Cartoons of History

For people who grew up on a steady diet of Cartoon Network,some of the most memorable shows on the channel would have been of the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series. Characters included Bugs Bunny,Daffy Duck,Sylvester and Tweety,Wile E Coyote and Road Runner,and at the end of every show,the banner would read, “That’s all folks”. Now,years later,the phrase reappears,albeit in an entirely different field — as the title of Bangalore and New York-based artist Raghava KK’s solo exhibition. On at Art Musings gallery,Colaba,from September 4,the show features iconic characters from the series,but the focus is far from being on cartoons. “My visual metaphors come from the emotional mappings of three disparate worlds — cartoon,historical and mimetic,” says the artist. “I will not map literal characters or events,but an emotional response to them.” The show attempts to comment on the “flatness” of Indian school history,which Raghava believes is made “by breaking events into a subdivision of approach (cause,event,and effect)”. “These are my historical documents where the linearity of time has been distorted and rearranged like a big knot creating parallel and orthogonal universes,” he says.