On blood-red screens suspended from the ceiling, float the bodies of villagers from Birbhum, West Bengal. From the times of the British, till today, it’s been a land fraught with bloodshed and turmoil for its residents, the Santhal tribal community.
Yet, in a typical landscape study of the area, which captures its trademark red soil, the history of its people finds no place. This thought sowed the seed for Sanchayan Ghosh’s art ‘Reversed Perspective — A Critical Approach to Landscape Study’. On screens stained red with soil from Birbhum, Sanchayan “shadow-casts” images of the tribals narrating their memories.
The result is a picture of the land with merely the shadows of its people, present, yet absent — a novel turn in landscaping.
Showcased at the Lalit Kala Akademi as part of ‘Ensemble’, the exhibition by 29 faculty members of Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan in West Bengal, Sanchayan’s work is just one among many that push the boundaries of contemporary thought. “If we are not contemporary in our practice ourselves, how can we hone students into contemporary artists?” asks Sisir Sahana, Principal, Kala Bhavana, who put together this cross-section of artistes-faculty for the show.
“The aim here is to reflect the present direction of art practice at Santiniketan,” he adds.
The exhibition is also a step further in the decades-long relationship between the Madras School of Art and the Bengal school. “We have the same roots, but differ in application; and this is one of the first major exhibitions to have brought so much of Santiniketan to Chennai,” says R.M. Palaniappan, Regional Secretary, Lalit Kala Akademi.
From senior artistes and Professors Emeritus such as K.G. Subramanyam and Jogen Chowdhury, to young teachers in their 30s, the exhibition spans a few generations of work in the Bhavana’s six areas of specialisation — painting, graphic art, design in ceramic and glass, history of art, sculpture, and textile design. And much of it addresses present-day India. Take Rajarshi Biswas’ ‘Swachch Bharat Aviyaan’ for instance — a gigantic, figurative oil-on-canvas that shows a man mopping blood seeping from behind a door. On the extreme right, the same man waters the very door from where the blood stems — a vicious cycle of privately feeding the evil that we publicly clean up.
In Arghya Priya Majumdar’s work too, she points to the follies of our times. In her ‘The Narcissist’, a man rides a tiger merely to capture a selfie of himself in the act.
The exhibition is also “multi-materialist” as Sisir puts it. From cotton, to fur, 3D digital paint, ropes and terracotta, they all find their way into these artistes’ work. The most tactile of these are, of course, the textile artistes. In Krishnendu Bag’s ‘Different Kind of Peace Energy’, cotton and mulberry silk thread weave in intimate knots up close, which from afar, reveal a placid pattern of whites, creams and browns. Meanwhile, the idea of peace arises far differently in Uttam Kumar Basak’s lithography ‘Peace’, where the Buddha, curls up, props his face on his knee and falls asleep. Further, Aditi Ganeev Sangwan in ‘Overlappings’ blends the border between poetry and art. In a series of etched panels that line up one after the other, she portrays the “in-betweens” of life — sleeping babies, growing trees, and stale food. Tucked in between the images are scrap pages from notebooks with lines of verse: “It’s a story about inbetween space,/ inbetween understanding of diverse situations and juxtapositions,/ of intuitive and informative overlappings;/when heavens sounds are turning into language.”
The exhibition is on till March 10.
