The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Spotlight on disappearing babies

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Wednesday, Feb 06, 2008
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Spotlight on disappearing babies

Special Correspondent

An exhibition that dramatically focusses on female foeticide

WITH CONCERN: At the exhibition at Gallery Sumukha.

Bangalore: If laws were all we needed to change the way we live our lives, girls and women would be the happiest lot in India.

But social conditions and prejudices often overtake the best of laws. So we live in a country where a girl child is still regarded a curse.

With modern technology coming to the aid of this age-old prejudice, we have easy ways of sex detection and easier ways of eliminating a girl child even before she has her first glimpse of the world.

Meera George’s show at Gallery Sumukha, titled “Partum Subvertio — To Bear, To Destroy”, explores the theme of female foeticide and infanticide through drawing, painting, digital media and installations.

Ms. George says that she was working on the theme of girl child when she was bombarded with a series of news reports on female foeticides in India.

The book by Gita Aravamudan on the theme, “Disappearing Daughters”, had her thinking more on the subject.

That was how the exhibition came to focus singularly on this theme.

The launch of the show had Ms. Aravamudan reading excerpts from the book.

One section of the series uses the image of a particular species of carnivorous plants, Nepenthes, known for their large pitcher or sack-shaped leaves.

These plants lure, trap and destroy their prey. “In my works, I have used its organic shape, form and structure to resemble the womb. They appear as a safe haven, to nurture and protect the foetus, but are in actual fact a death trap,” says the artist.

In the photographic series, she has used original ultrasounds of foetuses and images of carnivorous plants to digitally modify them in creating the work she simply calls “Scan”. In her installations she uses clinical gauze to create pitcher plants that are suspended in a formation.

Also on show is a six-minute video loop that shows a girl reading a text on female infanticide. The second clip in the video shows the girl reading the text backwards, over and over again, hoping to reverse the situation.

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