Triloka

A loose thread, a piece of brick, a clot of wires. Three contemporary artists pick up ordinary materials in the 5th edition of Triloka, to give form to worlds usually smoothed over. Here, we are less interested in seamless construction, and more in unruly accumulations, vibrant snarls, and the discovery of interstitial, in-progress and abrasive processes. A proposal emerges - to feel for the rough grain of things, enter into the logics of porosity, breaking points, pressures and catalytic changes, from which a sensitive and tense texture of reality can surface.

 

Moumita Basak transforms the everyday realities of women in rural West Bengal through stitches and applique. In her new body of work, we see them in domestic and public spaces, in unusually mixed communities and assuming the ease of men. Without facial features, the figures express their particularity through posture. Basak does not want to make portraits of individuals - it is rather the social habitus that is at stake. What would a world be like, she wonders as she observes and collects scraps from her own life, that of neighbors, of intimates and strangers, in which an aunt can sit cross-legged in public, smoke as the boys do, meet with friends for ‘chai pe charche’. The subtle re-order causes, at times, an undoing; the boundaries of figures and spaces become tangled - “things are in conflict, nothing is clean”.

 

Also set in West Bengal, each of Nirmal Mondal’s terracotta fragments holds the memory of its whole. Parts of temple architecture, designed for mythological and historical iconography, are re-inscribed with conversations with clay craftspeople, testifying to their contemporary precarities as a result of uncertain and low-paying work. We enter into a negotiation with history - Mondal layers preservative tinctures on these testimonies, knowing that the surrounding ceramic will degrade over time. A fragile and incomplete monument is erected to the present moment. In other works, tableaux of the hybrid cultural history of Bengal are painted in pigment mixed with mud, already fading, on garments belonging to his grandparents. His grandfather’s voice and sandalwood fragrance are layered over a suitcase of “smudged” collaged images. Here is a tussle between the necessity to remember better, and the ceaseless erosion of the stuff of memory-keeping - brick, clay, pigment.

 

A piece only gains meaning in the context of a hyper-networked system in Nayanjyoti Barman’s work. Sculptural drawings trace an intuition spanning the artist’s childhood spent at electric power plants and the “tech-anxiety” of living with too many machine companions today. Here, quickly disappearing sparrows become enmeshed with the urban environments responsible for their decline, upon which vigorously branched trees and efflorescent fungi grow. Blueprints from his father’s electrical practice grid the drawings, as if attempting to schematise the composites of biological and industrial density. A sculptural series shows the temporal spread of a changing historical structure; electrical poles bear the inordinate weight of industrialisation in another series. In Barman’s world, “the sky is completely covered” with the material vestiges and detritus of waves of technological development, each quickly making the previous redundant.

 

In the hands of the three artists, the world is sensed and questioned with the breath of clay, the weight of cloth, and the traffic of lines. Here the life-force of materials is not subsumed within any greater order. We come close, and start our experience from within their cracks and contours.