Festival gives boost to new media in city of nizams, pearls and bangles
Hyderabad, Jan 10: A rich mix of varied sights and sounds of Hyderabad has found artistic encapsulation at a show of four installations by as many young talents at the Krishnakriti2016 festival of Art & Culture here.
While two of them employ audio records to capture the city’s good old spirit which has been in the throes of a major transformation of late, the rest two present the theme with emphasis on visual elements that are suggestive of Hyderabad’s rich past and a vibrant present.
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| Artist - K Saisheela |
“The idea is to explore the relationship between image, memory and visuals in representing the city from a nostalgic angle,” says artist-researcher Nirmala Biluka, who is the curator of the show that has given up-and-coming artists working in new media to participate in the January 7-10 festival featuring fine art, music, film, literature and theatre.
Among the participants at Madhapur’s Centre for Cultural Resources and Training is Anila Kumar G whose 2016 work is a pile-up of 11 trunk boxes, some of which have audio recordings related to Hyderabad as an entity that just merged with nascent India in 1948 to developments as recent as it becoming the capital of Telangana in 2014 and certain general conversations of its public late last year.
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| Artist - Shravan Kumar Pendayla |
A similar idea finds tasteful application by K Saisheela, who has enriched a rectangular space with four iron boxes that let out local ethnic music when opened. Next to them, Shravan Kumar Pendayla has put together significant photos from the past and present related to Hyderabad, while Asgar Ali Mohd translates the city’s famed monuments into a tastefully-lit vertical work around a translucent cylinder.
Asgar took 15 days to complete ‘My City’ which is a roundish acrylic sheet given acid treatment to conjure up images of three key Hyderabad monuments: Charminar, Golconda Fort and Qutub Shahi Tombs. By late evening, it gets illuminated in the country’s tricolour pattern.
The LED-equipped drum has a stand beneath it surrounded by granite stones poured with blank paint. “They symbolise the original rocky terrain that is disappearing slowly with the urbanisation of our times,” points out Asgar, a native of the city.
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| Artist Anila Kumar G |
Shravan, too, has gone for a similar idea of projecting Hyderabad with its historical landmarks, but resorts to dangle the images as a row of nine acrylic sheets from bamboo hangers and leather flaps fitted with brass nails.
Why nine? “Because Hyderabad has nine letters (in English),” he smiles, showing the prints of Falaknuma Palace, emblem of erstwhile Nizam’s administration, his portrait, regiment and seal besides Golconda, Charminar and the white-granite Buddha statue towering Hussain Sagar Lake. Plus a note on his work ‘Renaissance and Reminiscence’.
The boxes in the works of Saisheela and Anila Kumar use audio tapes, but there is some major differences. Saisheela’s boxes open to ethnic poetry and music when they display ethnic items: Urdu poetry amid a pile of cups and saucers, Islamic prayers amid attar bottles, Qawwali music amid sepia postcards of the city and mundane noises from Laad Bazar amid a heap of bangles sold in that famed area. “Islamic culture has fascinated me in particular,” says the artist who holds a Masters in art history.
Anila Kumar’s trunk boxes, on the other hand, has audio clippings from events as old as from 1948 issues to those as late as the 2014 formation of Telangana and its common people discussing socio-political issues. “I recorded them a month ago, standing at railway platforms and bus stations—without them knowing what I was doing,” adds the youngster from Bangalore. “I am myself a migrant. Hence the trunk boxes here.”
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