A PART / APART

ATIN BASAK

Curated by Ayan Mukherjee.

It’s about organising a future by annihilating the unrealized practicality of the existing reality. It’s about making merry and creating history, overlooking a world walking towards dissolution. A world filled with innovative ideas and thoughts waiting to stretch its arms towards perfection fall flat every time we search for kindness and wisdom in it. Thus carelessly proving it to be eloquently imperfect. A Part / Apart, the exhibition tries its best to talk about and question this suppressed reality of which we are all proud and euphoric.

A lost world filled with nostalgia, gone by times loaded with memories, visuals that had always been cerebral, unutteredaching’s, and a heart filled with reminiscence—that’s what I relate to when I see those bold horizontal strokes of charcoal and pastels running through the images of crows and swans, making them look meagre and grievously inconsequential in the drawings on paper (mediums being dry pastel, charcoal, ink, and graphite) by Atin Basak. They are numb, yet they tend to express themselves profoundly, somehow symbolising the materiality of the present very perceptibly.

We human beings are apotheosis, gaining the sovereignty of being the greatest living creature on this planet with our inventions, creations, and fructifications, keeping technology as our perennial partner and savior in many ways. We have touched the Moon, yet on a separate aspect, we tend to invalidate the fact that just like we are citizens of this planet we call Earth, and we avidly call it our own, the same way these cramped and tender creatures like sparrows, crows, and even pigeons, who are literally struggling for their existence, are also an elemental part of the Earth family. We graduate from our existence, overlooking the fact that we are touching extinction.

It’s like awarding them with the lines of John Denver… Already, I’m so lonely, I could die.

 Validity cries out loud???

Where did the nests of those chirping sparrows vanish?

When did the ever-friendly bird that helped so much in clearing the junk of the city we call ‘CROW’ become so lazy that they preferred not showing up much?

Why are those pigeon nests on top of that old fort getting steadily emptier?

A huge terrace filled with crows, a lazy afternoon calling those pigeons back home, or the sudden chirping of a group of sparrows while the sun bids us adieu are subjects to discover and research for the current generation. A surreal feeling of questioning oneself arises here, which we somehow realise, but we are too busy formalising an uncertain future of which even we human beings may not be a part.

Atin Basak’s works in this exhibition strikingly raise these questions for all of us.

Maybe he sees himself in all those feeble creatures he has revealed in his works, as he understands that in today’s world, technology apparently connects distant people and again ends up creating distance between people. He respects and accepts that technology is the necessity of the hour; further attempts may be in futility that there’s an unseen enemy that the former had given birth to reside in our society whose constant interference is a bona fide curse to the environment and a good enough reason for the decline of a large number of amphibian populations.

Ayan Mukherjee
Curator