Creativity flourishes within the walls of the historic Alipore jail where contemporary artists reflect on the ideas of ‘freedom and awakening’
When the West Bengal Government decided to turn the Alipore Jail into a museum, coinciding with India’s 75th year of Independence, it invited the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) to curate a show that celebrated the freedom struggle.
The KCC arranged a camp with prominent and promising artists from all over India, who visited the then under-renovation Alipore Jail, and what they created became the Freedom and Awakening exhibition. The second phase of the exhibition, also to go on for a year like the first, was inaugurated last weekend.
“Interpretation of freedom and awakening continues with paintings and installations by contemporary Bengali artists. We hope that these artworks continue to inspire all those who walk into Cell No. 5 of the Alipore jail-turned-museum and keep reminding us of the struggles and the fight for freedom from British rule,” said Richa Agarwal, chairperson of Kolkata Centre for Creativity.
“Just as the struggle for Independence encompassed a spectrum of experiences, emotions, and challenges, this exhibition showcases a kaleidoscope of artistic expressions investigating individual freedom and collective awakening as a journey in progress,” she said.
The show presents artworks by artists such as Chhatrapati Dutta, Mithu Sen, Debasish Mukherjee, Smarak Roy, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Suman Dey, Arunima Choudhury and Debanjan Roy.
The only traditional sculpture in the exhibition, cast in bronze, is Debanjan Roy’s ‘Gandhi’ — an icon of the Indian freedom struggle and a theme Mr. Roy has been artistically exploring for decades. Of the two women artists in the show, in Mithu Sen’s artworks the idea of freedom — or the lack of it — revolves around a bleak picture of the present. She illustrates it with a dialogue between the unborn, the mother, and the motherland. Arunima Choudhury’s portrays life on the fringes — how joy and harmony persist in abundance at the unsung periphery.
Debasish Mukherjee, keeping to his practice, dwells on Partition in his work titled ‘1950’, which is a set of 32 mix media drawings and one installation, mapping the camp life and real stories of people who crossed the border and settled in various camps in India after the riots in East Bengal.
“It is an outcome of a recent engagement of mine with an oral history project, where I spoke to people from various strata of society who lost their homes across the border that year. Listening to them, I observed there were two things common in their lived reality of refugee existence: hunger, which they faced no matter where they were; and gamchha, the thin red-and-white-check cotton towel. In this work, I use the gamchha as the base to map out undulating barbed wires,” Mr. Mukherjee told The Hindu.
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