Red posters—with a picture of Gandhi and a star—have been popping up all over the city. If they caught your eye, you need to know that they are a precursor to artist Riyas Komu’s new exhibition, titled On International Workers’ Day, Gandhi From Kochi. Comprising two separate pieces, the first is a set of five portraits of Gandhi and the second, a collection of nine litho blocks titled, Stoned Goddess. “On Labour Day, this is a wake-up call for us to reflect on our times,” begins Komu, adding, “It reminds us of the necessity to be on guard against the loss of memory and the manipulation of ideas.”
While the former is an attempt by the artist to look into various possibilities of representing Gandhi in today’s world, the latter tries to track independent India’s history through its dark tragedies—like the Partition, anti-Sikh riots, Emergency and the Ahmedabad riots. The Gandhi portraits—each embossed with key words like perception, violence, victim, fear and control—are an extension of Komu’s Black & White show last year at JNU, Delhi. “The idea is to bring in a sense of vigour among the youth and to re-invent Gandhi in this contemporary time, to look up to him as an icon from a different perception,” says Komu.
Talking of the Stoned Goddess, the artist says the use of litho blocks was a way of paying homage to Raja Ravi Varma. “As a native of this state, I am someone who has admired his legacy,” he explains. Varma was the first to make visual arts accessible to the common man, by doing several series of oleo graphs. “This work is a reading of our history in reverse and my attempt to capture the concerns, anxieties and dilemmas of an individual born in independent India,” he concludes.
The exhibition is on till May 31 at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi.