Image Making

“For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. […] Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

 In an era of growing debate over artificial intelligence and its role in shaping the present and future, Walter Benjamin’s influential essay offers critical insight into the discourse of human versus machine intelligence. In the 20th century, Benjamin anticipated this discourse by examining the loss of “aura” in art due to mechanical reproduction, which stripped traditional works or art of their aesthetic and ritualistic significance. While he criticises this loss, he sees it as an inevitable shift—liberating art from elitism, making it accessible, and transforming it into a political tool. This remains relevant today as contemporary art merges digital technology with physical materiality. Anirban Ghosh’s recent solo show, Inscribed Imaging, curated by Soma Bhowmik at Ganges Art Gallery, Kolkata, explores these evolving intersections of art, technology, and politics.

Anirban Ghosh, a designer and multimedia artist, has spent decades in the design industry, contributing to Fortune, India Today, Open, and other major publications as an editorial designer. His exhibition at Ganges Art Gallery offers a compelling insight into how a designer interprets the world and translates it into a distinctive artistic language. Ghosh explores multimedia with a critically and technologically conscious approach, invoking various discourses filtered through a socio-political lens. His aesthetic sensibility and keen awareness of contemporary events is manifest in his works, and is expressed in a subtle yet engaging manner.

Curator Soma Bhowmik, on the other hand, has thoughtfully designed the show within the gallery’s intimate space, creating a conceptual navigation that allows each work to receive individual attention while fostering interactive engagement with the audience, adding a dynamic quality to the exhibition.

Ghosh’s works embody his experience as an editorial designer, where he deftly plays with words and images, using subtle puns to highlight various contemporary issues and ideas. One such work, My Own Magazine (MoM), distils his design aesthetics while blending them with evocative political commentary. In this project, he creates imaginative magazine covers that reflect his distinct design sensibility, incorporating typography, graphic imagery, colour, and material—engaging with critical themes such as identity, gender, displacement, migration, and the post-truth phenomenon in contemporary times.

Terms like “Artificial”, juxtaposed with an artificial rose and a subtitle stating, “Not genuine or natural but made by people,” or “Viral”, paired with a cluster of pins, reflect a clever play on meaning while subtly alluding to the post-truth phenomenon—where artificial could reference intelligence, and viral could signify social media content rather than disease. Meanwhile, politically charged terms such as “Hegemony,” “Logical,” and “Border” appear within the set of nine cover designs, each featuring images with layered connotations. Ghosh further extends this project through a video projection, displaying the works in different contexts, enhancing their interactive and socio-political significance.

A key aspect of his practice is encouraging audience interaction. By placing blank notebooks with symbolic titles from “My Own Magazine”, he invites viewers to express themselves through drawings, writings, or doodles, transforming them from passive spectators into active participants, thus creating an experiential space where the audience contributes to the work’s evolving narrative.

Ghosh’s work carries a witty and thought-provoking essence, where he cleverly invokes complex political and existential discourses through the interplay of text and visuals. A striking example is his interpretation of Badal Sircar’s Ebong Indrajit—a seminal experimental play critiquing societal mediocrity and existential angst by employing the strategies of the absurd and satire. Ghosh’s installation combines video projections of interviews exploring the meaning of life with acrylic mirror sheets printed with texts and images from the play.

The interactive nature of the text allows viewers to see their reflections as they read, making them a part of the work. Indrajit, the troubled protagonist’s portrait is depicted as a mirror, where the viewer’s reflection merges with the character, signifying an ontological discourse—questioning societal norms, class structures, and the hegemonic silencing of dissent. The adjacent video projection of interviews augments this immersive experience, turning the space into a conceptual dialogue on identity, agency, and imposed societal mediocrity. By using reflective surfaces and juxtaposing text with visuals, Ghosh transforms Ebong Indrajit into a multi-vocal installation that transcends the tangible.

Ghosh subtly evokes a similar sensibility in his notebooks and sketchbooks, where his artistic and design processes unfold in a more organic manner. These books offer insight into both the artist and the designer, filled with cutouts, typographic experiments, page layouts, and with sketches of figures like Alfred Hitchcock, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Chattopadhyay and others. Their rawness serves as an apt conclusion to the exhibition, reinforcing the ongoing debate between artificial/mechanical and human intelligence. The curatorial design deftly weaves these different trajectories, without any overbearing conceptual pretension, allowing the works to speak for themselves.

A signature element in Ghosh’s practice is the fusion of drawing and typography, which is present across most of his works. He also incorporates QR codes that, when scanned, reveal digital drawings on mobile devices. However, this element introduces certain technological limitations—not all viewers may have smartphones or the knowledge to access these digital layers. Compared to his other works, these QR-based images fall short of the same conceptual depth, functioning more as a playful filler between his more critically engaging pieces.

Ghosh’s exhibition presents a nuanced intersection of design, technology, and artistic expression, where words and images merge to create a multi-layered experience. His seamless integration of the digital and the handmade forms a fluid artistic language, resulting in an intellectually engaging and visually stimulating environment that immerses the viewer in a dynamic spatial experience.

(Inscribed Imaging: Multimedia inflections by Anirban Ghosh, curated by Soma Bhowmik, is on display at Ganges Art Gallery, Kolkata, till March 27)

Anirban Ghoshart exhibitionsby Soma BhowmikGanges Art GalleryKolkataMultimedia inflections