Embarking on someone else’s story is usually less fearful than embarking on one’s own. Otherness makes for a good buffer, but there are exceptions. One of these is Subba Ghosh’s animation video work at Anant Art Gallery’s Gayatri Sinha-curated show, Mutant Beauty. It’s an exception because it takes you to your own heart of darkness, a disturbing place.
Subba’s work, Within Darkness, must be entered in layers, each anticipating the next. A two-walled large cubicle is the first point of engagement. On each wall are full-sized drawings. One is a face, its tongue out, licking, caressing or taking in a fleshy something — simultaneously fuzzy and morbid. It compels the viewer to be led by curiosity to the next level, a darkened room with large drawings on the walls, with trepidation.
In the blue light of the screen, larger-than-life male bodies on the walls, and an ornate heart, all rendered by hand, seem to reveal a part of a larger story. The effect of such fragmentation is unsettling, as if the whole is as terrifying to tell as it is to hear and see. When the video finally plays, it is in a charged space, one brought on into the work by the viewer.
Using detailed drawings, Subba creates an animation where a man, in slow steps, tears open his chest. This collapses multiple mythologies (Hanuman revealing his loyalty for Ram and Sita, and Catholic images of Jesus that show him with an exposed, sacred heart), where such a passionate act leads to divine intervention or, logically, to certain death. It is a last-ditch, desperate act.
Then, obliterating any medically-accepted life, the man removes his own heart — which Subba realistically depicts as an anatomically depicted clump of muscle. In the background, Nat King Cole sings “I’ve Given Up on Love”. The heart, rather than shrivelling, blossoms and becomes richly ornamented with chains, flowers and even a fish whose tail continues swishing. Whether this is a struggle to keep the last ribbon of life or whether it has discovered a life-sustaining fluid in the heart is anyone’s guess. But Subba lets that be, and cuts to another narrative — identity-based violence.
Animating drawings in the tradition of shadow puppets, he tells the story of a communal riot. The victim is buried, and decomposes. We go back to the heart, and its original owner without his own essential engine. We still don’t know who he is — the killer, the lover of the victim, an observer or the narrator. His sacrifice may have been a poor investment but he won’t let it be. He offers his heart the best place for it — inside his own cavity. He pulls out his tongue and rolls in the now servile heart, cannibalising himself as an act of survival.
With this act, he completes the cycle of self-inflicted brutality — from tearing open his chest to cannibalism — as a way to experience the world and articulate himself. The end of this video creates a reflective moment because this performance could be ours. The abstract nature of the story allows for personal details to plump it up. The act of juxtaposing violence with a jazz song finds precedence in historical templates of suffering and extermination pitted against self-assured utterances —Marie Antoinette asking citizens to eat cake or the chess players addicted to their game in Lucknow as their world slowly came to an end. The music entraps you in its richness, its lyrics stand out as a narrative for the video. Eliciting an emotional, intuitive response is Subba’s triumph.
The video becomes the metaphor for a mass funeral. The decoration of the heart — with flowers, and a chain, love-arrows — all these draw on the rituals of cremation and burial. It’s the last dressing up, funereal and loving, and melancholic. Such references —unintended perhaps — remove the barrier of otherness and footnote violence as our own undesirable reality.
