Experimenter presents I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter II), the inaugural exhibition for its second space in Kolkata, Experimenter – Ballygunge Place. The new space will run simultaneously with Experimenter – Hindustan Road, allowing the gallery to build a multifaceted, adaptive and discursive exhibitions programme alongside lecture performances, conversation-salons and chamber-styled workshops.
I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter II) continues from Chapter I. The exhibition proposes a certain plunge or collapse of a fragile thought or emotion, allowing it to fall in an unrestrained re-examination of it’s purpose. It brings together works by a cross-generation of artists represented by the program to immerse itself into ideas of longing, dislocation, memory and the study of form and structure.
Central to the exhibition is Memorial to Lost Words by Bani Abidi, a sensitive sound installation culled from lost folk songs sung by women in undivided Punjab yearning for their sons, brothers and husbands who served as soldiers in the British Army in WW1. Abidi recovers memories from these heartfelt folk songs and reorders history, perhaps in contradistinction to national history that always has an intrinsic element of fragmentary forgetfulness.
Bereft of human presence, Rathin Barman’s works exude an emptiness and a sense of longing, it proposes a poignant memory of past grandeur. Barman’s recollection and constructiveness of this attempt once again like Abidi is a process to remember and recuperate in part and attempts to put together a past that may be only available in small fragments.
A sense of desolateness finds resonance in Adip Dutta’s drawings of the urban landscape, especially of construction sites referring to built spaces, and a particular way of seeing one’s surroundings, distressingly barren yet intensely textural.
Straddling time and realities, Moyra Davey’s profoundly personal essay film, Hemlock Forest reflects on the value of life lived versus a life recorded and is inspired by the work of influential Belgian filmmaker, Chantal Akerman. The work seems preoccupied by the fragile idea of holding the truth and the image of the forest as a beautiful refuge but also one that is potentially poisonous.
A gaze unbound by structures inform Ayesha Sultana’s series of watercolours, Form Studies – a body of work that represents her ongoing practice in the study of form and subtle observations of her environment exploring material, movement and distance; key aspects that have held Sultana’s interest over time.
As a juxtaposition Krishna Reddy’s suite of drawings from the early 1950’s also allow a window into his deep immersion in the understanding of form, in his case, unlike Sultana, the human form. The drawings and a sculpture from the late 1960’s, allow an immersion into his avant-garde practice that break expected conventions.
Attempting to review the way one sees and reads existing practices, Samson Young presents a mixed media drawing, Ancillary Motion reflecting on the idea of structure that governs traditional musical notational system’s rigid conventions and constrains. The reference to representation and viewing, the work finds resonance with the work of Sultana and Reddy both of whom are interested in these very questions.
Julien Segard often looks at the residual value of the discarded and refused. Using a range of found items, Segard’s collaged painting Sweet Corners, an untiled sculpture made with objects recovered from the building while the gallery was being constructed; and a suite of boxed collages, attempt to reexamine materials that have been let go, to find a renewed meaning in the disused.
