Indu Antony

This Grant was amicably cancelled based on reasons mutually agreed upon by the Grantee and IFA due to unavoidable circumstances.

Indu Antony is a Bangalore-based visual and performance artist, and photographer. She has been part of national and international residencies, has had group and solo exhibitions in India and abroad, and has been the recipient of the Public Art grant from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and the Toto Funds the Arts (TFA) award for photography. This grant enables Indu to undertake an olfactory exploration of Bangalore in order to understand the distinct smells that make this city.  

Indu has been fascinated by the idea of smells for some time now. She earlier worked on a project titled Vincent Uncle which was about smells. She also did a story about the incense sticks industry in Mysore. This introduced her to the science of scent makers in Mysore and Bangalore. Karnataka is known as the scent capital as it is the leading manufacturers of incense sticks. Inspired by this, Indu now embarks on this project to explore the smells of Bangalore.

Smell is one of the most powerful and important senses. It is the first to activate when we are born and it filters into our consciousness every day in subtle and profound ways, influencing decisions, desires and dreams. Smells link back to not just a specific object but also to memory and certain feelings of time. In 1938, French artist Marcel Duchamp filled the air with the smell of roasting coffee in an exhibition in Paris which could be the first example of olfactory art. However it was given some currency only during the 1980’s. But smell, as a concept, is still widely absent in popular discourse about art.

“Bangalore too, like any other city or town, has its unique smells. From the smells of Suma Coffee on CMH road to the smell of freshly fried samosas in the bylanes of Shivajinagar to sneezes from fresh textiles at Silver Plaza to ghee at Murugan stores in Hanumanthanagar to Tabebuia flowers in Cubbon Park...the list goes on to give a sensorial journey through various parts of Bangalore”, Indu observes in her proposal. As part of this project, Indu will conduct detailed interviews with people from various parts of Bangalore including shopkeepers from Chamarajpet, friends in Sahakar Nagar, drivers of public transport vehicles, pourkarmikas, employees at the Manyata Tech Park, nurses at the Mallya Hospital, perfume makers in Shivajinagar and Chamarajpet, and so on. These interviews will be around the idea of smell - the association people make with different kinds of smells and the connections between specific smells and certain spaces in Bangalore. She will also interview experts from the National Centre for Biological Sciences and other institutions to understand the science behind smells better. Indu plans to connect with Dr Kate Mclean, an artist, designer and researcher, who works at the intersection of human-perceived smell-scapes and cartography. Further, she will make a few olfactory trips to various parts of the city to understand distinct smells. This process will provide her with a wide range of smell profiles. Based on these findings, Indu plans to create a few perfumes that will carry the distinct smells of Bangalore.

The outcome of this project will be a book containing photographs, research text and an olfactory map of Bangalore with the specially created samples of perfume. The book is aimed to serve as a guide for anybody who wants to take an olfactory walk in the city. If the situation permits, various perfumers will be invited to conduct curated olfactory walks. Sometime in the future, Indu hopes to bring all this work together in the form of an installation. The idea of the book as well as the installation will be to enable an understanding of the relationship between memory, associations, people and places through olfactory perceptions and imaginations.

The deliverables from this project will be photographs, audio and video documentation, and the book.

This is the first time that IFA is supporting an olfactory project. At the time of the Covid19 pandemic when people are moving around with masks, with restricted perception of smells in their surroundings, a project like this poses interesting questions about the human condition in the current context. Also, one of the symptoms of being infected by the virus is the loss of smell, which makes this even more interesting. Further, artistic work on olfactory perceptions and smells of the city is a relatively under-explored discipline, at least in the context of India. While the distinct smells of food or perfumes have been widely written and talked about in magazines and television shows, the olfactory persona of a city has not been explored much. We do hope that this project will open exciting artistic possibilities centred around olfactory explorations.