When contemporary art rubs shoulders with ancient artefacts

There was a room filled with the many forms of Kali curated by Gayatri Sinha, from Chhinnamasta holding her own decapitated head to an ivory-skinned bare-breasted Kali who seemed to have emerged from European classical art. In another room, Arpan Mukherjee used the fragile archaic medium of ambrotype to explore the changing landscape along the road from his village to the nearest town, tracing both the vanished guava trees and ponds and his own departure from the village. Bappaditya Biswas used the prisoners weaving room to tell the story of indigo and revolution with real textiles and clay models of prisoners.

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But where was Aradhana Seth’s exhibit? Sada: Jaile Baire (The Jail and the World) was listed in the catalogue, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. The visitors gaping at the gallows didn’t seem to know about it. The guards sitting there to make sure no one misbehaved had no clue. A museum volunteer pointed me towards the gate. But I could see no gallery there, no sign for Seth. Then I spotted Seth herself coming down the path.

“Where is your exhibit?" I asked her. “I am trying to find it."

“It’s right here," she said. “You are standing under it."

That’s when I understood that it had been hiding in plain sight. I had not been looking up. Her art was lining the path, on old-school placards that once were a common sight, like sandwich boards on lamp posts. The images seemed innocuous—everyday objects like mobile phones, locks and keys, social media logos. But they told a story. As you followed the path to the cells, the boards were signposts about the world the prisoners shed as they entered jail. And if you looked up at them on the way out, they told the reverse story of the accumulation of the accoutrements of the world they were entering as they left the jail.

Seth said later that she started collecting images of hand-painted signs when she realised they were becoming rarer in a digital world. Kolkata still has a lot of them and she said they somehow gave the city a different feel, a gentler touch. I had grown up with those hand-painted signs all around me. But I had never paid them much heed. They were just part of my neighbourhood. But as things disappear, we realise their value. Now I get to see them as art. As the curator note says, the exhibit is all about “dissolving the hierarchies between ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts".

I grew up with vague artistic pretensions but little actual training in art, high or low. I went to drawing school and was bored out of my mind drawing vases of flowers and platters of fruits in class. I only wanted to draw animals, whether in the zoo or in the forest. We had some coffee-table books on art which we had bought at a sale but my art practice was limited to the endless sit-and-draw competitions that peppered Kolkata winters. I had some sense of what was art and what was not. Reproductions of paintings of Greek goddesses that hung in French museums was art. The Jamini Roy prints that were in every other Bengali home was art. Street signs were definitely not art.

What has been exciting and eye-opening lately has been to see art extend beyond those “names" to street signs and more. And artists and curators are leaving the confines of galleries and museums to bring art to unexpected places. The Kolkata Queer Arts Month exhibits over December-January were spread over different venues—a gallery like Experimenter but also Pratyay, a halfway house for people recovering from mental health conditions, and Aranya Bari, an old house turned into a boutique cafe. In a way, the spaces gently messed with my childhood notion that art was not art unless it was displayed in a formal gallery. It’s been an education to see how art could slide into the nooks and crannies of familiar spaces and transform them into galleries.

In one room of Aranya Bari, Sriparna Dutta told a story of sisterhood and struggle entirely through intricate needlework. The piece was so large it filled up most of the room. At Experimenter, the same Sriparna Dutta had a tiny cloth book, with black and white sketches of people on each page, done in needlework. Those running stitches, so much a part of our homes, on blankets stitched from old saris, were now art.

All of this has been an art education for me, one that I was sorely lacking. Like most Indians, I grew up with a smattering of names—Gaganendranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, M.F. Husain, Francis Newton Souza. But art only made news when it ran into trouble like Husain’s, or fetched mega prices at an art auction, again like Husain. And I certainly knew a lot more about European schools like Impressionism or Cubism than I did about what was happening at home. That was not because my school art class exposed me to one and not the other. School art class exposed me to no art history at all. There were just more books on European art. I just drew scenes of the sun setting behind a mountain, vigorously using my oil pastels to set the sky aflame in shades of red and orange. I wish art class had taught me to look at art instead of trying to wear my oil pastels to nubs.

As a result I grew up both fascinated by art and intimidated by it. As a boy I would be taken to the Indian Museum and would sit in the sculpture gallery with my sketch pad reverentially trying to reproduce the centuries-old stone figures on paper. So it feels astonishing that now that same Indian Museum has a show called Dialogues Across Time, where contemporary art rubs shoulders with the ancient artefacts. The statues of the Yaksha and Yakshi and the wish-fulfilling tree that have greeted visitors at the entrance for as long as I can remember have now been joined by Subodh Gupta’s red cow. Dayanita Singh’s black and white photographs of a young Zakir Hussain lead up to a statue of a young Queen Victoria. A huge head of a crow looms in the insect gallery. Women in black chadors recreate the Last Supper. Whether it’s a dialogue or a face-off between ancient and contemporary is up to the viewer to judge. But it’s wonderful to see the blurring of the lines between art and artefact, not irreverent exactly but not petrified in reverence either. It’s as if the museum is trying to live up to its Bengali word jadughar, the home of magic.

Art in Kolkata seems to be getting its groove back.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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