Chithkala Ramesh was never a very social person, but she did enjoy stepping out every now and then to go to a cafe and paint and be around people. She also would travel solo and find inspiration for more paintings. When the lockdown began, Chithkala did not know how to accept it. “Everything changed and came to a standstill,” she says. A regular artist since childhood and an NID alumnus, Chithkala froze and became unable to paint. As she gradually made peace with the turbulent years of COVID, Chithkala created a series of works that document personal – and universal journeys of the emotions during the period. On August 2, an exhibition of these works, “Once Upon A Time, A Pandemic” opened at the Monalisa Kalagram in Koregaon Park. The exhibition rekindles memories of the pandemic, reminding audiences of the suffering that the world appears to have forgotten. The first work shows two empty plastic chairs, skeletal white, facing each other on a balcony. This is a fictionalised image of her balcony in Pune when the lockdown happened. “All I was left with were these two plastic chairs. Slowly I started noticing the trees around the balcony, the birds and the blue sky,” she said. The exhibition is arranged into four parts and, after the first images from Pune, it moves to the artist's travels to Goa and Uttarakhand. There are depictions of her time at home in Bengaluru after the first lockdown, when she started cycling around, when street dogs became her new friends and her time spent with her grandmother— all of which are represented in her art. It is in the third part of the exhibition that death and the looming threat of COVID-19 makes an appearance. The experience is captured in images of a small car that the artist had to drive as if it were an ambulance, an ECG report and, finally, a password to a phone. The exhibition ends the way the pandemic did—with an image of the sun rising on a new beginning. “A lot of people think that art is my hobby. But, art is actually like my best friend who has got my back. No matter what happens, art helps me find a place of calm. More than anything, it is a silent friend,” says Chithkala.
