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Experimenter presents Drawn From Practice II, which relooks at the conceptual, notational, and foundational role of drawing without restricting itself to formal or conventional boundaries. Drawing's flexibility, its suppleness, its anti-monumental, and exploratory character, readily bring forth an intimate and nuanced, yet direct encounter with the mind of the practitioner, and reveal thoughts and intentions that may be less apparent in their final formal practice.
Drawn from Practice II unfolds in two physical manifestations simultaneously at Experimenter’s twin spaces in Kolkata. At Experimenter Ballygunge Place, disorder, notations, and initial ideas animate the works on view byAyesha Sultana,Bhasha Chakrabarti,Prabhavathi Meppayil, Sanchayan Ghosh, Seher Shah & Sreshta Rit Premnath bringing these practices together through preliminary thought, revealing a deeply personal, yet central framework of deliberation, resistance and process rooted in each practice.
A fertile ground for experimentation and testing the boundaries of thought, drawing is often the only initial scaffolding on which practices rely as a point of departure. Drawing is traditionally viewed as markings, notations and sketches often on paper or personal diaries, but the influence of drawing and the scope of drawing that Drawn from Practice II explores goes well beyond the physical act of drawing and enters the realm of drawing as thought, as form and as practice.
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For Ayesha Sultana (b. 1984 in Jashore, Bangladesh, currently lives and works in Atlanta USA), drawing is a bodily expression, whether in the form of counting breath, measuring distance and movement manifested in repeated constant marking of graphite on paper.
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Sultana often refers to her work as a ‘verb’. The act of mark-making and repetition is an essential aspect of her practice. Her mediums undergo phases where they maybe spliced, fragmented and layered, processes that are explicitly visible in the works on view.
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An attempt to make visible or to delve into what one can see, and simultaneously translating the visual information, is what engages Sultana. Through the primacy of drawing and painting, this act of looking is to assimilate the experience of her surroundings and space.
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"Painting is a solitary act for me—I'm not showing it or talking to anybody during the process, or sometimes even afterwards" —Ayesha sultana
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Prabhavathi Meppayil’s (b. 1965 in Bangalore, India, lives and works in Bangalore, India) work is as much steeped in an ancestral artisanal practice as it is in exploration of space, form and materiality. Works made by fine impressions of thinnam or enmeshed copper wire on masterfully gessoed surfaces punctuate the gallery, their shapes and sizes drawing reference particularly from the details of the architecture of the space, sizes of ventilation openings and floor tiles, underscoring how spatially, Meppayil’s minimalist practice unfolds.
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Prabhavathi Meppayil
fifty four twenty two, 2021‘Temporality is an important part of my work. The material transforms with passage of time, the embedded copper wire will eventually disappear due to oxidation, and this would change the work itself. And the thinnam work has a rhythm of time inherent in its making, time as sign.’ — Prabhavathi Meppayil
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Bhasha Chakrabarti's (b. 1991 in Honolulu, USA, currently lives and works in New Haven, USA) practice is rooted in acts of mending and repair, but also in text, sound and folklore addressing conversations around race, gender and power. She presents a series of works on paper made with discarded denim and indigo, alongside handwritten translations, blocks of indigo and shredded denim and notes from her diary that provide an insight into Chakrabarti’s direction of thinking and making.
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Blue Notes draws out the deep entanglements between plantation histories of indigo in the antebellum American South and in colonial Bengal. Lyrics of a Blues song, Mood Indigo, originally performed by Duke Ellington, are overlaid with the words to a Bengali protest song sung by indigo plantation laborers, titled Nilkorer ki Attyachar. The lyrics are made of pure indigo powder and laid on paper made from pulped blue jeans. The works are shown alongside recordings of the two songs: Mood Indigo performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Nilkorer ki Attyachar performed by the artist’s father, as well as the artist’s own translations of the two songs in both English and Bengali.
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"The body of work in this exhibition is really all grounded in the layered materiality of indigo and looking at how the transnational exchanges for this precious blue dye has bled into histories of constructing labouring bodies, historical tradition of representing divinity and even into economies of our affective musical resistance. I have been really trying to retrieve the stains left by indigo in various geographical locations and trying to imagine criss-crossing feedback loops between all these places that can lay the groundwork and framework for an alternative form of solidarity and resistance towards contemporary oppressions and stereotypes." — Bhasha Chakrabarti
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Seher Shah’s (b. 1975 in Karachi, Pakistan) Notes from a City Unknown is a series of prints that essentially manifest from a body of short and exquisitely nuanced poetic notes that Shah has written on a city. Writing becomes a scaffolding for Shah to build this body of work where landscape, forms and structures become markers of time and memory, read through the lens of her notes. Set against a brutal nationalism and pervasive surveillance, these notes are a record of her time in a city that is distant yet familiar, attempting to measure an unknowable distance between things.
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Seher Shah
Notes from a City Unknown, 2021Seher Shah’s practice is dedicated to drawing, printmaking and sculpture. The intimacy of the hand, through mark-making, has been a source of curiosity, research, and experimentation in her practice. She has worked with drawing and printmaking exploring ideas in architecture and perspective drawing traditions; contested relationships between history, objects and time; and the relationship between poetry and abstraction. Through works on paper using drawings, etchings, photogravures and woodcuts, and sculptural studies in cast iron, her work speaks to the poetics and fractures of how we view the landscape, through the historical and intimate.
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Sreshta Rit Premnath
Falling, 2022Exploring ideas of resistance and political boundaries further, is the work of Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979 in Bangalore, India, lives and works in Brooklyn, USA) who uses sculpture, photography video, painting and text to test possibilities and limits of political agency. Premnath uses a series of carefully selected materials to activate a productive tension between seemingly opposing forces in his suspended sculptures that submit to gravity but lean on each other for support. A series of writings and reading material accompany the sculptures that inform his layered practice.
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Sanchayan Ghosh’s (b. 1970 in Kolkata, India, lives and works in Santiniketan, India) project, A Site for the Pedagogy of Resistance is an immersive architectural drawing in conversation with the 17 drawings of swastika by Paul Klee made in the 1920’s. Klee was in pursuit of a scientific engagement with space and construction and always emphasized on the search for a balance. By activating the installation through a series of conversations and happenings, Ghosh constructs a series of planned exercises and reengages with the individual drawings made by Klee, to locate moments of resistance within the system itself. It revisits the fundamental ideas of the triangle, square and circularity as forms of control and attempts to map the different movements of social resistance in reference, to minority rights, religious intolerance, migration and territorial control, corporate control of land and landscape practices that are emerging all over India and the world. Ghosh uses reverse painting as a metaphorical strategy of reversing certain tools of democracy. By expanding on the drawings of swastika by Klee, Ghosh attempts to discover new democratic platforms of multiplicity and resistance. Exploring ideas of resistance and political boundaries further, is the work of Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979 in Bangalore, India, lives and works in Brooklyn, USA) who uses sculpture, photography video, painting and text to test possibilities and limits of political agency. Premnath uses a series of carefully selected materials to activate a productive tension between seemingly opposing forces in his suspended sculptures that submit to gravity. but lean on each other for support. A series of writings and reading material accompany the sculptures that inform his layered practice.
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Drawn from Practice II, takes the conceptual arc of drawing as a wide and impactful tool of thinking, deliberating, experimenting, and activating ideas that go on to define how practices evolve. It attempts to provide a point of entry into the artists’ mind, thought processes on materials and forms, revealing the nuances of complex practices. Recognizing that drawing is often the starting point of work, or the bridge between thought and action, or a segue between conversation and advancement, the exhibition attempts to break away from pre-determined boundaries and traditional disciplines by holding the idea of drawing at its kernel.
Drawn from Practice II
Current viewing_room
