Freedom Song
Kolkata’s Aakriti Art Gallery celebrates the 60 years of Indian Independence with a show of forty artists. Oindrilla Maity scans through each work presented in the show and asks why still our artists need images from the western art history for articulating the issues of freedom and its aftermath.
Aakriti Art Gallery is one of the newly formed and promising galleries and have been constantly upgrading its shows with researches and getting curators to do its shows, thereby emphasizing on specific ends.
Its latest show, titled “Freedom: What it means to me” (August 12th-22nd, 2007) was organized to celebrate the sixty years of Independence. Curated by Pranab Ranjan Roy, it showcases forty contemporary artists. Its sole concern lies in probing the existential situation over half a century after the colonial domination – “to see to what extent a desire for freedom and feeling of denial of freedom still motivate the painters and sculptors of the two generations of artists, born since 15th August 1947. There has also been an interest in finding how the artists of these two generations deal with the concept of freedom, do their conceptualization include remembrances of the anti-colonial freedom struggle and/or include freedom from authoritarian structures of injustice?” writes Pranabranjan Roy. It also becomes engaging to locate quite a handful of artists from Bangladesh, who have been incorporated in the show, hinting at the partition of Bengal in 1905. Many of our own folks are victims of forced migration.
To start with the oldest among the forty artists, Kanchan Dasgupta, who was born in 1947, in Benaras, had his visual training at the Government College of Art and Crafts and was an activist in the Group theater movement in Kolkata. His work, titled ‘Now on he wants to lead his life as he pleases’ delineates an acrobat who casts off his mask and all his acrobatic costumes that had so far kept him chained, and reaches out to a flying piece of white cloth, bearing the metaphor of freedom. His association with the stage becomes apparent with the heightened dramatic representation. The photo-realistic renditions of the images, too, hint at his colonial schooling in visual art.
The 1948 born sculptor, Janak Jhankar Narzary’s, (who was born in Assam is at present the Head of the Department of Art History at Kala Bhavana, Shantiniketan) work comprising of a steel post, straw, bamboo and stone chips is a jugglery with the word ‘Post’. The title reads: ‘The Post – Independent/ Independent Post’. The base bearing green straws and the top from which orange (saffron?) straws hang is an obvious reminder of the national flag.
Birendra Pani (b.1969) paints a diptych with countless gagged faces bearing a saffron cross on the fore head of each of them, titled, ‘Game of Fundamentalist’. Each of the ten white discs (on which a letter has been stenciled) which, put together reads ‘SWADHINATA’ has been divided between the two panels, put together, side by side. Isn’t that an allegory of the numerous partitions that shroud the history of the country? It becomes interesting to watch how the context of freedom changes with time, and how the artists born in different time periods generate their own idiom of the same. (I have, therefore, put their years of birth after them).
True, ‘the West’ no longer ‘is the West’ and ‘the East’ only ‘the East’. Does it explain the reason why we have Dali’s ‘Metamorphosis’ painted during a time of national crises is employed by Barun Chowdhury (b.1971) to delineate our own predicament? Debraj Goswami (b.1971) uses the predators, the same that Goya’s painting ‘May the 15th’ bear. Barun has dramatically placed them before a mirror,
hinting at a back firing of ruthless massacres.
Rajesh Deb (b.1979) is trained in Print-making. He cleverly employs traditional wood-cut and follows a style which goes back to the 19th c Kolkata. Rajesh uses 19th c elements such as the goddess Laxmi floating on a lotus on the Ganges at Babughat, a troller sailing with the phrase ‘My Leader’ inscribed on it; a woman made lie down on a funeral pyre and is about to turn out into a sati; the upper half of the print bears two of our national leaders with two contrasting philosophies – Subhas Chandra Bose and Gandhi. Two these he adds contemporary elements, such as jargon associated with the electronic media and other things. His sarcastic manner of rendition is a visual reward.
The Bangladesh based artist Habibur Rahman (b.1958) , trained at Baroda, follows the narrative style, typical of Baroda, while Mahjabin I. Mazumdar, (b.1970) from the same country uses an ornate style.
Rima Kundu from Kolkata makes extensive use of cloth in the form of nets and laces, on which she uses text that speaks of women’s emancipation and an urge to break away from it.
Other works in the show comprises of Manjira Chakravarti’s frenzied scribbles almost to the point of a mesh of threaded lines which read: ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’, from Tagore’s famous poem at the dawning of freedom from the colonial rule; Atin basak’s ‘Marooned’, a triptych of etching; Babu Xavier’s acrylic screen print on canvas, titled ‘Horror-1’; and other artists such as Asim Basu, Samit Das, Pappu Bardhan, Soma, sk. Sahajahan, Samir Roy, Chhatrapati Dutta, Indrapramit Roy were some among a list of forty.
However, despite newer experiments (in fact it is one of the best shows in the city during recent times), the concept of freedom becomes diversified amongst forty artists. Its meaning becomes blurred as one ponders whether freedom only means something patriotic, national or even personal or whether it’s the freedom of mediatic explorations in the true sense of the word. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Is that what one of the eminent critics in one of the widely circulated city newspapers wanted to say?
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