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Amrita Gupta Singh looks at the works of the Kolkatta based artists Paula Sengupta and Adip Dutta presented in a recent show by Project 88, Mumbai and comes out with a feeling that these works articulate a regional-(post)modern that is vigorous, ideologically conscious and experimental in approach.

Project 88, Mumbai presented a dual exhibition of two contemporary artists from Kolkata, Paula Sengupta and Adip Dutta. Both are pedagogues at the Faculty of Visual Art, Rabindra Bharati University; while Sengupta is a printmaker and installation artist, Dutta is a sculptor interested in experimenting with various non-conventional materials. The interconnecting tenor in this exhibition was their choice of aligning with the autobiographical and pushing the boundaries of constructed societal structures, both political and personal.

Sengupta’s exhibition, titled, No.8, Shorts Baazar/#8 Short Street, is the address of the artist’s mother-in-law’s home, in one of the many sites that carry strains of British India in Kolkata.  Sengupta says, “The house itself is over a hundred years old and was purchased some three generations ago from a Jewish businessman – a community that is virtually extinct in the city today. The house, today #8 Short Street, is marked No.8, Shorts Bazaar in 18th century maps of the city of Calcutta”. This grand house is marked as a “heritage property”, but Sengupta moves beyond the politics of conservation and heritage management, and presents the many stories that took place in the artist’s mother-in-law’s home, narratives of seven women, across generations, who lived in this grand colonial house within the patriarchal domains of a westernization that many members of the educated class (the Bengali Bhadralok) adopted to live by and the liberal philosophy of the Brahmo Samaj movement that the resident family believed in. This ambivalence of beliefs and practices is investigated in the many contradictory personal histories that the artist reconstructs in this exhibition, via the aspects of the “domestic periphery and feminine gaze”.

Transforming a part of the gallery into an intimate domestic space through the usage of found furniture, found crockery, satin ribbons, twine, handmade paper molds from mannequins, handmade perforated paper screens, mosquito netting canopy, embroidery, crochet mats, tea-cozies and subdued lighting, Sengupta recreates a delicate and problematic surreal space of pasts where the viewer discovers reminiscences of women who led seemingly idyllic lives, yet had complex emotional uncertainties and secret desires to break free from social conditioning and the claustrophobia of the male gaze. Through embroidery which is a woman’s craft and which assigns to the status of a ‘cultivated woman’, Sengupta with the needle, stitches words such as “No Male Issue” on a crochet table –mat, a story of an intense debate among the female members of this family during evening tea. “Run-run!” a mixed-media etching tells us another story of the transgression of a female cousin who wanted to run away in her favorite high-heeled shoes from this palatial home, tired of gender roles. Cryptic phrases, complete verses, visual puns tell particular stories of a “bygone era”. The influence of theatre and performances, her experiences of the pedagogy of Santiniketan, and the encounters of teaching in different institutes including NIFT, Kolkata, defines her art practice where she coalesces art, design, text and performance, history and memory, transcending hierarchies, in a commemoration of the post-modern. Sengupta’s maneuvers of feminine concerns is not confrontational, she deals with these autobiographical narratives with a lot of compassion, which is what makes her works so vibrant and rooted to everyday concerns that any so-called progressive urban woman can relate to, for the identity of the Indian woman is a contested site; many silent ambivalent voices still strain against the specified norms of society.
Adip Dutta presented sculptures, drawings, photographs from his family album juxtaposed with film stills, the autobiographical mode and issues of gender work around the prominent metaphor of the snake. A photograph of the artist’s aunt as a child, a still from a film called Bhakt Praladh, made by one of his relatives in the ’30s, shows his relative seated in front of the snake. Dutta recreates this photograph as a three-dimensional sculpture, in which the child turns into an androgynous entity, and the snake becomes monumental. As Dutta says “The moulds, the sculptures, the photographs are all objects to me, the only thing that is more than an object in this show is the snake. Like the apple in the bible, it is what it is and more than what it is. It represents consciousness. So everything else is the data that builds up the camouflaged self. Confronting the snake for me is confronting the truth, confronting the snake is like confronting history, culture, knowledge, and my own apprehensions. The definition of Other starts with the situation of the self caught between desire and destiny”.
Titled, “The Mould Confronts the Snake: Theatre of the Absurd” Dutta works from the dual position of an insider/outsider within his family and society. He further says,”When you don’t fit into a structure, you are left with no other option than to look upon it as a theatre. And when you then present yourself to others who are within the structure, your predicament is like a theatre to them. So it’s a theatre from both angles: from within the structure and outside it too”. There is this underlying friction that comes across in these works, both in his choice of materials and the objects that visualize these narratives. It is a friction of adjustments and mis-fits, of ambivalent sexual preferences, of existential realities and displacement, of masquerades of the self and desires that strain to be fulfilled. Dutta’s works move beyond the traditional domains of sculpture, moving into the realms of installation, he uses intimate drawings, museum-like objects placed in glass cases, stitching and weaving, hay, fiberglass, wood moulds, and portrait busts that one often sees in studios of sculptors. Two things work here, the mascunality associated with sculpture, and the femininity that goes with craft based practices; Dutta weaves trousers of steel-wool, comfort and friction; traditional academic portrait busts are placed on the floor on mud, slabs and pebbles, devoid of any pedestal, “like tomb-stones”; while ambiguous phallic fossil like objects interact, disjointedly, with rounded forms, simultaneously gendered and neutral, vulnerable yet inaccessible. Airplanes, skulls, overgrown infants/dolls, these works are like excavations and confrontations, difficult in their dichotomy. As Dutta says,”I go on improvising on what has been given to me: to appreciate the system and the structure, because I have grown up in it, that is a necessity, but at the same time creating a niche for myself is also a necessity”. Carving a niche while subverting artistic and social boundaries is a monumental task and Dutta does it with panache. Both Sengupta and Dutta represent a regional-(post)modern that is vigorous, ideologically conscious and experimental in approach.