(Akshay Kumar Seebaluck, Mauritius artist/MFA Painting student at Khairagarh)
Akshay Kumar Seebaluck, a final year MFA Painting student from
Mauritius at the Indira Kala Sangeet Viswa Vidyalaya aka Khairagarh University uses
his art to respond to the contemporary as well as historical events. In his
studio at the Painting Department there is a painting in a corner, which he
proudly shows to everyone saying that he has done that work keeping the deluge
that had devastated Kerala in the month of August 2018. Unlike his other
paintings, this one dedicated to Kerala is predominantly black interspersed
with dark olive green with white strips of paint oozing down, indicating the
cascading of water from the high dam shutters. He hardly uses black and dark
green in his other paintings; Khairagarh being a place full of lush greenery,
any artist should be carried away by the force of such emerald green. But
Akshay mixes a lot of greys and whites to his green in order to tone it down to
reflect a serene state of everything including the daily routine of the people
in Khairagarh, their attitude towards education (which is seen in the number of
schools here) and the calm flow of life in general. His human figures are not
the rotund kind but the stick ones that get stuck in the viewers’ mind. There
are a lot of verbal graffiti that in a closer reader reveal the queries that
the artist himself carries around in his mind. He remains silent while his
paintings speak for him through the visuals and the textual interpolations.
(Akshay's painting for Kerala)
The work dedicated to Kerala by Akshay is not shown to many.
Nor does he intend to do so. Upon asking why he does so he says that he likes
to respond rather than react but it is not necessary that his responses are
dealt with immediate. He is not led by any collective guilt but he is always
goaded by the ideal that an artist has a social responsibility and he is
supposed to act upon it or deliver it in the most feasible and possible ways.
Hence, Akshay, coming from Mauritius, a place far away from Kerala, feels the
responsibility of being one with the people who have been suffering. He suffers
silently along with them and his suffering is seen in the painting. Typical to
his style, a closer look reveals that in this painting too he has employed
verbal graffiti of which the one strikes at my mind is the question on the top
right of the painting: Has the Dam waters caused the deluge? This has been a
question raised by many an environmentalist in Kerala and they dubbed the flood
as a man made one rather than a natural calamity. While debates are on and the
artists in Kerala are still responding to the situation quite emotionally and
often sentimentally, Akshay’s work stands out elsewhere, far away from the
public glare and attention, in the corner of a sweltering studio but still
evoking the questions being asked currently not only in Kerala but also
anywhere in the world where dams have been posing critical danger to the
hapless human masses.
(Beginning of the installation -performance, 'Crash'
‘Crash’ is one such response by Akshay, which is at once an
installation and a performance combined together in order to commemorate and
also to raise a few disturbing questions on the seventeenth anniversary day of
the notorious 9/11 that had not only collapsed the iconic world trade center’s
twin towers in New York but also conveniently created a global ‘other’ in the persona
of a Muslim terrorist. With the incident which actually changed the course of
history into pre-9/11 and post 9/11 has raised so many disturbing questions
regarding the fight against terrorism by the United States of America. Akshay
is not a direct victim of this event. In fact except for those people who got inadvertently
entangled with the event and the US citizens in general the general population
of the world was more or less unaffected by the incident. But it took for them
to realize that a little bit of post 9/11 would come to their lives in terms of
so many global sanctions and restrictions, price hikes, stringent economic
orders, political dominations and the growth of right wing politics, disaster
capitalism and the proliferation of the weapon industry through maintaining
small scale wars all over the world; and also by setting up the democratic
governments against its own people. In this sense, the 9/11 incident is in our
lives even today.
(Crash by Akshay Kumar Seebaluck)
Perhaps, after the first Gulf war in 1990-91, the 9/11 was
an accidentally televised global spectacle which came to have far reaching
visual and psychological consequences among the world populations as they
partook in the event as shell shocked spectators. It was one incident that
consolidated the human psyche against a global other and the scale of the
attack on the twin towers was so massive that saving the attacker even by
playing the Devil’s Advocate could have been a self-alienating attempt. But
over a period of time people start probing into the veracity of the claims of
the successive US Governments, the posing of their military-industry
installations and also the aftermath of the chain of events that had created an
unprecedented narrative in the global scenario. Akshay perhaps stand at the
other end of this spectrum as a young artist who relives the 9/11 event as a
part of history as well as a memory and contemporary folklore. However, he,
detached from the event and distanced by times asks certain uncomfortable
questions through the whole performance cum installation that was held in the
Darbar Hall of Khairagarh University on the 9th September 2018 to
which I played a curatorial consultant’s role.
(the Interactive part of 'Crash')
The project ‘Crash’ is developed out of two surrogate
towers, symbolizing the twin towers that had come under the attack, made of
canvas stretched over rectangular cuboids. The canvases are etched with the
press cuttings culled carefully from the reporting of the event all over the
world and Akshay cleverly and artistically create a submerged narrative of
questions regarding the 9/11. The reports thus transferred on the canvases
start as mere reportage and slowly they take the form of raising questions,
probing into the details, victims’ narratives, experts’ observations, global
economic and cultural fall out etc. The ‘twin towers’ are then interpolated by
the stick figures as well as the textual graffiti created by Akshay himself,
which are lit from inside so that in the darkness of the hall they appear like
two large pieces of embers that refuse to die out. According to Akshay, this
emblematic representation of the event is way of raising the question that
never say die once again; has the War against Terror achieved anything? Where
are we in terms of terror? Even if the artist does not ask the following
questions directly, as witnesses we could ask ourselves; what happened to the
relatives of the human beings who got involved accidently in the incident? Who
are responsible for the wastage of a large number of human lives? What has the
US Government achieved after creating the global other? Has the growth of the
right wing all over the world ever since in any sense helped the positive human
evolution. Questions are many and answer could be always in the negative or in
a sort of vagueness.
(a view of 'Crash')
‘Crash’ started off as a performance where before a waiting
audience comprising mainly of the students and faculty members two student
collaborators enacted an orgy of/with flowers which slowly turned into a
violent act of mutual annihilation. This act was followed by a group of actors masquerading
as terrorists, with their faces covered and hands wielding fake Kalashnikovs took
hostage of some students and proceeded into the Darbar Hall where the main
installation, the twin towers were waiting. In total darkness the installation
looked like a pair of burning eyes while the actors moved around with lit candles
in one hand and flowers in the other. Six blank canvases were kept on either
side of the towers which was supposed to be acted upon by the audience. In the
orgy of responses it took no time to fill the canvases with the visual and
textual graffiti which surprisingly corresponded with the surface of the towers
created by Akshay himself. The performance and temporal installation was
concluded as a group of students and faculty members moved towards the front
gate of the University with candles and left them there along with flowers.
(the Culmination of 'Crash')
As some onlookers did not know what exactly was going on,
one of them exclaimed, ‘has Diwali, the festival of lights, come so early this
year?’ It could be jest partially and serious too. But the 9/11 was a spectacle
that has meant to go wrong; but still it was a spectacle, a lesson for the
Ravanas of the world, calling some Ravanas and some assuming the role of Rama.
The performance was persuasive and the installation in the darkness was quite
poignant enough to evoke the terror of the crash and also capable enough to
evoke piety towards humanity in the minds of the onlookers.
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