I did this project while in a residency themed ‘City as Site’ in Bangalore at 1 Shanthi Road supported by Shergill-Sundaram Arts Foundation.
I created series of postcards with images of public monuments around the cubbon park area made during and after the Colonial era of Bangalore. Subverting the idea of a ‘City Beautiful Movement’ commonly seen in the postcards available in city museums and galleries, I am trying to bring forth the forgotten or unacknowledged facets of urban life. Different situations are depicted by manipulating images by removing the existing sculptures on pedestals and replacing them with a man selling balloons on the street, a sweeper cleaning Gandhi memorials, a crumbling column from Krumbiegel’s lecture hall in Lalbaug garden, a monument which takes its own photographs.
My gesture of manipulating images is a response to the city and its past and present. With this work I wish to interrogate the presence of monuments within Indian context and respond with an ironic interpretation of these monuments, which many post world war German artists also called ‘Anti-Monuments’. I am interested in this inherent irony of creating monuments to counter argue the very essence of what monuments are built for. By Anti- Monuments, what I mean is a set of alternatives to existing monuments of the city by subverting the hegemonic ideals which manufactured those monuments in the first place.
