After you have identified yourself as a visitor to the gallery at the gate and been beeped in, the first room in the beautiful colonial structure housing GallerySKE greets you with the chirruping of what sounds like crickets. It is an eerie sound, and definitely not what one expects in a gallery in the city. But this is part of the quaint installation "tree frogs dream in the starlight" by Navin Thomas. There is also a CFL lamp, like a miniature version of a streetlight, shining on four trumpets, which were once part of a police brass band, placed on a stepladder. Intermittently, an orchestra plays. The installation in the next room consists of three wooden chests, sound boxes, constructed "chronologically" (in the order in which the raw materials were found) and is titled "cause we felled down a forest." Thomas's work forms part of the latest exhibition at GallerySKE, called "Trilingual". The exhibition is unusual because it really does seem as if the three artists involved are speaking in three different languages. Broadly, the works explore human intervention and the environment, according to the gallery.
Achitect and urbanist Karun Kumbera has chosen video installations as well as a work placed outside the gallery to convey what he wants to say. Kumbera's architectural firm in Bangalore works in collaboration with Aetrangere in Paris which focuses on sustainable solutions for the future. Accordingly the video installations beam urban solutions, statistics about city life in Bangalore, and an urban roadmap.
Perhaps the most accessible of the three 'languages' are the powerful photographs of the ongoing struggle by villagers against the nuclear power plant at Koodankulam, documented by Amirtharaj Stephen through his lens. The black-and-white photographs, 15 in all, are part of the series 'in my backyard' and represent the different aspects of the struggle, from the hordes gathered outside a church, fishermen heading towards the plant and policemen lined up outside their vans, perhaps awaiting orders. One of the most powerful images is that of a middle-aged woman lying on the beach, her mouth open in a soundless wail, while paramilitary forces stand a little way away, apparently unmoved. There are also different photographs of children, who have played an important part in the struggle. One has several of them holding candles, another where they wave letters and the last in the series, a few faces, slightly blurred, with a crucifix in the foreground. Stephen says his village in Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu was just a few kilometres away from the site of the protests, and so had always known about the nuclear power plant, one of the reasons he was drawn to the protests. But it was the way the government dealt with the protesters, with no official even bothering to meet the villagers to redress their grievances, that stirred him. "I wanted to do something from a neutral perspective," says Stephen, who started documenting the struggle from September 2011 and continues to visit the villages in and around Koodankulam.
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One of the incidents that stand out in his mind is the incidents that happened in September last year. "On the eve of September 11, thousands gathered to sleep on the beach, like refugees, even though their houses were just 500 metres away." The next day was the skirmish between the villagers and the police. Stephen has captured both incidents, but says there was not even a single representative from the mainstream media during these incidents. And then there is the fact that over 350 cases have been filed against the protesters. "That all this is happening in a democracy is the most shocking," says the Bangalore-based photographer, who plans to show his work at other protest sites next, rather than a gallery.
The exhibition will be on at GallerySKE, Langord Town, Bangalore till July 5
