Fine Art Award 2022 : Residency at 1ShanthiRoad — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Residencies are a space of incubation, exchange and experimentation. The 2022 Fine Art Awardees, Ankit Ravani, Arpita Akhanda, Debashish Paul, Hrishitonoy Dutta and Mallika Visvanathan attended a month long residency at 1ShanthiRoad in Bangalore.

In this week’s post they share with us their experiences and how their thoughts and practices evolved during this time.

Ankit Ravani

During our open studio at 1ShanthiRoad, I reflected on how we are persuaded by images, sounds and memory and how images come to pass in the public sphere. I did this with the help of three works, a lullaby, an ongoing project entitled Free Transform and an untitled exploration about states of blankness.

On our open day, as viewers made their way to my mezzanine makeshift bedroom cum studio, they encountered a sound piece on the stairs. It was the sound of a lullaby that I am humming. I wanted the tune of the lullaby to evoke a core memory and induce the viewer, into a state of rest. It is in this state of calm that I wanted my viewers to engage with the other two works on display.

‘Free transform’ is an ongoing experiment that looks at my escapism from triggering media images. I address this by selecting pleasing bits of landscape that form the background of traumatic imagery and assemble them into ideal landscapes of erasure. For example, the rainbow in the image on the left is formed by the water cannons used to attack the farmers during their protest in 2020-2021. To further this selective gaze and satire, I printed these digital collages onto a glittery paper.

For the third artwork on display, I took my cue from a previous project, A Site in Space. I looked at the aesthetic and persuasive language of Mock-ups, free source digital files meant for rebranding. I exported these pleasing Trompe l’oiel 3-D renders that attempt to simulate landscapes, textures, and bodies in their idealized forms and convert them into oil paints that draw from the tradition of realism in Dutch still life painting. The residency allowed me to visit oil paints as a medium after 8 years. By using Dutch still life painting as a reference point, the work aims to look at objects as an entry into a familiar visual culture that persuades, tricks, and sells through idealization and homogenization. The intent is to export these freely available virtual files that facilitate start-up culture into a traditional oil paintings meant for the aristocrats that preserve an original unbranded state of a mock identity.

Arpita Akhanda

The series of works I created during the residency are entitled, Residue, is my response to Bangalore as a residue of the historical events which shaped its identity through its architecture and landscape. On display were three works, Berunda, What else is incomplete? and an untitled video performance.

Berunda, Paper Weaving on archival print

The work Berunda deals with my experiences of exploring the city through various motifs which travelled through history and left a mark on Bangalore's architecture, landscape, and culture. Here I positioned myself as the mythological character Gandaberunda with two heads drawing a tension between memories of the past and the crisis of the present. The weaved motifs derived from the study of patterns collected from various sources such as the recurring jali motif/pattern found in the residency room on the room divider, the skylights of certain architectures in the city, the architectures of Mysore Palace, and the wall mural of Tipu Sultans Summer Palace, the Gandaberunda motif and the road signage structure.

What else is incomplete?, Photo-performance and collected objects

The work, What else is incomplete?, responded to the walks Suresh Jayaram (founder of 1ShanthiRoad) took us on in Lalbagh and Cubbon Park. Listening to the history of the landscape of both the parks narrated by Suresh sir, I began thinking about how these two landscapes are residues of the historical act of planting the foreign trees and architecture to create a collage of historical presence. As a practice of collecting objects from my travels, I began collecting residues from those landscapes. Bringing them back home I started drawing the objects and wrote about the relationship I developed with them. This exercise gradually emerged into the photo performance series.

Our neighbour at 1Shanthiroad was a bank that moved to another location. As per rule the section of the building where the lockers were placed had to be destroyed. Therefore, during the residency period, we heard and bore witness to how the identity of the architecture was being erased. The sound of the grinder breaking the brick walls became a part of our daily lives. People who had bank accounts there and were not aware of the action would come and ask us about the bank.

During the covid time last year, I developed a performance piece covering my body with the residues of an old architecture that was being replaced in Santiniketan. The sound of breaking walls reminded me of the performance piece which I had never shown anywhere. As a response to that sound, I displayed the performance video along with the residues of broken walls as a part of the open studio.

Debashish Paul

My time at 1ShanthiRoad was spent exploring how the body transforms with space, through photography, video, wearable sculpture, photo performance, and drawings during the residency period. I realized how the body is in conflict between collecting new memories and culture and leaving older ones behind, becoming conscious of how memories always disrupt the transformation process of the body.

Untitled, Photo performance, Wearable Sculpture

As a part of my exploration, I documented various markets of Bangalore, particularly the flower markets. The different types of flowers, their multiple colours activities of people in the market inspired me, and enabled me to understand the process of transformation of the body. When I saw the process of making flower jewellery, I noticed that the movement of the male hand was very feminine. The masculine hands control the soft flowers very beautifully and delicately, folding flower petals with a finger, and making garlands with a needle. It's very sensual and reminds one of the pain of a soft body. All these processes were like making a new body.

I collected different kinds of materials from the market which I used for my wearable sculpture and photo performance, including false hair, a variety of cloths, and flowers. My sculpture was created keeping the fluidity of gender in mind. I photographed my performance using the self-timer feature on my camera. The playfulness that emerged through the camera and materials was very surprising. The unexpected images tell personal stories and play a different role. It was very dramatic and cinematic as I did not know what would happen next. The result was unexpected, as the body moved in and out of the frame opening new possibilities to encounter and experience different notions of identity.

Hrishitonoy Dutta

1Shanthi Road was my first residency and therefore my first open studio beyond a college requirement. I was the first one to reach the residency and given the top room, also known as ‘the Den.’ The room brought everything together starting from the discussions, our readings of each other’s rooms and ultimately the curatorial itineraries.

During the residency, a friend called me a scientist or pilot. In their eyes, I have scientist-like tendencies since I like to collect, analyse and organise. It lead me to embody the identity of an explorer. I was deeply inspired by the Whole Earth Software Catalogue from 1985 edited by Stewart Brand. I noticed was how elaborately the catalogue explained things like drawing a line or shape or actions like pan, zoom, drag and drop - on software that were being developed at the time. A survival guide to live in a new digital realm. These gestures and ways of being are now second nature to us. Referencing things that I saw in the catalogue, I started making sculptural forms with papier-mâché. This was displayed as part of the explorers shelf inside the room (rocket ship).

In Tim Ingold’s Culture on the Ground: The world perceived through the feet, he outlines that making tools, drawing and using our hands and feet is what largely led to the development of our brains. Drawing from him, I mulled over what hand gestures could mean to us in terms of constituting humanity and the larger ontological question. I requested Debashish to interpret words that appear chapters of the Whole Earth Catalogue and clicked pictures of his hand gestures. These hand gestures became a starting point to make a manual containing hand gestures called Evolution of Dexterity through drawing and play. A manual of evolution and life through evolving gestures, dictated by the realm of the hyperreal.

Simultaneously, I also started drawing my own version of the Whole Earth Software Catalogue. I cut a hole in the back of the book and fixed a light fixed there. As people flip through it the light got brighter and started hurting the viewers’ eye as they read on. It was ironic as usually one comes into the light to read something, but here people had to cover the blinding light to be able to read it.

I was prompted to think about what kind of truth(right) are we accumulating? What does the moral right, the philosophical right and in recent years the political right signify? Could we say one or a singular kind of knowledge accumulation is dangerous?

Taking this into consideration I had pasted radium stickers with arrows asking the viewer to ‘TURN RIGHT’ starting from the first floor up until my room. This repetitive cueing helps the body get habituated. There must be a right way to be or the right way to function.

I would like to think of my work as a reference, an anecdote or as Sohrab puts it, a recounting.

Mallika Visvanathan

I spent my residency, trying to find a visual language for my film. Since I am still in the research stage, I was working on ways to present my preliminary notes. While I also screened a previous film of mine, the open studio became an attempt to translate conceptual ideas into images.

A lot of this evolved from conversations I had with my friends about what to present since a lot of my film is still only words and ideas in my head which I am yet to articulate through images. In a conversation, I mentioned reading a line from the book Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner that stood out to me, which was: “An adult fruit fly is the size of an asterisk.” I thought this was interesting because it didn’t specify what size of the font it was referring to. This idea of playing with scale then became a point of entry into representing my research. One of my friends responded: “Why don’t you make a hundred fruit flies?” The fruit fly, in the form of an asterisk, proliferated as a Cultivation of Fruit Flies on paper, marking time spent in the residency. They displayed their own patterns of behaviour towards the studio light as “v’s” in the form of typos marked the image.

Reiterating my interest in exploring text and language as image, this was in reference to another part of the book in which genetic mutations were explained as typos in the double helix structure of the DNA. The scientific study of such mutations came to be viewed under a magnifying screen on my table as The Solitary Fruit Fly, who did not behave the way it was supposed to. Placed directly under the light was To Scale: A Fruit Fly which consisted of an asterisk consisting of fruit flies that I drew. In an attempt to playfully depict one of the core ideas of my film, one of the fruit flies moved in the direction away from light. This was produced in the form of postcards which could then be taken away by visitors to the gallery so that each received one part of a larger story, much like research is one part of my larger film project.