Mixed media, Posters, Banners, Drawings, Video
Dimensions variable
My investigation seeks to compile an inventory of historical traces and contemporary events that interrogate today’s capitalist mode of production — a system that, in its relentless “drive for infinite self-valorisation,” contradicts the fundamental limitedness of natural forces and resources. Contemplating the metabolic rift, I examine the forces of forced labour and alienation that sever us from the very products of our natural bodies to cave in rifts in our social metabolism. This work plays on the tendency of art to mine the subaltern experience to lay bare the stark contradictions inherent in the capitalist mining of natural resources. It calls that art and active political protest are inseparable acts of resistance.
Working across multiple mediums — videos and drawings to diary-page sketches, banners, posters, book cover layouts, and wall texts wrought in charcoal and ink — I bring together these layers of concerns and contradictions. Infernal sentries celebrate the severing of the self in this sloshing time; our communes, our celebrations, and our connections lie amid abandoned graveyards of collective memory. This unnatural divorce from our humanity and our complicity in it, even as we weep forgotten tears of spilt comrade blood, diminishes us, degrades us, and strips us of our chaotic, complex, and inimitable humanity. The forest grows inside us, trees gnarl out of our ribs, as nature surges up from deep inside to protest the rupture that has torn us from ourselves.
Project 88, Banipur Art Society and Institute of Culture, Kohei Saioto, Sudip Chakraborty, Arzu Tarafdar, Subhankar Gain, Saptak Mistri, Labani Jangi, Ashis Dhali, Achinta Mandol
Anant Art Gallery