White open spaces: The Politics of Paper, a recently concluded exhibition at Emami Art, Kolkata, celebrated paper as medium and message

An exhibition that focused on paper, where medium and creation came alive

Brittle, durable. Flimsy, sturdy. We take these paradoxical qualities of paper for granted but since its invention in China in 105 AD by Ts’ai Lun, an official at the imperial court, paper has been used by artists, thinkers, writers, scientists and craftsmen as the medium for their creations, which, thus enshrined, have survived the wear and tear of centuries, largely unscathed. The Politics of Paper, a recently concluded exhibition at Emami Art, Kolkata, was a celebration of these apparently irreconcilable qualities of paper. At a time when virtual reality has nearly nudged physical reality out of our reckoning, this exhibition curated by Ushmita Sahu reminded us that art is a tactile experience and that our eyes are as sensitive to varying textures as our epidermis.

All the participants — Adip Dutta, Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Jagannath Panda, Jayashree Chakravarty, Mithu Sen, N.S. Harsha, Prasanta Sahu and T.V. Santhosh — used paper as the main medium of their works but four of them — Anju Dodiya, Chakravarty, Sen and Sahu — engaged with it more physically than the others, gouging, lacerating and even mashing it with other media to create imagined textures or shapes.

Poetry and persona

Sen evoked the terrifying beauty of death in her small, spare, delicately painted watercolours, Conjoined Twins and Unwing. Creativity and its feared death were also the theme of Anju Dodiya’s three large works of watercolour and charcoal in vivid shades of carmine and black. The allusion to Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the use of screen print and lithograph alongside shards of looking glass pointed at introspection and the fragmentation of persona.

Inside giant backlit palimpsests made with overlays of rice paper, cotton fabric, tissue and cellophane, glowed dried creepers, roots, leaves and flowers in Chakravarty’s work. They made up a complex web, a living entity representing nature untouched by human agency.

Sahu dealt both with politics — his engagement with Birbhum farmland — and paper in his Harvesting: The Untold Story,A Conversation with the Land. White paper reproductions of the land’s yield were affixed with texts telling the stories of farmers. It made for a strong statement on our disregard for the very hands that feed us.

It was impossible to miss Harsha’s Reclaiming the Inner Space, a 12ft by 39ft panel composed of aluminium and aluminium composite panel mirror — common building material — along with found cartons, acrylic and a ‘herd’ of 1,400 wooden elephants. His other two works, a carton painted with myriad tiny faces and a sculpture of packaging replicated in stainless steel were a pithy commentary on the nature of consumerism and ‘mall culture’.