Celebrating democracy,eschewing hatred

Artistes across come together over the weekend to “resist the politics of hate” and to “stand up for democracy” in a first of its kind festival of the arts being held under the banner “Artistes Unite”.There will be music, dance, poetry, theatre, cinema and more at the two-day festival, which will held against the historic backdrop of the Red Fort in the 15 August Park.

Signatories from more than 20 locations have cautioned that the ongoing assault on culture is an attack on democracy and asserted that ‘democracy is not a majoritarian project to identify enemies and enforce uniformity of language, behaviour and culture. Democracy is the celebration of a collective will for peace, of living together with dignity and equality’.

Hyderabad-based Vijayaraghavan S is a visual artist, video artist, painter and photographer. He is presenting his work at ‘Artistes Unite’, he tried to attempt to externalize the schizophrenia of the contemporary everyday life facing the situation of intolerance of freedom of speech and injustice against peace through his artwork tittle ‘Voice of desire’.

Vijayaraghavan is happy to be the part of the event he says, “It is a great privilege to be a part of ‘Artists Unite’. Through my proposed body of artworks, I tried to exploit the potential of socio-political, personal and emotional expressions raised over self-ideology and consciousness.”

About his work he says, “My coherent body of artworks and animated videos evolve through a process that has immense complexity, combines subversive expressions while juxtaposing the realms of new media technologies which bring abbreviation to an artistic expression dealing with the reality of mundane human life experiences. I try to articulate these experiences in an implicit, allegorical and symbolic way. The notion of these activities and the varied interrelated images and objects help me to develop a visual conversation which acts as a vehicle for the many dichotomies of rhetoric.”

“I have used my own body parts in my coherent body of artworks which reflect our unconscious being, colonised by motorisation, sexual torture, violence, mechanisation and urbanisation, deforming the habitual and the mundane. It is our voice to regenerate, re-create, re-question the human ethos for positive changes in social-political attitude in the democratic context,” Vijay concludes.