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Exploratory Ventures:
Recent Art Trends in Kolkata
Artists of Kolkata are in a retro mode but with a difference. They make incursions into the city’s history, which is predominantly shaped by the colonial outlook. Oindrilla Maity, while surveying the recent art trends in Kolkata says that most of the artists make interventions in their nostalgic past to articulate the present.
Alternative art practices have marked a steady outset in Kolkata in the last five years. The more recent trends show an indulgence towards working with issues that hint at our nostalgia: heritage buildings, dwindling societies and cultures; inexorable changes. Things with which we once grew up and that are no longer with us – in a word, a looking back and recreating it. Needless to say, the sentimental Bengali life is essentially nostalgic. It loves to indulge into the act of ruminating the old days. The colonial past, with all its remnants strewn about the city still haunts us. And it is this feeling of nostalgia, which has engendered a particular trend so unique to the Calcutta based artist. One key feature of our (the Calcutta based artist) art is that it centers on the local. A shift of locus, which is atypical of artists in western and South India, is conspicuously absent from our lot.
Earlier instances include Chhatrapati Dutta’s performances at the heritage site of the Shovabazar Rajbari, where the artist attempted to merge time and space – the past and the present – to build up his conversation.
Sanchayan Ghosh’s recent venture Nadir Songe Dekha, based on our ironical (the city people’s) relationship with the river Ganga is a collaborative as well as site specific installation-performance at the monument lining the port that commemorates the boarding down of Lord Princep in Kolkata. Our ancient ties with the river Ganga is underlined by strong religious sentiments. Our purgatory involvements with the river are historical, too. The immersion of the last remnants of the deceased – his ashes and a dip into the river’s water for a ritualistic cleansing to wash away all our sins not only makes the Ganga a container for imbibing humankind’s grunge but also that it has now become the city’s major ground where all the sewage of the city is finally dumped. Mangled or charred dead bodies of both human and animals, industrial wastes, public urinals and sewage pipes connecting lavatory channels all eventually made their way to the river’s water. The river Ganga therefore, now stands as a gigantic drainage system, cleansing the city of its filth.
Princep Ghat was originally used as a major site for farewell parties of the British rulers. Today as it stands almost deserted at on end of the city, the city has moved on further east. It now stands as the interface of the old urbanity and the river and the new urbanity that grows across the fly over with no contacts with the river as such, only the numerous water lines called ‘time calls’(the popular jargon for street side water taps) that still brings water from the Ganges. Princep Ghat exits as a mark of the great new world but also as a remnant of a history whose baggage is a major challenge to the mind of a community that still struggle to absorb its colonial legacy.
Writes Ghosh : “As the process suggest, a site specific Installation generally grows on the history, and the socio-cultural context of a site which Princep Ghat in his case. Given its general character a site specific installation practice is a temporary intervention to a site which provoke and participate in relationship to the architectural pattern of the site and the accessibility of the space. So in this case this site specific Installation will explore the following issues that are connected to the relationship of the city and the river.
- A historical context of the changing urbanity: through collection of documentation of the old city and the river and the new city and the river( which will include archival and original photo documentation reproduce as prints
- It will also explore the context of urbanity and the human existence and the existence of the myth of the river in urban psyche.
- It will also explore the river as an entity in relationship to the neo liberal economic situation.
- It will also include the aspect of global warming the vanishing of the river water.
- Finally there will be an interactive session on the first day with participating artist and the visitors which will focus on what way the city love the river.”
Body parts segregated from mannequins were attached to sewage pipes that either ended into a plastic tub – the metaphorical container – or connected to other pieced mannequins that were strewn about at the site. The columns were connected by means of a fishnet and on the floor was placed a plastic water bag nearly 36” long. This was certainly an adaptation suggesting the river on which Santanu Bose and three of his associates engaged the spectators, mostly the lay public, in a participatory performance suggesting our the descent of the Ganges and our relationship with it – which is both ritualistic as well as fundamental in the pollution of the river. The other participatory artists were Dhrupadi Ghosh, Koustav, Manas Acharya, Saikat Surai and others.
Dipali Bhattacharya’s paintings deal with the emergence of the city out of its colonial ruins. The portraits of individuals, long vanished, people her canvases. The sepia tinted canvases are often records of the grand colonial metropolis and hypermodernity. Often the 19th c Bengal makes its presence felt through the Brahmika saree clad women folks whose pictures she reconstructs from old photographs – who pose in groups before the camera, with a certain sense of anticipation towards an uncharted future. Juxtaposing them are reams of texts and painted in collage-palimpsest mode views of the modern city – its high rises, vehicles, endless queues of people – all of which point at her disenchantment with the new values and norms of the emerging city. Her style hints clearly at her visual education at a colonial institution of the city – in fact the oldest, and thereby creates an interesting connection with her subject.
Paula Sengupta in her installation ‘The Nuptial Chamber’, although quite close to Dipali Bhattacharya’s choice of a subject –the dwindling Brahmo Samaj and its ironical tutoring of the ladies and its fading glory (for it was a 19th c Reformist movement and did much to the emancipation of women) – she completely and deliberately abandons the idea of painting a canvas. Her mode of expression involves installations and performances. She makes lavish use of etchings, chine colle, found objects and text. ‘Nuptial Chamber’ deals with the nuptial vows and ties of the ladies, which happens to be the house of her in-laws. In another of installation/performance, titled ‘The Void’, Sengupta uses eight mannequins to represent all the seven men in her life and her traumatizing relationship with them, much after Tracy Emin’s work. Sengupta, however, is a student of Shantiniketan and the Delhi College of Art, and is trained in Printmaking. She is also trained in Fashion Designing.
Aditya Basak’s recent installation which is yet to be featured at Gallery Aakar Prakar deals with the fading glories of the printing press, which marks its outset, once again, in the 19th c, and thereby, claims a colonial lineage. The very famous Bottala (Batala), the hub where printing presses were once housed and ran a lucrative business catered much to the reading habits of the Bengali life. The hand composed blocks, which were very much there even during the later half of the 1970s are completely outnumbered by the modern off-set and the electronic media. The last couple of presses that still bring out ‘jatra’ posters at the Bottala area haunts the avid reader with their very smell of the printing inks and the typical tapping sound. Aditya Basak makes use of the letter compose tables, glow signs of 19th c reproductions of the ‘Krishnalila’ – prints from Bottala, old wooden blocks and videos screening the printers at work.
With a growing interest on the more unconventional media, Kolkata now undoubtedly expresses a greater flexibility and marked transgression in its exploratory ventures and one documents the recent trends, unique to a city, molded much by the colonial history.
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