Inscribed Imaging

Multi-media art works by Anirban Ghosh

Visual art, as a creative form of expression of one’s ideas, experiences, responses, and thoughts seek for newer ways and means to rebuild itself in an innovative manner. This driving force motivates the artists to go beyond the conventions and experiment with curiously unusual methods. One such experimentation involves use of more than one media to create a single work of art or a series of works. This innovative discipline, dismantles and dissolves the prevalent discriminations between ‘pure’ forms of art. Further, it allows them partake in a process that tends to unify a large range of art forms into one composite experience encouraging multiple readings as the viewers see, read, ponder, and construe meanings. In other words, these works, as in the present show Inscribed Imaging make it essential that the viewers move beyond the mental and visual engagement and embark on a journey that requires navigation, dialogue, and interpretations. Seemingly, this engagement looks complex and layered and it is true. But visual art practitioner and designer Anirban Ghosh, with his impeccable skill and fine-tuned concepts, makes this participatory act inviting and enjoyable and makes the viewer-participants feel at home while steering through each work and taking part in the meaning generating process. Participants, who are no more merely ‘viewing’ the works become ‘insiders’ who engage with reconstructing the experiences offered by the works.

Anirban, through his works and with reference to his own cultural readings of texts and life, builds up multiple realities amplified by multiple mediums like screen print, acrylic mirror sheet, video, sketchbook drawings, prints, readymade objects, found objects QR code stand, QR code generator, archival paper, mobile phones and various other technology driven means. Multiple mediums reflect on the present time and its complexities where the social, political, and cultural nuances of our layered lives offer insights into the concerns, values, and perspectives of our immediate time. While Anirban’s art may not adhere to a singular, unified narrative, or style, its richness and multilayered experiences are bound to provoke multiple interpretations as the contemporary time gets recorded into a galaxy of imaginations which stand out, like the viewers, as sharp witnesses of these process-oriented works. Anirban, has clearly diverged from the conventional modernism offering alternative approaches to artistic expressions. He creates a dynamic landscape of creative expressions mapping the diverse points of intersections and thus allowing the mediums as much as the image-text contents to reconstrue the significance of the multiple voices.  While engaging with his works one cannot help the feeling that you belong to a world where every kind of texts has the potential to be reimagined and every visual comes with a deeply inscribed text. Active participation of the viewer-participants can decrypt the works, make them alive and decode them once again – they can let them have an after-life too!

Dr. Soma Bhowmik - Curator