"Shadow World" Curated by GHOSH at T-93 Art Gallery Kolkata

T-93 Art Gallery in Kolkata is set to host Shadow World, a solo exhibition by acclaimed artist Sabyasachi Mullick, from December 1 to 6, 2024. The show, curated by Dipayan Ghosh, celebrates Mullick’s philosophical exploration of perception, existence, and the nature of reality. Mullick, winner of the prestigious 3rd All India Patron Art Award 2023-24 by BIG I ART FOUNDATION SILIGURI, is known for his ability to transform ordinary objects into profound visual narratives, inviting viewers to look beyond surface interpretations.  

Drawing inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of subjective reality, Shadow World challenges conventional ways of seeing. Mullick’s artworks delve into the fragile interface between existence and nonexistence, transforming simple fragments into thought-provoking arrangements. The exhibition aims to question the limits of perception and encourage deeper reflection on the complexities of being and knowledge.  

Curator Dipayan Ghosh, a multidisciplinary artist and founder of the BIG I ART FOUNDATION SILIGURI, brings his expertise to the show. Renowned for fostering artistic growth in North Bengal, Ghosh has received numerous accolades, including the Bengal’s Beloved Teacher Award 2024. His previous curatorial projects, such as "MRITTIKA: Redefining the Essence of Soil" and Led the Heritage Site Multidisciplinary Art Project at Gouripur House in Kalimpong, West Bengal, have received critical acclaim from “Rashtriya Sahara newspaper” and “The Visual Time“ by World University of Design, New Delhi .  

Born in 1984, Sabyasachi Mullick’s journey spans scientific academia and the arts. A postgraduate in Molecular Biology & Genetics from the University of Calcutta, Mullick has participated in significant exhibitions like the Rajya Charukala Parshad and CIMA Award Show. His first solo exhibition, Scaling the Immaterial (2018), and his authored works on art and philosophy highlight his multifaceted career.  

Shadow World offers a compelling platform to experience Mullick's profound interpretations, marking a significant event in Kolkata’s contemporary art scene.

"MRITTIKA: Redefining the Essence of Soil" | The exhibition's design, conceptualize, and curate by GHOSH

 "MRITTIKA: Redefining the Essence of Soil"

At the Ramkinkar Exhibition Hall, Information Center Siliguri. On 19th September and 20th September 2024.

GHOSH (The Curatorial Note): Through this multidisciplinary exhibition, we are trying to comprehend, interpret, and redefine the shifting landscape of women's perspective in contemporary suburban and regional India.

The exhibition explores the profound connection between women, land, and the evolving landscapes in contemporary India, particularly within smaller cities. Through evocative artworks, it highlights how female creatives actively shape and redefine their environments, navigating the tension between tradition and modernity. Their art reflects the changing socio-economic landscape, emphasizing themes of identity, belonging, and resilience.

These women, deeply tied to the land, question its utilization, benefits, and significance in a rapidly transforming society. As active participants in reshaping their worlds, they use art to transcend geographic and social boundaries. A poignant aspect of the exhibition is its focus on local tea female workers, migrant and rural workers, and upper middle-class housewives (work from home), often invisible despite their significant contributions to urban landscapes. Their resilience and agency are amplified through painting, embroidery, soil printing, installation, photography, and mixed media, portraying their strength in the face of adversity.

The exhibition also juxtaposes contemporary architecture, interior design, and digital technology with rural traditions in wall designs featuring mythical story patterns, tribal, or folk styles. This interplay between modern and traditional elements offers a layered understanding of the changing landscape; where past and present coalesce into new narratives.

By redefining the role of the artist in contemporary India, these female creatives engage with global conversations on gender equality, environmental stewardship, and socioeconomic structure, making their work both locally rooted and universally relevant. Their contributions mark an evolving chapter in contemporary Indian art as they reshape narratives of place, identity, and belonging.

In conclusion, this exhibition underscores soil as a metaphorical and literal cornerstone, with female creatives redefining India's evolving landscapes. By exploring urbanization, migration, and economic shifts through marginalized women's perspectives, it emphasizes their vital role in shaping identity and community. The integration of art and modern design challenges conventional narratives, spotlighting women's resilience and trans formative influence on their environments.

Archana Anjali Tuti

(Contemporary textile art practitioner)

(Naxalbari, Darjeeling, West Bengal

The migration rate among women according to the most recent migration survey (GOI, 2020-21)

is 47.9% for women as against 10.7% of men.

Manisha Saluja

 (Interior and land art designer)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

Exterior digital 3D design, often commercial, intersects with land art, where technology becomes a vital tool for creating visually expressive landscapes.

Samina Tabassum

(Artist)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

A phone conversation between REDIFF (a migrant worker) and KAFIYA (his wife)

Romee Dey

(Artist)

( Siliguri, West Bengal)

This panel of work reflects the transformation of a rural mud wall and the traditional practice of cleaning floors with cow dung.

Payel Shil

(Artist)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

 Crafted from soil impressions collected at Terai tea plantations, this series of twelve clay dolls embodies the spirit and resilience of the women laborers who work there.

Debjani Dey

(Multidisciplinary artist)

(Kishanganj, Bihar)

These five photographs, alongside five paintings, depict the static, unvarnished realities of contemporary migrant workers—both men and women—whose presence and labor are integral to the fabric of today's urban landscapes.

 

Rozina Yeasmin

(Multidisciplinary artist)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

 

In some remote Indian villages, residents safeguard their homes from evil spirits by adorning the exterior walls with symbolic images of simple weapons and kitchen tools, applied using traditional mouth-spray techniques.

Sabita Roy Chowdhury,

 (Artist)

 (Dhupguri West Bengal)

This piece elegantly encapsulates the serene yet industrious rhythm of rural life in the Terai and Dooars region, offering a vivid portrayal of the villagers immersed in their everyday labors. It evokes a deep connection to the land and culture, reflecting the harmony between people and their natural environment.

Proshomaa Anindya Kakoli

(Contemporary art practitioner)

(Kolkata, WB)

This work highlights how human interference not only alters the climate but also transforms vegetation into hybrid forms, where organisms develop such close interactions that they behave as if they were hybrids or mutant .

 Subhashree Bose

(Artist)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

The rapid transformation of suburban India, coupled with diverse economic statuses, has significantly impacted women's roles and opportunities, reflecting a dynamic interplay of progress and disparity.

 Sangita Sur

(Exhibition installer)

(Siliguri, West Bengal)

The installation, using plastic chairs, represents the gathering of common people in political meetings through a very familiar object from our daily lives. These meetings temporarily transform the otherwise peaceful regional landscape into a dramatic backdrop.

Kiran Sarkar

(Artist)

(Alipurduar West Bengal)

We observe small trees confined within the narrow boundaries of charred urban bricks, symbolizing nature's resilience amid the harsh constraints of urbanization and highlighting the tension between organic growth and the oppressive man-made environment.

For the first time in a national level newspaper published from the capital Delhi, an exhibition of North Bengal took place in a wide discussion. Eminent Art Critic Sri Jai Tripathi in the Rashtriya Sahara Newspaper titled Our "MRITTIKA : Redefining the essence of soil".

 

 

 

Project Gouripur House (PGH) | Curator - Ghosh | BIG I ART FOUNDATION SILIGURI

 

Project Gauripur House (PGH) : The Gouripur House was established as the summer residence of the Roy Choudhury of Bangladesh in Kalimpong. It has enormous, tall French windows and doors and charming balconies that overlook the magnificent Kanchenjunga. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore took at least four extended vacations in this location between April 1938 and September 1940, but also became seriously ill in this location. He never fully recovered from the illness and died on August 7, 1941.

Gouripur House gave us some of Rabindranath's greatest final poems, including Janmadin ('Birthday", which he read aloud from this same home on All India Radio on his 78th birthday (in 1938). 

Gouripur House is an abandoned architectural structure. It has thick foliage and broken windows, and the structure is on the verge of collapsing. It was severely damaged during the earthquake on September 18th, 2011.

The Gouripur house is a two-story building with a tin roof and a false ceiling made of wood. It has an elongated wooden staircase, multi-coloured French-style windows with geometric patterns, numerous glass ventilators, and a tin roof. Despite all the amenities, there is no furniture. The rooms and passages of the house tell many stories.

A few of the site-specific artworks have been produced using a contemporary multidisciplinary approach while staying sympathetic to historical events and taking note of the deteriorated remnants of the current home's architecture. The architecture has developed an intimate link with the abandoned structure that goes beyond just its historical significance. Every piece of site-specific art is continuously interacting with this void, and These temporary installations of site-specific art can be seen on the balcony wall, the fireplace in the hall room, and the side of the stairs leading to the second floor of Gouripur House.  

An antique mirrored artwork (painting on canvas) was mounted on the center wall of this ancient wooden stairway after I took note of this obvious fact. The reflection of the identical staircase is also shown in this mirror artwork. It appears as though the staircase itself wants to recognise the owner of the worn-in footsteps in each visitor to the home or to catch a glimpse of the imprint that the man's long-ago experiences have left on him. In this mirror's reflection, though, the mark of that emptiness is solidifying with time. Similar to how an archaeologist unearths Egyptian white mummies in a desolate desert, this inanimate house's dead wall is revealed through a few randomly selected rectangular paper frames. This is similar to a finding where the present's deterioration speaks of the past. These blank frames are blending into the home and becoming wall decorations. Constantly seeing their sincere and reciprocal discussion will raise people's awareness of exterior ornamentation and decoration to an intellectual level. Whenever you do a Google search about Gouripur House in Kalimpong, Guru Rabindranath Tagore's 78th birthday in 1938 frequently appears. A modest clay empty vase with the words "জন্মদিন" (Birthday) was placed in Tagore's bedroom on May 17, 2023, to symbolise the reunion of that historical phenomenon with the emptiness of the current Gouripur House through "PROJECT GOURIPUR HOUSE (PGH)."

Another strangely beautiful architectural design of Gouripur House and its practical utility are eye-catching: making multiple square, colourful glass windows to let the daylight come from the wooden ceiling just above the large bedrooms of the house. As a result, even the dark rooms inside during the day created an enchanting scene with beautiful soft coloured light, which even today shrouds Rabindranath Tagore's bedroom in solitude and emptiness. Seeing this dramatic stage of light created inside the room, an actor was needed, and therefore a white, hairy, synthetic fiber cloth abstract protagonist stood in static mode as a metaphor for an unknown story in this empty room. This fictional character is like the only ingestion in this empty room, absorbing the soft light through his whole body.  

In the frigid light, the architecture of the vacant Gouripur House occasionally showed a dramatic or intellectual tone, or it seemed like an older storyteller expressing his own viewpoints through this undertaking (PGH). - Ghosh.

We congratulate the enthusiastic artists without whom this project (PGH) would not have been completed: Rajesh Barman, Sudeb Ghosh, Sushanta Paul, and Amit Sutrodhar.

www.bigiart.com  \ bigiartfoundationslg@gmail.com

'Long and Short of it' : First Curated Art Exhibition in Siliguri

 

'''Long and Short of it' : First Curated Art Exhibition in Siliguri. 

Exhibition Review : 

The pulsating world of Art is ready for yet another exclusive venture in Siliguri, a city which does not have the tag of being a metropolitan and which definitely does not belong to the so called popular vibrant spaces for Art Viewing but has a diverse population along with vivid art lovers and significant art practitioners.  Big I Art Foundation Siliguri in association with A.M (Art Multi-disciplines), Kolkata will host Siliguri’s first ever curated art exhibition with 7 of the most important contemporary art practitioners from Kolkata. ‘Long and Short of It’, curated by Ayan Mukherjee this exhibition will be hosted by Ramkinkar Kaksha, Siliguri Information Centre from 24th to 26th November, 2021, 2pm to 8pm daily.

This exhibition is designed as an assemblage of thoughts, characters, perspectives and insights along with creation a milieu of various practices of visual art which acts as a catalyst behind setting up this Exhibition. The last couple of years have been a stumbling block and bewildering times that our civilization attended to and underwent. People of every hierarchy in our society have encountered their share of complications and undertaken challenges .We have a job in hand now in adapting ourselves with this situation, shielding one and all thus trying to protect the society from this deadly Virus and assuring the durability of our existence.. On a different doctrine and dogma this entire occurrence of the sudden intruding of COVID 19 in our lives and settling down with ease and comfort may have been a bone; a blessing in disguise for human beings and the society as it undoubtedly has compelled us to evaluate, introspect and realize our ways of seeing and defining life along with our philosophical search and outlook towards life, renouncing the discrete threads of inequalities which intensely exists in our Society.. Times such as these advocate re-ignition and reassessment of our conventionalities. It demands rehabilitation of the demeanour and characters of our practical, social, political and intellectual thought spaces and recommends us to realise and retrospect on various facets of life when interrogating our existence holistically becomes mandatory.

Perspective from Ayan Mukherjee,the Curator : 

As a practicing curator my story telling being was intensely integrated to discover the psychology and receptions of visual artists regarding the current circumstances; how they counter and reciprocate  but more importantly the kind of dialogue various dialects of practices of different Visual Artists generates with times now and how they interact with the Society. I have been under the spell of working and collaborating with art practitioners of various generations for the least ten years curating exhibitions and art projects throughout India. Just like time and experience propels one to learn and unlearn his or her independent notion and opinion about both their personal and professional lives, I too have my share of journey of the same. While conceptualizing / planning projects my automatic choice of venue had been the popular and metropolitan cities of India as I was naively following the conventional path which I had learnt from the time I had started my journey. This dogmatic biasness in selection of art audience gave birth to a feeling of consistent dissatisfaction and incompleteness in my mind and I was definitely not ready to walk with it. Thus I made categorical plans to show and curate my projects in subaltern cities and off spaces in search of an extended audience. I wanted to stretch the boundary of art viewers as I felt it was severely needed for a progressive future. I genuinely believe that we need to involve and engage people with Visual Arts from diversified walk of life negating the creation of a psychologically driven ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’ of discrimination in art audience and be more dynamic and open towards making a place in lives of people who may not prevail in their lives as creative pundits.  With time visual arts have heedlessly distanced itself from the society of people who could have been persistent art audience. I believe the art practitioners would get an opportunity to engage and create dialogues with a much larger community and I unconditionally wanted to do something about it. Constructing Visual art projects like exhibitions and workshops for people living in the subaltern cities and towns who are outside that ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’ we have made with persisting metropolitan snobbery which in turn gives birth to precariously formulated Ego can jolly well be a positive step towards it. It may take time but we would be on the high way towards building an extended visual arts community.

In this exhibition which I believe is my first of many such attempts I have selected seven contemporary art practitioners  who are involved in adopting visual arts as a vehicle of engagement and narration of their individual mental spaces using diverse mediums of their preferences such as painting ,drawings ,  graphics , multimedia etc and the ‘LONG AND SHORT OF IT’  is that I was inclined towards creating an ambience of Visual Arts which would hook up and interconnect with each other to visually interpret the times we are living in and the repercussions of the same on our lives through collaboration with visual artists embraced with receptive minds and responsive characters namely ADITYA BASAK , ATIN BASAK , ARINDAM CHATTERJEE , CHHATRAPATI DUTTA , CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE , JAYASHREE CHAKRAVARTY  and SRIKANTA PAUL…