The half-baked building with protruding rusty iron rods and incomplete steps leading to nowhere has been an eyesore for the past few years in a stretch filled with heritage buildings. But for the past three weeks, for a few hours every night, the proposed new block of the Fine Arts College at Palayam has been infused with some vitality, of 3-D mapped videos, anamorphic paintings, time lapsed photographs and etchings.
A few students and the faculty of the college, who were thinking of ways to react to the lethargy on the government’s part in not completing the building, hit upon the idea of this ‘site-specific project’.
“There are many ways that one can protest against a given situation. Through this method, we could make use of the space as artists and also make our voices heard. We did not have a solid script according to which we worked. All of us visited this area, interacted constantly with it and evolved our own reactions to it which came out in different ways. This area itself was inaccessible to the students and we had to seek special permission to start our work here,” says Naquash, faculty of sculpture.
The first work that one comes across is a complex 3-D mapping by Jino Joseph, a student of painting here. Coloured bands and images of old Greek and Indian architecture in decay move across the succeeding beams with precision. The dimensions of the building have been mapped accurately to arrive at this.
The next work, done by students Irshad and Deepak, is an anamorphic painting of the incomplete building itself, spread over a few slabs, each kept at a distance from each other. But the projection and arrangement means that the audience perceives it as a single slab. On to these painted slabs are projected light paintings and time-lapse images of the building taken at different times of the day.
The all pervading psychedelic mood, accentuated by the surrounding darkness and the faint vehicle sounds from the road across, continues to the next work ‘green room’ where the outgrowth that has invaded the area is documented and projected.
At the edge of the first floor, two of the pillars have been transformed brilliantly to represent the defaced Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan.
