Artist Mohanan with his Sculpture

An Act of Resistance

The anti coca-cola struggle at Plachimada, Kerala completes 2000 days. Mohanan, an artist-activist recently installed a public sculpture at the site of resistance (coca-cola factory) as a tribute to the struggling mass. C.S.Venkiteswaran writes from the site.

The peoples’ struggle at Plachimada village, Palakkad District, Kerala, against the Coca Cola Factory reached its 2000th day on October 12, 2007. The people there have been struggling against the multinational giant for the past 2000 days demanding compensation for the devastating ecological damage and human sufferings that the working of the factory had caused in the region.

Mohanan, an artist from Kozhikode, installed a sculpture near the samara pandal, a temporary structure where the activists gather to protest, opposite the Coco Cola factory at Plachimada. According to him, it was his way of registering solidarity with a movement that is fighting for the most basic of human rights – water.

By installing his stupa-like sculpture at the site of the struggle, Mohanan was also making his art ‘public’, placing it as a part of Creative Commons of humanity at large, and the struggling populations in particular. This act also affirms the very basic nature of art, especially sculpture - that of its sociality. His sculpture stands there like a ‘hero-stone’ a reminder of a fight for justice and common good, an idol of memory and memorizing… by installing it amidst the people and at the very site of struggle, it also becomes an act of retrieval of the political in installation art, which is fast becoming a fad and an elitist sport of sorts.

From Earth to Sky – Stupas of Resistance and Suffering

Human suffering and resistance are the abiding themes of Mohanan's work. His drawings and paintings teem with human figures and intricate patterns that weave themselves into an intense and haunting narrative of transcendence; these transgressions are not merely spiritual displacements of pain and suffering but very much gut-wrenchingly physical and emotional, very much that of the body as well as the spirit. They are very visceral maps of bodily and mental sufferings.

This sculpture is a continuation of Mohanan's leit motif in granite. These two granite stupas – cube-like blocks placed one upon another, have a grave yet very graceful quality to them. As one goes around these stupas, we come across grave faces, graven with misery and suffering, yet beaming with compassion and transcendence. They brim with pain yet pulsate with the spirit of resistance. These figures entwine themselves, as if spiraling upwards in a prayer to the beyond, as if leaping towards states more humane, just and joyous.

Their hair locks, palms and fingers, limbs and bodies, all meld to create a flowing pattern that resist the hardness of the material that constitutes them, whether it be the body of Buddha-like figure or that of the granite that forms the medium. As our gaze winds its way from bottom to top, we find faces of figures of varying ages, an adolescent face full of curiosity and wonder, a mature but anguished face of a youth, and the peaceful visage at the top. In the other block is the head of a Buddha-like figure, peacefully asleep atop folded hands and above the trials and tribulations of the mundanely human life. Together these two stupas pulsate with pain as well as calm, suffering as well as resistance, solidity as well as suppleness, as if the all-too real conflicts – external and internal – coalesce to form a whole as complex as our efforts at resistance and liberation..

On Mohanan

Mohanan is a self-taught artist based in Kozhikode, who has held a number of exhibitions of drawings and paintings. Working outside the culture of galleries and the established art world, Mohanan has been closely associated with various radical political and environmental struggles in Kerala. Due to his affiliations with the Naxalite movement in the 70’s, he was imprisoned during the Emergency. The scars – physical and mental – of those dark days still haunt Mohanan’s image-world. He is an illustrator of repute and has published a collection of his drawings – Ee Pachilayil Onnu Thodanam – ‘I want to touch that Green leaf’ in 2003.