Shifting perceptions

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM :   I am not an “artist.” In the sense, yes, I am one of the artists at KMB 2018 and two of my works are showing at the festival — but I am not an artist in the sense that I did not go to art school and I do not get my ‘rosie-rotie’ (livelihood)  from art. I have attended the Biennale for the past three editions, but this is the first time I had the surprise of having my work there. This time, I reached Kochi about a week before the opening to install my work and it really felt like the entire place was in a state of transformation.

orks in progress everywhere, hotels full of artists, volunteers zipping around, JCBs (earth movers) working away past midnight, painting, carpentry and fabrication going on 24/7, artists and producers spending sleepless night after night and slowly, bit by bit, things coming together (almost) for the opening day.As I installed away in a void, I heard about the other things being built around us. A sound-and-light work that attracts male mosquitos in the evening, a room full of microphones, a sprinkler that activates a rainbow — things that you feel you need to see to believe. 

Through my working life, I have played multiple characters — assistant director, line producer, researcher, illustrator, graphic designer, teacher, mosaic maker, animator, video editor. Along the way in 2015, I was selected as part of a fellowship with the India Foundation for the Arts — and I had the chance to access some fantastic archival images at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

I spent a few years playing with these images of women in the archives — women daydreaming out of windows and doors, or engrossed in their reading, images of men explaining things to women, women floating and flying away — and I used the ethos of remix culture to bring to life this material through an interactive multimedia story called Sultana’s Reality — which is one of my two works showing at the festival. Using a computer mouse set within an immersive game-like space, the viewer can navigate through the relationship between women and books in five chapters of a multimedia story made up of animation, GIFs, comics, jokes, statistics, music, hidden notes and more.

There is also a second work I made specifically for the Biennale (called st.itch) commissioned by the NNS with archives in the North of England. St.itch is a multimedia patchwork that uses video, QR codes, archival images and mechanised states of being, and embroidery to look at the transgressive nature of women’s work within the home such as cooking, cleaning, planning and especially sewing.   

Since the opening, there has been, on a daily basis, a handful of certain kinds of people who spend a long time at the works, sometimes even an hour — reading things over and over again, clicking around for hidden notes, laughing at jokes that I thought only made sense in my head, finding all the concealed connections and sometimes, seeing some totally new and unintended ones too. 

Every edition I have been to in the past, I too have found that some works really spoke to me and some were not so much my cup of tea. The scale of the Biennale is so large that the chances of every visitor finding at least one work that moves them is high. 

Afrah’s works are on view at Kashi Art Gallery till March 29.