You are reading this either in a newspaper or on a web-page. The process of writing this article involved moving from handwritten notes in notebooks to digital word documents. Highlighting these obvious facts serves to underscore the ubiquity of paper in our world, despite the digital age of screens big and small. This is precisely what ‘Propositions in Paper’, a recently concluded exhibition at Anant Art Gallery in Noida, aimed to emphasise. “Illuminating the materiality of paper and its uncanny ability to adapt to different forms of expression through its transmissive energy. Nowhere in the world is there an art award that centres on a material,” says Sohorpem Kazingmei, programme coordinator at The Anant Foundation for the Arts.
Around this time last year, the Anant Foundation for the Arts, in partnership with JK Paper, one of India’s leading paper companies, launched the inaugural JK Paper Award. This initiative attracted submissions from approximately 350 emerging and mid-career artists. A jury consisting of Delhi-based artists Sheila Makhijani, Manisha Parekh, and Ranbir Kaleka selected Sandeep Suneriya as the winner, with honourable mentions for Sriparna Dutta, Anshu Singh, Rutvi Vakharia, and Debojit Roy.
The exhibition was a dual showcase featuring Suneriya’s solo display and a group show of the honourable-mention awardees. It presented ‘paper’ as a kind of prima materia, a concept taken from western esotericism introduced by Aristotle to describe a primordial substance. The diverse artworks—incorporating fabric, threads, bamboo, terracotta, and metal wires alongside paper—initially seemed eclectic for a paper-focused exhibition. However, as Kazingmei noted during a walkthrough, the exhibition sought to historicise paper and explore its evolving gestures. She said: “Think of how paper has influenced the spread of religion and ideology, the becoming of a literate society, the emergence of an author figure, and the chain of transferences paper allows between idea to notation, memory to notation, and notation to transmission.”
‘Propositions in Paper’ reminded us that even in this digital age, the humble paper continues to shape and reflect our world. Historically, humans have named eras after matter—stone, bronze, iron, and now silicon—it is worthwhile to reflect on where, how and to what extent ‘paper’ has facilitated our civilisational history. Some highlights of the exhibition:
Small joys, eccentricities
Suneriya is a visual artist from Gujarat. Inspired by his everyday surroundings, his art highlighted the many lives of the city, addressing societal rules—who is allowed to travel, and where one can eat. His solo show featured postcards and train tickets documenting life in motion during the COVID-19 pandemic. By challenging the ironic ‘Happy Journey’ printed on train tickets, his artworks displayed small joys amidst the turmoil. Suneriya’s artwork dignified fear and loss with love and determination, liberating us through eccentricity, play, humour, and creativity.
Transcriptions on fabric
Transcribing testimonies verbatim on scrolls and quilted textiles could be seen in Sriparna Dutta’s work. “Inhabiting the role of the artist-chronicler, her art-making process questions the politics of representation that encompasses recording someone else’s life narratives,” said Kazingmei. The red and white stitched quilted base evoked the gentle presence of loved ones and a soft ground to hold different stories that women tell in her workshops. It is quirky, evocative, and calls the viewer to come down to the floor, caress it, and be comforted in its embrace.
Imprinting on textile
First came paper, then the invention of the letterpress. Going by this timeline, Anshu Singh’s handmade jute and cotton tapestry interspersed with tight black knots imitated bold, stoic printed letters: Kaam Karigar Kamchor. Singh, a Varanasi-based artist from a family of weavers and textile workers, also presented other artworks, including a set of hand movements behind the act of weaving and the creation of textile works such as expensive Benarasi sarees, embroidered onto paper.
Moist surfaces, spaces
Paper loses its surface when placed on water; in fact, it ends up disintegrating. The art of doing watercolours on paper is a careful calculation to strike the right balance between wetness and colour. Rutvi Vakharia’s watercolours gathered the moisture-laden domestic spaces of lower-middle-class living realities onto rice paper. Vakharia’s work, according to Kazingmei, showed that “other entities are equally important as family picture albums to study the lived realities of domesticity”.
Obsession with lines
On the one hand, there is the frailty of material; on the other, the magic of holding knowledge. An architectural blueprint notated on paper is later translated into an actual building. Debjyoti Roy’s linear iterations with bamboo sticks emulated the logic of transformations from drawings. He is inspired by ethnographic objects such as fish traps, scaffoldings for religious idols and pandals, traditional bridge structures, and the gradually emerging urban infrastructure from his surroundings in Bengal. One of his most striking pieces, Kazingmei added, was a set of terracotta plates with impressions of bamboo sticks “appearing as if (it’s) a language carrying sacred know edge, like Egyptian hieroglyphs”.
This article is written by Prachi Satrawal