New Delhi   

From Kolkata with anguish

Violent but not bleak: The world of Eleena Banik from Kolkata now showing in Delhi.

NEW DELHI: A weeklong solo exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculptures by Kolkata-based artist Eleena Banik that speaks out against violence is now on at Visual Arts Gallery of India Habitat Centre here in the Capital.

Titled “My voice against violence as a woman”, the characters depicted in the artist’s paintings and drawings come from the stream of people whom she encounters in urban and rural surroundings. These vibrantly “real” persons have been transmuted into her bronzes as well.

The world around Eleena Banik is violent. The figurative paintings concerning human predicament were made during her confrontation with the stark reality around her. “Violence is the most abhorrent form of human behaviour. A dark shade of terror reigns supreme within most of my works. It grew out of personal trauma I faced during 1994. One day while I was at Santiniketan I suddenly got the news that my father had been stabbed by some unknown miscreants in Kolkata. In the accident he lost one of his fingers. My entire world inner and outer got a severe jolt after this incident. In this exhibition I have depicted social, political and domestic violence.”

As a child, Eleena heard many stories of death and macabre from her father who was forced to settle down in West Bengal after the birth of Bangladesh.

“Partition was a painful experience for our family. I heard so many stories of communal violence during the making of Bangladesh. My dad and grandfather were forced to abandon our homeland and ancestral property. Then there was the violent naxalite movement and now Maoists are active in many parts of Bengal.”

Eleena has a solution to weed out violence from our society: “As teachers in schools, women should gift dolls not only to girls but also to boys. In fact, toy guns should be banned and they should be given building blocks, plastic toys, paintings, brushes and gardening implements.”

The exhibition concludes this Tuesday.

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