WORKING ON THE EDGE by Raghu Kondur

Raghu Kondur has been working with the city of Bangalore and mapping the city's changing landscape.This process has brought together many unheard voices and people from the city's under belly. The accelerated change and erasures are inevitable here; the city seems like  a construction site, a battle ground of change and resistance, loss and hope. The unplanned chaos is unnerving; the change in landscape has left us with only real estate as a promise for the future. This is visual response to the absurdity of a city that is at siege, the mocking of a city that seems to be waking up late and has been caught napping. This event is one of the many to focus on Bangalore growth, organized to look at urban issues and to ask questions.The overarching interest at the working class and to find meaning of ordinary people and their life's.

In all this,the worker is someone who plays a significant role. Raghu makes it visible, the images of the city beyond the gloss and hype. Makes you listen to many unheard voices.In this project the heroic worker is made the hero,someone who risks his life for us.It is here that we see the vulnerability of the worker who balances life and work.The artist projects the worker as an active participant in the process of development.And reconstructs the scaffolding as an installation for us to negotiate.

Raghu  Kondur, graduated from ChitraKala Parishath, with a  Bachelor of Fine Arts degree(Painting) in 2004.

Social Practice: an Entry, Showcase of Projects by Students of Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

Politician -Exhibition of Paintings by Ashok.U

Ashok.U has been consistent as a painter and has been exploring the idea of painting on the format of a box. This concept gave him an opportunity to approach the box with techniques used in package design. His current preoccupation is politics and the politician. He questions the system using popular symbols. In this exhibition fragments of symbols come together to create new meanings. The viewer is invited to visually unwrap the box. The box is empty!


Ashok.U studied at the Ken School of Art, where he graduated in 2000. Ashok works as a graphic designer and has been actively participating in group shows. This is his first solo show.

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A PROGRAM IN MEMORY OF FAMILA

A PROGRAM IN MEMORY OF FAMILA

Organized by friends of Famila

Famila, a radical feminist, very active in queer politics, a Hijra who questioned all forms of hierarchy and feudalist patriarchal systems within and outside the community, a beautiful person who brought in new visions and aspects to queer politics died in the year 2004 when she was 24 years.Famila identified herself as a Hijra, sex worker, bisexual and a feminist. She was a board member of Sangama, an organization working for the human rights of sexual minorities, an active member in Vividha, an autonomous collective of marginalized sexualities and genders. She was also working in Sangama as a project coordinator for Hijras and transgenders.  Her everyday life itself was a challenge to the hetero-normative patriarchal society. Many people during her time boasted about communal living but never succeeded. She was a real example for communal living, as there were many people who lived in her house. It was a house of marginalized sexualities and genders. This shows that she not only identified herself as Hijra but also respected and accepted different sexual and gender identities in its real meaning.Famila was born on 6^th November 1980. She was the first person to go against her own community to accommodate all queer identities, especially the female born sexual minorities, in her house providing shelter.Famila was well known for her clear, straightforward and radical articulation of the struggle of marginalized sexualities and genders in many conferences and programs. She took a lead role in organizing the 2^nd Hijra Habba in Bangalore through the autonomous collective Vividha, mobilizing more than 2000 people for the program and collecting funds from public to fight for the rights of marginalized sexualities and genders.Unfortunately, she passed away in 2004 July, at the age of 24. There has been a huge loss to the work that she planned to do and also that kind of radical politics. For friends of Famila she is not dead and is very much alive for many of us in our memories. A few friends of Famila from last year have started celebrating her birthday in her memory to keep her radical politics alive.We are organizing a program in memory of Famila on 6^th November 2011 at the 1Shanthi Road, Shanthinagar, where her friends will share their experiences with her and some footage will be shown about her. People who would like to share their experiences about the interactions with her are most welcome to do so.  
Speakers – A.Revathi, Shakun Mohini and Chandini

Art reviews Marta Jakimowicz

Keeping me Connected – New Old Media (September 3 to 5) presented the outcome of Sumitro Basak’s residency at Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery.

Spells against anxiety Magic Processors, Jehangir Jani’s exhibition at Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (September 30 to October 5), looked, and to a large extent was, quite unlike the familiar images of defiant human vulnerability in a hybrid, violent world. As the playful, lyrical works gradually revealed and overcame the underlying tension, the viewer could see that they differed only in degree or rather in their reversed proportion between the anxiety internalised from outside and the redeeming poetry within. As such the new path seems to further delve into a warmer, more peaceful centre that the older now artist instinctively recovers.  In his brief note to the show Jani muses about our daily drudgery, unfair circumstances and endless want wondering what would happen to rational pursuits of there was magic. And, indeed, he went on to conjure its effect on our domestic environs casting spells against the noises and tensions that accompany our life ceaselessly generated by the mechanisms meant to help us do things efficiently and quickly. In the gallery space one found oneself surrounded by white walls with white reliefs scattered almost all over where a large pressure cooker spewed a blender, a mobile and a washing machine, a toaster popped out computer and TV monitors, while the wide open “Alladin’s Briefcase” yielded cars, motorbikes and cellphones, all the elements plastered separate rhythmically and fairly flat on the surface to offer an intuition of a steady, continuous pulse, as though normal in its illogical relationship between the over-size contraptions and the miniatures of vast objects. Whilst the many appliances and vehicles represented the materialistic possessions we ever strive to acquire, the artist so transformed them into toy-resembling motifs in an adult childhood game. The non-colour whiteness of it all embedded in the architecture created a sense of calm and a tabula rasa to be inscribed with potentiality. The gay softness of the plaster of Paris with resin and cotton pulp appeared to be absorbing and muting the technological whirr and tension of the machinery. The magic of young innocence could even turn the old-fashioned meat mincer, this art-historical sign of the human flesh as cannon fodder, into its antidote metamorphosing guns into riotous horses and sheep. Like a child willing the mundane into the phantasmagorical, Jani made his chair a flying scooter and let a two-wheeler exhaust butterflies. The auto-rickshaw relief was used in the video piece “Cop and Goat,” as the artist playing his aged father enters it along with a child and other characters to go to a cricket match. On a nostalgic-mischievous note, the participants gesticulate, are thrown out of the auto to get back to it, until the beautiful Chandramukhi goat nibbles at the policeman with a toy riffle and eats the vehicle which has fallen apart. Used to the intensity of Jani’s mainstream sculptures and installations, at least the earlier ones, which flaunt drastic conditions and force the onlooker to confront uncomfortable, distressing issues before offering insights of feeble resolution, one may have taken the show just lightly, since it asks for it first. As an environment entirety, nevertheless, it was pervasive in atmosphere eventually allowing for the realisation that the childhood magic there was equated with the saving grace that the potential of art holds. Mapping meanders The young artist from Kolkata, for the first time anywhere in south India, was surprised to find familiar sights and situations instead of the differences expected from this technology-driven city. The continuance of tradition in contemporary life here stimulated him to look for a common ground between the two local cultures while exploring the novel place. Having worked with rangolis in Bengal villages, he responded comfortably to their Bangalore variants, in particular that their curving and spiralling trajectories that refer to cosmic symbolism must have appeared to layer over the enmeshments of urban traffic and flyover flights that serve to connect people. The resulting work on the gallery floor indeed was a rangoli of his own, footprints denoting his entry, the meanders alluding to tracing of the metro, street webs, map charts and rippling streams among which Basak tried to mark places as well as images known to him now inclusive of divine chariots, signboards, ritual motifs, dotted rows and plastic palms, all distributed on the flat so as to relate to the fluid diagram rhythm. As much as one liked the graceful and readable idea behind the effort and appreciated the appropriateness of the details, the whole was perhaps somewhat literal, hence did not generate enough sensation.