The everyday lives of women have been a central theme in Soma Das’s works for long. Drawing on the miniature painting tradition, she creates vignettes from a woman’s life, magnifying moments of labour and respite that often get overlooked. She has, over time, documented her observations in a daily diary. Das combines these with memories of growing up in a conservative family in Bengal, with her early years shaped by the women in her life, from family members to classmates at an all girls’ school. At the ongoing show, Vichitra, which brings together 14 artists from three generations, you get to witness the evolution of the Kolkata-based artist’s practice.
There are subtle shifts in the way she expresses the dreams and desires underlying the mundanity of daily living. In Home Sweet Home, she maps out a house through the objects that represent the various spaces. The only figure visible at the head of the painting is of a woman in the kitchen, with her labour and energy knitting the various spaces into a home.
If you walk through Vichitra, presented by Emami Art at the Temporary Gallery in Patna’s Bihar Museum, you get an overarching sense of the artist as the documentarian. Like Das, other participating contemporary artists like Prasanta Sahu, Anjan Modak, Ujjal Dey, Pradip Das, Tapas Biswas and Kushal Ray too chronicle subtle shifts in the inner lives of people, be it the migrant labour or those whom official records overlook. Joining the contemporary practitioners such as Das and Dey are seniors like Arindam Chatterjee, Arunima Choudhury, Partha Pratim Deb, Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri and Suman Dey, who have pursued formal questions of figuration, colour and abstraction. The works of two modernists, Lalit Mohan Sen and Kartick Chandra Pyne, enter into dialogue with contemporary works.
“The exhibition travels from Bengal to Bihar to mark and to extend a cultural relationship between the two regions that reaches back centuries,” states the curatorial note. Spanning mediums like painting, sculpture, photography, textile and print, the show’s title draws from the Sanskrit word that means the “variegated and the many-sided”, thus framing a body of work that resists a single narrative. “The participating artists belong to no common school and share no single subject. They are united instead by an attentiveness to the overlooked: the labour, materials, gestures, and lives that larger histories tend to pass over,” adds the note.
Take, for instance, the photographs by Kushal Ray from the series Ladakh: A Syncretic Living (1987-2017). A self-taught photographer, his background in journalism has informed his style of image-making. Instead of going down the oft-trodden route of capturing the rugged landscape of Ladakh, Ray has chosen to focus on the humanity of the region and its rich cultural memory. The photo, Women Wait with Flowers to Greet a Religious Leader, in a way takes forward elements of the story that we came across in Das’s painting in the show. Here too, you witness those “in-between” moments. They become far more interesting than the actual act that the women might perform later on in the day. The smile of anticipation on some faces, the wariness in others; the flowers held high in some of the hands and drooping just a tad as one of the women sits down, tired of the wait—the gestures and objects animate the frame, taking away the mundanity of the day.
Ujjal Dey too becomes an archivist through his textile works, only this time for ecological loss and intangible memory. Born to a Bengali family and having grown up in Bihar, Dey acts as a bridge between Kolkata and Patna in the show. “He is influenced by indigenous techniques and precolonial methodology of textile dyeing,” says Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator, Emami Art. Dey makes his own dye from natural materials to create abstract works. He draws on the memory of his grandmother and mother applying mud, or lepa, to the walls of the house. “It was this act of feminine labour that he grew up with. Though it was commonplace while he was growing up, the practice of lepa is not as widespread anymore. He dwells on this memory to also reflect on how everyday rituals connected people with the local ecology and land,” elaborates Sahu.
Another artist in the show, Pradip Das, turns acid-etched iron and found objects towards the memory of Partition and what identity means in a post-colonial nation. He is known for creating immersive installations during Durga Puja to create conversations around poverty, marginalisation and politically instigated violence.
Das also talks about things that are getting lost in the urban milieu. Sahu cites an example of his work from last year that focused on Art Deco buildings, which are now confined to a single lane in Kolkata. “His research-based practice looks at how, through sheer self-motivation, we can hold on to these elements,” says Sahu.
The venue itself holds a lot of meaning, going beyond the function of an exhibition space. Vichitra hopes to create a continuum of dialogue between Bihar and Bengal, which share centuries of history not just with each other but also with the North-East and Odisha. “We are looking at the larger context of the space—one where borders dissolve. Bihar Museum has been bringing in voices from different parts of the country. And we feel at this juncture, it is important to show art from Bengal, which is connected to the past but also situated in the present,” elaborates Sahu.
At Temporary Gallery, Bihar Museum, Patna, till 21 July, 10am -5pm daily.