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Terrorism, Inside Outside - -Wood, HayStraw, Silver Foil, Thread, exterior Emulsion, Resin cast--39x-36-x34

‘We the people…..’
by Kishore Chakraborty at Gallery Threshold

‘We the people…’ the exhibition of recent sculptures, photography and video works by Kishore Chakraborty, opened at Gallery Threshold, New Delhi in November.

Chakraborty who was trained as a sculptor from Rabindra Bharati University, makes use of unconventional materials like straw, jute rope, cheap cotton lining, crotched thread, silver foil, bamboo, wooden boxes, resin and exterior emulsion to create sculptures that are scathing indictments of the current state of affairs in India.

Chakraborty’s oeuvre includes gigantic handcoloured prints of black and white photographs, all from the city of his birth, Kolkata. He says that the idea of using cheap materials evolved after watching, as a child, the idols of Durga being made, during Kolkata’s famed Durga Puja celebrations. “At a certain point my work is very close to traditional practices but at the same time purely synthetic,” says Chakraborty.

Passionately involved in Marxist politics as a youth, over the years, Chakraborty became terribly disillusioned with the ‘games’ involved in politicking. He seeks to express his rage and deep disappointment in his art. “The parallel co-existence of all feelings is the central idea of my work,” he says. 

The stark black emptiness of death and the red rush of anger are constant in his works along with the crab motif. Crabs are the dominating element in this body of work. For him, crabs are the symbols of terror and of cancer, the rot that is destroying the fabric of life. One crab is coming out from a chest and others are following at the back. The chest is supposed to guard all our valuables or all our values. Goddess Kali's extended tongue is another repeatedly used motif. “The hanging tongues silently terrorise us by telling lies,” according to him. 

His work provides no easy answers, but provoke, shaking the viewer out of apathy into a new consciousness.

- From A Correspondent