Ganges Gallery’s show of five artists, Intimate Chronicles, demanded intimate viewing. Not only because there were interactive works by one of them but also because of the detailing in those of the others. But since it was hosted just before the third wave came a-visiting, physical visits were put on hold. However, the best part of a bad bargain — cyber viewing of art — is that you could still make out how these young artists refused to be reined in by staid convention.
Take the only male artist of the group, Bihan Das. This Birbhum boy affirms his regional identity through the optical illusion of staccato movements in his scanimation (picture). Anchored in the principle of persistent vision, this technique of disarming simplicity by employing two layers of paper relays a sequence of fleeting images of Santiniketan. In the installation, Fictional Heirlooms, a circular montage is set in motion by moving a crankshaft, while in Imagined Heirlooms, paper cut-outs tumble out of matchboxes, revealing little visual tales of the area.
Ekta Singha’s fabric pieces are like dainty doilies with frills and lace. The title itself, Letter from Me to Me, clues you in on her visual haikus as confessional monologue. No. 1 is particularly intimate in its sense of aloneness and painful separation. Possibly of the artist from her mother or a mother-figure. The suggestion of pain percolates into her paintings, too, with cactus sprouting near a woman’s heart.
To Mallika Das Sutar, the public recognition of women doesn’t matter, resilience does. Anonymous women, toiling to survive, head held high, are worthy of homage as icons to be hung on the wall in decorative frames. Meenakshi Sengupta’s combative feminist pride is powered by a clenched fist and a V sign for the vagina to interrogate patriarchal ideals of femininity. And finally, there’s a bristly restlessness in the paintings of Sarabita Das, which suggest, in their brooding colours and textures, inchoate secrets submerged in the mind like strange, underwater life that even the sun can’t catch.
