Entering the spare whitewashed interiors of Galleryske, the first work you encounter is an iridescent fabric-kumkum layered Sheela Gowda hanging above a skyline of potted grasses. The room on your right flickers in aqua, pistachio, rose, lavender and cobalt blue, displaying a movingly rendered recipe-prose piece by Archana Pidathala that you contemplate from a Phantom Hands bench. In a back room, a Krishnaraj Chonat painting in mauve and cobalt depicting a root-wrapped tree communes with plants, mounds of red soil, a copy of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, and a Dia Mehta Bhupal miniature of quiet landscapes.
‘Reclaiming the House’ is an interesting and unusual convergence of ideas and layers, where art and the quotidian is juxtaposed intimately on an island of Bengaluru heritage. The diverse strands of experience complement the centrality of the art experience. “The show is a gesture towards including non-visual art voices into the space,” says Sunitha Kumar Emmart, founder of Galleryske. A long-time patron and collector of arts, Emmart says putting together the exhibition contributed equally towards her own redefinition of what it means to be a gallerist.
Food, books, music
The art that resides in the fabric of everyday life is increasingly becoming a subject of contemplation and engagement for artists. In this exhibition, layers of ordinary, everyday life and works of art are in dialogue with one another, just as one might find in any home. Emmart was particularly preoccupied with the idea of a house and all that it encompasses: the spaces and objects in it, the art hung there, the food cooked and its attendant smells, the books and music, and the conversations conducted there. It is thus that the house becomes a receptacle of accumulated memory and experience.
As you travel from one space to another in the gallery, you realise that there is a small ecosystem or environment for each artwork to exist on its own. “After all, houses aren’t curated,” Emmart points out. The house is, therefore, as much a participant in this exhibition as the artworks and the other complementary components.
A colonial house dating back to 1870 was converted into this art gallery, and so the home’s physical dimensions and heritage details add another layer to the multifaceted exhibition. “We have been able to trace all the owners except the first one,” says Emmart, pointing out how the house is a sum of all of the people who lived here. In some ways, the exhibition therefore is a reclaiming of the house as it once was, with its wealth of experiences.
Sheela Gowda’s No Title, kumkum, cowdung, cloth on paper board.
Featuring the works of Dia Mehta Bhupal, Krishnaraj Chonat, Sheela Gowda, Prabhavathi Meppayil, and Sudarshan Shetty, the gallery then invited five collaborators to respond to each work. Arjun Jayadev selected a book that would relate to each of the five artists; Pidathala wrote a piece of text that’s also a recipe reflecting on each work; Michael Little curated a plant display; Phantom Hands and Avinash Veeraraghavan chose furniture and music pieces, respectively, as their responses to the works. That all the collaborators were Bengaluru-based made their responses also uniquely space-specific.
Space for music
Emmart talks of how certain individuals have an amazing ability to engage with just one thing and in the process open up the world in many other ways. Jayadev’s engagement with literature and poetry or Veeraraghavan’s relationship with music are such examples. “Avinash could bring music into the space in a way that would make sense,” she says.
Landscape designer Michael Little had already, a few years ago, worked on the garden that surrounds the house. “Before choosing the plants, I wanted to understand both the artists’ works and the gallery space. I saw the books, I listened to the music, I sat on the lovely chairs and benches. I then did some sketches to find a point of resonance or syncopation between room, space, art and the plants,” he says, describing his artistic process.
Little points out the various factors that influenced his selection of plants, and describes planting design as “a combination of common sense and intuition.” In the case of arranging plants for an art exhibition, he talks of keeping in mind environment conditions, particularly light intensity. “Here the challenge was very low light... and there were a narrow range of plants that would work,” he says.
Sudarshan Shetty’s No Title, acrylic letters, LED on wooden frame.
For Sudarshan Shetty’s work, Little uses Horsetail plants, which are relatives of the Giant Horsetail forests that covered the earth 400 million years ago. Inside the room illuminated letters spell out ‘Sometimes when we travel, we forget who we are’. “On a geological scale, how much we have forgotten,” Little says, of the relationship between the horsetails and this particular work.
Speaking of why she chose to contribute hand-written recipes to accompany the art works, Pidathala says, “Over the past few years, food has become my most natural and intimate form of expression.” When Galleryske asked the author of Five Morsels of Love, which was based on her grandmother’s cookbook, to respond to the artworks, she says she used the voice she was most expressive in, resulting in food and recipes. “Sunitha gave me the freedom to choose the form. I could have used images or photographs but we exist in a world where we are already too exposed to visual imagery.”
Tribute to grandmom
She used pages taken from her grandmother’s notebook, where the recipes were written out by hand with pen and ink. “I attribute my whole journey in food to my grandmother and try to pay a tribute to her and the gift of her generosity in some way in everything I do — hence the notebook,” she says.
Pidalatha found the concept a great way for the viewer to make connections. “So much is left unsaid and is left to the viewer and her imagination to connect the dots.” The interesting thing about an exhibition of this kind is that it reinforces the multiplicity of human beings; the fact that they each respond to the world from the lens of their own interests and past and understanding. Setting these facets next to and against each other in shared spaces helps create multiple entry points for the viewer and multiple communication points for the artist.
The writer is a poet and tree lover based in Bengaluru.
