Look (Again) before You Speak

Artist Adip Dutta’s debut solo has succeeded in taking reality by surprise

For his debut solo in Kolkata, artist Adip Dutta remains the quiet trickster. Perhaps the title—I Have a Face but a Face of What I am Not— is the only ‘straightforward’ element of the show. It serves as a statement and warning that what you see is not always what you get, and sets up for us a situation filled with surprises.

The first, visually most striking piece, is placed in the centre of the exhibition space, nestled within upturned clay and mud. Its white skeletal form carries the aura of an important archaeological dig, the remains of some ancient prehistoric animal—until you step closer to find it’s a larger-than-life hair clip. On a similar note is another work hung on a nearby wall, which turns out to be a gigantic hair band. In a corner, brooding like a shiny space-age lead zeppelin is a colossal metallic loofah. The banal and the mundane are lifted out of their common, everyday applications and propelled into the domain of other, ‘higher’, often unrelated professions of archaeology, architecture, drawing and art history. The functional is transformed into the venerated, the awe-inspiring and magical. The ‘Khastha Kotha’ series, placed next to a softly-lit life-size bronze sculpture of male genitalia, is a witty and engaging example of this. Inspired by cheap Bengali porn magazines (usually bought at roadside newspaper stalls and shops at railways stations), these five books belie their rather sordid origins. To begin with, they are bound in lush tussar (raw) silk, an expensive material used mainly for family photograph albums or rare old texts, and the paper is of high matte quality. The prose offers vignettes of various scenes oozing with sexual innuendo and double entendres—for example ‘Tap Tonic’ talks of how the liquid gushed onto her arm, while others speak of ‘snakes’, ‘balloons’ and lungis convenient for quickies (as opposed to the Western trouser). Accompanying the text are carefully crafted drawings that could easily have come from an academic textbook. Placed next to each book is a magnifying glass, which viewers are encouraged to use to read and examine the works.     

Yet, pushing the boundaries of our notions of banality and high art isn’t the only thing that interests Dutta. The exhibition has been carefully orchestrated to allow for shadow ‘drawings’ to emerge from the works themselves. The hair band (titled Drawing II) piece, for instance, throws delicate twisted shadows on the wall, while the loofah, bathed in a spotlight, also creates an interesting interplay of silhouetted forms. Moving away from the intangible, Dutta also deliberately allows material to echo each other through the show. Working mainly with industrial wire, the artist replicates the delicacy of this material, its shape—sometimes curling and convoluted or stiffly straight—through his brush and ink drawings (fine enough to have been done by pen or pencil). The images are of mundane objects—a safety pin, an egg beater, a broom, clothes hanger, a pair of trousers and coat, a cloth jhola (bag), a slice of toasted bread—yet drawn with extreme intricacy and attention to detail. Interspaced between the drawings are bits of wire that you need to look at twice to check if they’re real or sketched.

If, as French writer Françoise Sagan said, ‘Art must take reality by surprise,’ then Dutta  has, in his own way, succeeded, by infusing the utilitarian with a little sweetness and light.

I have a Face but a Face of What I am Not is on display at Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata, till 10 September 2011

Adip Duttaexhibitionsolo