Assembly Installation view

Monsoon Showers and Political Arches

Renu Ramanath

March, generally speaking, is the month of winding up in Kerala. The wrap-up time. When everything draws to a close slowly. The closing time for schools and colleges, which invariably affects the household timetables. The time to get ready for the sluggish spread of summer months lying in wait ahead.
 
Of course, offices do not close for summer (unlike the Raj days, when the British trundled off to the hill stations, closing down the offices). But the general air affects all, especially those who come from households that usually revolve around the school and college time-tables. The cruellest month of April is just round corner. And the monsoon far away. Monsoon, which always spelt magic.

Even the galleries, slowly beginning to design the annual calendars and schedules, seem to slow down in these months, like changing the gears after a period of hectic riding. Not that there is already a clear-demarked season for shows in Kerala, but surely, it is in the offing.

However, people were thrown out of their summer siesta with a rude jolt this year as the March skies suddenly opened out with torrential rains that was nothing like any summer shower ever seen.  Just out of the blue, literally. Instead of the sweltering heat and rising mercury levels, there was an overcast sky and rising water levels, clogged canals and unmended umbrellas.

Monsoon never keeps Malayalees indoors, but these untimely summer showers, with bolts of thunder and streaks of lightning do. And true, it’s no fun time for art openings, with the unpredictable weather looming above. Yet, Anup Mathew Thomas and Varunika Saraf opened their exhibitions in overcast, rain-drenched evenings.  The Fort Kochi streets wore a damp, deserted look, as if perplexed at the changing patterns of weather.

Interestingly, Anup Mathew Thomas’s video installation (presented in a solo at Kashi Art Gallery), ‘Assembly,’ was also taking a curious look at one of Kerala’s changing faces. The work consisted of a slide show of images of the publicity arches erected in many parts of Kerala, the projection taking place inside a shamiana arranged like a typical public meeting space. 

Entering from the lashing rain outside into the passageway leading into the ‘meeting hall’ created inside the gallery space gave a strange feeling of reminiscence (not exactly nostalgia !) for many who have entered into similar meeting halls.  The walls were made of white cloth and the floor covered with the typical reddish, jute floor mat. A neat arrangement of red plastic chairs, an omnipresence element in present-day Kerala, arranged in two rows with convenient aisles in between (in typical ‘meeting’ fashion) welcomed the viewers.

Anup had made use of the ready-made full-screen twirl, a common feature of most image-viewing software for the transition between the images, calling to mind the techniques applied by the early videographers of Kerala. Around 250 images of the publicity arches in varying colours spin away in front of the viewers.  The arches, a relatively new invention in the publicity business of Kerala, had started to dot the roads and highways in the last four or five years replacing the rectangular gateways made of wooden trellis that was the norm for many decades. The arches are convenient for the professional publicity people as the skeleton is set up at first, then followed by a cloth wrapping of appropriate cover. Often, the same structure will be used for consecutive events, with only the colour of the fabric being changed. Thus, the arch flaunting the revolutionary messages of the CPI-(M) local or district conference in brilliant red wears a green hue the next week announcing the conference of the Indian Union Muslim League, or turns saffron for the temple festival.

Anup’s work presents a dispassionate view of a small but significant feature of Kerala’s contemporary social life. Here’s a Kerala that you can not find in the tinted tourism brochures.  The images are as unflattering and unemotional as news photographs that appear in the local pages of dailies, or even those which disappear in the morgues everyday.

If you can read the arches, i.e., read Malayalam, the underlying paradoxes are revealed more sharply.  The arches list the political, religious and cultural happenings that have taken place in the extent of a particular period (the past four or five months, in this case), in Kerala. These range from the local / area / district committee conference of the CPI-(M), rally of the Congress, church festivals, sports events and even the ‘Pongala festival of Vasoorimala,’ (festival to propitiate the Goddess of Smallpox), to name just a few.  It is an impassive survey of the paradoxes that go into the making of a particular society (that of Kerala, in this case), at a particular point in its history.

Anup’s act of deliberately and meticulously re-creating the ambience of the standard political or cultural ‘meeting’ in Kerala within the gallery space is both a  documentation and a critical comment on one interesting feature of the current social life of the State. Also his use of the ready-made twirl used to present the slides invites attention to the uses of media images and electronic technology as a means of influencing and coercing the masses towards a particular idea, event or ideology.

However, the inherent paradox of these publicity arches is that like the other tools used for publicity and advertisement like posters or banners, the arches too have started to wear out their novelty and people are already passing underneath them without even a glance at the event being advertised above their heads. Familiarity breeds indifference too. Whether be it the party conference or the Sevens Football Match, it’s only worth half a glance, the public decides.

The publicity arches represent just one specific angle of a society living through a complex process of high-frequency transition that has left everything topsy turvy, at least for the time being. But more on that tumultuous transitions later.