November 14 to 24 2024
At HSAC
This exhibition includes works of eight artists from various parts of Bengal.
Works of eight artists in this exhibition scrutinize the living reality, which is diverse, but the direct and different positions of art confront the viewer in an overwhelming and dizzying fashion. Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions through which spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These spheres of life are linked through an ‘in-between’ temporality that takes the measure of dwelling while producing an image of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative a double edge. The beauty and ideas of these works are extreme promises of post independent nation. ‘We Live in Furnished Souls’ real importance is not only to challenge representation as a ‘formidable tool of domination’ but to contribute to a redefinition of realism, abstraction and cultural representation. The exhibition also reveals that one of the important problems facing non-centrist (non-western) international culture in all parts of the world is the need to come to terms with essentialist thinking to create new concepts of true open-ended fields of cultural construction. Cultural hybridity leads our analysis of colonial canon formation to an analysis of the present art practice in a post-colonial context. Homi Bhabha’s metaphors of ‘bridge’ and ‘harbour ’ as places designed for exchange, and defined in the chaos of that exchange, provide provisional schemes at hand. The present language of postcolonialism is honed for articulating the muffled hum at contemporary locations of transnational transactions and exploitation, focusing on the anxieties and ironies of hybridity at places teaming with migrant workers. These are the dissonant and dissident histories and voices that have no place in “modern’. It does not represent the culture of displaced minorities, ’blasted out of the history’ into Benjamin’s present.
“We live in furnished souls…
unscented, shapeless, spirited…”
E.e.cummings.