Landscapes of memory
I would start this writing with an off note citation. I would like to refer to a photograph which is being repeatedly published in many dailies in the recent times. This is photograph of a dilapidated structure, a ruin of a gruesome genocide, the pain and the repercussions of which are even felt today. I am referring to the photograph of “Gulberg society”. The significance of the photograph lies not just in representing the fact/incident/event it stands for, but it reminds us in understanding our present as the greatest failure of the civil society to mourn or attempt to resurrect in posterity a better future. The photograph offers many meanings. It stands for the ongoing struggle of the people to remember the scar, to question the cold blooded callousness of the state. It represents the erasing and normalizing attitude of the state in this case even the civil society. It represents the fascism embedded in the state and its legal bodies. The news papers reduce it to a ‘news’, sufficing the photos with a factual mention of the “incident”, or sometimes referring to the people’s attempt to offer justice to the victims. But more often it suffices the news about the failure to punish the perpetrators who heroically and freely occupy a column in the same paper. Even after daring efforts by some journalists to make the perpetrators, speak up themselves the act of genocide, the civil society and the entire system stands a miserable failure to deliver justice to this heinous past. This indifference clearly points us to the inability and the immaturity as society to respect individual and collective memory which gives a free hand for state power and authority to exercise its hold invisibly in our minds.
“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”- Walter Benjamin
"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." - Walter Benjamin
Snapshots from the past
The visual constructions of Anto’s work largely depend upon the dark room of memory. Like bringing back to light/life the captured moment of the photograph through the processes in the dark room, he paints with references and flashes of memory, which brings some experiences to light in his works. It would not be wrong to say his works heavily depends upon photography and are photographic themselves. By saying this I shall not reduce his paintings to the ‘in demand’ titillating surfaces of the so called photo realism or Mediatic realisms. Anto’s paintings are more about the ideology behind the process of photography itself.
His paintings are about death. They are about the ruins of time. They proclaim that what is bygone is irretrievable lost only to relive in memory as living dead. It is similar to the photograph which pronounces the death of the moment it captures; thereby proving that the moment is irretrievable and can only be re-constructed in the present. His visual constructions are extensions of the past interpreted/interrupted by the present. The significance of such an attempt is the ability of not accepting the past as a casual account of many incidents connected by a common thread. By willfully selecting memories which suffices his present intent, he pushes his work into the terrain of the historical. This restructuring/resurrection is enabled by the help of photographs which connect him with some instants of the past. This is also enabled by the particular use of frames in his paintings. Most of his paintings are framed by the foliages and other organic flows. This immediately refers to the framing of the photograph which cuts and trims the reality as it is technically viable and also as it is intended subjectively by the person photographing. The framing of an incident/event/reality though promises a nearness to the reality as it had happened to be, it also proves that, it is not the only one version of the reality and there were other views and other frames of references simultaneously. Anto too makes a deliberate selection of images which proves that his past was not only that instant which he selected to represent but also a lot of memories which is forgotten. This instance selected is actually a frozen moment. Like the photograph which can only freeze a particular moment thereby making it timeless, his selection of the instance makes it timeless and allows to spatially visualize the memory. The frames make us feel that we are part of the extended picture plane thereby assures that the viewing is happening in the present. His works like ‘Puparium’s visions of the past’ brings an interesting remainder of the present again. The ‘pupae’ during this transforming state are inactive. We can relate this with the instant of remembrance or the moment of the flashing memory which is flat and timeless.
His recent “untitled” work can been seen as the most assured understanding of his investigations of the (his) past. The framed space occupied in other compositions, where we find painted photographs of a house or a person or a child, here is taken by a skeleton. Probably he assures that the memory and past itself as dead; A memory which is irretrievably lost but continues to recur as a flash, as an image always assuring nothing other than its own death. This past is like a ruin which could be only “reconstructed” in the present as we remember it in its moment of danger of losing it again. Anto seizes this moment and relates it through a laborious process of painting thereby recollects the experiences as fragments never complete. Like snap shots which capture instants his works frame his memories on the surfaces.
Dissolving bodies
Srinivasan’s depiction of bodies represents a process than a final outcome. In that way they are always in the process of becoming something else. Though his bodies are mostly in the stage of dissolving, yet a lot of recognizable traces of the objective body are found. I would like to read this transformation as a movement from the objective to the subjective or a movement from the real to the virtual. They are bodies transforming and dissolving in the flux and flows of the nature. Interestingly his works rarely separates the foreground and the background. They are in the same plane intermingling, overlapping and simultaneously existing. The bodies whether human or animal, are always represented not just as objectively known but as made up of a nest like formation. Does this point towards the temporary status of our existence itself? Though there is a pointer towards a spiritual (not religious), I would like to read this dissolution (sublimation as he refers to) as an attempt to realize the multiple flows of nature and the cultural within oneself. One can see the elements of the human/cultural floating, intermingling and overlapping the landscapes. This can be further substantiated by the dissolving contours of his bodies. If we read that the stark lines which build the bodies defines its individuality by separating it from the ground, we also can read that the fragmented lines which seem to blow away from the body are necessarily the same which combine to constitute the body, that defines the contour in the picture. Most of his paintings are about his bodily sensations as the figures gesture. Interestingly these sensations are both internal and external or neither internal nor external. They are always in the threshold of a feeling which is indeterminate. His inward looking/feeling/sensing is always at once projected outside the body. This process enables him to maneuver in the realms of surrealism and even abstract language. His bodies are reservoirs containing energy potentials which the contours when dissolved becomes the bodies without organs, without limitations. His landscapes are also landscapes of experiences which places it in the realm of the memories. His works are like travelogues (as he titles) whose remembering throws upon new light on the individual self always in interaction with the outside.

Postscript:
I would like this writing to be read not as a promotional venture of the established discourse , rather one of the possible readings the works presented offers. The writing doesn’t emphasize that the reading gives a final say or is the only possible understanding of the works other than the artist’s intent. My intention in this writing was to briefly read the works by referring to certain frameworks, which I believe enables one to grasp the present socio-cultural condition in its polyphonic variations. Though both of their works traverse memories they belong to different terrains. Their terrains are marked by their respective intentions in remembering their memories. The significance of their work is that in a time where memory is becoming a much contested space for differing ideologies the need to nurture memories surely gains as a significant political act of rupture.
I would like to again conclude with an off note that there are news reports of scientists in the west and elsewhere attempting to work on a wonder drug which would erase traumatic memories of human! Obviously every authoritarian regime would be open for such audacious experiments in the name of humanity…
V.Divakar
Art Critic, Vadodara.
I would like to thank Rollie Mukherjee for her valuable suggestions.

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