Chennai | Memories and mothers are the centre of this exhibition-performance by Nimi Ravindran

Nimi Ravindran's exhibition-performance explores a daughter's struggle to remember her mother's life amidst Alzheimer's through art.

It is likely that there is an old wives’ tale in dusty books of fables somewhere, about mothers who either protect or mangle memories. But fiction often stems from vicious reality where even mothers — guardians — struggle to have a say.

Nimi Ravindran’s To Forget is to Remember is to Forget, an exhibition-performance, at the Goethe Institut on October 25 and 26 by Prakriti Foundation, looks to tell the story of a daughter struggling to remember everything that her mother forgot. Through tape recorders, transistors, radios, Mp3 players, jars, walls and speakers, Nimi looks to encapsulate her mother’s life and her tryst with Alzheimer’s through performance art.

“My mother was an excellent singer and she sang in five to six languages. But the thing about her was that she only sang the saddest songs ever. So I put all of that into the performance. Her life though isn’t all tragic. The Alzimer’s is just a portion of her long, 50-something life,” she says.

Nimi began work on this show 10 years ago. It was initially conceptualised as a theatre production because of her own background in the field, but she found herself bereft of a vocabulary that could capture her experience of life, illness and grief. The show was instead personified in the form of installations and performances. Through songs, voices, pictures, videos and jars of memories, Nimi said that she reconstructed versions of the time when she and her brother learnt of an illness alien to both them and their mother. Meticulous note-keeping to keep the doctors abreast and for her own personal record, were important in this memory reconstruction process.

“I was raised by a strong single parent who could speak and sing in multiple languages. She put both my brother and I through school and university and lived a full life. It was fascinating and deeply difficult to see her regressing into childhood,” Nimi says.

The Bengaluru-based artist adds that at the time, there was little conversation about the disease and mental health in India. Although the doctors at National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) treated her well, there were few channels of support 10 years ago, when her mother passed. In her exhibition, Nimi says that she used objects and pictures from her past to make sense of this fate.

Through Photobooth and Akaashvani, Nimi places pictures from her childhood, songs that her mother enjoyed and a consistent narrative of a story from days of yore, to tell a tale. There is also Placebo and Mirror, Mirror, two video-based installations that dabble in the surreal. In the exhibits Library of Lost and Erase, Nimi hopes to showcase an imaginary archive, where the audience is drawn in to watch bits of the author recall the difference between fiction and fact. A live solo performance is also on the cards.