The Experimenter Art Galleries have opened three very different shows across the city: All you need to know

Drawing from personal experiences, deep memories, and lived practices, assemble three curated exhibitions by the Experimenter Art Galleries across all their venues in Kolkata. We attended the opening of each of the exhibitions and share reasons for you to attend as well.

Paint as skin

Among the many ways art has been perceived, one of the most distinctive stances we have come across is the use of paint as a healer. Through her works in Grid for a Disappearance on display at Experimenter-Ballygunge Place (till September 19), Biraaj Dodiya brings together steel sculptures, photographs, and oil paintings on linen. Talking about the point of emergence of the whole idea, she mentions, “Human beings have a desire and a need to support, repair, and resist the constant state of collapse our world is in. The violent images we are seeing in the last few years, or the ease with which we see a body being held, carried, or disposed off, have been on my mind. I have been working on the idea of collapse and support forms. Last year at the Kochi Biennale, I made an installation in which the central form was a medical stretcher. That got me thinking about its relationship with the body, its horizontality. Here, there is an expanded scale which is uncanny, stranger, and it starts looming over you.”

One of the most interesting aspects of her works is how seamlessly two different media such as paint and photograph merge within a frame to form both a continuous vision and a break from monotony. She states, “It began like an exercise where the drawings and photographs were notes for larger paintings. I started to find parallels when they came together, and a third view got activated. The colours and the forms look like bones and marrows; I started thinking of them as scans of my larger work.”

From the industrial ashes

Pune-based artist Prabhakar Pachpute specialises in creating art out of industrial mining and marginalisation. Keeping this as his focal point, he explores themes such as inner turmoil, emotional collapse, and erosion of landscape in his ongoing exhibition, Lone Runner’s Laboratory at Experimenter Outpost, Alipore Museum (till October 17). The gallery, with its paintings and sculptures, transforms into a reflective space with unsettling encounters and silences, yet has a silver lining through it all. Observant viewers will be able to identify how Prabhakar loves to experiment with mediums in his work. Bronze, jesmonite, wood and acrylic all form a major part of his works on and off canvas. His body of work deeply projects metaphorical animals and landscape imagery to put forward his thoughts.

Prabhakar explains that the exhibits are part of a larger work. “Museum Menagerie is a work, which is the culmination of my visits to different mining and anthropological museums. It explores what lies beneath, and why there are hollow spaces in the artworks. It also makes me curious about questions like who is the predator and who is the prey?”

Talking about his choice of materials and experimentation with them, he says, “I spend a lot of time with the material and process. I am working with wood carvings, jesmonite, and bronze. It stems from my thought process and the nature of the mediums. I also use a lot of clay in my works. Using a certain material is always a conscious choice for me. I don’t want to make a permanent structure because nothing in life is permanent. It’s that dilemma I try to address through my concept and medium. Right now, I’m working on animations. The digital exposure we live in is highly visible. But I would want to include both the digital media and manually made pieces in my body of work.”

Pertinent conversations

Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky is a unique combination of films and paper archives, brought together by Dhaka and New York-based artist Naeem Mohaiemen. On display at the Experimenter-Hindusthan Road (till October 10), the exhibition marks the Kolkata premiere of his new film A Missing Can of Film, which explores the legacy of filmmaker Zahir Raihan and the role of cinema during the Bangladesh Liberation War. His body of work called Jamahiriya Means People: Okba Ibn Naafa, a series of prints inspired by the reading habits of his father, and Karen’s Last Books (Ibsen to Nguyen), a work inspired by the reading list of Karen Wentworth before she underwent willful euthanasia in 2023, are also on display. With a unique name for the exhibition and deeply personal displays, viewers to see how archival histories shape observation, perception, memories, thought processes, and make one live in the shadows of an undying past that actively shapes the present.

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