'''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…
