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Review
Pain Transfigured: In Memory of an Ideal
‘In Memory of An Ideal,’ solo show by Ng.Bidyut Singha was held at Experimenter, Kolkata recently. Oindrilla Maity examines the mindscape of pain and nostalgia expressed by the Manipur-born artist.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (Verse I)
Images of three sizeable stars in water colour on paper framed individually and arranged side by side, are on display on the wall. The red hue startles the eyes of the viewer even from proximity. A close inspection reveals that an abysmal blackness gradually devours them, increasing in degrees each time the eyes move to the right. The darkness is only a subsequence to a graver disaster – an all-consuming fire that chars the stars, leaving its prominent traces on the surface where the stars rest.
An image portraying a glimpse of a site under construction – a trowel, a shovel, a deformed canister, wooden planks that scaffold the pillars, a pair of worn out slippers, better known as Hawaii chappals – lay sprawling. Several others, those of a hurricane lamp, a sugar-cane press, an old sewing machine, a mouth piece – all addressed as single disjunctive units; disowned and secluded, exist solitarily. There is no humdrum; there is no warmth of bondage. Only an uncomfortable silence prevails in the realm of these solitary images. Painted predominantly in blotches of red watercolour and burnt slowly and painstakingly at sections, what do these images, produced from water colour on paper, signify? Which world do they hint at? What past or future do they indicate?
Ng.Bidyut Singha’s solo show – ‘In Memory of an Ideal’ – at Experimenter, Kolkata (12th September – 31st October, 2009), invokes countless questions. Each of his objects, each of the glimpses of these unfinished sites, as though abandoned and photographed unitarily do not represent continuous narration, but a fragmented story of their own; an ideal once dreamt of and eventually shattered. The papers on which they are produced, burnt at places, create a successful imagery of memory – between the existent and the non-existent, like a hazy veil; between myth and reality – metaphors of the past – lingering at the edge of their precarious existence.
The press release reads: “Singha uses the gallery space to create an imaginary village, Irabot Nagar, named after the famed Manipuri socio-political poet Hijam Irabot Singh whose poems fuelled passion in the idealistic principles of early socialism in the northeastern states.” Singha creates this utopic village as an iron installation of an unfinished memorial that seems to have been commissioned for the forgotten poet and the socialist ideals he believed in. “The drawings result from interviews with regular working class citizens through Singha’s travels and are meant to be portraits, yet don’ t resemble the subjects. They embody their struggle to survive in an unequal society.”
Singha thus titles each of these images in accordance with the workers associated with each of them. Subsequently, the sugarcane press becomes Chandrashekhar Rai; the site under construction becomes Rajmohan Singh and so on and so forth, tapping the mind of the viewer. A gigantic skeletal star, made of iron rods and wires is placed in the centrally placed pit of the gallery, bathing in moonlight. A set of other skeleton structures, which generally are employed to form the base of buildings vis-à-vis are grouped in another section of the gallery, adjoining the pit. These represent the utopic village.
Singha predominantly wants to bring out the futility of the same ideologies that once formed the base of this country. They served as the only ideal model to Nehru, who, left with no choice after the Independence had sent off his group of economists to Soviet Russia and who in turn brought back with them the concept of egalitarianism. Its hollow echoes are what the artist is left with today. However, in bringing out the irony, Singha addresses the very notion about art as its status was in the perspectives of socialist realism: “Art belongs to the people. Its roots should be deeply implanted in the very thick of the labouring masses. It should be understood and loved by these masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings, thoughts and will. It must stir to activity and develop the art instincts within them. Should we serve exquisite sweet cake to a small minority while the worker and peasant masses are in need of black bread? It goes without saying that the following is to be understood not only literally but also figuratively: we must always have before our eyes the workers and the peasants (Vladimir Lenin/ On Art and Literature).”
Needless to say, the relationship of art to the masses and especially the toiling people is largely hypothetical today. However, Singha’s practice tends to be more porous and democratic than a display of authoritative nonchalance or be overtly romanticized. He interviews, documents and is more rhetorical to his approach, than just be metaphorical.
The artist was born in Meghalaya, a State where people, almost deprived of administrative support, live in the hope of a better developed future. The artist later settles in Mumbai only to witness the wastage of power and resources for political gains. The discrepancies between power games is what molds the artist’s thought about the once most valued principles that now turn out be mere fallacies and empty promises in a moribund society.
Singha’s sentimental and nostalgic works are reminiscent of an exhausted soul, grateful for the remembrance of things past.
(Oindrilla Maity is a Kolkata-based art historian, independent curator and practising artist. She teaches Art History at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Email: oindrilla.maity@gmail.com.)
Photographs and texts: courtesy of Prateek Raja, Director, Experimenter, Kolkata.
