An artist relives his childhood memories

Artist-photographer Cop Shiva's recent series of photo performance works features his mother Gowramma

- Meera Menezes

With an upturned moustache à la Salvador Dalí, a nattily clad gentleman in a three-piece green suit and bright blue shoes greets visitors to the exhibition, No Longer a Memory, at Gallery Sumukha, Bengaluru. This is none other than the artist-photographer Shivaraju B.S., better known by his moniker, Cop Shiva. In this latest avatar, he looks as if he has just stepped out of the frame of one of his photographs.

Curated by Joshua Muyiwa, a Bengaluru-based poet and writer, this series of photo performance works features another character alongside Cop Shiva—his mother Gowramma. Long fascinated by the idea of masquerade and the roles essayed by people in their public and private lives, the photographer decided to train the lens on his own family.

The idea for the body of work was sparked by the recent realization that mother and son did not have a single photograph together. The closest Shiva had come to getting one was as a youngster, when his maternal grandfather decided to take the mother-son duo to a photo studio, but then abandoned the idea because it was too expensive. He consoled his grandson with some sweets instead.