Here’s looking at you, virus

From exploring similarities between government responses to Bombay’s 1897 plague and our present one, to demystifying the infectious nature of laughs, a new virtual exhibition explores how emotions, behaviours and diseases are transmitted

Well into the second year of the pandemic, questions about that enigma that is the Coronavirus, and its impact on our lives, continue to confound us. Therefore, Science Gallery Bengaluru’s online exhibition, CONTAGION, couldn’t have come at a better time. The exhibition explores the infectious nature of not only diseases, but also emotions, behaviours and information. Showcased in collaboration with the Robert Koch Institute, the Indian National Science Academy, and DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, it has been curated by Danielle Olsen, International Cultural Producer at the Wellcome Trust, and Jahnavi Phalkey, founding director, Science Gallery Bengaluru. The show features 16 interactive exhibits and more than 40 live programmes that seek to reduce the distance between human and natural sciences, arts and technology, while breaking down barriers between research and the public. The shows are available for online viewing till June 30.

Drawing the Bombay Plague by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

In Drawing the Bombay Plague, artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar combines imagery from two collections: photographs from the Wellcome Collection and satirical cartoons from The Hindi Punch, a monthly satirical magazine archived at the Asiatic Library, Mumbai. He encapsulates the different imaginations of the plague to recover under-represented facts, figures, and people’s voices. “In the context of Covid-19, I didn’t go back to the plague; I have been studying 19th century trusts and public health ‘infrastructure’ through watershed moments in the city’s history, and through the outbreak of disease and the city’s response to it through smaller, embedded autonomous programmes like community-based care.” For Kandalgaonkar, images from the Hindi Punch form an interesting alternate archive because they showcase speculative settings within households.

Barber at work in one of the camps, 1897, Karachi Plague Committee Album. Pic/Controlling the Plague in British India by Christos Lynteris

“A lot of the events are conversations playing out indoors, within the setting of a living room, which give a sense of people’s fears, state of mind, and their own understanding of what the plague actually is. It becomes an archive that is not created by the state, but by a private entity that has its ear to the ground.” The project has interesting elements. For instance, if you click on the image of the hot air balloon, you see the more privileged sections talking about escaping the plague in a hot air balloon. According to him, the similarities with the plague crop up with the way governments respond to a health crisis. “In 1897, the public remain spectators of their own fate. The only response within their reach for self-preservation is to leave, a mass exodus. This was repeated in the Covid-19 crisis when the government poorly planned the return of the floating migrant population from cities to the hinterland, very similar to a mass exodus of Bombay’s population in 1897, which halved from 8,00,000 to 4,00,000, documented in this work. In the current scenario, disinfecting migrants when they entered cities as they walked home, or Donald Trump speaking of inserting bleach into people to “clean them” are acts of dehumanisation that treat bodies, and those at the mercy of government policies, as lesser.”
Log on to: https://nowtransmitting.com/exhibits/bombay-plague/

Vision 2020 by Robert Good

Robert Good. Pic Courtesy/Nat Wilkins Allenheads Contemporary Arts

Artist Robert Good’s Vision 2020 explores global anxieties and information overload during the pandemic using animations of headlines. These animations grow on the screen like a virus in a Petri dish before gradually receding. “I decided on the grid of 5x5 cells because I had in mind the multiple banks of TV screens that you see in newsrooms and the rows of security screens that show images from surveillance cameras; each vying for your attention.” Each cell then fires out a headline, until you can no longer process them all.

The 5x5 cells are inspired by the multiple banks of TV screens in newsrooms. Pic/Vision Cell from Vision 2020 by Robert Good

“I was actually looking at the anxiety of information overload before the pandemic came along: how can we make sense of it all? How can we know who to trust? These anxieties were then intensified further by the pandemic.” He teamed up with researcher Vasudha Malani to explore regional variations in the Google News content between the UK and India. Good’s original selections were all questions in the form of, “What is the future of...?” “I chose this format because so much clickbait is in the form of a question that is intriguing, but impossible to answer. No one knows what the future will hold so this seemed like a particularly teasing question to be asking.”
Log on to:  https://nowtran smitting.com/exhibits/2020-vision/

When the World was a Laugh by Anaïs Tondeur

Anais Tondeur. Pic Courtesy/Patricio Retamal

In an attempt to track down the origins of the most contagious of laughs, French visual artist Anaïs Tondeur began documenting the sounds of laughter from across the world. The exhibit invites us to share a laugh at a time when the pandemic has disrupted ways to connect and be together. “I conceived this project at the beginning of the pandemic. At a time of social distancing and increasing virtual events, I was searching for human expressions, which could connect people. I then came to discover the place of laughter in myths telling the origin of the world. The ancient Japanese chronicles of the Kojiki, for example, narrates the birth of the world in a laugh. This tale stood for me as a promising image for the dark times we experience.”

The exhibit invites us to share a laugh at a time when the pandemic has disrupted ways to connect and be together

Most of her work is devoted to an exploration of our relationship to the environment, to other humans, while investigating ways to immerse again in the cycles of the living. This project was composed as an exploration of the generative power of laughter. She set up a worldwide call for laughs with Science Gallery Bengaluru. “We received one hundred sound recordings of laughs from around the world. In this moving collection, 15 laughs are extremely communicative. I noticed they are laughs which convey a sense of the laughter’s postures, revealing the expressions of the body itself. We can perceive through the recorded laughs the bodies bending, twisting, interrupted in their movements by the saccade of laughs. Even their breaths sound suspended.” According to her, the most contagious laughs are often triggered in an environment of tension and instability.
Log on to: https://nowtran smitting.com/exhibits/when-world-laugh/

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