Art as catharsis

“Hate was just a failure of the imagination”: this line from The Power and the Glory left a lasting impression on Amitava Kumar when he read Graham Greene’s novel in his late teens. Post-September 11, Kumar writes, he returned to Green’s “dictum” to understand how writers and artists (“the imaginative lot” he calls them) try and understand the “voice and detail of the actors participating in the war on terror”.

In Evidence of Suspicion, he writes of contemporary American artists whose work focuses on the “changed realities in the nation’s political and social psyche” post-9/11 — artists such as Paul Chan, the Hong Kong-born, Nebraska-bred font-maker who made a video on Lynne Stewart, an activist lawyer convicted for providing “material support” to Islamic terrorists.

 

How do contemporary artists in India deal with terrorism in their work? Many of them engage with the phenomenon.

According to Goa-based artist Subodh Kerkar, who recently showed a suite of works in Mumbai and Goa based on the 26/11 attacks, “Most terrorists are young. They are like robots being used by someone else.”

To illustrate his point, Kerkar used choreographed performances on the beach (apt, since Kasab and party also took the sea route). One of these had a bull, the vehicle of Yama, the god of death in Indian mythology, standing in a puddle with swirls of blood-like red in it.

Veer Munshi, painter and installation artist, and emigrant Kashmiri Pandit, says that working on a terror-related theme is a form of “mental release”. “When I first came to Delhi, I tried drawing beautiful landscapes, but I didn’t enjoy it. Then I created a painting which showed a terrorist on floating land and felt an immediate sense of relief.” Munshi’s recent series, Shrapnel, depicts the reaction of a young man to a bomb blast.

Do artists see a larger, deeper role for themselves as members of society?

Kerkar was affected by 26/11 personally: his best friend lost his son in the carnage. “I maybe an artist,” says Kerkar now, “but I am also an activist, and I think it’s time to explore why these things [terror attacks] keep happening.”

For Munshi, “When someone dies, you sometimes have to make his kin cry to release the trauma. Similarly, I see my work as a release of the trauma I faced [of leaving Kashmir].”

“As artists, we are not bound by the media and can transmit information which is not sensational, has a deeper meaning and can be shared with our viewers,” says Shilpa Gupta, whose paintings, sculptures, installations and performances often make reference to acts of terrorism.