Experimenter, the gallery at Kolkata’s Hindustan Road known for its cutting-edge artworks, inaugurated a new space at Ballygunge Place earlier this year. Its ongoing exhibition, Drawn From Practice, is running at both venues,but there is a striking disparity in the quality of the exhibits. The curatorial note gives us an idea of the inclusiveness and breadth of this exhibition, bringing visual and performing arts, theatre, music, textile, writing, architecture and archives under the rubric of “drawing”, as the exhibition “relooks at the conceptual, notational and foundational role of drawing across a wide arc of disciplines and media.” And, although the “exhibition proposes to explore the conceptual idea of drawing as a scaffolding for building practices of expression”, at times it stretches the idea, otherwise full of possibilities, beyond breaking point.

Fantasy and factuality

But to begin with the high points, the works of New York-based Kanishka Raja, who died young at the peak of his creativity earlier this year, are truly outstanding and exciting. According to the website/ art blog, Hyperallergic, Raja “charted a singular artistic and personal trajectory between two worlds: America and India...” His large works are firmly structured, yet pulsating with rainbow colours and energy. One each is on display at both addresses.

His ‘Ornament and Translation’ (at Hindustan Road) has nine panels, oil on canvas, hand-woven, embroidered and solvent-based UV inks printed on gesso on canvas, together forming a large rectangle. Cross-referencing multiple cultural influences, technology and altered states of consciousness, the variety of stimulating textures and tones adds to the dazzling virtuosity of this work. Raja’s 16-panel painting, ‘KR020’, displayed at Ballygunge Place, is more subdued, but is evidence of his mastery of draughtsmanship. Seemingly rooted in real life, although painted in rainbow colours, with its amalgam of fantasy and factuality, it is quite as fascinating as its more shimmering counterpart.

Sahil Naik’s experimentation with architecture and scale has a haunting quality. In the Hindustan Road space, he displays the precision with which his imagination works in his graphite drawing of the brise-soleil or sun baffle that was a signature of Le Corbusier in his Chandigarh plans, a feature that came to characterise the work of many of his followers. Yet the drawing has an intangible airiness about it, belying the rigidity of the structure.

Leap across barriers

The participants are drawn from diverse professions. Bijoy Jain is an architect, and he encrusts the surface of banana fibre paper with lime, indigo, vermilion and turmeric on which are drawn barely discernible grids in contrasting shades. He does the same on cement sheets, infusing geometry with an intensity of feeling, and encouraging one to leap across barriers, if only in imagination. Srinath Iswaran’s photographs,using light as a medium of drawing, present graphic designs in stark black and white, using straight lines, quite as basic as the binaries that depict them.

The idea of drawing is stretched far enough with the inclusion of an exotic textile (Ottoman velvet) with intricate designs that blend geometry and floral motifs. Woven by highly-skilled artisans and presented by Rahul Jain, who is trying to revive rare traditional woven materials, this two-toned Ottoman velvet displayed at Hindustan Road appeals to our haptic sense.

Abir Karmakar’s installation at Ballygunge Place tries to fool the eye by painting doors on canvases, but better than this attempt at trompe l’oeil are his photographs of junkyards and the highly textured details.

Sounds fancy

The inclusion and quality of works of performance and cinema at Ballygunge Place is questionable. To begin with, isn’t Badal Sircar too big a figure in Indian theatre to be represented by a video played on a screen the size of a mobile phone, with snatches of dialogue from his famous Evam Indrajit? And does his work really fill the slot, notwithstanding the participation of both actors and audience, and collaborative nature of the final production? Would extenuating circumstances justify that?

In Padmini Chettur’s video, ‘Beautiful Thing 1’, “the dancers are the discreet segments of a unique mathematical equation,” to quote the curatorial note. This sounds fancy and can even be passed off as avant garde, but it is more like the drone of the tanpura without the melody it is supposed to support and sustain. The sonic canvas is there, but what about drawing the melody of the raga on it? So one ends up watching almost-catatonic performers, seemingly in a state of suspended animation.

Ashish Avikunthak’s 106-minute single-take film, ‘Rati Chakravyuh’, despite the posturing of experimentation, is bromidic. A group of newly-weds and their priestess hold a never-ending discourse in funereal tones on life, death, carnality, riots, and, to add a touch of the contemporary, the Hindu-Muslim divide. They discuss in graphic detail rape, bestiality, menstruation, the erotic games their parents played in the Victoria Memorial grounds, often using the crudest language possible. Even if one overlooks the yawns such dull exercises induce, the work has discrepancies that puts off viewers.

ON SHOW: ‘Drawn From Practice’, till October 31, Experimenter, Hindustan Road and Ballygunge Place, Kolkata

The writer focuses on Kolkata’s vanishing heritage and culture.