by Shatabdi De

Santiniketan. Communicating with the audience, this stands as an important factor in today's contemporary art world. As a matter of fact instilling a consciousness, awareness and even inspiring laughter, these traits of a work of art assemble the entire body of art and its composite structure. In this context, the exhibition, Violence: Double Spread-From Private to the Public to the 'Life Systems' is an appropriate exemplary to be held up.

This show was in true statements an interdisciplinary fusion of art forms as it was a collection of paintings, sculptures, posters, prints, photography, videos, drawings and installations exhibited at Kala Bhavana, Nandan Gallery in Santiniketan from 23rd February to 28th February with a large group of artists getting involved in it. The show was curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay with the assistance of Arpan Mukherjee, Sanchayan Ghosh and Ashish Ghosh. The participants were all in their own way striking the corner of that world in our mind which remains hibernated with the drift of adaptive nature of sustenance that is fear against the bitter truth of life. This is so prevalent in the modern world with the name of violence and is widely distributed everywhere in the world in various strata with variable definitions but the same impact.  It was a bombardment of realist emotions towards the audience and as I rightly said above thus, establishing a relationship with the viewers.  Ashish Ghosh's installation Biponno Basudha and  Arpan Mukherjee's C-Prints on paper and silver gelatine on ceramic tiles, having the title Either You or I in the perfect terms of dynamism appealed the congruency of the decaying human imagination to the stirring reality of the nature's extinction at an alarming rate were attention seekers. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted an installation by Sanchayan Ghosh was a censored site specific light drawing used the gallery's space as a public network system and maps peripheries of different faces of public and private act symbolizing the multiple extensions of human life in reciprocation to the society and its anti-social elements. The expression of the artistic attitude and boldness were confirmed by the works of Dhrupadi Wahshat Ghosh's posters, Gag AFSA, Oliver Ressler's, Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt, What Comes Next? and Naeem Mohammein's photographs with text having the title, I Have Killed the Pharaoh, Now I Am Afraid to Die.

The world which the exhibition wanted to build was even more powerfully constructed with Binu Bhaskar's photographs, Unknown Portraits, Anuradha Pathak's installation Moving Out ...Staying In, Sarmistha kar's textile based work, Fragmented Fragrances and Sudipta Das's Passing Memory which were all intensive portrayal of the sensitivity of the matter. The project entails visualization of the human receptivity and exchange of the patterns of their languages. Janak Jhankar Narzary's sculpture, Nirmalendu Das's Riot, Punyo Chobin's I Know How to Press the Trigger, Meenakshi Sen Gupta's Page 110 seem to increase the depth of the meaning of the particular show as a whole. Other artists whose works were the measured increments in an attempt of unravelling the hidden but common emotions of the sufferers were, Nil Yalter's, Exile is a Hard Job, the posters from Valencia , Spain , Sheersha Mukherjee's drawing, Hats That Hide, Claire Fontaine's collective videos and Veer Munshi's painting and photograph. Here the effects of contemporary art rely on the enrichment of the bombast and theatrics in pursuit of awareness. And thus, the exhibition puts forward a new angle of vision which certainly has very well sufficed the designation of an art activity, broadcasting the approach of the creative implementations of the several individual thought processes. In simple words this was the synchronization of multiple art languages to convey one single message, to centralise the focus of the mass against the “double spread”.