“The demonstrations of demolition/must prevail,” goes a line from Ayan Mukherjee’s poem, “Trap” — the anchor around which the exhibition, Raconteurs Season 2: Episode 1, Fnaad/TRAP, was woven. The show was on view during the peak of the protests demanding justice for the victim of rape and murder at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital. Fittingly, the predominant mood of the show was unsettling, with dim lighting, dire messages scrawled on the walls, and the ominous words of the poem, “Trap”, being narrated over the speaker, making it impossible for viewers to avoid the harsh realities underlined by the artists.
Women dominated the artworks, with their poignant eyes peering from behind the reddish-pink haze in Debarati RoySaha’s works and their fists raised in protest in spite of vultures tearing at their flesh and clothes in Vandana Kumari’s thick impasto creation. The latter, especially, managed to capture both the viciousness of patriarchal society and the vitality of protest against it in her mostly black-and-white pieces.
Saptarshi Ghosh presented a dystopic world where death is a spectacle and both man and bird are scavengers, hovering over the dead to benefit from the departed, in a scathing indictment of man’s selfishness and lust for power. Rajib Bhattacharjee’s sketch of a grotesque tangle of limbs against walls the colour of dried blood evoked a crime scene and the glibness with which a victim — dead or alive — is paraded to satiate human prurience.
The focal piece, though, was by David Malaker, who painted a cityscape full of familiar imagery — taalpatar shepai, Kalighat, the dinosaur sculpture at Salt Lake, trams — but a Kalighat-pat style Shiva dominated the canvas, indicating that the city is as anarchic and bizarre as 'Shib thakurer apon desh'.
