It is uncanny how some paintings remind you of a poetry…as if the painter and the poet met at some secret place and decided to tell a story not all will have the eyes and heart to read. Like Sylvia plath’s Mirror and Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas; like The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí & Moments by Rumi. But what happens when the sole purpose of art is to tell a poem, show it?
This:
I am a believer in using colours not just for its aesthetic value but to represent what and idea or a person stands for. Be it the blue of Mukibodh’s melancholy, or the youthful yellow and pink tinges of Majaz’s revolutionary ideas, or the bloody red of Jaun’s extreme passion – the hues speak to me and I seek to be the medium to carry the message along.
Growing up in a Dalit ghetto, I could never associate the term ‘artist’ with the subaltern because I never saw people like me being a part of the popular culture. Although my grandfather was a skilled drum maker, my father could play Tabla and my neighbour, who was a sanitation worker would often sing Kishor Kumar songs effortlessly, their art was always considered labour or even nuisance. For a long time, art was always an upper caste’s virtue to me. Especially for the visual medium, Dalit or subaltern aesthetics were inferior, cheap even vulgar. This ahsaas-e-kamtari or the inferiority complex that the oppressor inflicts upon the oppressed did not let me even aspire to become an artist.
That all changed when I discovered Ambedkar, when I learned about the methods of appropriation through colonialism and Brahminism and when I became aware that art belongs to the workers, to the Bahujans, the Adivasis, the queer and every other identity who toils to create something only to be capitalised by the powerful, the rich, the whites, the upper castes.
I dare to make art and call myself an artist as a means to revolt against this crushing wheel of oppression and create a counter-culture or rather reclaim the culture.
My art is political because art can only be political!
Adopting minimalism, the design idea which says less is more, is an exercise that I love to take on and what could be more challenging than interpreting an overtly stimulating medium of cinema through shapes, iconography and negative space.
While I love the elaboration and intricacies of a design, I strongly believe that design language exists to convey the most complex of stories through the simplest of shapes.
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