Kerala Art Exhibition explores hope and despair in a post-Covid world. Outlook India Magazine

Locked in a village in Kerala for almost a month due to the pandemic, one morning I looked at myself in the mirror and was shocked. Strings of my hair were all over the floor. I felt terrible. Imagine my surprise a few days later when I saw a work of art created from strands of the artist’s hair. I was at the ‘Lokme Tharavadu’ (World is One Family) contemporary art exhibition in Alappuzha – my first outing after the easing of lockdown restrictions. Who would have thought of one’s hair as material for an artwork of such size and scale to portray despair and longing due to pandemic-induced loneliness?

The pandemic shut down human bodies around the world, but it also opened up their minds and emotions in many ways. Bangalore-based Malayali artist Indu Antony says the pandemic and the lockdown have thrown her into unknown territories. The separation was especially heightened because she was living alone. “The absence of touch was striking,” she says. Then she discovered her old ‘orma box’ (memory box) containing the items she had been collecting for years.

“I began to sew each of these items with a single strand of my hair, because for me, the act of hair and sewing is a metaphor for memory,” says Indu. Memory is a function of resistance against forgetfulness. Indu had felt a sense of resonance with the abandoned photographs. She has been collecting photographs of women from various places – some on the street and some from old shops. She used them on a salt print and sewed their sides with her hair. “Salt prints have an ephemeral quality to them. They fade, they disappear before your eyes—just like abandoned ones. I maintain their presence by sewing the sides of the picture with my hair wanted, which will ultimately be the only part of the work left with free space to question it,” she says.

Such pictures of women are now on the boundary wall of their house. “It’s like these women and I are in the house like an extended family. By the end of the year or early next year, the image will completely disappear and there will be only hair around it,” says Indu. She even weaved a poem out of her hair. “Sewing gave me a kind of meditative feel,” she says.

There are many such stories in ‘Lokme Theravadu’, perhaps the largest contemporary art exhibition ever held in the country. Indu’s Memory Box is only one of the many surprising pieces of work on display. More than 270 artists, of whom over 50 are women, are showcasing their work—paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, documentaries, etc.—in the 70-day show at six venues—five in Alappuzha and one in Ernakulam. Artist Bose Krishnamachari, founding member and president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, says, “The exhibition is held in a space spread over 6 lakh sq ft. The wall space is 1.5 lakh sq ft.” ‘Lokme Tharavadu’ is the brainchild of Bose.

How Bose brought such a large number of artists on one platform is a story in itself. All the artists are Malayali but based in different cities and countries. Some are famous such as Gigi Scaria, Parvati Nair, Jalja PS and Jitish Kallat, but many others are relatively unknown. According to Bose, restricting the selection of artists to only Malayalees does not really limit the scope of the exhibition. “It’s rather opened up a new horizon,” he says. Bose traveled to every nook and corner of the state to find artists. Some of them didn’t even have a studio. She found that one of them was painting on her kitchen table and the other was placing her artwork on her bed. But Bose gave him confidence. He did not put any barriers – age, gender, successful or struggle – to select an artist.

“A true artist can be identified by his consistency and constant practice,” says Bose. This process helped him find talents with diversity in practices and schools of philosophy ranging from Surrealism to abstract and conceptual art.

It all started when the Kochi biennial could not fly in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bose then conceived the idea of ​​’Lokme Theravadu’. The then Finance Minister of Kerala Thomas Isaac suggested Alappuzha as the venue. Bose also met Beni Kuriakose, the chief architect of the Alappuzha heritage project at the Thiruvananthapuram airport. It was then decided, with the help of Bose’s designer and architect friends, to convert heritage properties in Alappuzha into temporary spaces for art exhibitions, which were in dilapidated condition.

Even before the project started, Bose invited his artists to visit the venue. One of the artists participating in the exhibition, Blods V.S. showed us a place in the Coir Corporation building where coir and weaving machines were scattered. The organizers turned it into a beautiful, though not climate controlled, place. “Finance was the biggest challenge. The government offered Rs 2 crore,” says Bose. Artists have so far sold their artwork in the show for Rs 22,000 to Rs 28 lakh.

Self-reflection and rethinking during the pandemic have had a profound effect on most of the artworks here. All subjects—from gender to race, from nature to disasters and so on—have a common element that lies somewhere between despair and hope, which resonates with the sentiments created by the pandemic.

Disappointment and hope take a toll on not only the artwork in the show, but the surroundings as a whole—indeed, people’s lives. The show itself was hit by the pandemic as it had to be suspended just 12 days after it opened on April 18. It was resumed on August 21 after the state government relaxed the lockdown restrictions.

Alappuzha, also known as the Venice of the East, is a tourist center in Kerala. Tourism everywhere was badly affected due to the Covid-19 pandemic and Alappuzha is the worst affected as a large section of the people here are directly dependent on tourism. On the way to the show, we could see a long line of houseboats waiting for tourists – with despair and hope. Outside the venue of the show, 52-year-old Kalpana Kumari, who runs a small shop, tells that she did not earn anything during the first and second wave of the pandemic. Even now its sales are only 20 percent compared to the time before the pandemic.

In the show, art becomes inseparable from the surrounding reality. You can see a railway track installation titled ‘Rest in Peace’ by artist Vipin Dhanurdharan, which is a sharp reminder of the deaths of 16 migrant workers who were crushed by a train in Maharashtra’s Karmad while returning home during the first wave of Covid- 19. Another artist has a completely nude portrait of himself which he painted during his quarantine period. Someone else paints human faces on their utensils, then a quarantine experience.

There is also a keen sense of traveling through history. A film about Mulakkaram (imposed by the Kingdom of Travancore on disadvantaged-caste women if they cover their breasts in public) plays in one of several small theaters set up at the venue. The names of Unniyarcha, Thathrikutty and other heroic women carved on the surface of an artwork are hard to miss.

‘Lokme Theravadu’ is a line from a poem by Malayalam poet Vallathol Narayan Menon. taravadu That is, the ancestral house in which the joint family lived. There is a picture of one of the exhibitions taravaduAfter the division of the property, cut the middle by a concrete cutter. A contradiction, really. But this show is nothing short of liberating our minds.

(It appeared in the print edition as “Unlocking the Memory Box”)