Experimenter presents Skin of Elsewhere, a solo exhibition by Adip Dutta at Tokaroun, Santiniketan. Spanning almost a decade of his practice, the exhibition traces the continuity of his enduring engagement with the urban landscape.
Fragmented and ever-evolving, the city is transformed into a layered archive, one in which the archaic and the contemporary, the natural and the constructed, coexist in continuous dialogue. A meticulously constructed, surrealist portrait, in the form of ink works—of the densely packed, bustling footpaths, strewn with transient architecture and shanties—acts as a point of entry into the exhibition. These spaces, all of which Dutta has witnessed over time, narrate the story of a city, constantly evolving, shaped by its people. His works on paper are created painstakingly over several months. They usually begin with a single fragment on paper, more recently on canvas, gradually expanding one layer at a time. Executed through fine brushstrokes under a magnifying glass, the densely packed marks resemble intricate stitchwork, lending the works a tactile quality that echoes the layered skin of the city. In Dutta’s hands, drawing becomes an act of excavation, patiently uncovering the traces concealed within the everyday. Extending his inquiry into sculpture, he casts obsolete construction tools, fallen trees, and branches into bronze, transforming these overlooked forms into archaeological relics that invite renewed attention. Construction sites are presented as archaeological plates, while mundane scaffoldings are reimagined as an echo of the forest. He collapses the boundary between the manufactured and the natural, suggesting that the urban is layered with ecological memory.
In Skin of Elsewhere, an aerial vantage point emerges, providing a lens into Dutta’s mind where the city and its spatial, material, and formal elements are constantly transforming. The exhibition offers a nuanced way of looking at both corporeal and psychological landscapes as terrains layered by time and memory, attempting to draw meaning from what surrounds us yet often escapes our attention as the world remains in a constant state of flux, while re-evaluating how we find ourselves within a recalibrated environment.
