Part of ‘Scene From A Wake’.
During a recent press tour of “Scene From A Wake” by Anup Mathew Thomas, this year’s winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation-BACC Award for Contemporary Art, there wasn’t really a tour. We were left to wander unguided, and consequently left confused, even though the Indian artist was present. The second attempt was through an email interview: “Suppose this is a virtual tour, can you take our readers through a few of your pieces in the exhibition?” Here’s his reply:
“I would rather not. The works have a certain mood and tone, which is conveyed through the images and the texts, which is left to the viewer to decipher in their own special way. It reveals itself, slowly, as one goes through the exhibition. Any explanation that I do of the works will interfere with that.”
Left to our own devices, we are lost and confused in the Studio room on the fourth floor of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) — the usual phenomenon with contemporary art. Scene From A Wake comprises mainly of large photographs plastered on the wall with accompanying texts. Inside the exhibition, your first thought is how Thomas’ works are incredibly random, there are photographs of a sculpture of the Madonna and an interior of a church, then suddenly those of a tropical forest and a dentist’s operation room.
“Scene From A Wake is a series that looks at a few incidents, spread over a century, set in the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore, now part of present day Kerala, in India,” wrote Thomas in an email. “This series is part of a larger body of work on Kerala that I have been developing over the past 10 years.”
With that in mind, we start to at least have a sense of geographical location to hold on to. We know that these seemingly random subjects in his show are all in Kerala, a state on India’s tropical Malabar Coast. Thomas said that even though it seems random at first, once viewers engage with the texts and images, the connections will start to reveal itself.
Anup Mathew Thomas.
Thomas, who lives and works in Bengaluru, India, is the second artist to be receive the biannual award, given to artists below the age of 40 living in Asia who have developed a solid body of work and have yet to be showcased in major institutions. His past exhibitions include “Native Ball And Revisions” at GALLERYSKE, Bengaluru in 2014, “Double Feature” at Lothringer13 in Munich in 2013, “Metropolitan” at Gasworks Gallery in London back in 2007.
Unlike the exhibition “Green Sun” by the 2013 winner Zhou Tao, shown at BACC in 2014, which spoke instantly and directly to viewers, Thomas’ photography series demands time and patience as viewers navigate.
“The individual differences between the protagonists will disappear if you see them as people,” wrote Thomas. “The works contain insights into how people behave collectively and individually.”
The easiest way to connect these photographs is to treat them as “characters” in Thomas’ documentation. Texts alongside each photograph aren’t the usual short wall texts, but detailed, hard-to-digest background of his subjects.
The sculpture of the Madonna, for example, was made by a Jyoti Sahi by commission from the Society of the Catholic Apostolate for their chapel at Pallottigiri, Thiruvananthapuram, which was later rejected because it was deemed to dark and ugly to be the Virgin Mary. The photograph of a wilderness area on the opposite side is accompanied by a text suggesting that it belongs to Kottayam city.
The text reads: “Pope John Paul II has been the most important visitor Kottayam has hosted in recent times. He would spend 7 hours in this town and announce the beatification of two future saints from Kerala at an event organised for his visitation… The number of people expected to come into Kottayam for the event varied from a hundred thousand to half a million.”
Thomas said the work came from the process of looking very closely at something, in this case a place, followed by continuing investigation and engagement with it.
“Then of course, there is the access to what needs to be photographed that needs negotiating,” wrote Thomas. “Sometimes with their custodians and sometimes the wait for a favourable situation or change to arise, which will make it possible. It is a slow process.”
The subjects of Thomas’ documentation, then, aren’t limited to just people — like farmer and dentist — but expand to space and object related to his geographical focus. The latter is evident is a huge fabric installation hung from floor to ceiling, spanning almost two walls.
We learn from the text that the fabric, mostly used in Syrian Christian churches to partition the altar from the congregation, is made in the city of Surat in Gujarat and exported worldwide, but most of it ends up in Kerala.
Even with these texts, and the fact that all these subjects are of the same particular location, this isn’t one of those exhibition you can spend only 10 minutes to take in and leave. One poignant aspect of Thomas’ series is the fact that even though these are stories of people, the very people he talks about are hardly present, the dentist’s operation room is empty, the forest is deserted. It is perhaps the viewers’ job to put the characters in, and, who knows, they could be those outside of the artist’s texts.
“Scene From A Wake” is on view until March 6 at Studio room, fourth floor of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.