Leather Puppetry Festival: Representing One’s Own Self  

(Published in www.cartanart.com on 14th April 2014, Editor: Johny M.L)

 

Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath is hosting a rare retrospect exhibition of puppetry from its own collection, for the first time after four decades of beginning the process of collecting them. The show is intended to ‘showcase’ its own possession. In the process it is addressing a wider question of how to appropriate art forms and representations which have comparatively taken a back seat, so to say, in the contemporary artistic practices. Selected from 3000 and odd leather puppets, this curated show’s ‘showcasing’ would be a curious take on the notion of contemporary curatorial exercises as well.

The show, being held at all the galleries of Parishath (3-11^th May 2014) and at Rangoli Metro Art Center, M.G.Road (throughout the month of May) is a project which believes that there was a classical phase of Leather puppetry and now it needs to be brought to the notice of the world. A workshop about making puppets, a series of talks on the ‘subject’ of puppetry and dossier talks in the gallery by experts are planned all through. The workshop, showcasing and subject are three aspects that would be tested in the given situation, since there are loads of contemporary kitschy and pastiche adaptation of puppetry-for-sale in the same Parishath premise, throughout out the year, since KCP is also a venue renting out its spaces to melas of folk, craft and traditional art.

*

In the two day seminar, the second day panel discussion is being compiled by the IFA (India Foundation for Arts) which would try to make intervention as the subject of puppetry (Anurupa Roy, Prakash Garud, Vidyun Sabhaney, filmmaker Ramani would be the tentative penalists). In other words puppetry itself is no more a subject, since, arguably, folk cannot address itself from within. The festival, in this sense, would give way to a traditional and contemporary mode of ‘representing’ puppetry as an art form, within the revivalist mode of documentation and archiving. Renowned set designer Shashidhar Adapa will take care of the architectural structures to display them in galleries.

Keeping in mind the fact that there are other art forms of both traditional and folksy kind, collected in the thirteen categories of KCP museum, the question here is to re-define the notion of showcasing what is to be appropriated, from the past. In fact the IFA panel discussion is supposed to be a reaction, an intervention into the first day symposium of speakers (Suresh Jayaram, Prof.M.J.Kamalakshi, among others). This open-endedness is the hall mark of the current festival.

*

The history of how these puppets got collected at KCP might be able to solve the riddle of this idea of the claim for a golden age, a classical phase, the originality away from its today’s pastiche avatar. Prof.M.S.Nanjunda Rao, with the assistance the art community which was close to him (like M.J.Kamalakshi, puppeteer Hombaiah) used to travel to villages in and around the urban localities of mainly Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh to recover almost discarded puppets. They would convince the villagers who would have no value, whatsoever (religious, spiritual or economic) to donate their collections/discarded images, due to urbanisation and dislocation of their profession as puppeteers. The question is the quasi-professionalism of such puppeteers; most of them were rural agrarians by option.

The current collection could be an elitist ‘showcasing’ of what could be a poor man’s discard. This kind of reading would somehow be probed not for the urban-rural artistic representational differences as much as for how such a collection gets attached to an art school. The collections at KCP led to an altered and adopted syllabus in the College, wherein the relevance of the study of folk art forms in general and leather puppetry in particular was inserted.

*

The puppetry festival is to create an ambience but would demand many novel results, at least to differentiate itself uniquely from those seemingly similar shows by organisations like Dasthakaars. To know, to identify, to familiarise and then to appropriate and adopt, will be the main essence of this celebration. However, the relevance of the question of an absolutist form, time and classical age and its restoration is what one hopes will be critically addressed in the current happening.

The festival also gets enlisted in the series of festivities that the city of Bengaluru is including into its autobiographical-representations like display of this city’s old photographs, from past couple of years. Culturally focussing one’s own self, unlike the nearby NGMA retrospect shows of a pan-national desire is also an intervention into contemporary visual representational attitudes. If one keeps in mind the fact that a decade ago the caste and class(ification) politics behind the usage of animal’s leather in fashion-dressing and making of musical instruments like mridangam (played by the vegetarian upper caste musicians) became an issue of cultural dialogue, the current puppet festival should only be able to continue it, in order to represent-itself.//