Art Recipient Update: Boshudhara Mukherjee, Rohini Devasher and Pallavi Paul

March 2021 saw the opening of two exhibitions by three Inlaks recipients, Boshudhara Mukherjee (Fine Art Awardee 2010), Rohini Devasher (Fine Art Awardee 2007) and Pallavi Paul (Artist Grantee, 2017).

The Familiars, a solo show of Boshudhara’s work, showcased her “woven canvases”, exploring ideas of kinship, belonging and rebirth.

Rohini and Pallavi curated, Not an Imitation, a show that does not fantasize or posit a return to ‘normal’ as it was understood before the Covid-19 crisis. Instead, they have designed and populated a virtual form to restage the work of their fellow artists, working closely with their responses to this collective moment of fragility and uncertainty.

Read more about their ideas, thoughts and provocations below.

The Familiars by Boshudhara Mukherjee

Adi by Boshudhara Mukherjee — *Adi* by Boshudhara Mukherjee

She prowls around my shadowy brain

as though it were her dwelling-place

— a great soft beast of charming ways,

meowling in a mellow strain.

- Le Chat, Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire

The Familiars is a presentation of eight recent works by the Boshudhara Mukherjee in her distinctive style of large-scale, tapestry-like installations of woven canvases. The title for this show is inspired by the Wicca legend of ‘spirit guides’ called ‘Familiars’ who are believed to take the form of an animal or human to guide individuals. The ‘Familiars’ are a source of strength and wisdom; they are guardians and protectors.

The artworks in this exhibition present the artist's introspection of her sense of drawing closer to the lives around her, drawing sustenance and inspiration from them to conjure new beings in the form of her woven canvases. For instance, she draws inspiration from her cats whose movements take on a metaphorical significance, much like they did for the French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose poem Le Chat, the artist quotes as inspiration.

For the suite of works presented in this show, Boshudhara continues her practices of shredding painted canvases or revisiting old canvases only to dismantle them, repurposing these to create new entities that take on an entirely original form. For instance, her piece New Bridges is a recent work, created from a work titled Bridges, that the artist had created for her solo exhibition at TARQ in 2016. New Bridges, is an entity of its own and yet carries the memory of an old act of creation within it. A celebration of the dichotomy of continuity and rupture is a strong theme in Boshudhara’s practice.

Talking about the ideas being explored in this exhibition, Boshudhara says - “The spirits of the Familiars have their own physical existence, yet they are a spiritual extension of the individual they are destined to guard or move with. My artworks are an alter-ego I have conjured and yet I see these self-determining, organically growing entities, following their own predestined path.”

The exhibition can be viewed on TARQ’s online viewing room.

All images are courtesy Boshudhara Mukherjee and Tarq.

Not an Imitation by Pallavi Paul and Rohini Devasher

Globally, the past year has been scarred by a sense of displacement and loss. While for many this loss may have been personal, there has also been a loss of the ‘real’, followed by nostalgic recounting of our immediate past. Social contact, physical proximity or ‘normal life’ – in other words the ‘real’; now seems moored to a time gone by. The exchanges between ‘nostalgia’ and the ‘real’, their relationship to history and by extension our present, needs our attention.

We know intuitively that today an epochal shift is underway. We find ourselves in the midst of a new paradigm, where technology, time, human senses and ambition must all be reconfigured. Images and screens are no longer stop gap solutions or poor imitations of reality; they have now become our primary interlocutors, the bearers of a new order of time.

In these times, Not an Imitation does not fantasize or posit a return to ‘normal’ as it was understood before this crisis. Instead, Devasher and Paul in partnership with their gallery, have designed and populated a virtual form to restage the work of their fellow artists, working closely with their responses to this collective moment of fragility and uncertainty.

Not an Imitation includes works by Amitesh Shrivastava, Anupam Roy, Goutam Ghosh, Hemali Bhuta, Himali Singh Soin, Huma Mulji, Khageshwar Raut, Mahesh Baliga, Munem Wasif, Neha Choksi, Pallavi Paul, Prajakta Potnis, Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte, Raqs Media Collective, Risham Syed, Rohini Devasher, Sandeep Mukherjee, Sarnath Banerjee, Shreyas Karle, Shumon, Tejal Shah, and The Otolith Group. Using a virtual reality content management platform, the gallery space now enables viewers to navigate artworks in three dimensions and to scale.

The show can be viewed on Project 88’s website at project88.in.

All images are courtesy Rohini Devasher, Pallavi Paul and Project 88.