Beatrice de Fays, or B2Fays as she likes to call herself, has been working between her home country France and India, particularly Hyderabad. She has worked in the city before and hosted a few exhibitions and yet, each time she arrives in Hyderabad, is intrigued by the sights and sounds of the city and the memories they leave her with. On each visit, she observes how the landscape is changing, like a shape-shifting organism and tries to trace its evolution from her memory through her new exhibition, Nomads of Memory.
The artist puts herself amidst this changing landscape, which is far removed from her home country. She draws our attention to her new mental landscape, where old memories are replaced with new ones, through paintings, multimedia installation and an interactive installation.
At Alliance Franciase, the installation has a few briefcases on which cardboards and screen printed jute bags bearing faces of people are placed in a carefully casual manner. An old-fashioned metal trunk lies open with a few cardboard blocks. All this is part of the artist’s journey. A video projection that falls on these boxes and screen printed surfaces shows a city in motion — traffic whizzing past at different times of the day. Largely unfolding in hues of deep blue, occasionally shifting to pale yellow and pink, the video has images of buses, ambulances, cars, auto rickshaws travelling at different speeds and people walking by. The sound that supports the installation is subtle and the nuances audible to a keen listener. A moving image of a globe signifies the journey of the artist from a different time zone to India. Somewhere in between the hustle and bustle, there are faint strains of ‘Ajeeb daastaan hai ye…’ as though summing up the artist’s experience in a new landscape.
B2Fays takes this idea further through an interactive multimedia installation at Goethe Zentrum where the visitor takes centre stage. She urges any visitor to step forward and his/her movements captured by a camera reflect on the multimedia projections. What she wants the participants to do is observe the transience where the paintings look like they are leaving the walls and forming a new interface.
The artist’s paintings, now on display at Kalakriti art gallery, are canvases with many layers, with each layer having a fragment of an image. Superimpose these layers and a story emerges. In her own words, “Layer by layer, sequence after sequence, the story becomes a part of the canvas while simultaneously being erased as a palimpsest creating an arborescence.”
Nomads of Memory is on view at three venues — Alliance Francaise (multimedia installation, till January 21), Goethe Zentrum (interactive installation, till January 19) and Kalakriti art gallery (paintings, till January 21).
