The Conversations of Lights
This is a dormitory in Bangalore where I spent two unforgettable nights that ignited all known human emotions in me. Within a span of 48 hours I was bewitched, scared, intrigued and angry for incarcerating myself in a place that had 26 beds with me as sole inmate.
It had all the qualifications to be a set for a horror movie. Yet, in the end I was pleased. There was an overt interplay of lights that came in from the windows, courtesy the lights from the street on either side of the dormitory.
Which is what made it intriguing because how could anyone in a strange place know that I had a weakness for walking on the streets at night.
While the light that came in through one window was from the neon lamps on one street, the other was from the tube lights on another. It was as if I was witnessing a conversation between lights of two hues: yellow and white. As the interplay continued on the walls of the dormitory there would be some fleeting passersby: the lights from the vehicles that occasionally went past the dorm.
Adding to the drama were the shadows formed by the latticework on the windows. And then my camera recorded the theatricality of the tête-à-tête.
I imagined it all as a clandestine meeting of lovers or a friendly banter between friends who had turned it into their own night rendezvous. I wondered if I was an intruder, an eavesdropper. However, I left with the images of that mesmerising conference of light, shadows and loneliness.
The Conversations of Lights 2
The environment around us allows unique optic perception at different hours. Light shapes visual familiarity; thus capturing it in its most provocative state has always been an artistic preoccupation. A hypothetical situation of a world where if all light rays got absorbed by objects, would result in an alien darkness metaphorically or otherwise.
We see objects due to numerous reflections and refractions, the pleasure or disturbance the human eye encounters is consequently shaped by the intuitive optical knowledge of these trajectories of light and colour field constructs.
Gireesh GV captures this play of light in a series of photographs from one of his night-time encounters in a dormitory in Bangalore.
The darkness of the space interspersed with numerous patterns of light trickling through the window glass panes create a surreal ambience, with crisscross configurations of shadow and hues of warm yellow and serene white lights.
As an artist who interacts with the lens extensively, Gireesh exhibits a refined understanding of relations between time and light. The duration through which light is allowed through the lens plays an important role in his photographic series.
The desolateness of the dormitory is caught in minimal selection of subject matter, a glimpse of the window grill here, and the bare white bed sheet of the touched bed holding the faint blue hue of the streetlight there, initiates a phantasmagorical tale.
The images are left with subtle hints to enter into a fluid narration with restrained inclusion of objects in a single frame.
Stirring the imagination of the viewer, this series contains robust possibilities of exploring interplay between natural lights, objects and shadows and an aesthetic that explores and appraises emptiness.
by Avijna Bhattacharya / art curator / New Delhi