LURU Hangs w/ artist & farmer Suresh Kumar G

Art is rooted in place.

On an overcast, cloudy day, we – the LURU newsletter team – trekked nearly 40 kilometres to the outskirts of the city. We arrived at B Hosahalli, a peri-urban neighbourhood off the Sarjapur-Attibele Road.

Tucked away amongst the sporadic towering building blocks, vast educational campuses, and brightly-coloured highway eateries, were swathes of flourishing but fast-disappearing farmlands. One of these lush, thriving plots has been adopted by the artist Suresh Kumar G as the site for his on-going artistic project – Sarjapura Curries. Here, he brings together his lived experience of farming, community-building, and artistic practice.

Soil mate

Suresh has had quite a storied return journey to these farmlands. “Like any other visual artist, I went to art school,” he declares, standing in the midst of sprouting vegetables. “I had a very formal, intense training,” he adds, starting off as a sculptor at the city’s Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. Before spending a year on a residency programme at the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad, “where it was most happening at that time,” and later a master’s programme at the College of Art in New Delhi. He chose the capital city because of “the libraries, the museums, student theatre, and the film screenings because of the consulates and embassies” and not necessarily for the programme, he admits with a soft chuckle.

As a sculptor-in-training in Bengaluru, “I’d done mostly hardcore work like stone and wood carving because coming from a rural agrarian background, I’d always been very physical and found it harder to relate to a white canvas, paints, and things like that,” he explains. Instead, he found that, “I was more of a material person” and it was “easier to carve a trunk of wood” and just lug it on his bike to college “because I wasn’t allowed to take it on the bus,” he recalls. While studying in Delhi, he “explored other materials” but chose to return to village life after the programme. Over two decades ago, a few kilometres away from the present location of Sarjapura Curries, at his mother’s ancestral village, he began to use a room formerly used as a saree weaving centre into his artist studio. It was the “ideal space to practice this materialistic kind of work,” he says.

At this time, Suresh “did large-scale installations and sculptures” that addressed “the concerns of this area around Sarjapura and my so-called community,” he states. He points out that “my concerns from those days and today are the same but the material and the understanding has changed a lot,” he adds. Also, around this time, he remembers, “doing large installations with impermanent, perishable materials like wood, discarded construction material like tiles, or found materials. It wasn’t about making objects for a museum or a gallery, or as a collectors’ item – it was just physical stuff,” he says. He’d made a concerted effort to show these artworks within the city and galleries in other cities before realising “these objects were so grounded that were losing relevance once it was taken out of context,” he expresses. Outside of its place of creation, these art objects were understood as “exotic or kitschy; the same art object shown near the milk dairy, a secular communal place in the village, made complete sense,” he says. Suresh admits to being “very comfortable” with his work or choice of materials being rendered as exotic, kitschy, or rooted.

Just can’t beet the farm life

Through his years of making these art objects in the village, he came to see that he was “actually a storyteller,” he says and smiles, “these were just excuses to bring people together.” He tells us about making a 15-foot installation with a tree trunk and having to transport it to another town on a tractor to be painted. “It was a huge procession. [While] people relate to functional objects like a chair, furniture, or religious idols that are made of wood. I found myself having to tell them the story behind this installation because it was something they weren’t familiar with,” he explains. At this point, Suresh reached back into his days in student theatre because “anyways, these objects don’t sell, and they don’t have a second life, so I better become a storyteller.”

This moment of epiphany redirected his artistic journey to “live art projects.” In 2004, he made his first project titled ATP Kiosk on the MG Road boulevard. “It was called Any-Time-Plant, it acted as an ATM machine, which were just starting to come to the city,” but instead of money, people would simply show an identity or visiting card and get saplings that could be planted in their gardens. In this manner, his art addressed concerns around agrarian life and the environment, with his live art projects framing these issues as fun solutions. Even while going down the medium of performance and live art, Suresh firmly decided to stay clear of the white cube spaces and keep it public-facing.

This element of the public and community-building has grown to become a more important facet of Suresh’s artistic practice and philosophy. Previously, he might have “dealt with artists, artworks, and materials,” but with Sarjapura Curries as a project, “it is food, stories around them, the farmers, the workers, and the students.” For him, the approach remains the same, “it is just the community or the audience.” He has come to see over decades of practice that “even if I sit and do art in this village, a lot of people can’t connect with it because it isn’t their medium of expression. But now, when I’m gardening and farming, everyday I have a very critical engagement with my neighbours and surrounding community,” he explains. And through this engagement, even the community he has built “see[s] the value in this farming and archiving project, the way one would see in art.”

Keep track of Suresh’s work here.

Catch LURU Hangs with… on YouTube or Spotify.

LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.