Experimenter presents The cage broke, and I found the horizon, Rathin Barman’s solo at Experimenter Outpost at Alipore Museum, Kolkata. The exhibition brings together a new body of work, spanning sculptures and drawings, seen together for the first time in the city.
The title of the exhibition alludes to the duality of confinement and liberation, while also situating the works within the history of one of Asia’s largest prisons, the erstwhile Alipore Jail, now the Alipore Museum. This site housed many prominent Indian freedom fighters during the independence movement and bears witness to a time that marked several unprecedented forced and economic migrations—a central and longstanding enquiry in Barman’s practice.
His sculptural forms investigate new possibilities of living in once grand, now decrepit, often abandoned, old colonial buildings in North Kolkata, co-occupied by migrants from fragmented lands. Barman’s body of work is anchored in his personal connections forged with the residents of the erstwhile old homes of North Kolkata, those who had migrated from post-Partition Bangladesh to settle in the industrial fringes of the northern suburbs of the city, as well as those who relocated from different parts of the country to find new life in Kolkata. The socio-political and economic challenges, wrought in abandoning homes and migrating in pursuit of more sustainable lives, lead to a building of new histories. There is a constant attempt to transcend and negotiate beyond the built physical and psychological structures, to carve out new horizons within the ever-shifting elusiveness of a ‘home’.
Barman explores the notion of home as a living organism beyond its fixed constraints of permanence through an anthropological lens, using a precise conjunction of disembodied built forms and a simultaneous renewal of future possibilities, which act as both reminiscence and propositions. The configuration of spaces and other architectural features transform over time to mirror the spatio-temporal transformations and lives of people. He draws from spontaneous responses to a sensorial realm in his representation of spaces. Barman reimagines the memory of lives left behind, alongside the enduring aspiration for a place to call one’s own.
