atavistic
consciousness. She asks, “Painting as a human skill is losing ground in the
face of technology. It was important for me to paint these working hands within
the context of Bangalore.
But I did question whether I’m painting photo-realistically, or whether these works
were a collage. To me, technology can never be a solution to sweat, hunger and
pain. How can it replace basic urges like wanting to play with colours or
indulging in rituals that soothe?”
Perhaps her most rooted work in the
series is a woven tapestry embroidered with the words, ‘Made in India,’ a label
often exported to the first world. An intermediate space where Indians hire out
the cheap hand skills that the west has lost to industrialization.
To Shanthamani, it matters how her
body is read by the world at large. Or how she is often viewed as an aspiring
immigrant while in the first world, threading through her layered engagements
with Indian life in flux.
She reiterates: “Gestures Speak is not about opposing
growth. It’s about recognizing what’s happening, placing myself within it, hanging
onto what I hold dear…”
Finally, the viewer and the artist
revisit the crux of the interchange. In the age of the cyborg and the cyber
coolie, they examine the sites of human endeavour through the lens of history. In
our context, within our city, do our gestures speak? Or are they symbolic of
mere tokenism that so marks our place in the globalized world? Each hand could
change the course of this great charge forward into the unknown. And thus, the
lifeline of Bangalore
as we interpret it today.
(This essay was originally commissioned by Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, in 2007)
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