IVSAA, nature's fury & drik.

there was an exhibition of shahidul's work yesterday at indus valley school of art&architecture titled "nature's fury" it was about how the south asian earth quake had affected the lives of the locals.
because of the workshops that i had been taking at indus, i knew my way around and was walked upto the 2nd floor looking around for possible clues as to where the pre-exhibition lecture was supposed to take place. a cute white haired, grey bearded man asked me whether i was looking for the auditorium and showed me the way. almost immediately i saw almost famous and z.a.k sitting in the front row and went over to say hi. saw a friend with an empty seat sitting right behind, i said salam to shahidul and joined friend.

the video that shahidul played for the people present was about a lot of things. it had a lot to do with reaching out to people, it had a lot to do with coming together and making the world a better place, it had a lot to do with how photography as a medium could be adopted by people from all classes, it had a lot to do with spreading awareness and testing creativity. it had a lot to do with the "coming together" of people from different walks of life.

some of the pictures in the video depicted some harsh realities that we have been consciously aware off, but which when shown make it more real somehow. some of the clips showed people celebrating, some of it showed people working hard to make the shobi mela (festival of photography)a success. video clips showed people watching the pictures and talking about them (in bengali).

there are two forms of art which truly transcend boundries of language, culture and race. one of them is music (how many of us have listened to ricky martin or khalid without having a clue as to what their lyrics mean?) and the other is painting/photography and that becomes plainly apparent when you see in the video, a man wearing a dhoti and a tattered shirt looking carefully at the pictures.

i dont even know how to describe how i felt watching the video. for a moment i saw the person on the other side of my chair, wiping his eyes.

the world is bigger than the one we live in and its truly amazing to know that there are people out there who, in their own way, are trying to make that world a better place.

my little obsessions, books, cds, guitar music, painting bathroom orange... they seemed soo irrelevant and so trivial.

the exhibition itself was very very good as well. the pictures seemed to have captured with them, the souls of the individuals who had allowed pictures to be taken of them. overall what i loved most was that the pictures not only showed the destruction caused by the earthquake and the people affected by it, but also showed "hope" and "life" and whole new proccess of how peeple were trying to get their lives back together again.

by the end of it, i felt thoroughly overwhelmed.
do visit drik to see some more pictures of the exhibition and other projects that drik is involved in :)