The inter-disciplinary exhibition, People’s Music: A Reconstruction, is an amalgamation of protest music and two visual narratives accompanied by a soundtrack, says Kritika Dua
Cone-shaped megaphones, which seem to be hanging from the sky, belt out folk songs and invite visitors through a sound path of protest music with a touch of folk. The unique exhibition People’s Music: A Reconstruction brings to life revolutionary anthems.
As one enters the basement in the display hall, around 10 posters capture the attention and give out snippets of various traditions associated with protest music. The entire step-by-step process of conceiving this project is laid out for the spectators — plastering emails exchanged between Serendipity Arts Festival and the key collaborators in June 2017. There were notes of logistical arrangements, artwork inspired by South African artist William Kentridge, photographs from the Goa exhibition and memos on budget and the two untitled animation films.
The same songs of revolution took the people who came for Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival (in 2017) to a large container through megaphones hanging from the trees. Below it were floorboards holding an engaging exhibition of sound and video installation inside the container. At the festival, which was held in December in Panaji, a stretch of the promenade along the Mandovi river became a site to recall and celebrate a genre of music born out of concerns about hunger, livelihood, war, conflict and displacement. The vision behind it was to create a soundscape or aural cue to lead people into the container.
This one of a kind project on protest music is curated by Sumangala Damodaran, designed by Sudhanva Deshpande and animated by Shaaz Ahmed. Delhi witnessed its deconstructed version. Damodaran elaborated upon the idea behind creating this interdisciplinary project, “I have been working on protest music traditions in the Indian subcontinent and understanding them in the context of international developments for more than a decade now. When Serendipity Arts Trust got in touch with me about creating an artwork based on my research and work, it was an exciting possibility to bring the visual and aural aspects together in paying tribute to a rich tradition of music. I had been wanting to do something innovative with the material that I had collected over the years and this was a great opportunity. That’s how the project People’s Music: A Reconstruction came about.”
Deshpande asserted, “The idea really germinated from the third collaborator Sumangala Damodaran, who is an academician and a singer. She has worked over the last decade on radical tradition of popular music in India which, in a sense is connected to Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). It is not one single tradition and there are many spans to it and this exhibition presents one of the traditions (protest music). Damodaran has been singing these songs for a long time now and since she has an academic background, she interviewed a lot of old singers, many of whom are no longer with us. She revived many of the old songs. Damodaran has an archive which she studied and wrote a book on. The idea was to try and see how that archive can become a contemporary art installation project.” They wanted to interpret Damodaran’s archive in a contemporary manner which is relevant while trying to highlight the diversity within the archive. This was done by presenting it visually as posters and animation films.
At Goa, two visual narratives and a soundtrack was placed inside the container. The soundtrack composed by Damodaran was played alongside two animation films (made by Ahmed) simultaneously inside the container.
At the basement display in Defence Colony, the audience could witness six minute soundtracks along with the two animation films. The other part of the installation in Goa was the posters outside the container — which were now seen adorning the walls at the exhibition in Delhi. Deshpande emphasised, “Each one of these posters is about a particular aspect of the tradition such as relevance of radical poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge, thematic and stylistic similarity between protest music of India and Bangladesh, protest music from Nepal, Maharashtra, Telugu song by a migrant road worker and many more.”
The two animation films created by Ahmed used techniques of paint animation, which are influenced by the film loving Vincent. Said Ahmed, “We undertook a workshop as well to show the visitors how I made the film. Each frame is shot first (done by hand on glass sheets and no graphics were used in it) after which it is automatically transferred to the computer and from there it reaches the projector. The labour-intensive process involved oil paint and tactile material was also used.” It took him more than a month to execute the concept based on the given soundtrack and create animation films out of it. The soundtrack is an amalgamation of an array of songs in different languages which belong to diverse times. Damodaran has given the voice to some of them and they are strung together to create one beautiful track. Tracks like Nina Simone’s Strange Fruit, which protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans are a part of it. Deshpande revealed, “We were not bound by geography or language. The same soundtrack was interpreted in two different ways through the films where one is a direct interpretation of it while the other is a completely different level of thinking.”
Damodaran concluded by talking about this whole experience: “There was also a great deal of personal involvement with the content of what was being prepared.”