Returning to Akar Prakar over two years after his last show here, Delhi-based artist Debasish Mukherjee brings a vastly different body of work to show. What is striking between these two outings though, is clear preoccupation with how we are sensitive to, and preserve, things of the past.
With ‘A Museum Within’, his last solo at this very space in 2016, his installations had expressed a concern for the neglect of Indian heritage, encouraging a re-think in conservation. Mukherjee circles back to a similar theme with ‘River Song’. This time, he is re-thinking how the ‘heritage’ of one’s own life is preserved.
Some may complain that this very trajectory — from the public and built, to the highly personal and intangible — is what makes contemporary art inaccessible to large chunks of the population.
But the subtle richness in each installation, cocooned within a larger tone of minimalism, puts you at ease immediately; you want to linger to experience the texture. This is when his work shakes the old, dusty, and forgotten reaches of memory, and as good art is supposed to, delicately changes the way you’ve always reflected on something.
Take for instance, the first set of installations. Called 22 Moons, it is a representation of the artist’s formative years of the artist’s life, spent in Chhapra, Bihar. Mukherjee has 22 embroidery hoops, one for each year he spent there, with different types of fabric stretched taut and twisted within them. A cracked coat of industrial white is painted over. Peer closer and the fabrics reveal themselves as varying types: plain or floral.
A hoop from the ‘22 Moons’ installation
“My father worked in the railways, and we lived in the railway colony — with each new occupant, the houses there would be painted over with a fresh coat of paint without actually scrubbing out the old shade or wallpaper,” Mukherjee recalls, as he explains how he’s ‘talked about’ the layering of memory over memory, across the two decades he spent in the quarters.
There is also homage. The artist amassed thread-spools — they’re commonly junked in his daily work in fashion — because they reminded him of homeopathic vials from his father’s side-practice of the stream of medicine. He then heaped them onto each other within a seven-foot-tall wooden cupboard frame, to create a beehive-like structure that spills out. “Till when he was alive, my father kept our family together,” he says.
The cupboard with the spool-hive
Mukherjee’s father passed on in 2015. In a conversation with cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote at the show’s opening on Thursday, the artist talked also of how his mother coped with the loss of her husband — she didn’t understand that he was no longer alive, and continued to wear the sindhoor , the vermillion mark that women are to traditionally discontinue when their husband dies.
At the centre of the hall is a long, sari-like cascading of cream threads with a vermillion flow in the centre, all fused together with a dissolvable adhesive-like material. Not a woven fabric, but holding on together somehow.
Mukherjee is rejigging “the approach towards time-honoured genres” like portraiture, says Hoskote. In a separate room is a tall assemblage, with thaan stacked over thaan, a printed pattern on the ‘spine’ of each. Step back, and a portrait is formed — of a generic ancestor-type figure taken from a hoary, yellowing family album.
This is the artist’s way of remembering his strict grandmother, who followed every rule in the book prescribed for how a widow should live — one day, when he caught a glimpse of her opened cupboard, a sight that he wasn’t privy to otherwise, he saw stacks of plain white saris arranged in the same way.
On view until 4th October 2019, Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.; Akar Prakar, D-43, first floor, Defence Colony
