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a river of unrest … a delta of dreams by Paula Sengupta

a river of unrest … a delta of dreams by Paula Sengupta

August 23, 2024 – September 30, 2024

Artworks in Exhibition

The gardens that Paula Sengupta creates through different mediums are places of poetic explorations and expositions. Detailed blooming flowers, a menagerie of animals, both domestic and exotic, flowing waters, abstracted and life-like, life-giving, remind her and us of impossible pasts and possible futures. The animals take center stage. Through them the artist creates a language of longing, a metaphor for artistic languages beyond the spoken word….

Sengupta inscribes her print-based practices, textile works and animations (in the truest sense of the word) into these philosophical realms and questions by rooting them in art history. In the tapestry of Indian art, animals have always played an intimate and profound role, weaving through the ages like sacred threads in a vast, cosmic loom…. Sengupta draws from this tradition and expands it; animals are not just subjects to be depicted; they are active participants in the cultural and spiritual life of the people. They are symbols of the other and the similar, guardians of the sacred, companions in the journey of life, and reminders of the interconnectedness of all beings. Through their portrayal, animals transcend their physical forms and become metaphors for the deeper truths of existence.

By taking them out of the imagined lawns of the Nawab [Wajid Ali Shah], away from the shores of the rivers of unrest (as the title of the animation suggests), away from the king without kingdom and into contemporary questions of biodiversity loss and our threatened and disappearing natural habitats surrounding us, the artist reframes the historic gardens in Kolkata.

Sengupta examines these colonial entanglements of metaphors and splendor, that stand for our convoluted contemporary condition, by turning her artistic gardens into a chora. Chora was the territory within the Ancient Greek city, the polis, allotted for growing olives or grapes. Plato used this term for defining a specific space between the world of ideas and that of sensuous perception. His chora is the embodiment of pure unpredictability, possibility, and chance. In postmodern theories, the category of chora is reconsidered and turned into a metaphor of self-propelled sign systems. Creating a space of pure eventfulness. In such a reading, the menagerie, full of contradictions and fancy, becomes a poetic space, contrasting its arbitrariness through the beauty of its inhabitants.

-Damian Christinger

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