Aussie artist offers new metaphors for protest

During the time the Melbourne-based Emily, spent doing doing a residency here, she witnessed a string of street protests ranging from Anna Hazare's anti-corruption agitation to the ones triggered by the Delhi gang-rape.

All the sloganeering, candle-lit vigils and placards and banners-carrying dissenters shouting in the streets provided Emily thought for action, literally.

She offered art as a new metaphor of protest, replacing the strident and the vociferous with silent verbal salvos and placards and posters with thought-provoking artifacts.

"I too want to protest but not the usual way with candles and sticks and loud-message carrying placards and caricature- laden banners ruling the streets. As an artist, I believe in evolution of ideas and innovation of thoughts and I wish to register my voice in own way. I also want be heard but not by shouting at the top of my lungs and that's what I have shared with my viewers here," says Emily Floyd.

With specially crafted wooden bars, bearing the Internet URLs or web addresses of websites such as the Wikipedia she gives a a silent nod to the freedom of Internet while making a reference to the online censorship in the era of free and transparent information.

A poster that looks from a distance like an eyeball but only a closer examination reveals the verbal-cum-visual pattern weaved into it with and slogans and messages embedded in them unlike the in-your-face way of placard-waving that usual protests mark, generally.

Floyd and two other leading contemporary Australian artists Kate Daw and John Meade's works displayed at a private gallery here form the exhibition titled "Sleep on the Left Side" organised under the ongoing Oz Fest, an initiative of the Australian government.

The title borrowed from a British indie rock band "Cornershop" song of the same name alludes to the "dualities, dichotomies and the sense of politic" that each of the artists engages in different ways through "different sets of relations and conditions", according to the organisers.

So, is she a Communist