One woman show par excellence

Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 is a product of the lockdowns

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: A special student screening of Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 was held at Shoonya last weekend and saw students from all across the city drop in to watch.

The performance that originated as a play in 2011 has been transformed into a visual experience due to the isolation we faced in lockdown. In it, Mallika Prasad Sinha plays four characters - Girl in the Apartment, Mrs Raghuraman, Sandhya, and Mailer Daemon.

“It was born out of a need to be heard and seen. During the pandemic, 70% of artists had no work and I had to find a way to exhibit my craft,” says Mallika who worked on the project with Ram Ganesh Kamatham who has been her collaborator for 17 years.

The performance uses four lenses to simulate different feelings of being watched from your phone to the CCTV camera often simultaneously that gives the viewer an extreme close-up to a bird’s eye view. “The choice of dual/multiple frames of the same moment became an invitation to “drifting” or a “wandering” to allow the eye to be drawn to what feels right to the viewer at the moment,” says Mallika.

 Mallika believes in using the body as a musical instrument and has crafted the performance from the memory of being on stage. “For me, each of the characters is me, if I had made a different choice and shows how images dominate our lives,” she says talking to the students after the screening.