Artists breathe life into memories of 26/11

Whether it is turning the negatives into positives, healing yourselves from within or analysing the role of the media during the 26/11 siege, with the first anniversary of the attacks drawing near, the creative brigade of the city wishes to drive home a point— that life might have moved on but the memories haven’t yet got frayed at the edges.

“On November 26, I was roaming the city, visiting and revisiting the sites of the attacks. I saw the dome light up. I heard the endless rounds of gun shots and met the living corpses in the hospitals,” says photographer Ritam Banerjee, who was on a 60-hour shift clicking snaps for Getty Images many of which were published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. A year later, Banerjee wants to bring to light the resurrected beauty of the city in his exhibition titled The City That Talks To Me at Gallery Art and Soul from November 19 to December 2— a series of photographs, whether it is a BEST bus or the Asiatic Society of Mumbai—which capture the throbbing pulse of the city. Incidentally, Banerjee is being awarded the Karambeer Puraskar, a National Award for Social Justice and Citizen Action on November 26 this year, an honour he terms as “ironic”. If Banerjee’s is a message of hope, installation artist Subodh Kerkar’s take on 26/11 is a stark and gritty, if abstract, spinning of reality. His exhibition consisting of 13 photographs, two paintings and four objects, at Gallery Beyond, is titled Of Donkeys, Demons and Diabolical Death because the “terrorists were brainwashed automatons programmed to move from point A to point B and destroy everything in sight”. Ergo, the term ‘donkeys’. “If I could describe the present world in two words,” says the artist, “it would be terrorism and telecommunication which is paradoxical because it’s the lack of communication that gave birth to terrorism in the first place.”

... contd.