Wednesday, October 23, 2024

"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

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