OF INFLUENCES, RECEPTION AND ENCOUNTERS…

Enquiries on what are art and how do we engage meaningfully with any form of artistic representation within a particular geopolitical space have intrigued both the practitioner and the spectator/ audience across generations. The level of identification varies depending on the medium, manner and mode of representation. There can be no identical pattern in mapping reception of any work of art. Often, the positions being interchangeable (artist/spectator),an artist or the recipient of any mimetic art is responding to her inherited traditions that  can be directly related to her field/domain or could be non-artistic or beyond the domain of ‘Art’ and still have relevance in the creative process. The individual artist might choose to respond to a particular phenomenon and still be selective in interweaving her experiences in the process as she finds her subject matter- which is an eternal quest for relevance. Whether an artist like the ‘author’ figure is/ not present in the final displayed ‘product’ is indeed a grey zone. It is better if we accept that a piece of art actually leaves traces of direct or several other encounters which have shaped the journey of an artist which we fondly call the ‘process’. Thus the process of ‘understanding’ an artistic intervention is an individual act that includes sensory perception/s and also a social act of recognition- recognising the multiple interfaces, identifying the diverse intersections, participating in the meaning making process, demystifying the idea of product and the language used. That does not mean that we can ignore the history of commissioned art, patronage and the market. Recent art interventions, produced especially in times of excruciating anxieties, will thus have their own sociology of ‘understanding’ and contest established art historiographies. Inadequacies in existing models of ‘appreciation’ are already being felt and we have to realign our positions. ‘ThainBodol’ as we might rightly put. Art can/does challenge existing order of things and yet refrain from being didactic, though it might select to deconstruct or destabilize social codes, conducts. The process becomes more complex with the introduction of gender, caste, class as categories which the artist might have deliberately introduced/ engaged with.

Mahjabin Majumdar evokes the story telling traditions that form the base of several religious practices of our subcontinent-of nations and borders. Oscillating between faith and doubt, her latest interventions provide a context for every human action and inaction. Through the representation of the body of a contortionist, she deconstructs the socio-religious codes which are shared knowledge systems. At times orders are imposed from above to monitor the body, mind and soul. The verbal and the non-verbal, the literary text, the spoken words, the performativity of language-all find place in her repetitive usage of Imaan and Shakeen as the kern motif of her visual narrative. Alluding to the great chain of beings or the day of judgement, she engages critically with human nature and the several in-between spaces. Human beings, having attributes of the both the Supreme and the beast, probably struggles with faith and doubt which are elusive. The major tone in this journey is a deep sense of loss, sorrow, ennui. The enactment of remembrance is personal and collective. The body remembers the scars, the stories of oppression and yet celebrates the moments of transgression in ecstasy –often merging with organic, unrefined, non-human energies. The colour palette used in the series also reminds us of the process of becoming- the basic, ordinary, commonplace transforming into a dance of subversion. The performing body liberates itself from social taboos and attempts to write a history that was denied to her across time and space. The idea is not to wait for the ‘final day’ or experience the promised land of milk and honey without any action.

Dheeman Bhattacharyya  (Dheeman Bhattacharyya is a performer and teaches Comparative Literature in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan).

MONOCHROME OF LOSS AND REJUVENATION

Image making in the new millennium has liberated itself from the dilemma of engaging with different tools of documentary in the age of mechanical reproduction. 20th century saw the encounter between academic realism and individual improvisation leading to over emphasis on process based practice deriving tools from traditional techniques in the early modernist phase to reengagement with different process of performative actions with pigment in late modernist abstraction. The linguistic shift from representational forms to mark making as an open-ended encounter of social and cultural signifiers, transformed painting into a flattened space of open encounter of multiple signs derived from diverse source and references. Especially in the age of digitized network and post mediatic time, painting is a neo space of social meetings.

In the words of Felix Guttari,

"The emergence of [the] new practices of subjectivities of a post-media era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted reappropriation of communicational and information technology, assuming that they increasingly allow for: [..] Innovative forms of dialogue and collective interactivity”

Mahjabin Majumdar’s paintings in this exhibition explore the possibilities of image making as an open field of unlimited access and encounter in the new age of post mediatic encounter. Traversing a wide spectrum of personal and the historical as an intertwined network of references Mahjabin opens up the discourse of painting into the realm of the fiction and transcultural utopias ushering a new possibility of cultural coexistence and cohabitance.

In this respect process plays an important role in creating these interfaces and encounters of images and references. Mahjabin uses the process of layering as an intuitive act of building of space to a concrete juxtaposition of the dark and the light . Often reversing the process of layering, her canvases takes the viewers into a complex network of foreground and background that goes beyond the known territory of the natural phenomenon of light and darkness and transform their relationship into a conceptual inter play of inside outside, masked unmasked into the realm of lament and absence.

Mahjabin explores water colour as an interface of playfulness and control where process becomes a conversation of different layers of memories often engaging into a performative interplay. Drawing references from different memories of drama, movements and theatrically her painting evokes a baroque enactment that transcends the masculinity of the grand symphony into the very personal dynamics of a soloist.

Monochrome finds a specific role in Mahjabin’s pictorial framework. Many a time artists have explored monochrome as a device to engage in very specific research or investigation of form or space. Monochrome has been both a tool for academic and structural analysis of form and space . Monochrome has also been a means to reflect social critic and cultural hegemony. It is also the process of unmapping spatial stereotypes of the back ground and fore ground, positive and negative dark and light. Mahjabin revisits many of these ways of engaging with monochrome where she explores different shades of red and transforms paper into a memory of making steins and washes. Revisiting different process of  tonal gradation and  stippling techniques, there is an attempt of engaging with the internal memory of process beyond the immediate experience of realism or abstraction and transcend process as a interplay of the physical and the psychological, towards a body of recollection and reconstitution , loss and rejuvenation, fragments and the multiple.

Documentary is another very significant phenomenon of Mahjabin’s practice. Reengaging with different tools of investigation and documenting her paper works creates a trans anthropological narrative of fragmented forms juxtaposed against each other and create a performative encounter of diverse references made accessible only in the post mediatic network and reconfigures new relationship between references of different time and space in the present.

Material in Mahjabin’s practice is a conglomeration of physical and archival manifestation. It is a confluence of the organic and the simulation of spaces where time, history and memory collapse in unfolding the dark steins of dried up wounds, spirits of unheard songs sips through the different shades of the black red as pigments dissolves into grains of lightness.

Sanchayan Ghosh

(Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist pedagogue working as an associate Professor in Department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. He has been exploring pedagogy as art practice and regularly exploring site specific art as an interface of different kinds of private and public situations)