Much like these footpaths and streets, Dutta’s works on paper emerge organically. Each work is created painstakingly over a period of 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.

Dutta’s archaeological sensibility is most evident in Ruptures and Running Woods. In Ruptures, construction sites are presented as archaeological plates, transforming spaces of development into sites where history, archaeology and excavation converge. In Running Woods, mundane construction scaffoldings are reimagined as an echo of the forest. Putting these two into conversation, he collapses the boundary between the manufactured and the natural. Moreover, remnants of trees, trunks, branches, and twigs, that recurrently feature in his intricate drawings and sculptural forms, extend this inquiry. To Dutta, these vestiges become a reminder of the forest that once occupied landscapes before yielding to urban expansion. His works explore the coexistence of the forest and the city, 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.