On Practice, Collaboration, and a Shared Interior

This collaboration begins from looking, slowly, repeatedly, and from staying with the work long enough for it to speak back. Debarati Roy Saha’s paintings do not announce themselves. They arrive through fragments, through pauses, through moments that hover between clarity and erosion. What surfaces is not a story, but a state of being with memory as it shifts, settles, resists.

Her practice moves through a continuous play of presence and absence. Images appear, retreat, blur, and return…sometimes insistently, sometimes shyly…occupying spaces that feel uncertain yet familiar. There is a measured distance at work, and also an intimate closeness. A tension between revealing and withholding. Colours, and their manner of application, act as carriers of emotion, but also as shelters, holding what cannot always be spoken or blatantly revealed.

As the curator, an interdisciplinary practitioner, and also an avid viewer, my engagement with her work is shaped by this oscillation. What I observe is not resolution, but negotiation. Joy and sorrow. Fulfilment and alienation. Reveal and hesitation. These are not binaries here; they coexist. The paintings respond to lived experiences…family, community, reading, music, daily routines…allowing them to accumulate inwardly before finding form, sometimes as quiet emergence, sometimes as silent explosions. Memory does not arrive intact; it arrives layered, fractured, and often veiled.

Oh Me!!…a phrase I remember as a song heard long ago, written by Kurt Cobain, returned to me through pores, fragments, and moments. It settled gradually, as I began composing the poem that emerged from this space of self-address. It is not an exclamation of certainty, but of questioning. A call inward. A moment where the self-pauses, observes itself, and continues, still falling, still moving. I believe the title resonates deeply with Debarati’s practice because her works operate within this tension: between exposure and protection, between the urge to share and the instinct to guard what is deeply personal.

This project unfolds as a collaboration rooted in attentiveness rather than instruction. The language that forms here is shared, subtle, porous, and collectively held. The poem does not illustrate the paintings, nor do the paintings seek to explain the poem. Instead, they inhabit a common emotional register, allowing individual voices to overlap without dissolving into one another. What emerges is a collective sensibility, quiet, layered, and resonant…finding its way into the open.

The works also carry the weight of lived multiplicity. The self that appears here is not singular. It is shaped by roles and responsibilities of being a woman, a mother, an art practitioner, negotiating time, labour, exhaustion, and the need to make. These negotiations surface not as declarations, but as gestures: in colour, in images explored through rupture, restraint, and silence.

Oh Me!! holds all of this together… again, not as a conclusion, but as an ongoing inquiry. It speaks of the dialects of life and living. Of identity in flux. Of collective breathing within individual struggle. This collaboration does not intendedly seek closure. It remains open, attentive, and in motion, part of a continuous practice shaped by return, reflection, and shared presence.

Ayan Mukherjee
Curator