https://www.gqindia.com/content/bengaluru-unleashes-a-new-creative-impetus-that-matches-its-energy-and-ambition
A curious paradox has reigned in Bengaluru since it began boiling with money after liberalization in 1991, and the famously bucolic “Garden City” became the epicentre of India’s globalization story. Now the fastest-growing city in the entire Asia-Pacific region, its population has tripled in the greatest urban economic boom in the subcontinent since 1947. Yet, even while defining the country’s future prospects in many different crucial areas, all that limitless ambition seemingly stopped short when it comes to art and culture, which continued to languish under-institutionalized and incongruously informal. Now, all in a rush in the post-pandemic era, that too is being rapidly transformed, as a host of independent ventures are rising up to fill the vacuum. Trail-blazing this bold new direction is the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), which opened in February earlier this year, and has already galvanized the art world with its impressive tech-forward online and physical avatars. Intrigued by what it has achieved in just a few months, I recently visited MAP to better understand how this cultural start-up is navigating an expanding set of international ambitions alongside its home city’s rooted identity. “The native and the global are always in conflict in Bangalore, it is part of our evolution,” says Suresh Jayaram, an integral bridge figure between the colonial-era cantonment city and its 21st-century ambitions, whose studio-gallery-residence 1Shanthiroad has functioned as an influential creative crossroads since he built it on family property in 2003. I have been an admirer since he attended the Goa Arts and Literature Festival many years ago—where I am a cocurator along with the Jnanpith Award winner Damodar Mauzo—and last year thoroughly enjoyed his self-published labour of love *Bangalore’s Lalbagh: A Chronicle of the Garden and the City*, which “grounds itself in local histories and presents”. The evening before venturing to MAP, we spent pleasant hours talking together in the shaded courtyard of 1Shanthiroad, which was hosting an excellent exhibition by Kapila Nahender, where the artist statement explained: “I have access to an eclectic iconography and various traditional practices, juxtaposed and living side by side in the Halasuru neighbourhood, and surrounding areas of Fraser Town and Shivajinagar where I live in Bengaluru. [They] inspire me to create works of art that afford a certain acceptance and ambiguity. It helps me in understanding this urban energy, its vibrant mishmash of a lovely, pulsating and hopeful way of life.” Perhaps more than anyone else in constantly shapeshifting Bengaluru, Jayaram has experienced the city’s diverse art scenes up close, and singularly embodies both its Kannadiga roots and 21st-century international networks. It is his life’s work and his life itself: 1Shanthiroad is home, where he extends “radical hospitality” to everyone who enters, in an intentionally disarming way of being that generates instant familiarity and friendship. This one-man lifeline for artists has made a huge difference all by himself, recounting that “the 1990s were unmistakably a paradigm shift, where Bangalore was caught in the global climb of IT, but this new economy was not reflected in the arts, and was more seen in rampant unplanned urban growth that changed the city and the mindset of people. The ‘art boom’ in Mumbai and Delhi hardly mattered to the local scene, which has diverse forms of regional modernism and subversive art and experimentation. My way of addressing this problem has been ‘solidarity economics’. A space with zero administrative and bureaucratic designs, which adapts in accordance to the possible. Over 20 years after it came into existence, 1Shanthiroad continues to present the ‘alternative’ as an institutional critique.” There is important context here, in the Indian art world’s ever-present existential anxieties following the shocking collapse of the still-nascent modern and contemporary art marketplace in 2008, followed by the consistent mismanagement of most of the country’s museums. Almost everything of value has withered disgracefully over the past decade, and while there’s still considerable hype it is not at all backed by numbers. The comparison to countries like China, which were exactly in the same place just one generation past, could not be more painfully stark. They have thousands of museums, and keep building more, while our few dozen crumble from neglect. Their collectors drive a huge portion of global trade, while ours don’t even add up to 0.5 per cent. Here in India, it’s a shameful fact that most people can’t ever see our own greatest masterpieces in person, with my home state the ultimate example. Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza of the seminal Progressive Artists Group share deep ancestral roots in North Goan villages, but it’s impossible to see their paintings in their own homeland, in the depressing pattern of apathy and incompetence that characterizes attitudes towards the arts across the country. Things could turn around with Bengaluru leading the way, and spending time with Suresh Jayaram to understand his milieu better was an important reminder that his hometown cannot easily be compared to Mumbai or Kolkata—or New York and London either—because this city on the move is still very evidently embroiled in becoming whatever it’s eventually going to be. Not only the start-up capital of the country—and perhaps even the world—it’s also very much itself a start-up, spilling over with millions of young migrants who are swiftly reprogramming what it means to be Indian even as they do the same to the apps on your mobile device. Here, the speed and scale of change is genuinely mind-boggling. A few years ago, I walked my young sons around Cubbon Park and pointed out Vijay Mallya’s colonial-era mansion, but this time I found that landmark was no longer on the ground. It has been hoisted atop an astonishing skyscraper over 30 storeys high, and crowned by a vast helipad. Hard by is another giant building with its own helipad, and in between these monuments to excess is MAP, which is comparatively modest in size, but references the same visual language of glass and steel. “Cubbon Park is the soul of this city,” said Suresh Jayaram, who was kind enough to walk me to MAP on the morning of my first visit. He told me his new book is about this lovely “public space that has changed down the years from being native farmland to a colonial garden to the most contested social, political, and cultural space that defines the city’s urban planning and concern for nature. It is not just a public park, but reflects dreams and aspirations about the city like the collective botanical diversity of the trees that grow there. It is part of the network of local and global transactions of human minds that work to nurture the cosmopolitan nature of this global city.” Many of the most important institutions of the city and state are here: the Karnataka High Court; the Seshadri Iyer Memorial Library; the Government Museum; and the Venkatappa Art Gallery. This is the storied cultural landscape onto which MAP opens its doors, directly across from the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, in what is surely one of the most desirable locations in Bengaluru. From the moment I entered, it was clear this new institution is working hard on openness and accessibility, to live up to the mission statement outlined on its website: “At MAP we believe that art is for all and have a range of accessibility services and features to make your visit as seamless as possible. The Museum is designed with mobility in mind, with accessible parking, pathing and bathrooms for ease of access. We have also developed audio guides and tactile artworks for a holistic experience of our exhibitions.” This must be the first and most important principle for all art and culture start-ups in a country like India, as private entities joust to take the place of what the state should be doing, and equally impressive is the online emphasis via mapacademy.io, where huge resources are being made freely available. “The pandemic changed the way we approached our audiences,” says Kamini Sawhney, director of MAP, who previously headed the outstanding Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in Mumbai. I met this distinguished art world insider—she became the first-ever Indian elected to the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art board last year—at her light-filled office, surrounded by attractive open-plan suites, filled with young people (they seemed 80 per cent women) visibly engaged in their work assignments. She told me, “Our initial idea was to build a strong base within the community in Bengaluru, and then move outwards across the country and internationally. But the lockdown encouraged us to innovate, and reach out to audiences online. It turned things on their heads in a way, because we were connecting with people across the world alongside local audiences.” Now, there’s an equal emphasis on the physical: “If MAP is to have any impact in Bengaluru then it has to be relevant to the people in the city. It is only when the people who live here have a sense of ownership over the museum that it will become the vibrant cultural hub that we want it to be. Art has always flourished in different pockets in the city but what it has lacked are more formal institutions that provide organized experiences and points of contact and exchange. Along with other similar institutions like Bangalore International Centre, Indian Music Experience, and the [upcoming] Science Gallery, our plan is to work together to change that.” I noted many fascinating aspects to MAP on my visit, but one I did not expect was the conspicuous absence of the names of its founders: Abhishek and Radhika Poddar. Every major donor is listed on panels by the entrance except them, despite their spearheading and seeding the entire project from its contested genesis—when public outcry prevented the museum from being transplanted onto the public Venkatappa Gallery—and bringing in the great majority of the artworks in its permanent collection. It was both refreshing and surprising when Sawhney told me, “One man did buy these works, but they don’t belong to him. We believe they belong to the city and its people. Also, museum collections tend to be structured, but because this grew out of a collector’s passion, it wanders in all sorts of directions with often delightful surprises. I often say MAP’s collection is a curator’s delight even if it can be an archivist’s nightmare, including premodern, modern, and contemporary art, textiles, indigenous art, photography, and popular culture. It allows us to collapse the hierarchies between what is perceived as high and low art and draw interesting connections across the collection.” MAP is very good in several ways: It’s free to enter (although more signage to that effect would help to welcome more people) and you can explore some of its collection without paying anything. On its first floor, there is an ingenious interactive display on which you can mount any one of several collections on walls of screens, the first of its kind anywhere in the world; it struck me as an ideal example of art-related innovation that IT-forward Bengaluru can contribute for the rest of us (although, by contrast, the so-called virtual reality exhibition in the basement was sorely disappointing). There is an affordable cafe downstairs and a restaurant on the roof, as well as an unusually well-conceived merchandise collection in the museum shop. More than any other existing art institution in the rest of the country, this new venture struck me as having its act together, with a comprehensive vision that is likely to result in the broad-based achievement of its goals. “Our success is going to be determined solely by the people of Bangalore,” says Abhishek Poddar, “We could have moved out of the city and built much more on far bigger land for the same kind of money we have spent, but our goal was to be right here, and we want to have the same connection to the citizens as the Visvesvaraya museum right opposite our doors.” Although we couldn’t meet at MAP, I was glad for a video call to discuss his ideas for the city he moved to from Kolkata just when the economic boom started to take hold 30 years ago. “I came to the Garden City just at the cusp of its change, and soon after my own journey in art had begun with gurus to show me the way like Martand Singh, Jyotindra Jain, BN Goswamy, and Dayanita Singh. It’s been an amazing journey of learning, and one that I am motivated to share. Bangalore somehow didn’t have the kind of museums that it needed, to instil pride and joy in Indian art amongst the majority of young people who live here. MAP was the right choice to address that,” he says. This long-time art buyer has collected some standout works that make his museum an instantly essential destination in which to view the best modern and contemporary Indian art. Among a few others, I was strongly drawn to Arpita Singh’s 1990 Devi Pistol Wali as well as Bhupen Khakhar’s baleful 1965 Devi. Poddar says, “When I began, it was more all over the place, as different people guided me, but these days it’s about what gives me joy. The most important question: Does the work make you pause and wonder? It has always amazed me, how art can take you back, make you think and savour the moment. What I’ve learned over the years is you don’t have to be an expert, but just listen carefully to those who are. When I’ve asked for help, I’ve always received it in abundance. That wonderful experience of sharing is what I want to help inculcate in the city and its residents. I want MAP to make a difference.” That might well happen, but at the moment MAP is a work in progress, exactly mirroring Bengaluru. There is much to admire in this supercharged South Indian city, as well as many problems including some of the world’s worst traffic. On my way out to the airport, I fought through the gridlock to make a final pit stop at Bengaluru Oota Company, which serves typical Gowda and Mangalorean fare, and earlier this year made an improbable leap into the top 50 restaurants in the country in the Condé Nast Traveller India rankings (for which I am one of many jurors). Here again is local and global, unpretentious but extraordinary, in yet another example of what the rest of the world can learn from and emulate, from what’s happening in the capital of Karnataka. To discuss that, I was happy to be joined by Raghava KK, whose own remarkable art journey maps that of his home city. A self-taught prodigy with deep roots in the old Bangalore, he’s now represented by the Dubai-based Volte Art Projects—along with global stars like William Kentridge and James Turrell—as “the embodiment of the new India’s global and digital aspirations”. Raghava and I spent our lunchtime discussing the contradictions and congruences in the sudden change of pace in the Bengaluru art world. He told me his home town “has always been open to change and new perspectives. Having seen no major adversity in terms of wars for many generations, the people of Karnataka are very laid-back, warm, and open-minded. They have the potential to imagine alternate realities, and transcend hegemonic practices.” But there’s also something important to consider here: “We should be seeing more experimental, more open-minded and inclusive art coming out of Bangalore along with original solutions. Unfortunately, we as a nation do not value original thought and experimentation and would rather adopt successful models from the West and impose them on our people. Even venture capital has a long way to go, leave alone the art world. I think that post pandemic, one cannot think about activity merely in the digital world metaverse or in the physical world. We need to think of how the two can come together and dance. I believe that a new direction could and should come out of here.”