KOCHI: Sudeesh Yezhuvath rips open a chapter from a universal past, and presents its chilling reminders in front of us through his photography exhibition titled Yours Is Not To Reason Why. The exhibition starts with frames of the well-maintained, picturesque lawns outside Auschwitz Museum in Poland. Two ponds where the ashes of dead inmates from concentration camps are still maintained as a stark reminder there, and these slowly reveal the barbaric pages from history.
“I once asked myself, what would I do if I was living in Nazi Germany. Would I believe the propaganda and become a Nazi? Would I be against the fascist ideology but scared to speak up, which essentially means joining them? Or would I stand up and fight? I couldn’t figure out where I would end up. And that was a scary feeling,” Sudeesh says. It was 2013, and he was standing inside the attic where Anne Frank was hiding from the Nazis at the time.
In 2018, he visited the Auschwitz museum. It was a concentration camp where Jews were locked up before they were gassed to death. “Germans are efficient. When they planned a genocide, they did that efficiently. Rail tracks were built to the prison. They collected every personal belonging of the prisoners and stored them for future use,” the artist, who is an IT entrepreneur by profession, explains. All of these collected items are still preserved at the museum.
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As you proceed through the frames, you get to the one with piles of old prosthetic legs. These customised legs were stored by Nazis for future use. Leather suitcases, tea mugs, shoes, shoe brushes, frames of spectacles — remnants of many Jewish people who lived a full life before they fell into the pit of Nazi hatred, are still intact.
“Many countries are now joining the right-wing, supporting religious and racist ideologies, otherising minorities and vulnerable groups. I just wanted everyone to see these pictures and stop history from repeating itself. It’s not a political commentary. The exhibition is meant for everyone to look inside themselves. In a way, it is asking everyone where they stand,” he says. The answer, he says, cannot be easy.