Life recast in bits and pieces
Palash Bhattacharjee has undergone a notable shift in his artistic journey, transitioning from academically focused print-making toward multi-media, experimental art-practice via a close encounter with performance art activism. Therefore, his striated oeuvre is informed by the traces and tendencies acquired through exploration along his forward-looking artistic trajectory.
Palash, takes critical interest in closely reading filmic genres and their performative idioms. The photo/videographic style and the eclectic selection of objects in his works are heavily influenced by the cerebral matrix of contrapuntal, non-narrative aspect of deconstructed story-telling adopted from global cinema. Objects serve as signs or nostalgic reference to events or ideas that remained seared in memory; books, microphones coupled with restless or rhythmic movements of hands have time and again reappeared in his works. These elements not only attest to the mundane, the everyday but paradoxically provide an almost innocuous backdrop to Palash’s profound yet seemingly dispassionate observations on modern life, materially reincarnated within the sensorium of visual-auditory-tactile elements and visceral tones that went into making his works. Palash is not condemned to the past, he seizes every passing opportune moment to insightfully imagine, “one’s sense of being in a given place.” Palash’s repertoire reads much like a meditation on “what exists but exceeds any full grasp.”
About “Of Fragments”:
The vast arsenal of embodied experientiality he calls into action emerge ‘re-materialized’ on photographic surfaces/screens in the form digitally encoded simulation. The virtual corporeality thus constructed becomes the stuff of a parallel reality which is based more on transposition or replacement of identity than on similarity or representation. In a spirit of suspension of disbelief, the audience is trans(tele)ported to the claustrophobic world of a series of digital photographs entitled “Insomni-Lucid Sleep” where the ‘characters’, partially defamiliarized with the help of props, stage a performative ‘re-enactment’ of straddling a threshold between light and dark, metaphorically indicating knowing without seeing, as the Bangla title roughly translates, “I can see with eyes shut during sleeplessness”. Or, where the video projection of a night bulb turns into a lodestar, eternally failing to show any path of resolution to the meaningless absurdities of life.
“Open door”/”Closed door” deeply resonate with Edward Casey’s words,
“… each of us is pitched on a thousand edges—edges on which we shake and tremble even as we pretend to go about our lives undisturbed… we are ourselves creatures of exposed edges.”
The artist watches from within the protective bounds of the walls the tumultuous storm raging outside, reminiscent of lives being whisked away, displaced by the wind of change. In contrast, the interior reverberates with images and sounds emanating from a screen, part of an odiously calculated performance gaslighting a populace into squeamish submission. Counteracting which is another irreverent act of scratching and deflating a balloon, echoing the futility of any subversive act under the regime of control and surveillance, thus ‘exposing’ our ‘edges’ of vulnerability. As our lives continue to be governed by forces of nature or power, this again finds representation in the physical installation which accompanies “Open door”.
“Whimsy”, a double channel video installation with prints to accompany, dramatizes the dismemberment of the human body recompensed by surfeit of concessional information disseminated by the mechanics of marketing and consumerism. Axing its primordial contacts with the world, the body is denuded of its vitality of movements and intentionality of actions, and eventually is reduced to the repetitive moves emulating that of a stringed puppet.
Palash’s deep-rooted fear and sense of insecurity resurfaces with every single stroke drawn on the surface of the TV screen as a signification of negation. Contesting and fictionalizing the dynamics of simulation Palash posits an antithesis of absence, or in other words conjures up a presence; presence of all those who fell victim to various means of disappearance. This is “Arrow” in a nutshell.
“Of Fragments” invites contemplation in view of the variegated tools/media of creative expressions Palash Bhattacharjee has employed to poetically translate the complex nature of the self’s intra-action with the world, in his case channelled through sporadic bursts of recollections/visions. Being held hostage within the domestic scene yet stirred by the call of the wild, the artist negotiates the passage of time by re-creating a world of his own. The realization of this act hinges on the imaginative and critical participation of the viewer, a reciprocation that “Of Fragments” powerfully commands.
Sharmillie Rahman
Writer, curator