Reconciliation through art

Mahatma Gandhi had once famously said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

A new exhibition by Multicultural Arts Victoria reinterprets the Mahatma’s philosophy in response to the recent media discussions about racial attacks and other challenges faced by the Indian community in Melbourne.

An Eye For An Eye, currently on at Melbourne’s City Library, highlights the diversity of artistic insight that Indian communities bring to visual arts in Victoria, through the photographs of Sudeep Lingamneni and the paintings of Maitreyi Ray. In a show of support for the Indian communities in Victoria, the exhibition was opened by the Indian Consul General Anita Nayar.

Lingamneni’s photographs document common sights seen on an Indian street – a labourer carrying a disused audio player perhaps to be recycled; in another image a performer dressed as Krishna poses for his camera. These photographs are a product of a lifealtering journey that Lingamneni made in India after the death of his father.

“In 2004 my father died, just before my 27th birthday, so I decided to travel through India for a year and discover the country of my birth.”

Although he was born in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, Lingamneni was raised in Boston and Melbourne. He recollects that visit to India thus: “I found myself walking for hours, photographing what I saw. The hours became days, which became months. When I wondered what I was doing, I realized I was seeking some sort of truth, in relation to myself.”

In photography, he found a way to understand his motherland and her people, although he did not speak their language.

“Photography was connecting me in the most intimate, emotional way with the landscape around me, and the people that inhabited it. India was teaching me to watch, and wait on life.”

Through his photographs then, viewers can relive his undiluted emotions.

“The images I took in India were nothing more than my emotional experience, my interaction with the people I met along the way.”

Meanwhile, in Maitreyi Ray’s nostalgic paintings, Indian immigrants can perhaps relive memories of this own childhood.

“My (sic) first ten years of life were spent in carefree wonder under the sheltering skies of Bengal, in a home which seemed to be a strong, beautiful palace,” says Ray as she recollects her happy childhood in Calcutta. Her paintings are a child-like representation of the many joyous traditional ceremonies Ray witnessed in her home-city: women giggle away at a bawdy joke during wedding preparations, a young girl rehearses for a traditional dance performance. Ray recollects, “All these years later those times still exist for me, still redolent with the fragrance of stolen fruits and flowers and pungent with the odour of burning charcoal, coconut husks, fat, frangipani and fried fish.”

Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi

An Eye For An Eye will continue to show at the City Library, Melbourne until November 29, 2009