Important Notice

"Blindness is a pathological condition where the human being's ocular engagement with his surroundings gets disrupted. This disruption causes logical discontinuities while pushing the human being into a state of ambiguity. Ocular deprivation is one of the tactics that the State uses for taming a rebelling individual and converting him into a conforming citizen. Ideological indoctrination through the systems, which Louis Althusser qualifies as... "Blindness is a pathological condition where the human being's ocular engagement with his surroundings gets disrupted. This disruption causes logical discontinuities while pushing the human being into a state of ambiguity. Ocular deprivation is one of the tactics that the State uses for taming a rebelling individual and converting him into a conforming citizen. Ideological indoctrination through the systems, which Louis Althusser qualifies as Repressive State Apparatuses, prepares the individual to turn 'blind' to certain situations so that he could follow the ideology without causing crises to himself and to the State. Ideological State Apparatuses like schools, jails, asylums, police, family, and so on, though designed as institutions that reclaim the citizens from aberrations an mold them as 'models', covertly function as punitive' military-industrial' complexes that literally control the body and mind of the rebelling individual" (Johny ML, "Blind and Blinding Bodies", The Birth of Blindness, Aicon Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, unpaginated).

In his large, textured canvases G.R. Iranna uses the trope of blindness to challenge his viewers to rethink their notions of freedom and democracy. Are we truly free? Do we sometimes choose not to see things, or, are important things sometimes deliberately kept from us?

In the present lot, the artist has painted a group of young girls, most likely of school going age, standing in two disorganized rows. From the sheets of paper some of them hold and the microphone placed before them, the girls appear to be presenting something to an audience; perhaps a song, as the title of the piece suggests. The irony of the image lies in the fact that, as the choir performs, all its members' faces are covered with what look like handkerchiefs. The artist, mimicking the political and social indoctrination that he critiques through his work, has effectively rendered his subjects blind. Continuing to sing, fully unaware of the realities beyond the bubble of their individual handkerchiefs, the subjects evoke both scorn and pity. More implicit in this frame, perhaps, is the artist's commentary on the issues of suppression of the girl child and the broken promise of 'education for all', which lend another, more local dimension to the painting.

In this fashion, Iranna's work censures the complex and often illegitimate politics of democracy and its practitioners. The microphone placed at an unusually large distance away from the speakers is perhaps another suggestion of this disapproval – is it really true that every voice will be heard in equal measure?

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