What does your isolation look like? Lounging on the sofa, with hair blooming on your legs. Your home transformed into a witchy abode, filled with herbs and sunlight. Or the calm after a hurricane, with your laptop, books, pages, worn clothes and your own naked self, strewn across the bedroom.
Fifty five of India’s up and coming artists have come together to design a set of 55 playing cards, all under the umbrella theme of the pandemic, under the project, Cards for a Cause, by Ahmedabad-based Nidhi Shah.
It all started with a game of animal flash cards with a toddler. Physical distancing back in May, Nidhi would spend a lot of her time playing with her three-year-old niece. Cards, she realised were a good way to make the forced down-time at home a bit more fun. What if they could also be used to evoke empathy and encourage people to donate for those affected by the novel Coronavirus, she wondered.
Over the next two months, the idea snowballed into Cards for a Cause. “We have teamed up with the NGO, Give India, through which the profits go to a campaign called India Fights Corona. For every deck of cards that is bought, we donate 10 meals,” she explains. A copywriter by profession, she got Rhea Patel, founder of Cliq, the advertising startup where she works, to co-found this initiative.
Approaching artists to volunteer for this project did not prove to be too difficult. “I run a page called The Artlet Poetry, in which I post artwork, with relatable poetry in the caption, giving both artists and poets credit. It started as a poetry-first page, where I was just sharing work that I liked using the pictures in my phone gallery,” she says. But eventually she built a network of artists that she admired. In two years, the page blew up, it now has almost 38K followers.
Every artist involved in the project had their own take on the pandemic and isolation, depicted in their trademark style.
Chennai’s Varshini Ramakrishnan chooses to point out the sense of community in her work. The train featured on the 10 of Spades is a reference to how the Indian Railways turned the coaches of trains into isolation wards for the first time in history.
Others have been introspective — Saumya Shukla, in her abstract style, talks about the towns of ignorance and islands of bliss she has built in her head.
Some artists specifically requested for a card number: Delhi-based Shreya Tingal has used the Three of Spades to turn her father, mother and herself into Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles respectively, “a powerhouse of three.” Radhika Sivsankar uses the Two of Hearts to depict digital love between two partners.
“I wanted to approach this from a kid’s point of view and that reminded me of the movie, Room ,” says Tabrez Alam, whose trademark is to place movie posters in the backdrop of Classical paintings. “I haven’t lived at home with my family for this long since long, so it is interesting to observe how the dynamic and our equation has changed. You’re not the same person you were six years ago!”
Nidhi, on her part, has been overwhelmed by the response the project has received in just 10 days of the launch. “We are close to donating 4,000 meals already. The numbers will be up on our website soon,” she says.
Visit @theartletpoetry or cardsforacause.in to place an order. A set of 55 cards costs ₹700.
