While I was on the fifth day in the residency, Gauri Lankesh, a known journalist was murdered in the city of Bangalore because of her political opinions and persistent activism against the right wing forces in India. The image of Gauri Lankesh’s dead body was circulated in the media after the murder. I removed the sculpture of Mark Cubbon on a pedestal in front of the Karnataka High court and replaced with Gauri’s bleeding body to remind the hegemonic power structures of the unjust methods they use to proliferate their cause.
My gestures by manipulating images are 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.