Hanging Terraces offers a world within itself — an exhibition of 26 artists from Kerala, the works range from acrylic to metal and cut-piece cloth to everyday objects. The themes are varied and yet, intrinsically linked to life and to the universe.
Hilma Hari’s pieces are found all over the gallery, crouching, peeping, sitting — silhouettes of women made from cut-piece cloth on polyfoam. They have long, wavy hair that falls by their side. Perhaps that’s why the series is called ‘Guerrilla girls revisit’. Sanal C’s oil on canvas, ‘Electrified’, has a blue man with wiry hair that’s standing at its end. The blue man could be the earth and the strands of his multi-coloured hair could be the roots that connect every being. The man’s face exudes mixed expressions of pathos and delight, indicating the confused lives we lead.
The Love Jihad could be a mythical tale, or maybe not. A lady in white, with long, curly raven hair is tuning back to look at her feet that seems to have been pricked by something. A bird with a long braid for a tail and orange wings perches on a tree nearby and watches. A man with a bull head holding a bow and arrow (with a rose at its tip) stands behind her. Cactuses fill the floor. Depiction of intense emotions, indeed! Suvitha K V revisits her childhood in ‘Pages from the past’. The painting itself appears like a worn out single-ruled notebook, with a house by a river. Another frame shows the river teaming with ducks and of course, like any child who used these notebooks, there are patterns and doodles between the lines. And a lamp in between, in no particular order, like snatches of memory.
Working with different materials are Basil Baby and Abdul Haque. Basil uses watercolour and charcoal on paper. The hair and bindi in his works are arranged around the main character like raindrops . They fall intermittently, all over the canvas, while the nearly bald man crouches on a rope.
Abdul’s installation is colourful and yet powerful. He uses polythene bags, cloth and locally collected objects to build a mountain of trash. Here, pink plastic bags shaped like grenades (though they look like large strawberries) are arranged on top. Another installation in the middle of the room is Chitra E G’s ‘Abreaction’. A metal woman, formed of fused ringlets, lies horizontally, a little above the floor and the only thing that supports her apparent levitation is her hair, which falls down to the floor. An acrylic-on-canvas nearby is Shajith R B’s After rain, which captures Kerala. The splashes of colour are a blend of yellow, green and blue in which you can trace some palm trees, shacks and a snaking stream.
Hanging Terraces is on display till September 25, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Gallery Veda, 4/22 Rutland Gate, Fifth Street, Nungambakkam.
