When people describe “Bangalore culture”, they often speak about hot spots like CTR, Lalbagh, Blossoms Book House, Vidyarthi Bhavan, etc. The essence of the city is associated with localities like Malleshwaram, Basavangudi, Jayanagar and Halasuru which are often referred to as “the real Bangalore” and are somehow considered superior. This narrative is binary and limiting at best, and elitist at worst. Bangalore cannot be reduced to a few popular places; it contains multitudes. Its culture goes much deeper than this superficial narrative.
In choosing to explore Yelahanka, Lakshmi Nagaraj a visual artist wanted to look beyond this popular narrative and explore the culture and communities of a locality that is often considered insignificant and left out yet adds to the essence of Bangalore.
For a long time (and even now to an extent), Yelahanka’s public spaces didn’t look the same as those in central Bangalore, which meant our public lives here were vastly different. “While speaking to residents for this project, I learnt that 30 years back, many parts of Yelahanka were almost forest-like, with not even enough infrastructure for residents to walk back home at night safely.” 15 years ago, we did not have continental restaurants, multiplexes or even a wide selection of clothing stores to shop at. When happening places like pizzerias or boutiques did open here, they didn’t last more than a few months or a year or two. “Personally, this was heartbreaking. Spaces disappeared just when I had come to love them. As I spoke to people, I learned that this was a shared experience. I have created paintings of each lost space that the participants have described. These paintings are placed on the map in the corresponding locations where they used to exist. Each painting contains layers that come together to form the whole picture. Visitors are encouraged to flip through the layers and take a closer look.”
“As the participants were describing spaces of the past to me, they were also encouraged to try their hand at drawing these themselves. What was once an optional activity ended up bringing a lot of people childlike joy in the process. These drawings by the participants are displayed as well.”
Build-a-painting station
This is the interactive element of the exhibition. At this station, visitors have the option of interacting with the exhibition in one of two ways:
- All the paintings have multiple layers to them. At this station will be multiple copies of each layer of each painting. It is essentially all the paintings in a deconstructed form. Participants get to mix and match these layers to “build” their own painting. They get to take home their painting.
- Visitors also have an option to create a drawing/painting of their own memories. This can help capture emotions that the exhibit might evoke in them and spark memories of spaces that meant something to them.
The 30-35 people whose memories have been captured include Muslims, Christians, people from lower castes and classes, people with disabilities, transgender people and queer people, in addition to the usual dominant groups. “From the beginning, I aimed to make this project inclusive of underrepresented voices. Initially, I tried to do this by simply having a balance of different social classes, but the intersectionality’s could not be ignored. So, I put out a call for participants – through social media as well as word-of-mouth – from underrepresented communities across religions, caste, gender, and other marginalisation’s. This meant that the project could break out of the privileged bubble and capture a truer picture of residents’ interactions with public spaces across spectrums. While I do not mention this explicitly, one can see patterns emerging in the final paintings that reveal the ways different groups interact with their neighbourhood, the different spaces they like to occupy, and who gets to occupy them at all.”
The venue is an open-air parking area, which was chosen carefully to ensure barrier-free access to all social classes. An exhibition that centres the residents cannot be gatekept from those very residents; so it was of utmost importance to exhibit in a space that is inclusive and representative of the community. Making it a public installation is an attempt to break away from the elitist, white-walled gallery culture and bring the art to the people. The meaning of the phrase ‘public spaces’ in this project goes beyond the traditional park or library settings, for instance; it encapsulates much more. They range from tea stalls, bus stops, food stalls to provision stores, bakeries, veergallus and even just streets. Most of them are not landmarks that are popularly known, but rather, spaces that have very personal, individual memories attached to them.
Read the full story that first appeared in Our Bangalore dated Aug – Aug here:
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