“It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter,” Alfred Eisensetd. The recently concluded photography show at the Venkatappa Art Gallery Living in the Fringes of Duality by Pramod Stephen and Naveen Kumar has seen turmoil and protests, bringing it into mainstream news.
The show by Pramod Stephen and Naveen Kumar showed a lot of promise. Of course, it didn’t have the fanfare associated with other shows, but the photographs depicted a side of the country that we are rarely exposed to.
Stephen has captured rare photographs of tribals and their colourful lives through his discerning and incredible images. The Kunde Habba is a spectacular phenomenon that is far from serene, placid and ethereal. It is highly volatile, and its exuberance of colour and form often border on ghastly, garish and trashy with performers decorating themselves with wigs, leaves, flowers, goggles, balloons, serial lights, umbrellas, cans, blurring the boundaries between the performer and his props.
The costumes represent a ‘steamy soup’ of incompleteness, simplicity, absurdity and plain emptiness-symbolised by pots, drums, buckets that the performers carry with them. The loud, bright body painting lends a wild-primal touch allowing performers to return to a more organic raw beauty that is found only in nature.
The narrative is not a song, not a eulogy, but a barrage of abuses directed at a God who abandoned his people. The verbosity is so intense that it unmasks the dark energies trapped in a culturally mannered body, revealing layers of the oppressed self. These narrative forms poignant social commentaries of the lives of the performers.
Pramod Stephen is a Bengaluru-born artist who has rich experience in various creative fields like visual arts, poetry, music, documentary films, theatre, photography, animation, game design and multimedia, web applications, software design and is a musician as well, and Naveen Kumar is an aspiring photographer.
“As a photographer I wanted to move out of the mainstream photography concept. I wanted to capture the festivals which we rarely know or are heard of. Kunde Habba is a colorful and visual treat. I wish to explore more on the similar lines and have plans to take festivals like this to a global platform,” explains Stephen.
He is conducting an outreach programme at Venkatappa Art Gallery on February 10 and the idea is for people to search for their identities and get photographed. The concept and passion of these maverick photographers is second to none and they will go a long way in achieving their goal eventually.
The outreach programme is on February 10 at Venkatappa Art Gallery. — The writer is an art expert and curator.
