Please Listen, People: Addressing HIV/AIDS in Bengali Scroll Paintings

[Guest guest]

Please Listen, People: Addressing HIV/AIDS in Bengali Scroll Paintings

on display at the Fowler Museum, March 16 through August 3, 2008

by Stacey Ravel Abarbanel for the Fowler Museum at UCLA

The Patua of West Bengal, India, are multimedia artists who paint

narrative scrolls and compose songs to accompany the scenes they have

painted. They perform their songs while unrolling the scroll in front

of their audience.

While this performance genre once drew its stories from the great

Indian epics or other traditional sources, in recent years local non-

governmental organizations have begun commissioning scrolls

addressing health issues, including HIV/AIDS education.

` " Please Listen, People " : Addressing HIV/AIDS in Bengali Scroll

Paintings'—on display at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from March 16–

August 3, 2008—features twenty-six of these colorful and innovative

works of art, along with a video showing scroll performances (the

title " Please Listen, People " is a line taken from one performer's

song).

Nandita Palchoudhuri, a curator based in Kolkata—100 miles from Naya,

where many Patua reside—became concerned that Patua scroll painting

was dying out. In 2001, after hearing that the American Center in

Kolkata was organizing an HIV/AIDS communications fair and collecting

educational materials from all over India, Palchoudhuri approached a

husband-and-wife team of Patua artists, Rani and Shamsundar Chitrakar

with the idea that they produce HIV/AIDS scrolls to be exhibited at

the fair.

A few years later Gere, co-curator of the related Fowler

exhibition " Make Art/Stop AIDS, " traveled to India and met the

artists, who showed him their AIDS scrolls. Rani Chitrakar sang her

scroll—a plaintive poem that accurately described how HIV is

transmitted.

Walking through the village, Gere was surprised to see that other

Patua painters were also producing HIV/AIDS scrolls, but many with

shockingly inaccurate messages. One, for example, said that AIDS came

from Poland and that little pills that would cure it. In fact, these

erroneous AIDS scrolls were such curiosities that a niche market had

developed for them, especially among Western tourists.

Gere and Palchoudhuri began to organize efforts to correct the

inaccuracies that had crept into Patua HIV/AIDS scrolls. Gere invited

Rani Chitrakar and another artist, Monimala Chitrakar, to a

conference in Kolkata. The artists questioned why urban Indian

artists were afraid to address sex in their work. They told the other

delegates what would and would not work in their village.

On the final day of the conference, as the delegates briefed

government officials, Monimala Chitrakar demanded a role for herself

and her fellow Patua painters in the public health interventions

being planned for West Bengal. With support from the West Bengal

organization Bhoruka Public Welfare Trust, many Patua painters began

producing scrolls that featured accurate HIV/AIDS information,

including several featured in " Please Listen, People " that were

purchased by the Fowler Museum in 2007.

In 2007 Gere, Palchoudhuri, Tom Coates and the staff of the UCLA

Program in Global Health, and the Patua painters teamed with the

Kolkata organization SPARSHA (Society for Positive Atmosphere and

Related Support to HIV/AIDS) to devise a new arts-based intervention

program for villages in West Bengal. In each village, two Patua—one

man and one woman—would join a pair of community health workers from

SPARSHA, at least one of whom is HIV-positive. Together they make

multiple visits to villages, sing poems about how HIV/AIDS is

transmitted, and teach about condom use and access to medications.

Examples of these newest scrolls used in this program are featured on

the final gallery wall, and focus on themes of HIV transmission,

stigmatization, testimonials of AIDS patients, and love with

responsibility.

` " Please Listen, People " : Addressing HIV/AIDS in Bengali Scroll

Paintings' will be on view in the Fowler Museum's Goldenberg

Galleria, and is presented in conjunction with the traveling

exhibition " Make Art/Stop AIDS. "

The Fowler is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from noon to 5 p.m.;

and on Thursdays, from noon until 8 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays

and Tuesdays. The Fowler Museum, part of UCLA Arts, is located in the

north part of the UCLA campus. Admission is free. Parking is

available for a maximum of $8 in Lot 4. For more information, the

public may call (310) 825-4361 or visit fowler.ucla.edu.

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