Mahesh S

Mahesh S is a Coimbatore-based self-taught artist dabbling with video and photography. He has a background in research and advertising and has earlier worked as a researcher and communication strategist. This grant enables him to undertake practice-based research into the history, architecture, and cultural memory of Building No. 37, in Bangalore. 

Around 1970, the Bangalore City Corporation commissioned the construction of Building No. 37 as a means of providing recreational facilities for the growing middle-class in the city. Constructed over three years, the skyscraper was opened to the public in 1973. At a height of 325 feet above ground level, housing several shopping arcades, conference halls, commercial showrooms, art galleries and boutiques, the building was immediately recognised as iconic, and was held as the emerging image of a metropolitan city. Presently, after 46 years, Building No. 37 still stands as one of the tallest structures in the city but without its earlier popularity. Most of the shops wear an empty look, several offices have been abandoned and the entire building is in various states of decay. 

Early this year, Mahesh chanced upon Building No. 37 during a stroll. Instinctively drawn by the strange mix of silence and decay, he slowly began to unearth the stories residing in the building. Over the next few months, he conducted interviews with shopkeepers and employees of the city administrative offices inside the building. There was nostalgia, dismay, hope and indifference in the narratives that the respondents shared with him. There was also an overwhelming web of secrecy that had engulfed the entire building. 

What started as a casual walk through the building has now become an artistic quest. Through this grant, as a researcher-photographer, Mahesh hopes to research into and document the ‘half voices hanging in the air, stains on the walls, everyday lives of its occupants, half-remembered memories of those who had frequented it and the architecture of the building’. For this, he will consult libraries, archives, city corporation reports as well as drawings and images of the building in popular media. He will conduct a series of interviews with architects and city planners to understand the building’s conception and architecture, the impact it has had on the city and imagine its possible future. Interviews will also be held with historians, shopkeepers, sales persons building personnel and government office staff and general public. 

On this project, Mahesh will collaborate with designer and researcher Saumyaa Naidu, photographer Balaji Maheshwar, sound and graphic designer Anuj Malhotra, spacial designer Hiteshree Das and a group of illustrators and sketch artists who draw portraits of passers-by.  

The material gathered as part of project will lead to a multimedia exhibition / installation comprising of audio, photographs, and sketches, a personal essay, a photo essay and a website. While the curated exhibition will be on-site, on the first and second floors of the building, the website will contain all the materials. Deliverables to IFA from this project will be photographs and sketches from the project, photographs of the exhibition, the photo essay, audio recordings of the interviews, the website and the personal essay on the building.