[Urbanstudy] Bengaluru’s Erasure: One Exhibition At A Time

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.countercurrents.org/munikempanna180616.htm



*Bengaluru’s Erasure: One Exhibition At A Time*

*By Rashmi Munikempanna*

18 June, 2016
*Countercurrents.org*

*A*s someone who grew up in Bangalore and came into an identity through
Bengaluru, there is a deeply wrenching dichotomy one is forced to negotiate
and live with. Janaki Nair’s wonderful book on Bengaluru, The Promise of
the Metropolis, traces this to a spatial and linguistic division between
the pete (native quarters) and the cantonment (British military station).
This dichotomy splits and fragments further through gender, class, caste
marking every aspect of one’s interaction with the city. Contemporary art
practice, constructed through hegemonies of race, class, caste and
language, has been engaged in positing a version of history. The recent
exhibition ‘The Bangalore Hunt’ by the faculty of contemporary art at
Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bengaluru is another such
attempt at a reiteration of hegemonic constructions of the imagination of a
city.

The exhibition which happened over a weekend in June, at Venkatappa Art
Gallery in Bengaluru, responded to an archive of photographs of Stephen
(Simon) Simmons, a British military man stationed in Bengaluru during the
1930s, about the Bangalore hunt. This exhibition is an important marker
within the larger framework of the battle over Venkatappa Art Gallery. The
Government of Karnataka, on the advice of the Karnataka Tourism Vision
Group (KTVG), identified this building as a potential tourist site needing
development and entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Tasveer
Foundation, a private entity, in July 2015 for a handover. For long,
Venkatappa Art Gallery, has nurtured artists as they started out on their
careers, supported regional artists as they came here to Bengaluru to
exhibit, functioning like how a public gallery should. Artists from
Karnataka have, since February 2016, gathered around under the name of VAG
Forum, to protest this takeover and this exhibition is one amongst a series
of events performed as protest.

Ayesha Abraham, an organizer of the exhibition and a member of VAG Forum,
in her introductory text to the exhibition says, “Looking at these
photographs again evokes the past and what has been lost”. The photographs,
that populate the archive of Simmons, represent a history, the violence of
which has been erased in ways that enable that violence to continue into
the contemporary. The exhibition embeds itself in a history of an arts
practice defining itself in its opposition to the unruly chaotic caste and
language based democratic appropriations of street and visual space. It
creates a desire, a nostalgia that ends up ironically supporting private
capital’s appropriation of public space. It understands British rule as,
benign and even longed for, a narrative that links itself up to the history
of cantonment.

Smriti Mehra and Matt Lee’s work, in the exhibition, on the rescued beagles
and their adoption process questioned the ways in which care is defined, as
possible only through a set of rules that excludes by putting forth the
rejection letter from CUPA for the adoption. The work ends up making the
rejection problematic rather than the desire, which somehow is
understandable? Amitabh Kumar’s work, 57th Bangalore, harks back to a myth
that explains the founding of the city of Bengaluru. The myth speaks of
Kempegowda, the founder of Bengaluru, as witnessing a hare chasing a hound
and that becoming the omen for the choice of place for the founding of the
city. The place, where Kempegowda spots the hare, is named as ‘gandu
bhoomi’. English interprets the word ‘gandu’ as heroic when in actuality it
means man/masculinity in Kannada. If the beginnings of a city are
constructed around ideas of masculinity then what does reproducing such a
myth through art do? It renders the art work’s masculinity safe and
legitimate within the art space as compared to caste and language based
mobilization that traces the claim to the city through its ‘son of the
soil’ narrative which is seen as ‘uncouth’ and ‘parochial’. Aditi
Banerjee’s work which addresses caste looking at the brides/grooms
classified section is a trope that feels clichéd. A caste breakdown of the
artists who exhibited or even the faculty itself at Srishti which points to
a White, Brahmanical, non-Kannadiga structuring might have actually been a
political and truly radical response to the archive. The works at the
exhibition are a symptom of art’s caste, class and race blindness in their
production rendering artists complicit.

Alison Byrnes, an organizer of the exhibition, in her introductory text to
the exhibition states, “cultural occupation is perhaps more insidious, and
thus more dangerous”. This is terribly ironic since Srishti has
institutional collaborations set up with two of the Karnataka Tourism
Vision Group members, the very same group gunning for privatizing the
gallery.

The narratives produced at the exhibition keep in spirit with the
narratives being produced by VAG Forum’s leadership. The leadership’s
directive around the forms of protest – no placards, no street protests is
indicative of the way it sees democratic occupations of the street as
chaotic, unruly, emotional, plebian. It performs the aesthetic as protest
even though, hidden in the background, a whole host of other methods are
being employed such as government lobbying. The leadership’s refusal to
align with the employees’ union even though they are all set to lose their
jobs with the takeover, frames art as a privileged space where workers are
not welcome. Its refusal to organize the community into a union points to
the fear inherent in the leadership about horizontal organizing. All these
were proposals put forward, during meetings, which were struck down by the
leadership without any vote. In their letter to the tourism minister, the
VAG Forum leadership has asked for a three year programming control in an
attempt to activate the space as a contemporary art gallery. This in art
language means that the space will now be curated. As seen, through this
very particular exhibition, curation is deeply embedded within class, race
and caste structures. This exhibition, VAG Forum’s leadership and Tasveer
Foundation sadly stand on similar ideological ground. The battle for
Venkatappa Art Gallery was a battle already lost even before it began.

*The author is a facilitator and independent researcher whose work engages
with image, image production and circulation. Her interests revolve around
representative practices, image and truth, witnessing and testimony and
participatory methodologies. She is based in Bengaluru.*
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