Being is the condition of struggle; becoming is the journey of reclamation.” These poignant words of Bell Hooks seep into the sketches and paintings of two prominent artists, who are quietly having conversations about identity, memories, past, struggles, freedom, and fraternity.
On one side of the art gallery at The Lalit Kala Akademi is a bunch of black and white sketches, while on the other side is a flow of acrylic colours on canvas — a display of artworks of artists S Venkatesan and Natarajan Gangadaran. A glance at the hung paintings and sketches, and you see scattered images and splashes of fragmented thoughts, but as you stand still and go deeper, there are layers of meanings being conveyed and many stories being told. The exhibition, Becoming – Weaving the Commons, presented by Neelam Cultural Centre, and curated by Prema Revathi, is an exploration of aesthetics through telling and retellings of personal and collective experiences, and imagination tied to past and reality.
Born into Dalit families and having witnessed the layers of discrimination and injustice, these commendable artists draw strength from the collective voices of the community. Art is their way of expressing, of existing, of questioning and responding, of creating new conversations.
For S Venkatesan, who believes, “Art is love that has set forth from cruelty — of being nameless, homeless, and wandering,” the medium he chose — of strokes, spaces, and contours — is also a path of understanding his own existence. With a mix of fragmentation and abstraction, he sticks to the superior theme of reclamation. He does it by showing his land and memory onto the canvas. His artworks are a way of giving form to his memories, his realities, and his life — of streets with overflowing dustbins, a horde of mice, and a nearby area where goats’ legs were skinned and sold — while also reclaiming his childhood.
Reclamation in his art also goes beyond his lived memory. It is shown not just by depicting the problem as it is but by giving agency to the subjects. His sketch of a manual scavenger reclining on his broom and a portrait of an Adivasi woman of Kandhamal, Odisha, are ways of reclamation for him. These characters are symbols of life beyond their struggles, synonymous with resistance. He has also explored ruthless themes like honour killing, which he has shown metaphorically as fear piercing through a human eye, where love is seen as a problem.
Venkatesan says his mother was central to his artistic journey. He grew up in North Madras, where he observed women as vibrant, full of life, and also violated. “My father used to sell vegetables in the market. The market was also full of strong women.” Thus, many of his sketches exude his strong admiration for women.
For Natarajan, too, women are a quintessential part of his work. But he says, “They are not women who I know, but could be anyone, women from Africa trying to protect the forests, women from Gaza trying to hold up the broken pieces together, or women from the tea estates. They are nameless women who bear the burden of the havoc wreaked on nature.” Human dignity and harmony with nature are recurring themes in his paintings. The works speak about the landscapes that he has lost. This sense of belongingness to forests and the sense of loss is invariably a symbol of his own search for identity. He believes in imagining a new world — devoid of discrimination, where people and nature exist in harmony.
For him, art is life, and sometimes, life itself can be a way of protesting. In his words, “To put aside these external factors that affect us, that cause a certain stirring within — this is akin to painting a white canvas white.”
The artworks will be displayed till November 1 at Lalit Kala Akademi.
