Bhavana, the Hindi word for emotion, is fitting for almost every artist—creative practices are, more often than not, guided by feelings and intuitions. Even though far-fetched, one can infer that Kala Bhavana, the artistic institution established by Rabindranath Tagore in 1919, could have been named by the literary and artistic genius for similar reasons. If you are not convinced by this theory, a walk-through of the ongoing exhibition ‘A Season of Conviviality—Kala Bhavana after hundred years’ might, sort of, nudge you to believe it.
The group exhibition featuring “close to 180 works by both faculty (78 artworks) members and masters’ students (108 works) of the visual arts centre of Visva-Bharati University—on till October 18 at the city’s Lalit Kala Akademi—is curated by Anshuman Dasgupta with Sanjoy Kumar Mallik and Soumik Nandy Majumdar. Featuring a blend of traditional and contemporary practices, most works here are reactions by the artists to moments that vary from cultural to political and more.
Revive and rejuvenate
The show has been majorly curated in order to mark the centenary years of Kala Bhavana and Visva-Bharati—it happened in 2019 and 2021 respectively. However, curator Anshuman Dasgupta mentioned that the show has a different relevance as well.
“In the post-COVID circumstances, we needed to energise the field. There was a huge lull in the art field as well as in teaching and learning on campus as everyone was learning from a distance. Ours [art] is still necessarily a tactile medium and that was lost in COVID, and it was very damaging. The students suffered for two years, so we wanted to put up a show to boost their morale and rejuvenate the art scene.”
Of past, present and future
On entering the show, the first area that you will notice is the ‘Study area’, a space where they’ve displayed pedagogic tools—copies of the centre’s journal Nandan, and more. A large mural (it is 15 per cent enlarged)—a replica of Cheena Bhavana on the wall—by Benodebehari Mukherjee. Walk into the first floor and you will see works across mediums—an Untitled stoneware piece by Archana Das; ‘Visage’, a watercolour on paper by Arghya Priya Majumdar; mixed media work titled ‘Dexterity Between Ephemeral Waves’ by Banatanwi Dasmahapatra—and more by participating teachers.
The second floor is dedicated to students, with pieces by artists like ‘Tribe’ by Stanzin Norgyas made using soya sauce on paper, a ceramics piece titled ‘We lick, we Greed, We Lost’ by Soubhik Pyre, an untitled piece by Agni Mitra, etc. A work that caught our eye was ‘Breaking News…His Master’s Voice’ made by the centre’s former principal Pankaj Panwar, who is said to have initiated this exhibition. Panwar said, “The piece is a sarcastic take on the state of media—you find so many versions of the truth across, it makes me think is it the voice of the ‘master’?”