When Kanishka Raja passed away in 2018, the art world marked his passing by describing his singularity as a contemporary artist, someone ‘caught between two worlds’. The ‘two worlds’ certainly included the United States of America, where Raja studied and lived for 30 years, and India, the home to which he returned throughout his career for inspiration. But Raja was also caught between an early commitment to abstractionism and the problem of representing his experience within this genre. Raja’s problem lay in relating his work to his Indian home and heritage, to India’s post-colonial reality, and to the displaced diaspora in which he worked.
His art is generally described as a form of geometric abstraction, but the description seems entirely inadequate. His paintings are slow, meticulous, exquisitely conceived and executed in their balance of shapes and colours against the rectangle of each canvas. They all carry a depth of memory, emotion and, often, a quizzical humour that turns them into something closer to stories. It is no different in Ground Control, his posthumous solo exhibition being hosted at Experimenter, Ballygunge Place (on view till October 15). As was Raja’s wont, the exhibition engages with multiple media and several lines of thought.
It is difficult to pin down the cotton tapestries and oil on panel paintings on display that seem like well-drawn-out blueprints. Raja’s plans to ‘control’ — his meticulous lines notwithstanding — go awry and it is this loss of control that the artist explores. The lines could apply to rules and regulations, notations, or the timing, precision and discipline that govern the fields of music, sports technology and architecture — recurring influences in Raja’s work. For an artist raised in West Bengal, in a region divided between India and East Pakistan after Partition, the arbitrary lines that divide his canvases also signify something else: borders and their futility.
The most obvious influence in this show, though, is that of his growing-up years. Raja grew up in Calcutta, in a family steeped in textile design and weaving. This is a craft that needs exceptional control and skill and Raja had always been mesmerised by the complexities of weaving techniques and its underlying grid — a pattern that has been a constant source of exploration for him. The works on view in Ground Control are woven by the master weaver, Dipak Haldar, in close collaboration with Raja, on double-weft handlooms in Phulia. Many a meaning emerges between Raja’s conception of these blueprint-like works and their execution — the artist was as interested in his vision as he was in the translation, the slippages and the transformation of form, from drawing to painting to scanning to weaving on the looms in India, and back on stretchers in his studio in Brooklyn as woven paintings. The works take shape from art to craft and vice versa and from paper to image to thread. Since the works underwent several processes, some executed in Raja’s studio and others in the weavers’ pit looms, Ground Control also explores aspects of control and its absence that a creator has over an artistic work.
That is not the only sort of control Raja explores. Some of these blueprints are of sports fields — growing up, Raja played several field sports and remained intrigued by them, especially because sports are defined by lines and rules that qualify these lines. His interest in them was natural given his awareness of the fractured political history of South Asia, where lines of control are real and palpable and the punishments for breaking them dire.
At the core of the exhibition is one of Raja’s pavilions, which he envisioned in drawings, notes, sketches and digital renditions, and which is influenced by Durga Puja pandals that appear every year in the city, bringing together art, craft, public and private spaces, music, installation and interactivity. With the musician, Mike Ladd — a long-standing collaborator — Raja created soundscapes for these pandals from deeply layered sonic sources. Here no lines hold. In fact, it is the blurring of lines that this seemingly chaotic festival excels in.