Kuli and Other Scenes in Retrospect

KOCHI: “Kuli and  Other Scenes”,installation by  B Priyaranjanlal curated by C S Venkiteswaran will be displayed as part of Kanyaka Talkies in ‘Capital and Cinema - Breaking the Circuits’ at Aspinwall house, Fort Kochi on Wednesday and Thursday from 6 pm to 9 pm.

The installation is a return to Malayalam soft porn film industry. The title of the installation invokes one of the major devices that soft porn generally use while narrating the story or the lack of it, namely Kuli scene- the scene of bathing, the history of which runs back of Raja Harischandra. It tries to situate soft porn as the constitutive outside of mainstream cinema and at the same time looks at the female leads in this genre of cinema as the constitutive outside of the desiring subject.

‘Kuli and Other Scenes’ brings the question back to reckon that is at the heart of cinema.  The project invokes the pornographic scene which is placed precariously at the edge of body. The pornographic scene here accentuates the move from primal scene to obscene.  The installation uses the images of the major female artists from Malayalam soft porn and playfully reverses the view, pushing into crisis the gaze that produces the obscene out of the scene. Through this reversal the installation addresses the desire of the Other viscerally and metaphorically. It offers a  liminal space where the pornographic scene arouses contemplation confounding the idioms of both arousal and contemplation.

The film ‘Kanyaka Talkies’ will be screened at Aspinwall house on Wednesday at 6.30 pm.

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