Chronicles of Silence (Khamoshi ki Dastaan)

B V Suresh "Chronicles of Silence" (khamoshi ki daastan) an intermedia installation curated by pushpamala n. Curator’s Note For his first major solo show in Bangalore, B V Suresh transforms the gallery space into a spectacular if dystopian landscape of the contemporary, creating a veritable “Animal Farm” of grunting and snuffling pig noises, radio speeches, kinetic machines, crashing weights, radars and laser beams. The sculpture of an albino peacock presides over the whole thing, a blanched version of the national bird: the picture of an outsider whose body is washed by hypnotically flickering video images while bits of cotton and feathers fly around. Mechanized cotton gins, cotton beaters, torn garden nets, and modified versions of agricultural grain separators filled with feathers, tumble, beat and rotate, casting great shadows on the walls. A hundred old radios placed on a bed of cotton, blare forth the talks of the Leader, alternating with interviews of farmers. The old fashioned radio, famously close to the farmer and known to broadcast agricultural programmes, becomes a device that chatters on its own, activated by sensors and oblivious of distress. Banks of scarecrow-like figures fitted with speakers make obscene porcine noises. The white peacock is overwhelmed again and again by brilliant landslides of cotton heaps, while weights crash down on pillows with raucous shrieks. The installation pulsates like a kind of satirical “sound and light show” of the dark times. Since more than a decade B V Suresh has been intensely engaged in reflecting on the place of the dispossessed and the marginalized in his paintings, videos and installations. In 2006, this resulted in a major exhibition “Facilitating the Beast” held at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi which was a large installation around the metaphor of burnt bread, addressing the anti- Muslim communal violence of 2002 in Gujarat. In the present exhibition, some of the burnt bread loaves made nine years ago in a local Baroda bakery are preserved in resin in miniature glass houses, and hung up along with other little houses containing landslides of florescent saffron. Suresh in his role as “artist-chronicler” collects and distils these memories of the unspeakable.

Pushpamala N, 2015