Shaju Subramanian calls himself a failed artist who is on a constant search about the state of being of individuals — faceless, nameless in most cases — in a society that weighs down heavily on them.
The outcome of his search, two conjoining streams of searing photographs, will be on display in an exhibition titled, ‘Fear and Freedom and Cogwheels’ at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery till October 24.
The exhibition, which was opened on Thursday by noted political cartoonist E.P. Unny, showcases a set of photographs in the ‘fear and freedom category, comprising mostly contorted, tenuous, even amorphous images of a nude male body that’s at once a celebration of freedom as also a spectacle of fear. They also double up as a window, for the viewer, to an uncertain source of fear!
The cogwheel series has a remarkable connect with the first set of pictures and features anonymous working class people – the pictures are about ‘being-labour’ and ‘labour-being’, as critic C.S. Venkiteswaran has mentioned in the elaborate exhibition brochure.
There are images of labourers at work and those of machines. “Aren’t humans as expendable as the machines that they’ve made? People form the skeleton of the society, as homogenised and dehumanised as the machines. There’s a certain degree of suffering that you constantly encounter and experience.
I’ve only tried to capture a moment’s angst,” says Mr. Subramanian.
Mr. Unny, who opened the show, recalled the recent phenomenon of intolerance, often on the part of suspicious cops, towards sketching in public, but nobody would have any qualms about a few clicks on the mobile phone or camera. Contrast this to a tribal village in Odisha where they would even pose for a good 40 minutes for you to draw them, but grow suspicious the moment you take out the camera, he said.
Mr. Subramanian’s photographs have deliberately left out the aesthetic aspect, to make way for a clear political perspective, he said.
Senior journalist C. Gouridasan Nair introduced the theme of the exhibition.
