Eloquent tales
Nabanita Guha’s Passage of Time
The cultural season begins this year with galleries showcasing younger talent through group shows.
One such group show Allegories at Art Konsult, explores the sensibilities of six young contemporary women artists, who come from diverse backgrounds, but who share a unique sensitivity towards their surroundings based not only on a keen observation but also participation in the same.
Commenting on the existent socio-cultural reality in terms of time and space through their work.
In Nabanita Guha’s works, the protagonists are mainly women. Her present works are a combination of line, stitches, calendar art, comic book, photo-real coloured foliage that engage with women aspirations, as well as reality.
Interestingly, she has used imagery derived from the popular Amar Chitra Katha comics with their glossy gods and goddesses within a calenderish genre to create a visual vocabulary that articulates the physical, mental and cultural restriction imposed upon women within patriarchal society. The concern for the women continues with the use of stitchery that symbolises women’s work and sensibilities, combined with indigenous textile printing with very folk elements.
The male as a defiler and desecrator, of the urban landscape and further of the post modern mindscape is shown in Sareena Khemka’s mixed media on paper works. Hybrid animal-human forms can be seen urinating and vomiting garbage within the already grimy and squalid niches of an urban environment. Colours are subdued, almost absent from the yellow and grey of this urbanscape. A similar treatment using natural pigments on wasli can be seen in Gopa Trivedi’s painted stories of lives of people in isolated environments. The image of an old man with his back turned towards the viewer, lying on the pavement, with a radio transistor as his sole companion is simultaneously intimate and yet compelling.
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