Gestures speak (Gallery Sumukha, 2007)
by Aditi De GESTURES SPEAK: a one-offtake on Brand Bangalore A CITY. A map. A reckoning of the past, present and future. Each can be read, deciphered, decoded by a sensitized individual - with as much insight and intuition as a palmist reads the tracery on the soft inner spread of a hand. The hand, thus visualized, can evoke an individual within a city, a country, a globe. It can trace the trajectory of a human being, an artist, a poet, an architect, often tantalizingly on a parallel track to a city like Bangalore. M. Shanthamani’s current show - titled Gestures Speak - brings this home conceptually and visually, pregnant with layered significance. On her large, brooding acrylic canvases, the local and the global, the insider and the outsider battle, collide and jostle for co-existence, defragmenting life cycles and existential notions long imbued with history by association with the onlooker and the activist alike. Shanthamani’s stances stem from her multiplicity of experiences as a rural-born individual, now an urban being. As a young woman who made the transition in 1992 from the arts schools of Mysore and Baroda to a burgeoning, IT-propelled Bangalore. As a girl rooted in the rustic soil outside Mysore, warding off suitable matches as a pre-teen, able to identify with the indomitable womenfolk who cared for their households and 30 cattle, toiled in the fields, committed to life in a deep, essential sense. As a questing mind enriched by the company of strong, emancipated woman artists. Even as an artist who once couched herself thus: “Painting became an important space for me to get out of all this. It gave me freedom -physically, mentally, financially. My canvas is now a surface that constantly questions and looks for answers in that space.” Shanthamani’s questions on Greater Bangalore, even as Bengalooru, are imbued with reflections from her journey into the future. To her, it matters that the Garden City is now almost invisible - cloaked in dense vehicular pollution that chokes plant and human life alike. And that the genteel norms that governed the pensioner’s paradise have been overtaken by a high-speed youth-centric buzz, as set-back bungalows are gobbled up by high-rises blocks, gated communities, and malls. Even the fact that the silk-weavers of the old city have vanished as big brands lure the new, well-heeled customer with global mantras. Is the constantly-morphing city redefining who we are? Is technology creating a rift between those with insider information, and the tech-deprived? Are our bodies changing as shrinking city spaces crowd us into personal cocoons not of our making? Perhaps. Through giant acrylic canvases melded with stencilled photo-verity images, water colours and body/ hand casts, Shanthamani creates parallel city narratives. Of the migrant street woman who vends mallige flowers. Or the labourers who shape the new city. All those unknown, unseen, unsung stories beyond the hype. Those women who also work round-the-clock, expressing themselves through their working hands, their inherited classical postures.