The one thing that an artist requires to explore his/her imagination, is solitude. Here, in this space, the artist gets a chance to nurture their ideas and take it beyond. So, in March when the country experienced the first lockdown to tackle the spread of Covid-19 virus, Goa-based art gallery, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts thought of utilising this time for something productive.
“If solitude is the fertile ground that fosters creativity, we wanted to reach out to artists (both within India and abroad) to learn how to cope with isolation and what are some techniques we could integrate into our lives,” states the curatorial note of Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts. The gallery then launched Surviving SQ (Self-Quarantine) project on March 23 where they invited artists to share with them the strategies on how to get through this phase. They received paintings that imagine landscapes without human presence; videos that critique public gestures of solidarity; messages of hope through poetry recitations of Richard Hendrick’s seminal poem Lockdown.
It then led to full-fledged four projects by four artists from Goa, Delhi, where they expressed their emotions during this quarantine and also encouraged people to share the same. All these works are now shared online on Sunaparanta’s Instagram account (www.instagram.com/sunaparanta_goa/).
Measuring silence
Among these, the most talked about is Pallavi Paul’s ‘Share Your Quiet’ project, where Paul questions whether silence can be measured. For this, she invited people in isolation to share 10-second bytes of silence. Pallavi states, “The first provocation for the project was the ‘Janta Curfew’ announced by our Prime Minister. As people clanged and banged utensils on their balconies — several important questions like the unavailability of PPE kits for doctors, anxiety, and suffering of daily wage workers and lack of testing facilities, were drowned out in the noise. I wanted to produce a space where the quietude of those who had withdrawn from this bullish display of public spirit, could be hosted. Here, quiet is a space of reflection, thought and churning not of tranquillity.”
The project is a compilation of various sounds that had drowned in our day-to-day lives. In these 10 weeks, they received more than 700 entries and sounds involving bird calls, azan prayers, wind, sounds of machines, housework, children talking, hospital equipment, all these collected from people based in India and from countries like China, USA, UK, France, Norway, Belgium, Serbia, Japan. Pallavi adds, “The entries respond more to psychological time rather than bureaucratic impositions and divisions.”
For Delhi-based artist, Tanya Goel, videos made from her home during the precautionary self-imposed quarantine upon her return to India, was her natural response to her immediate surroundings. Her deeply existential work turns into a sublime recording of her curfew. The virus also in a way resonated with her work as her art is mainly based on abstraction. “Virus is also an abstraction as there is no form to it. Also, the nature, the weeds growing outside my house, and the stillness inspired my work,” explains Tanya.
Finding calm in colours
The photo essay by Ipshita Maitra titled, ‘Metaphor of Contrasts’ encourages us to identify gradually contrasting colour palettes. Ipshita opines that during this lockdown we are exposed to a lot of anxiety and uncertainty and the only way to find calm amidst this chaos is by finding
beauty in ordinary, playfulness, and inspiration in our immediate environment. “Fundamentally to stay ‘present,” says Ipshita. She uses colour as her theme in her photographic work as she opines that colour is the lens through which we approach the photos.
“Our surroundings through their myriad colour schemes are making us aware of colour harmony — pale blue with grey, pista green with salmon pink or lemon yellow, lilac with burgundy and jade green — the colour compositions that emerge from the photos are as important as the pictures themselves,” elaborates Ipshita.
Discomfort of loneliness
Goa-based Kedar Dhondu’s ‘Lonely Residents’, that depicts the discomfort of staying indoors, makes a deep impact and makes us realise the importance of being free and outdoors. Dhondu, who was following the news of the spread of the Covid-19, right from the month of February, decided to document this lockdown by asking people on social media to share a picture of themselves in their house and also a brief text, when the first lockdown started in March.
“I felt that this initiative of mine doing one drawing of ‘Lonely Residents’ daily would give a thought of realisation, ‘to invent things everyday’ or to get a feeling that, ‘the house is a great sea to explore’. I also feel that by giving importance to ‘Lonely Residents’ in the form of art, I hope that people will feel good and happy about it, forgetting about the tense situation and I also hope that people can use this time to try to reinvent themselves,” says Dhondu who has worked in graphite on paper of size, 43cm x 28 cm, and the drawings are uploaded on Instagram and Facebook.
For Dhondu it was not just about portraying isolation but telling more about the situation these people were in. He says, “I was looking at portraying the fear on their faces by depicting their gaze in such a way that as if they look at you and you witness them being lonely. Their surroundings (apartments) also played an important role in the visual space, which suggests the comfort zones.”
During this process, he came across many stories of people who were staying in self-isolation away from their families and also discovered the anxieties they face and the fear factor in their neighbourhoods.