Cop Shiva: No Longer A Memory

Cop Shiva (Shivaraju BS) has always been fascinated by the characters roaming around our world. He has an alert eye that knows who among us produces, performs and plays on the daily. He delights in presenting these characters in the process of becoming but also patiently waits for their final form to emerge. He shifts between doubling-down by fixing them within their context or freeing them from it. He doesn’t always get his results with a velvet glove – but he has always earned that intimacy with his subjects.

In his latest work – No Longer A Memory, a photo-performance series with his mother Gowramma, Cop Shiva becomes a character too.

On recently returning to his village to live with her – in a new house Cop Shiva has built for her, he realised they don’t have “a single photograph of us together”. No Longer A Memory, a photo-performance series, honours his childhood days spent playing with his mother Gowramma. Slipping between the roles of gods and goddesses, film heroes and heroines, cops and robbers or a benevolent royal couple – costumes and props fashioned from humble household objects or their colourful imaginations. No Longer A Memory makes real those fantasies from their past.