How Bharathesh GD draws on democracy, dissent in his show ‘Pain Corporation of India’

The 44-year-old artist, who grew up in Davanagere in central Karnataka and trained as a painter, has been working on the ideas behind this show for nearly six and a half years. “It largely started from a space of anger. I was not very happy about what was happening around us. The political landscape, the speed of change in society, and the way behaviour has shifted in the last 12 to 15 years — all of that affected me. The way demonetisation impacted some of us so deeply, raised a lot of questions for me. I had to turn to painting to express this,” explains Bharathesh.

Inspired by cinema’s visual language

Though the show appears overtly political with recurring images of inked fingers, Ashoka Chakras, slogans and mentions of Constitution articles and familiar symbols, Bharathesh insists that the works function as what he calls “meaning-making machines.” They invite viewers to enter at different points and construct their own reading. “Be it the plywood works or polythene works, they have multiple entry points. They look straightforward, but they are not. Whatever information you carry, whatever position you lean towards, you create a meaning from it,” says the artist, who had his previous solo in Mumbai last year.

The exhibition is divided into several parts. One section consists of pencil drawings on paper. These are not finished works, he says, but preliminary explorations, “a laboratory of my thinking.” Text phrases such as “how to avoid democracy” or “masks of middlemen” appear alongside sketches and fragmented imagery. “I write something and sit with it. I ask myself if this idea can become an image. Or can this image turn into text? These drawings were spaces to test that,” he says. One of the drawings featuring pakodas alludes to PM Narendra Modi’s statement about how a pakoda seller is also employed. “A pakoda seller is selling pakodas because he doesn’t have a job,” states the artist.

Interestingly, many of these early drawings began with the idea of making masks. “You see the eyes in almost all of them. Initially, I wanted to cut them and turn them into wearable masks. But as the ideas developed, they demanded something else.”

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That “something else” eventually took shape as plywood cutouts, which he calls “stacked narratives.” The fluorescent borders around these works are unmistakable references to South Indian cinema cut-outs. Growing up, Bharathesh was closely exposed to that visual culture. His father painted film hoardings, and as a fine arts student in Dharwad, Bharathesh himself assisted in painting cinema banners in Hubli. “I have seen cinema from the projection room. I know that visual language. The fluorescent green and yellow borders, the exaggerated forms — that language is unique to our cinema culture,” he says.

The line between image and painting

Bharathesh takes this public art form and transforms it into something subversive. The series of 10 plywood cutouts combine hybrid imagery; tongues pierced with screws, folded hands that could be praying or begging, dining tables that double up as cutting mats. “They are hybrid images that contain multiple references from popular culture. As you glance through them, you create your own inferences.”

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One work features hands fixed together with bolts. “We are confused: are we praying or begging?” he asks. The dining table references food politics, with plates generated through AI during the initial years of AI and then painted over: “I was curious about AI very early on. So I generated images using prompts and then painted on them. It became part of the work.”

Bharathesh observes that we live in a time when image-making has become universal. “Earlier, photographers and painters generated images. Now everyone with a smartphone produces images every day. The line between an image and a painting is blurring. It’s a very challenging time to be a painter amidst AI, camera and printing machines and I wanted to take this challenge,” says the artist who has come back to painting after a long gap.

Another striking section of the show comprises works painted on transparent polythene sheets, which renders a three-dimensional quality to a two-dimensional context. Hung in the gallery space, they cast shadows on the wall and can be viewed from both sides. The material choice is deliberate. He underlines, “I wanted the material to speak. If the same painting were on canvas, it would lose the context. Polythene is transparent. It allows you to see the other side. It allows you to see the process, the layers. Transparency makes us uncomfortable, and I want people to respond to my expression.”

‘Too Much Democracy’: A retail Republic

The transparency also suggests duality: how narratives can shift depending on perspective. “Sometimes you don’t know the right angle to see the work. Both are right,” he says. The artist asserts that we have developed a sense of passive protest over the years. “There is helplessness and this passive protest eats us from inside. These plastic polythene works depict that angst and passive protest that we always carry now.”

In one installation titled Too Much Democracy, cast relief objects — JCB logos, police barricades, dental casts — are displayed in small plastic pouches reminiscent of kirana store sachets. The reference is intentional. “In small towns, if something is expensive, like costly cardamoms, spices, it is sold in small sachets to make it accessible. Democracy also gets converted into retail units. We are retail republic,” chuckles Bharathesh.

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Despite the weight of its themes, the exhibition does not rely on spectacle. Instead, it uses familiar visual languages — cinema cutouts, shop displays, signage — to comment on how dissent can be absorbed, normalised or diluted in popular culture.

Asked whether this is his most overtly political show yet, Bharathesh nods. While earlier works dealt with the politics of the body, gender and gaze, this exhibition confronts the broader political environment more directly. Yet the tone remains reflective rather than rhetorical.

“It’s a scary space,” he admits, referring to the current moment. “But I don’t think we have accepted it. I don’t want to say we have normalised it. That would mean we have given up.”