History often intervenes within contemporary individual artistic practice as an idea. It percolates through stories, motifs and images, in which there remains embedded a strong visual culture of the time and also the artist’s field of enquiry. The River of Unrest...A Delta of Dreams, a recent solo exhibition of Paula Sengupta, held at Gallery Espace, New Delhi (from August 23 to September 30, 2024), takes off from a historical narration to lay out issues regarding the loss of natural space to habitat, while addressing other ecological concerns.
The exhibition begins with a reference to the siege of Awadh by the East India Company in the mid-19th century, and the consequent uprooting of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who was displaced by the British from his native land to Calcutta, the then seat of colonial administration in India. The incident of the Nawab’s relocation to an area on the banks of the Hooghly, later known as Metiaburj (Tower of Mud), is interwoven with another set of stories about the struggle for survival and hardship in the Sunderbans, leading to extinction and destruction of species and spaces at another end of the river. The second important motif that appears in the show is the banyan tree, that stands on the bank of the Hooghly opposite the Nawab’s ‘tower of mud.’ It holds within it two centuries of history, and as imagined by the artist, becomes a symbol of an era of “post truth.”
In fabricating the show’s design, Sengupta has intermingled reality in the form of historical narration and fiction based on first-hand experiences of diverse geographical sites. The layout of the exhibition overlaps with the idea of the “forest” that she has experienced in far off continents, and of the “jungle” in India. It is like a menagerie of the mind, which also becomes a metaphor for the much talked about menagerie Wajid Ali Shah once had. Elements of “unrest,” as undercurrents of anxieties, emerge in certain works through an irrational juxtaposition, wherein animals belonging to different geographical and climatic conditions are brought in to build a sense of the theatre of the absurd. The artist creates her body of works around this surrealistic space of the menagerie, that conjures up the idea of exotica. The complex linking of fragments of layered history associated with the land by the river requires a careful reading, to get a feel of the context complimenting the visuals in the show.
The exhibition acquires its cohesive nature with the artist’s selection of materials. Sengupta has long been interested in textiles and their colonial histories. In these works, she consciously chooses the delicacy and refinement represented by Lucknow chikankari, and used textiles like muslin and batik, indicating a passage of time. This adds a new dimension to the archival texture of the presentation. Sengupta is academically trained as a conventional printmaker, yet has extended the boundaries of her practice and diversified. The use of different kinds of materials and modes of production adds richness to her works. The displays at the show included two-dimensional framed visuals, sculptural reliefs with compressed cotton fibres, pages of an artist’s book containing lino-cut black and white prints, and animated moving images, intermingling among themselves to form a composite whole. The use of back-lit muted light, percolating beneath the networks of the visuals, also compliment the idea of the “dawn and dusk,” that Sengupta refers to as the “dreams of the delta.”
Adip Dutta is an artist and academic based in Kolkata.