Salila Prasad Vanka

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Arts Projects (Research/Practice) will investigate the narratives of visual culture and spatial politics in the city of Bangalore through a study of the evolution of its public statues and sculptures since the early 1990s. Salila Prasad Vanka is the Coordinator for this project.

Salila Prasad Vanka teaches urban social theory and conducts architecture and urban design studios in RV College of Architecture, Bangalore. Besides an undergraduate degree in Architecture and graduate degree in Planning Studies from India and the USA, she holds a doctoral degree in Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Salila’s research interests span the fields of urban theory, participatory governance and spatial politics in the public realm in the Global South. She recently published a book chapter titled Informing to Placation: Locating Participatory Planning in Bangalore on Arnstein’s Ladder in Lauria, M. and C.S.Slotterback (eds.) 2020, “Learning from Arnstein’s Ladder: From Citizen Participation to Public Engagement'' (pp.110-28). In July 2021, she presented her ongoing research titled Sensing and Shaping the “Public” in Public Art: Street Aesthetics in Bangalore at the RC21 Conference 2021, Antwerp. Visual artist and educator Ravi Kumar Kashi and architect S Madhuri Rao will be Salila’s research collaborators in this project. Given her experience, Salila is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The research titled Narratives of Visual Culture and Spatial Politics: A Study of Public Statues and Sculptures in Post-1990s Bangalore is based on the premise that public art in a city is inevitably political. While the murals, public sculptures and public statues in a city are visual markers of the socio-cultural milieus where they are present; they are also signifiers of the city’s spatial politics from a macro perspective. The aim of the research is to develop a framework to document and classify the public statuary in Bangalore, in order to explore narratives with regard to Bangalore’s visual culture and spatial politics.

The research derives from a credible body of academic work on the city of Bangalore, including S. Srinivas on sacred and civic public culture of the city; Janaki Nair on architecture and public life; Jayaraj on urban commons; S. Benjamin as well as L. Kamath and M. Vijayabaskar on the relationship between public sphere and governance; Arzu Mistry on public art projects; Shreya Pillai on the privatisation of public art spaces, among others.

The research will explore the dialectics between the strategy of the state and the tactics of the civil society in shaping the visual culture of Bangalore, with special reference to the politics of space traced through patterns of patronage. It will therefore look at government commissioned statuary as well as other visual markers that spring up in an unplanned manner, such as busts, posters and commemorative tributes dedicated to luminaries from popular culture. 

In order to study the evolution of the visual culture post-1990s, the area of the research is limited to that part of Bangalore, that was defined as the city limits prior to the 1990s, including the Pete, Majestic, Cantonment, Malleshwaram, Basavanagudi, Sheshadripuram, Chamarajpete, Jayanagar, Ulsoor and Rajajinagar. Notwithstanding, there will be some flexibility regarding the boundaries of the area of study depending on the primary researchers’ field investigations and the data that is aggregated from contributors through crowdsourcing. The research methodology takes into consideration the ‘citizen researcher’, as a source of information. It aims to reach out to a large audience in the city, beyond academics and ‘urbanists’. Through integrating public participation in the research process for crowdsourcing in data collection, the citizen researcher is positioned as an active knowledge-building partner rather than a passive recipient of project outcomes. The citizen researcher will also be in a position to contribute to the metadata, such as location, context, site-specificity, patronage, visual design, provenance and all other data that are pertinent to public statuary in Bangalore. Other than the crowdsourced data collection, the research will primarily depend upon the conventional methods of research, such as visual documentation and data analysis, in order to draw out themes and inferences. This will include acts of demolition, defacement, removal, replacement, vandalism, and delayed unveiling, which will be explored as acts by old and new communities in the city asserting their place and position in the city.         

The outcomes of the project will be an archival photo collection of public statuary in Bangalore, six to eight in-depth case studies of public statutes, and a public exhibition highlighting the project findings. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the archival photo collection of public statuary with annotations, maps, a detailed illustrated project report of six to eight in-depth case studies, and detailed documentation of the public exhibition, including publicity creatives, photographs and audio-visual documentation.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Project 560 programme in the manner in which it engages with unearthing the patterns of socio-political formations in the city of Bangalore through an understanding of its spatial politics by indexing public statuary data as a barometer of social change.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.