I Will Build My Own Kingdom There

In the land where the jaggery grows
And the skies are raucous with crows
Years ago on a pastoral hill
(Which was left to him in a will)
A young man was heard to declare:
I will build my own kingdom there
And proclaim myself it’s chief
As the absolute Bawa of Brief.

– a verse from the poem a Californian film-maker and poet as his mark of appreciation after his stay at Brief for several weeks in 1980.

If you ever get a tour of the brief Garden you will see a massive mural (of which a small section is pictured to the left) by Donald Friend, an artist whose predatory history was long known and politely swept under the rug. In the background scene of my painting which comes directly from the Friend mural, Bevis Bawa reclines as local workers wait on him, an image that lands somewhere between colonial fantasy and the oblivious rich couple in Parasite. I wanted to bring this image of Mr. Bawa and those who served him into a contemporary context, to look at why it was something that was normalized then, and why it feels uncomfortable now. I’m also playing with scale and hierarchy expectations by making the insects feasting on the rotten jackfruit the central subjects of the painting, rendered as large as the human figures in the background.