10 March, New Delhi. Prayag Shukla ji, a renowned art critic, opened the group show “Manjusha” at the Visual Art Gallery at the India Habitat Centre. The show is scheduled to run through March 15. Johny ML, an art critic and curator, wrote an article for the catalogue that was also issued on this occasion. That article is here – Editor
Johny ML
A Group Exhibition of Paintings, Prints, Sculpture and Ceramics.
Manjusha means a beautiful jewellery chest. Artist-curator Chaita Basu Jena looks at the works of her contemporaries as jewels meant to be cherished and flaunted. Almost twelve years ago Jena came up with an idea to showcase the works of fifteen artists including herself without claiming any theoretical cohesiveness or stylistic similarity among the participants. It was like a coming together to celebrate each one’s creativity in different mediums along with the friendship that they shared. Manjusha II, once again brings in apparently the same set of artists for aesthetic appreciation and approval from the public. However, the curator knows that both appreciation and approval of the public are mostly relative, depending on their tastes and perspectives, but it is imperative for her to present the works and wait for the best to happen.
From left Chaita Basu Jena, Prayag Shukla and Tribhuvan Kumar Deo
With diverse educational and professional experiences, these artists, namely, Sudhi Ranjan Maharatha, Sharma Muni Lambardar, Swapan Kumar Saha, Krupa Sindhu Barik, Hareet Basu, Subir Kayal, Saswati Choudhuri, Sukanya, Gouri Bhowmik, Chaita Basu Jena, Shubhankar Tarafdar, Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Lalit Maity, Priyoum Talukdar and Saroj Kumar Rout, have been creating works in their respective mediums and exhibiting in various venues in India and elsewhere. Their chosen mediums, as represented in this exhibition are painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics; each medium has its own autonomous existence in the contemporary art world. The curator wants to emphasise that the autonomy of these mediums is never compromised for the sake of glittering effects or pompous spectacularity.
Transmedia experimentalism is one eye-catching thing that we see in the contemporary art scene and the effects of such creativity mostly hover around the formalistic aspects, taking the viewers to the multiple layers of meaning and feeling. While object experience is one desirable thing when it comes to the appreciation of contemporary art, divesting the art objects of their meanings could leave them hollow shells once taken out of the exhibition context, which is largely determined by the spectacles built around the exhibition logic itself. The works of art however have a different existence outside these expository contexts, an existence much depended on their aesthetical and hermeneutical values. In other words, in their pure life, away from the artists’ studios and exhibition contexts, works of art are orphans who are destined to trace back meanings within and through the temporal frameworks.
Manjusha Il as a whole delves deep into a sort of mediatic purism in which each artist explores the chosen medium, at the risk of being called a conventional artist, and presents the works in a secular and temporal context without making thematic or theoretical connectivity with the other works surrounding them. Here, neither the curator nor the artists are hard pressed to follow a pattern, theme, idea or medium. Therefore, the freedom of expression and the expressed become all the more important for a considered perusal by the audience. In the process, there could be a lot of takeaways including the open possibilities of comparing the given works with the accumulated idea about contemporary art in general and also the discourses pertaining to the conventional-cutting edge binaries.
All the fifteen artists have presented the very best of their works and Manjusha II being a platform that features a variety of aesthetical expressions, could easily consolidate its position in the art scene and derive momentum for the forthcoming editions.
