His self-awareness emerges from endless questions. Personal interrogations have impregnated his thinking with eonian reflections that have crafted his artistic sensibilities to what they are today. Of these internal inquiries, the matter of democracy and what it means in the present social context assumes a larger-than-life character. The vastness of the subject cannot be summed up in any debate, nor can its scope be fully determined, but through his latest musing over the matter, artist Kishore Chakraborty has produced a body of art called Decoding Democracy, where he takes a close and brutal look at what has transpired in the name of people’s power.
Whether 53-year-old Chakraborty is unforgiving sync or a sharp realist, his introspective journey has revealed many truths. He calls himself an idiosyncratic Bengali who passionately involved himself in Marxist politics as a youth and become disillusioned with the murky involved in politics. “Since then urban dilemmas — the crisis of regular killings, sexual abuse, corruptions — have led me to pour out my feelings through an outburst of art,” he says.
Each work is an acutely personal reflection born out of a gamut of intimate emotions that impune Chakraborty’s idea of democratic legacy. The idea behind them will change with each pair of eyes that sets on them. “The two-dimensional work talks about scars. Scars not wounds depicts the myriad emotional experiences of my journey that life has intricately etched in the form of scars. These scars are not wounds, but relics of a life well lived,” he says.
The white painted hot water bags titled ‘young at 51’ is an ode to memories wherein each memory is permanently marked on a hot water bag, a simple contraption to alleviate physical pains, Chakraborty explains. “The canvas affords me the joy of reminiscence and balmy comfort that hot water bag provides. The hotness of the bag serves as a backdrop to my journey as a person who was unabashed, fiery, proud and equally intense in expressing elation and anguish,” he says.
Delving into the thick of dissecting democracy to its core, has become an important pursuit for the artist, given its pervasiveness in our lives. It has become such a big part of our existence that the way we function becomes a direct manifestation of our ideological standpoints. But is it really a part of our DNA, the questions?
“It seems like a dubious double helix of warped ideology and skewed sensibilities at times. Or is it only a superimposition on our original character. Can we rid ourselves of this or are we bound to politics in eternal servitude? Is democracy the messiah to end this servitude or the prodigal progeny that will entangle us further in a seemingly new manifesto of age-old Machiavellian manoeuvres,” Chakraborty asks.
Shadowing these inquiries, his work has become the means to find answers. For one, they are realisations of his struggle with these burning questions that scars his existence, he believes, but whether or not he’ll get an answer that is good enough to douse the fire of what he calls ‘fractured, opportunistic democracy’, he doesn’t know. Decoding Democracy: On view, till January 7, from 11 am to 7 pm, at Art Konsult, 3-A, Ground Floor, Hauz Khas Village.