Here’s Looking at You, Tihar

A stellar cast of artists interprets life behind bars as part of an art-therapy project to rehabilitate the inmates of Tihar.

“I don’t believe in art therapy, the only therapy that works is physiotherapy,” says artist Chintan Upadhyay, tongue firmly in cheek. We are discussing the ambitious ‘Expressions in Tihar’ initiative to rehabilitate inmates with art in India’s most famous jail. This week, the over two-year-long project culminated with a show at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in New Delhi. It will be on till 2 September.

Upadhyay was among 36 prominent artists, including Rameshwar Broota, Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas Komu, Gigi Scaria and photographers Raghu Rai and Ram Rahman, who collaborated on the project. All artists, says Anubhav Nath of the Ramchander Nath Foundation, visited the inmates of Jail No 5. Nath, along Johny ML, has curated the show.

Photographer Ram Rahman was faced with an interesting dilemma. “Having done portrait photographs inside the prison, it later struck me that exhibiting or publishing these pictures would be a violation of the inmates’ rights. They have a right to privacy too, and what right did I have to permanently brand them for life as a sometime inmate of Tihar Jail?” he says. He then superimposed images of murals (Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar Azad, Sri Aurobindo) inside Tihar over portraits of the inmates.

Upadhyay’s work, Tapori Gang, is inspired by Bollywood. Notice carefully and you’ll see each baby sports a tattoo. And one of them has something you just cannot erase: ‘Mera baap chor hai’. In the second work, Tapori Baby, the baby’s forearm reads ‘Tera baap chor hai’. “My image of jail has always been through cinema. But Tihar was very different from what I had in mind. The young kids there were so regular. But I wanted to create an image reminiscent of film.”

In Fact As Fiction, artist Gigi Scaria depicts a construction site with walls which looks partially like an apartment complex. But at the same time, the layers inside the structure look like a jail. Scaria says it’s a comment on our social system which keeps a ‘jail’ within, but never accepts that it exists.

Like Upadhyay, Bose Krishnamachari too speaks of a film hangover. “Like anyone else in India, I am saturated with the narratives of popular movies, where they show jails as some kind of dungeon with torture machines. Policemen are portrayed as cruel beasts. But in Tihar, I found things totally different. It was more like a school.” Bose’s work is possibly the most ambitious: 108 self-portraits. “Face is what gives identity to a person. Here, I create my own face using random lines. Some may capture my likeness to a criminal. Some may look like an innocent person… It is about seeing myself among the inmates and the inmates in me.”

Riyas Komu also saw something of himself in the prisoners. Komu’s three-panel Mr Panopticon 2009 is inspired by the 18th century prison designed by English utilitarian thinker Jeremy Thinker. The Panopticon was a jail where inmates would be under constant surveillance without being aware of it. “In this age of 24/7 surveillance, I feel like a prisoner myself.”

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