Birla Academy of Art and Culture is all set to host an exhibition, showcasing their latest acquisitions at the Sarala Birla Gallery, beginning this Saturday. The exhibition called The Wind Will Carry Us: A Visual Journey of New Acquisitions and Newer Perspectives will have on display, a wide variety of modern and Indian contemporary artworks by artists, such as Anirban Seth, Parvathi Nayar, Jayashree Chakravarty, Rajen Mondal, Avijeet Singh, among many others.
“Birla Academy of Art and Culture as a multidisciplinary space and institution has its own basis of identifying and incorporating a visual, non-linear chronology of artistic trends and making them into a collection,” says theatre director Parnab Mukherjee.
“A collection, after all, is not just a monologue, but a dialogue between cosmology, reality and transcendental themes and subtexts, all of which, can be visualised floating independently in time and space. Any particular narrowing down, will almost always reveal different socio-political realities,” he adds. Mithun Das, Tapas Majumdar, Arindam Chatterjee, Diptish Ghosh Dastidar and Pradeep Rakshit are some of the artists who very well illustrate the point.
Whether the artwork is in more more traditional form, like acrylic or oil on canvas, or watercolour on paper or in some unconventional approach, such as, mixed media on leather or paper, archival print on paper, lithograph, tempera on paper or etchings, Chine-Colle, serigraph or even digiography- the exhibition will have a mix of themes which speak about both personal and private themes, through various experimental forms of expression.
Whether it is the simplistic bronze sculpture by Rohini Reddy, Sudhir Patwardhan’s work called Aaya, Patient and Mother, (acrylic on paper), Atul Dodiya’s Scribe on the hill (watercolour on paper), Julien Segard’s Monuments,(collage on paper) or even Shijo Jacob’s idea of the fences- in Fenced earth and Unlimited Sky (acrylic on canvas)- each of the themes and subtexts, convey with uttermost sincerity the pathos and complexes of human life in a ‘modern’ world.
There are photographs and archival prints on paper too, called Bijapur Heritage photograph by Mohammed Ayazuddin Patel, and Beyond Crossover by Umay Ray, both of which depicts a different perspective of looking/seeing altogether.
You can also trace some kaleidoscopic or absurdist elements in the works of Sanjeev Rao Guthi and Tapas Majumder. While Guthi depicts a colourful frame- with a dash of deep pink flowers, (quite similar to the shade of bougainvillea), to stand for the structure of a brain and two men standing on opposite sides, with their headless figures meeting in a yellow dash of colour, underneath two zebras, who are both looking in different directions, outwardly-with their back to each other, but heads intact. The imagery not just attracts attention for its brilliant use of colour, but also invites diverse interpretations, some of which end up in farce.
Tapas Majumder on the other hand, finds different images manifested on the most mundane but most dreaded inanimate object in human life- a lock, in the work called Paradoxical B (I-V, XVIII). Whether it is the face of an eyeless girl, the face of a tiger, a brain or faces of multitudes in general- his lock series will be one of the simplest and unique allegories you will come across, among the most extravagant works at the display.
“Our academy was founded in 1967 and houses an excellent museum of ancient and contemporary Indian and international artworks, starting from 2nd century B.C. to the 21st Century A.D,” says Sikha Roy, the curator of Birla Academy of Art and Culture.
“All the works displayed here have been collected over a period of five years, under the supervision of our chairman Jayashree Mohta. I personally like the works of Atul Dodiya and Sudhir Patwardhan,” she adds.
The exhibition -The Wind Will Carry Us: A Visual Journey of New Acquisitions and Newer Perspectives will open at the Sarala Birla Gallery, Birla Academy of Art and Culture on April 20 and continue till May 18, 3 pm - 8 pm