Whether the title of the exhibition, Bare Liminal, held at Akar Prakar was justified or not is debatable, but its display of an established artist’s works alongside those of her younger colleagues was unusual. The variety and the high quality of the works on display also set apart the exhibition curated by Siddhi Shailendra. Jayashree Chakravarty’s mixed-media works, based on her research of nature and ecology, were an extension of her earlier installations denoting nature under threat.
Urbanisation of semi-rural regions and the resultant disarray of the ecosystem were the inspirations behind the multi-layered mixed-media works of Debasish Mukherjee. These works, rendered with graphite among other material, are visually arresting but one needs to know the back story to get the picture. Saurav Roy Chowdhury, who admires classical sculpture and is stimulated by its strength, interprets two iconic figures in his own way. However, his plaster Chariot and the inside-out fibreglass cast of a head are more clearly conceived.
Arhant Sreshtha’s colour photographs endow dull, sublunary objects with an extraordinary life of their own. Scaling up the illumination focused on these objects possibly did the trick. Manir Mrittik of Bangladesh uses infrared photography to bring out the secret life of the Sundarbans in a series of dark and sombre prints on bamboo paper. Fraught with mystery, the mangrove forests and the driftwood take on fascinating sculptural forms not visible to the naked eye. Supriyo Karmakar’s extraordinary pen-and-ink line drawings methodically analyse the weave of cotton cloth like the lightweight, versatile gamchha that is used all over the subcontinent. He uses photographs on which he leaves his mark as a part of his project. His sculpturesque drawing of undulating coarse textile seems to respond to touch (picture).
East Midnapore is known for its white ant hills and these transient natural formations were the inspiration behind Debiprasad Bhunia’s unusual sandstone carvings. At times resembling melting wax, they become symbols of impermanence.