What Bengaluru’s flex banners say about who we are Premium

“For the course, I introduce them to the fundamentals of art language,” he explains, pointing out that things like size, scale, proportion, shape, position, association, framing, and proximity play a significant role in our perception of any image, whether a flex board or an art object. “I was using these images as part of a classroom exercise to show how the visual language we were discussing in class could also be seen on the street,” says Kashi, who recently delivered a talk titled Bangalore/ Bengaluru Changes at the Alliance Literary Festival, Bengaluru.

Ravikumar Kashi says that his interest in flex banners began around 2007 when he began photographing them for a series of his artworks and to use as material for an art appreciation course he teaches at the RV College of Architecture, Bengaluru.

“For the course, I introduce them to the fundamentals of art language,” he explains, pointing out that things like size, scale, proportion, shape, position, association, framing, and proximity play a significant role in our perception of any image, whether a flex board or an art object. “I was using these images as part of a classroom exercise to show how the visual language we were discussing in class could also be seen on the street,” says Kashi, who recently delivered a talk titled Bangalore/ Bengaluru Changes at the Alliance Literary Festival, Bengaluru.

Kashi started this photography journey using a digital camera that he would lug around with him. “If I see something, I take a picture and document it,” he says. “It was all in one big folder. Nowadays, I have started putting it in different sub-folders, but it is still not properly segregated. ” He admits that back when he started, “it wasn’t very planned. I had no clear idea why I was doing it, but I knew in my gut that these are important because I have studied the history of visual culture a little.”

A few years down the line, however, the project’s raison d’être became much more evident. “All I am doing now is collecting, but as I do so, more and more, I realise the value of it,” says Kashi, who has shot between 7000-8000 images so far and intends to keep doing so. He thinks of this exercise as living documentation of sorts. “Flex banners, which usually vanish in a few days, are something in flux. Unless you document it day in and day out, it is not going to be there,” says Kashi, who went on to publish Flexing Muscles (2019), a bilingual series of essays linking these banners to the city’s constantly evolving socio-cultural and political landscapes.

Flex banners, and by that same logic, posters, cutouts, statues, and vehicle images, have become a way to assert various identities, believes Kashi. “People are continuously communicating who they are and what they want, and then, because they can’t find a voice in other ways, they use this medium of public visual culture to say something.”

In the first essay of Flexing Muscles, Kashi talks about how senes, “armies to safeguard Kannada land, language and culture” using flex banners to communicate their power and position. “It becomes a tool through which they announce and represent themselves,” he says, tracing the evolution of linguistic identity politics in the city.

There is a stark difference between what Bengaluru is today, “with its high-rise buildings, congested roads and saturated visual stimuli,” and what it used to be: a laid-back pensioners paradise with excellent weather. But soon, the IT revolution started in the city, with Texas Instruments being the first to set up shop back in the mid-1980s.