Mindscapes Bengaluru platforms hyper-local conversations about mental health and wellbeing, that speak to the idea of missing voices in mental health discourse. It focused in particular on the themes: lived experiences of marginalised communities; disparate vocabularies around wellbeing; recognition of traditional practices of care as valid forms of knowledge; and broadening the scope of cultural representation in policy and decision-making. Supported by his colleagues at Unbox Cultural Futures and Quicksand Design Studio, Rohan Patankar anchored the Bengaluru chapter of Mindscapes. The Unbox team comprised Aparajita Bhasin, Jyoti Narayan, Riya Gokharu, and Fiza Jha, and was advised by Avinash Kumar.
Mindscapes Bengaluru platforms hyper-local conversations about mental health and wellbeing, that speak to the idea of missing voices in mental health discourse. It focused in particular on the themes: lived experiences of marginalised communities; disparate vocabularies around wellbeing; recognition of traditional practices of care as valid forms of knowledge; and broadening the scope of cultural representation in policy and decision-making. Supported by his colleagues at Unbox Cultural Futures and Quicksand Design Studio, Rohan Patankar anchored the Bengaluru chapter of Mindscapes. The Unbox team comprised Aparajita Bhasin, Jyoti Narayan, Riya Gokharu, and Fiza Jha, and was advised by Avinash Kumar.
During her Mindscapes Bengaluru residency at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Indu worked with a network of community centres and opened a new space called Namma Katte — a space for leisure, a space for women to exchange stories of care and mental health. These stories informed a collective artwork. Indu Antony is an artist who previously trained in medicine, often working with communities to express the inequalities of gender, class and caste.
Project assistants:
Trisha Appanna, Shalini, Bhagya
20 April – 6 August 2023
In Bengaluru, multiple overlapping identities co-exist in the form of languages and dialects. This exhibition intends to locate spaces in which spoken language can take the shape of thoughts, actions, and gestures. It turns towards structures of exclusion to understand a lack of expression of emotional health. What is speakable? How do we share our experiences of trauma? How do we also share our joy and respite? When do we speak up loudly for ourselves — when do we whisper?
This exhibition, showcasing Mindscapes Bengaluru Artist-in-Residence, Indu Antony’s works is at three locations across Bengaluru, inviting ideas, artworks and people to travel through the city: at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP); the artist’s studio space Kanike in Cooke town; and Namma Katte, a place for leisure for the women and children of Lingarajapuram. Antony’s work foregrounds questions around language on mental health and the city, care and a shared space for healing in togetherness.
10 April – 30 June 2023, NIMHANS Heritage Museum
An immersive exhibit by Quicksand Design Studio at the NIMHANS Heritage Museum, Notes on Madness is an attempt to take the medical case files from 1920 to 1970 of the NIMHANS archives beyond the shelves of academia and research, into conversations with the public at large. The focus is on humanising stories of serious mental illness from the medical archives to the present.
Project team:
Quicksand Design Studio with
Jyoti Narayan, Riya Gokharu, Sinjini Ghosh
National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) with
Dr Pratima Murthy, Dr Sanjeev Jain, Dr TS Jaisoorya,
Dr Ajit B. Dahale, Dr Chethan B., Ms Yamuna Rani
Studio Slip with
Kamini Rao, Adnan Mohammed, Arya Dave
Siddharth Kumar, Vivan Kamath, Vishwas Kashyap
Sunil Kumar
2022-2023
Weekend film school and creative anthology with the workers of Bengaluru
A pedagogical experiment exploring storytelling and the language of mental health. Filmmaker and facilitator Varun Kurtkoti and a small film crew worked with a diverse set of contributors — an auto driver, sanitation workers, workers from a sex workers union, and some of their family members — who articulated interest in learning filmmaking. Varun set up a weekend film school in August 2022 based on the Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies. The output, Kathi Kathi Kaarana, is a collaboratively directed “true fiction” anthology narrated by the filmmakers.
Facilitator: In this projects’ context, there is no technical “director”. Further, even during the “school” process, there is no teacher. Instead, we have a facilitator, Varun Kurtkoti. Facilitation in this project’s context, is more than teaching, directing, mediating or providing — it is about taking a step back and designing a pedagogic structure that diffuses power. It is to provoke, invoke and guide when necessary.
Team: The team that assisted the facilitator in designing the process, includes the participants (Shanmugam, Preeti, Chandrashree, Suhas, Nishita, Anita, Balaji), the facilitating crew members (Vivek Sangwan, Navya Sah, Bhamati Sivapalan, Ravi Ranjan, Himanshu Bhat, Sumedha Choudhary), the producers from UnBox Cultural Futures Society (Fiza Jha, Faith Gonsalves), and facilitator Varun Kurtkoti.
Conversations in Drama is a series of five drama-based community mental healthcare groups that were conducted in 2022. The premise of these groups was to offer promotive mental healthcare and support in the context of the arts and community to those who are in situations of stress/distress based on marginalised identities in intersection with alienating and isolating life circumstances.
Project team: Conversations in Drama was conceptualized, supervised, and led by Maitri Gopalakrishna with the support of the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP). 'Kalaji Nagara' is the documentation of the project on film made by Debosmita Dam and Maitri Gopalakrishna. The different workshops were conceived and conducted by Padmalatha Ravi, Sri Vamsi Matta, Aruna M, Yuthika Subramanyan, Arjun Khera, Shilok Mukkati, Sannidhi Surop, Pallavi Chander, Mohini Singh, Madhu Shukla, and Vijji Chari.
Bringing together art and themes of mental health care through self-reflection and self-care.
This is a set of creative exercises in English and Kannada that aim to gently aid exploration into the ways we relate to ourselves, our bodies and our surroundings. It is packaged as a box experience that opens up thought-provoking avenues inviting you to ponder, imagine and create.
Project team:
MAP & UnBox Cultural Futures Society
Concept: Elizabeth Mathew, Arnika Ahldag, Shilpa Vijayakrishnan, Rohan Patankar, Aparajita Bhasin
For further credits see the website above.
Art Sparks is MAP’s learning series for young people, hosted on the museum’s Youtube Channel. It advocates learning and thinking with the arts amongst children on a global scale. The programme is structured as seasons, with each season having eight short episodes that explore the chosen content through a variety of formats—whether it is thinking routines and art games, or do-along making based demonstrations.
Season eight of Art Sparks features expressive arts therapist Nidhi Khurana and four young volunteers who try out eight artful prompts from the Art For Thought toolkit. Art for Thought is a set of mindful learning exercises shaped to make one gaze inward, wonder, imagine and feel.
→ Episode 1: Inner Self (Reflecting On The Self)
→ Episode 2: Inner Self (Recognising The Self)
→ Episode 3: Body (Accessing Restfulness)
→ Episode 4: Inner Self (Identifying Feelings)
Shubhasree Purkayastha, education & outreach at MAP Bengaluru
ShotReady Productions
Indu Antony
2023
Clay, iron oxide, sound, 27 minutes
There are countless memorials that exist in the world as manifestations against forgetting. They are spaces to grieve and process loss. What happens if shame surrounds the death of someone? Antony commemorates the death of women who could not be mourned, whose stories were left unacknowledged and whose presence left forgotten. Us, is an invitation to hold space for each other, to remember and to share.
In some communities of Lingarajapuram, the passing away of women is accompanied by silencing the causes of their death. This leaves little time and space for families to grieve their demise. Indu Antony creates this work as a memorial to honour such women from the community, whose stories have been ignored.
This artwork is accompanied by an oppari — a folk eulogy, that you can listen to here, and read through the transcripts in English in the accompanying booklet.
Indu Antony in collaboration with women from Lingarajapuram
2021-2023
Nanna Langa (my skirt) draws from the central idea of Namma Katte — a space of solidarity where the women of the Lingarajapuram come together to embroider their stories.
The skirt is fifteen feet tall and made with patches of fabric. These patches have been hand stitched together in the traditional Karnataka quilting method of kaudi. The rectangular pieces of cloth are saree and blouse materials which differ in shape and colour adding a tone of vibrancy. The patches of cloth are embroidered in variations of stitches, motifs, languages and patterns. The inside of the skirt leads one to a sound installation which elaborates on nine stories.
→ Listen to the stories here, and read the transcripts of the conversations in the accompanying booklet.
22–27 April 2023
Building ethnography on hyper-marginalised workers of the city for policy makers, mental health service providers and outreach workers.
A co-created exhibition developed by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and the sex worker community in Bangalore, with the guidance and support from Sangama, an NGO working for the rights of sex workers and sexual minorities in Bangalore. Equipped with oral and artefactual materials gained from multiple workshops and discussions, as well as from scrutiny of archival, legal, and policy documents, the project builds their narratives in visually engaging ways.
Project team:
Dr Neethi P, Sofia Juliet Rajan, Yashodara Udupa
State of Care is an immersive gaming tool developed by Fields of View and the Centre of Mental Health Law and Policy (CMHLP) to reflect and highlight the various challenges that vulnerable persons face while accessing mental healthcare in their journey through the public system.
Project team:
Fields of View with Srinidhi Santosh, Sumit Sute, Meera Prajapati, Sukanya Deepak, Sruthi Krishnan, Trina Talukdar
Centre of Mental Health Law and Policy (CMHLP) with Arjun Kapoor, Tanya Fernandes, Manisha Shastri, Amiti Varma
The Education Department at the Museum of Art & Photography collaborated with several artists to explore thought, emotion, memory, mindfulness and aspirations through the immersive journey of “creating” with young and old audiences.
Project team:
MAP with Shilpa Vijayakrishnan, Elizabeth Mathew, Kinjal Babaria, Shubhasree Purkayastha, Sandhya
Artists:
Rency Philip, Christine Wong Yap, Pallavi Chander
The city — in its streets, sidewalks, trees and parks, tower blocks, plazas, squares, bedrooms, balconies and terraces; holds us and all our feelings. This is a series of public conversations that explore how the design of the city shapes the mental health outcomes of citizens. Special attention was given to the following themes: Foregrounding Lived experiences, Women, and Mobility and Access.
All sessions were conceived and moderated by Rohan Patankar, cultural lead of Mindscapes Bengaluru.
