Surekha
Ragi.net – Post Oil City- Bangalore Gardens Reloaded
– R Dhanya

To the left of a life size replica of Wright brothers’ first ever
airplane, a small enclosure opens to the science museum visitors with
a lawn of ragi (millet) growing out of computer keyboards. Dark,
chocolaty mud sits in the unfamiliar space between the keys. Tightly
wound with their own cords the keyboards are black, grey and white
arranged in a rectangle with bright green sprouts of millet peeping
out of the gaps. This is no groomed lawn, but Surekha’s conceptual
art for the exhibition Post Oil city- Bangalore Garden Reloaded. An
estimated number of five thousand visitors will see the work as part of
their visit to the museum every day.

Varthur, a village ensconced amidst IT firms and fast rising
residential apartments near Sarjapur, thirty kilometres from
Bangalore city is where these keyboards were revamped into their new
avatars. After Surekha sourced the keyboards from an e-waste shop,
Subramani a farmer and artist at Madappanahalli followed the process
of sowing ragi on the keyboards just like his family does every year on
their actual fields. The rich mud is from these fields.
Slightly bewildered museum visitors scrutinize the paradoxical
coupling and walk over to a smaller installation eight feet away. Here
hundreds of computer keys separated from the boards are kept upside
down like toy cups; the half an inch hollows holding little servings
of brown, globular grains of ragi. Their individual textual symbol is
now invisible, creating instead a more democratic picture of millet
wielding gathering. In unison they also appear like a topographical
screen shot from Google Earth.