Captured in motion

The blurs capture the movement of figures in the frame between the epic and the elusive

Walk into Cymroza Art Gallery for The Epic and The Elusive, a set of photographs that still motion while making it visible. The show opens today and offers a look into a series that was taken by Naveen Kishore, photographer, poet and publisher at Seagull Books, in the 1990s when he used to work closely with theatre groups in Manipur.

Performers on stage captured unconstrained by the conventions of the ‘still image'. Pics courtesy/Naveen Kishore from The Epic and the Elusive

Looking through the 25 black and white photographs, the first words that come to mind are ‘a fury of motion and movement.' The figures in the frame are blurred to the point where some of them almost vanish, becoming, as the show's curator Ranjit Hoskote shares, "Two tangents of a perspective - epic and elusive." The performers captured in the photographs seem to elude not the camera, but the moment in which motion is born, to move on and keep going - a cue to the times when they were taken while Manipur was in the midst of insurgency and violence. Kishore says, "Consider them as an act of bearing witness to a particular and troubled time in history." The photographs that were first published in Seagull Theatre Quarterly's issue 14/15 document groups performing humanitarian-political theatre under state-led authoritarian control.

Naveen Kishore. Pic/Sunandini Banerjee

Kishore shares that in approaching two contradictory media - photography that freezes and stills movement, and theatre - the challenge for him was to capture that movement and leave the viewer with the possibility of its original movement. "These images have become ‘mirrors' into what we have become - immune to the atrocities around us," the photographer tells us. Referencing works like Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and The Mahabharata to note the power of theatre, Hoskote notes that theatre has a universal and perennial dimension in speaking about fundamental human experiences like loss, grief, solidarity and upheaval, which is what makes it relevant. Kishore's suggestion in approaching the works in the show is to relate to them in the light of the political upheavals around us.

Ranjit Hoskote. Pic/Priyesha Nair

Till May 16, from 11 am to 7 pm (except Sundays)
At Cymroza Art Gallery, Bhulabhai Desai Road, Breach Candy.
Free