'Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth'
– Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Heritage architect and accessibility consultant Siddhant Shah echoes the poet and novelist when he urges the visually disabled to touch, feel and even smell his reproductive artworks – placed alongside the original – at museums, art galleries and events.
By discarding the cardinal rule that art objects must not be touched, be enjoyed from a distance and only by the sighted, Shah is ensuring that the visually impaired can now enter and admire art spaces sans assistance.
A better understanding of what Shah does was in evidence at the Serendipity Arts festival in Goa last month. Along with exhibition brochures and signage for toilets in braille, his tactile maps indicated entry and exit points, junctions, venues, pathways, exact number of steps, the location and even the foliage.
He also reproduced artworks such as Kalam Patua's contemporary Kalighat painting of tourists on a beach. Shah's version had sand and embossed the outlines of the chubby bodies and elongated eyes – typical of the Bengali painting tradition.
To make visually-challenged students understand how perforated Sanghi paper artwork – that was dedicated a section at the festival – is made, Shah compared it with a punctured braille slate. In another exhibit on colonisers and cartography, a tactile coastal map marked water bodies and islands.
"I told them (visually challenged kids) how the GPS on their phones evolves from the compass," says Shah, who usually packs trivia about the artist on his tactile walks. He, however, avoided marking every single name of a place on the reproduction. "The idea is to not confuse and complicate but to make them understand without aid."
So far, Shah, 27, has helped create Anubhav, a tactile gallery at the National Museum in Delhi. At the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur's City Palace, he installed ramps throughout the museum complex, provisions for wheelchairs and placed tactile reproductions of select artworks.
In 2015, he wrote India-Pakistan's first braille book for Karachi's State Bank Museum. Since the 2016 India Art Fair, Shah's associated with the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), producing reproductions and tactile walks for their exhibitions.
Perfecting the touch
Shah, who has a Masters in Heritage Management from the Athens University of Economics and Business, took up this cause because of two simultaneous developments in his life – his mother lost partial vision and he won a scholarship to Athens where all cultural sites have tactile works.
"But here, people are not ready to finance such works. One gallery told me upfront, 'We don't want to associate ourselves with anything disabled'. I want to create educational kits, but I'm struggling for funds," says Shah, who runs an organisation called AccessForALL in Mumbai to produce braille and tactile material, and ropes in karigars from Jaipur and Delhi to create tactile replicas of artworks.
To perfect his 'masterpieces', Shah says he relies on his mother and the blind kids he interacts with. "For J Swaminathan's painting from the Colour Geometry series, currently showing at DAG, mom told me to further open the ridges of a hexagonal shape. On touching it, a kid instantly associated it to a pizza," says Shah.
He recalls how another eight-year-old reprimanded him for being too polite when showing her around. "She said, 'I know I'm blind so just say it.' It made my hair stand, but I'm more confident with the disabled."
On the job
When I ask for a 'blindfold' exercise at DAG Modern's ongoing show Group 1890 in Mumbai, I'm made to interpret a Jyoti Bhatt partially-painted serigraph of a peacock and shrubbery inside the side profile of a human face blindfold on. I was told to trace my own side profile – from the back of the neck, skull, forehead, nasal bridge, lips, chin, Adam's apple, to the pit between my collarbones before I touch the 2D reproduction of the profile. When my hands reach the feather, Shah plays an audio of the cries of a peacock to help me make an association. And after I touch the plastic leaves and flowers, my fingers smell of parfum.
