published in Art India
August 2019
Role Play
Vasantha Yogananthan’s painted photographs explore the Ramayana in a modern context and collapse the mythical and the quotidian, the manual and the technological, states Anuj Daga.
In showing photographer Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls from the 14th of March to the 4th of May in Mumbai, the Jhaveri Contemporary makes a gentle political comment. Exhibited alongside the parliamentary elections of 2019, Yogananthan’s photographic prefacing of the Ramayana coaxes a subversive reconsideration of moral values tensioned between a conservative right wing regime and an unassertive left wing and left of centre opposition in India. Yogananthan’s Ramayana offers an aesthetic frame through which prevailing ideologies may be teased out to gain perspective on morality, truth and the role of art.
An androgynous young boy, dressed as a woman wearing a saree, sitting on the threshold of the house against the almost closed door greets the viewer with a piercing gaze. Diametrically behind this door frame, across the gallery wall, is the picture of the same boy combing his hair to perfection. Spatially installed behind each other thus, the photographs call for a queer conversation inter-mediated by attires that essentially differentiate the same person into two characters. In working through such duality, the photographs in the exhibition demonstrate a continuous play between the real and the ideal; the performed, the hidden and the revealed; the physical and the mirrored.
The historicity of the Ramayana has been continually debated. As a travelling epic, it has been recited all across the subcontinent in varying versions. The imagination of its physical settings remains a subject of curiosity. What kind of geography did the central characters of Ramayana inhabit? What was the landscape of exile like? In Yogananthan’s experiment, the land, forest and the sea around which the mythical tale unfolds expend a mysterious quietness, achieved through the hand tinting of black and white photographs. This bringing together of photography and painting collapses several layers and registers: of myth and the everyday, of the manual and the technological or even of the fictional and the real. In its pastel saturations, gently pink skies or misty landscapes, the photographs blur our eyes and traverse us into a space of the imagination.
There is a tendency for the mythical to become fantastical in everyday India, whereas, in Yogananthan’s project, it seemingly becomes so normal that its image can no longer be distinguished as the ‘other’. It is through extreme normalization that the photographs induce defamiliarization. In doing so, the revered figures of Ram and Sita or Luv and Kush are literally divested off their sacred auras, where they no longer live representational lives. Rather, young men wandering in forests and fields, performing everyday activities when identified as such representational characters, at once begin to invert the real into mythical, albeit in uncanny ways.
It is through myths that societies borrow moralities for their everyday existence. Keeping rationality at bay while absorbing these myths helps in building a community that thinks homogeneously. While the virtues of righteousness, heroism and sacrifice upheld in an epic like the Ramayana are institutionalized within Hindu families in India, their internalization is often uncritical, possibly producing societies that exhibit traces of chauvinism. In such a scenario, one is then compelled to think if the ideal is merely a performance? In consuming a staged photograph, does the viewer complete this loop?
In bridging the gap between the representational and the lived, one wonders if Yogananthan’s photographs come to frame the aesthetics of the ‘hypo-critical’. It is the hypocritical perhaps, that accommodates both: the true and the false. The artist’s photographs explore and give form to the seductive power of the hypocritical. The make-believe realism achieved through the process of eventual staging of characters tames the truth as well as the lie, affording multiple realities to co-exist within one frame, one life.
The willing suspension of disbelief bears the seeds of a community that can unite benign bodies to take the form of a large agitation. A deep belief in the mythology of Ramayana as a defining Hindu text has kept the Indian state occupied to a large extent over the last few decades. It is ironical that a story recited to impart values of love and sacrifice appears to have become the agency for othering through religious polarization. The triplet of Longing for Love, Sea Monster and Secret Door could be a representative of such phenomenon, occupying the liminalities of tension and suspension between the land and the sea. Yogananthan’s hyper-normal Ramayana shocks us in its everyday-ness, allowing us to gauge the closeness of stories to our lives. However, Yogananthan eloquently summarizes in an interview with British Journal of Photography, “I realised the distinction between truth and falsehood wasn’t important…This was an important discovery for me, that this is where my photographs should lie – in this in-between world between physical reality and the imagined.”
August 2019
Vasantha Yogananthan’s painted photographs explore the Ramayana in a modern context and collapse the mythical and the quotidian, the manual and the technological, states Anuj Daga.
In showing photographer Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls from the 14th of March to the 4th of May in Mumbai, the Jhaveri Contemporary makes a gentle political comment. Exhibited alongside the parliamentary elections of 2019, Yogananthan’s photographic prefacing of the Ramayana coaxes a subversive reconsideration of moral values tensioned between a conservative right wing regime and an unassertive left wing and left of centre opposition in India. Yogananthan’s Ramayana offers an aesthetic frame through which prevailing ideologies may be teased out to gain perspective on morality, truth and the role of art.
An androgynous young boy, dressed as a woman wearing a saree, sitting on the threshold of the house against the almost closed door greets the viewer with a piercing gaze. Diametrically behind this door frame, across the gallery wall, is the picture of the same boy combing his hair to perfection. Spatially installed behind each other thus, the photographs call for a queer conversation inter-mediated by attires that essentially differentiate the same person into two characters. In working through such duality, the photographs in the exhibition demonstrate a continuous play between the real and the ideal; the performed, the hidden and the revealed; the physical and the mirrored.
The historicity of the Ramayana has been continually debated. As a travelling epic, it has been recited all across the subcontinent in varying versions. The imagination of its physical settings remains a subject of curiosity. What kind of geography did the central characters of Ramayana inhabit? What was the landscape of exile like? In Yogananthan’s experiment, the land, forest and the sea around which the mythical tale unfolds expend a mysterious quietness, achieved through the hand tinting of black and white photographs. This bringing together of photography and painting collapses several layers and registers: of myth and the everyday, of the manual and the technological or even of the fictional and the real. In its pastel saturations, gently pink skies or misty landscapes, the photographs blur our eyes and traverse us into a space of the imagination.
There is a tendency for the mythical to become fantastical in everyday India, whereas, in Yogananthan’s project, it seemingly becomes so normal that its image can no longer be distinguished as the ‘other’. It is through extreme normalization that the photographs induce defamiliarization. In doing so, the revered figures of Ram and Sita or Luv and Kush are literally divested off their sacred auras, where they no longer live representational lives. Rather, young men wandering in forests and fields, performing everyday activities when identified as such representational characters, at once begin to invert the real into mythical, albeit in uncanny ways.
It is through myths that societies borrow moralities for their everyday existence. Keeping rationality at bay while absorbing these myths helps in building a community that thinks homogeneously. While the virtues of righteousness, heroism and sacrifice upheld in an epic like the Ramayana are institutionalized within Hindu families in India, their internalization is often uncritical, possibly producing societies that exhibit traces of chauvinism. In such a scenario, one is then compelled to think if the ideal is merely a performance? In consuming a staged photograph, does the viewer complete this loop?
In bridging the gap between the representational and the lived, one wonders if Yogananthan’s photographs come to frame the aesthetics of the ‘hypo-critical’. It is the hypocritical perhaps, that accommodates both: the true and the false. The artist’s photographs explore and give form to the seductive power of the hypocritical. The make-believe realism achieved through the process of eventual staging of characters tames the truth as well as the lie, affording multiple realities to co-exist within one frame, one life.
The willing suspension of disbelief bears the seeds of a community that can unite benign bodies to take the form of a large agitation. A deep belief in the mythology of Ramayana as a defining Hindu text has kept the Indian state occupied to a large extent over the last few decades. It is ironical that a story recited to impart values of love and sacrifice appears to have become the agency for othering through religious polarization. The triplet of Longing for Love, Sea Monster and Secret Door could be a representative of such phenomenon, occupying the liminalities of tension and suspension between the land and the sea. Yogananthan’s hyper-normal Ramayana shocks us in its everyday-ness, allowing us to gauge the closeness of stories to our lives. However, Yogananthan eloquently summarizes in an interview with British Journal of Photography, “I realised the distinction between truth and falsehood wasn’t important…This was an important discovery for me, that this is where my photographs should lie – in this in-between world between physical reality and the imagined.”
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