Bangalore: Blank Noise, which has been bringing to focus the issue of sexual harassment, is holding its first public exhibition.

The exhibition, titled Mind the Gap, will present a documentation of Blank Noise projects through multi-media art installations using photographs, sound and video. It will be centred around the debates of looking and the gaze, and of modesty.

The exhibit explores personal boundaries and forms of control as practised in changing urban India. The exhibition proposes to bring forth and challenge common attitudes towards women and street sexual harassment.

The artistic and conceptual challenge of this venture lies in transferring a project situated originally in the public and virtual space — through street interventions and blogging — into an exhibition space. The outcome addresses issues of art and space, and art in space.

It is also an experiment in relating the public to the exhibition space, the virtual to the real. The spaces are interlinked but the specifics of each space also shape the artistic creation and the viewers' experiences. The link between the spaces will also be established through a daily street performance that can be viewed from the exhibition space.

Blank Noise asks that visitors be participants in the exhibition by bringing along a garment to donate and discard so that it can add to its collective stand, I Never Asked For It. The clothes project concludes as soon as 1,000 testimonials in the form of garments donated by you are collected. The variety of the clothes it has received — salwar kameezes to tank tops — defies the notion that by wearing a particular kind of clothing, a woman "asks for it." Street sexual harassment is a universal phenomenon.

Blank Noise was initiated by Jasmeen Patheja, artist. This exhibit is the collective effort of Blank Noise members and participants from different cities in India.

The exhibition, at Max Mueller Bhavan, will be inaugurated on Friday at 6.30 p.m. and will continue till April 21, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.

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