The work of India’s best-known graphic novelist, Sarnath Banerjee, will be splashed on Olympic billboards in London this month, with an unusual message for the millions who will be watching the greatest sporting event: the games don’t just deal with winning.
“It is almost like a campaign on people who fail despite trying very hard,” Mr. Banerjee says.
“The project goes against the grain of the rest of Olympics-related advertising that emphasises only on winners.” The public-art project, commissioned by Frieze East, includes several billboards, and graphic essays in newspapers and posters.
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Challenging clichés
Mr. Banerjee says he wanted to change the discourse on competitive sports, and challenge the clichés on winners and winnings. “To me,” he says, “winning is a small detail, perhaps because I have always been terrible at competitive sports. I sometimes find winners vulgar.”
He, therefore, created characters like ‘a boxer who is forever thinking of dodging punches’, a pole-vaulter ‘who, just before a jump, realises that perhaps he has chosen the wrong sport’, a judoka ‘who learnt the sport through correspondence’, a high jumper ‘who only eats light food, has light thoughts, and reads light literature, because high jump deals with levity’.
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His gallery also includes a race walker ‘whose mind moves steadily towards the finishing line, but the legs don’t keep up’, a ping-pong player ‘who is suddenly aware of the eerie silence of the indoor stadium, and tries to remember how one spells ‘eerie’’.
Some stories are dark, like that of a javelin thrower who accidentally spears a long-jumper, thus disqualifying himself and destroying his medal chances.
Another is on a hockey player who faces a wall of bureaucrats squatting before the goal.
Indian characters
Mr. Banerjee calls the gaze of his works purely Indian, but the characters aren’t, though, there are two from the subcontinent — Hassan Sardar, the former Pakistani hockey captain, and an unknown Sikh long-jumper, who accidentally gets hit by a stray javelin.
“I feel you aren’t truly international unless you have a very good sense of the local.”
The New Delhi-based graphic artist says he hit on the idea of celebrating ‘losers’ when, as part of the Sao Paolo Bienal, he was interviewing silver medallist judoka Douglas Vierra, who almost won the gold at the LA Olympics. He defeated the Japanese favourite, but lost to a Korean at the finals.
During the course of the interview, Vierra demonstrated to him the art of falling and threw him several times on the floor.
“It was strangely liberating, as if with each fall, my mind kind of cleared up. He told me that judo has as much to do with falling, as it has to do with throwing. I remember him as a thinker, a little like Hegel, something very wise concerning him.”
And four years later, he turned it into a proposal to Frieze East, when its curator, Sarah McCrory, sought one. He was selected along with three more artists.