Framing violence, pain and
others through the moving
images of B.V. Suresh
Aparna Roy Baliga

Since 2001, B.V. Suresh has started working on videos. His very first
work ‘Introspection’ is based on photographic stills from documentaries on
the second world war. The contours are blurred, as are the memories, but
the images produce fear. His images change their position, their entity gets
transformed and double-edged. The dilute contours and hazy images lose their
particularity and relates to him through the Dionysian in it. It was shown in
the ‘Silent nights’, an exhibition in a South East Asian festival in Kathmandu.
His next work, done in 2011, is Albino, it is a video talking about the
identity politics, the tale of exclusion both of the minorities and the laboring
class from the major nationalist discourse. He culls out references of colonial
resistance in the form of developing cotton industry encouraged by Gandhi
and that of the Muslim populace constituting the bulk engaged with the cotton
industry. The cotton has no colour but the industry is coloured in the sense
that it completely denies the laboring bodies their share of rightful wages and
alienates their labour from the capital it generates. A series of photographs
of albino peacocks in the Kamatibagh zoo in Baroda is
used again and again. The albino peacock appears and
disappears as a haunting image representing the phantom
of the nation as a panopticon. Sometimes, even outlines of
the same image appear as an overwriting emphasizing the
notion of the nation as an apparition, which seems to be
present even if it is absent. The very opening scene of the
labourers beating cotton merges, very metaphorically, with
the whiteness of the peacock. A peacock which represents
the nation has lost it colour and thus, disempowered of its
ideological aura, the colour is squeezed out, exhausted in
the background, thus deconstructing the entire symbolism
associated with it. The images coalesce with each other,
the handmade image, the image taken by the ‘ideal arm
of consciousness’ and even the texture of the news print
creates a mélange.