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Experimenter presents (Un)Settled, a two-person exhibition by Kanishka Raja and Rathin Barman at Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata. The exhibition draws its title from Barman’s monumental sculpture Unsettled Structure, and explores the oscillation between being ‘settled’ and ‘unsettled’, mapping the transitory nature of both interior and exterior, personal and spatial, across time and location.
Kanishka Raja and Rathin Barman made work in disparate geographies, within the context of different spaces and times, yet they have strong converging points of interest. Both have lived their formative years in a land and environment far removed, both physically and aesthetically, from where they practise(d). They have both used their memories and past influences to build a vocabulary of their present concerns. They have also built connections through ethnographic explorations and lived conditions to build a scaffolding to navigate their practice.
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Rathin Barman’s ‘Unsettled Structure’ is a series of wall mounted sculptures with brass projections that highlight the altered current arches and pillars, resembling scaffold-like structures protruding from their surfaces like a parasitic modern grid, imposed over a series of reinforced concrete board panels with drawings and perspective notations. This series also stands as a metaphor for the makeshift tenements and adaptive architectural interventions installed to accommodate an expanding family some of whom are either descendants of the rich traders who built these edifices at the nadir of the East India Company’s reign in undivided Bengal or migrant tenants who have adapted these homes over generations as their own.
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“Airports are particularly resonant repositories for the purposes of what I do, because they are so quintessentiallly in-between, places of arrival and departure, mid-point on this arc of the journey from province to center. I see a lot of what I do as observing the peculiarities of that journey.”
—Kanishka Raja
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 7, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 8, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 9, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 10, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 11, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 12, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 13, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 15, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 16, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 17, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 18, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 19, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 20, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 21, 2024
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Rathin Barman, Spatial Notations 22, 2024
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Rathin Barman often breaks down the thoroughly engineered and fixed construct of a ‘home’ into a graphical outline of formal abstraction. In the ‘Spatial Notations’ series, Barman explores the notion of a ‘home’ as a living organism, as the configuration of spaces and other architectural features morph over time to mirror the mutability wrought in the time and lives of people. Concurrently, Barman also explores the various nuances of fragility and materiality with regard to architecture. In common parlance one does not associate the notion of fragility with a material such as concrete, but Barman through his experiences of working with materials of construction emphasises how this material also demands delicate handling and would often require multiple interventions of repair, much like the structure of a house which also needs renovation and maintenance for it to endure the ravages of time. One often notices how Barman plays around with the assumed infallibility of permanence by choosing concrete as his medium, which is both porous and rigid at the same time. Many of the sculptures in the ‘Spatial Notations’ series seem to highlight the certain shifting facets, maybe an addition of rooms, walls or extension of a balcony through the use of lines, colours and charcoal planes in multiple tonalities on pigmented concretepanels. The use of gold and copper leaf evoke the past grandeur of these edifices, once based in the imposing colonial architecture, but have now succumbed to decay and ruin.
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In ‘Smooth Jazz’ and ‘Lay Down, Stay Down’, Kanishka Raja presents domestic spaces that are caught in a palpable tension between realistic representation and surreal spatial perspectives. Raja, in one of the paintings, blends a faux scenic view and domestic interiors in an unusual way, while in the other a stonewalled recreation room of a suburban American basement is juxtaposed ambiguously with a variety of other cultural and temporal markers. In these interiors, disparate elements such as the kitschy animal printed furnitures, firearms, an antique sewing machine, a modernist chair designed by Mies van der Rohe among other objects are all placed in the same disjunctive plane where the boundaries between various levels of cultural and personal meanings blur together to form a fragmentary view. “I am interested in ways that coded visual languages are transmitted and translated across cultures and the ways in which their newly transformed selves find a function and place within their adopted homelands. I find myself simultaneously immersed in this sprawling cultural complex and standing just outside of it. The spaces thus invented are fragmentary in nature: suggestions and recollections of arenas that offer a richer and more complex existence. It is an odd sort of privilege to be living in many places at once.” — Kanishka Raja, excerpted from Jeet Thayil, “Cowboy or Indian?”, India Abroad, Feb 22, 2002.
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In the monumental installation ‘Unsettled Structure I’, Barman simulates the inner courtyard of a grand colonial mansion but strips it of its weight-bearing exterior by exposing its inner skeleton formed of an interplay between a dense grid of steel bars and malleable yet brittle brass arches that overlap and sweep across the imposing base. The work reveals the rigours of engineering technicalities which are at the core of Barman’s practice yet it ruptures the fundamental idea of solidity associated with architecture. The sculpture replicates a particular central space in the house that is associated with the coming together of residents, but Barman’s use of densely interweaving forms and structures creates an almost impenetrable labyrinth where one’s awareness of single-point perspective is distorted and reoriented. The viewer must navigate through this maze to vicariously experience what it feels to live in such houses which have undergone changes and essentially transformed into a cramped enclosure, through addition of multiple walls and facets to accommodate the growing needs of the tenants and owners.
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Perhaps, apart from all these commonalities, the strongest connection between the two artists is that of migration, of living and making a life and an artistic practice far away from one’s homeland, and through their lived experience, incorporating within them both a point of entry and departure through their personal migratory experiences.Raja and Barman’s works have no apparent discernable human presence, yet it is very much palpable. Being devoid of human figures makes these paintings and sculptures open to interpretations and closer examinations that are not bound by a narrative arc, but become a visceral exploration of the shifting idea of home, settlement and what it means to be unsettled.
(Un)Settled | Kanishka Raja & Rathin Barman
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