The ongoing exhibition in Kolkata unfolds truth and stories as told by rare photographs collected from all over the world. By Saugar Sengupta
Spider is the world’s best artist’ — Anonymous. True. Alongside he is also a prolific storyteller. His art sprouts in his belly and spit out in cobwebs. Naturally and really. While spider’s realism is full of deceit, man’s is sometimes adulterated by sympathy. Man also ventures into cobwebbing art, weaving realistic forms into life. In doing so he often draws juice from crass historical facts or historic accidents.
This is an earnest endeavour by a group of 12 artists to rediscover the thirteenth one — lost in time — by simply following a shoebox full of unsigned photographs of yesteryear belonging to the land of different people. The exhibit, now running in Kolkata, is an aesthetic and cross-cultural exploration of historic imagery, “a celebration of the universal power of photography to elicit memory and spurt conversations.”
Dubbed Following the Box (FTB), it is both a mystery story and a visual dialogue between Americans and Indians, putting to best use the eternal power of art. The 12 artists involve with a 13th invisible one to transgress prophesy of Kipling in order to ensure that twain meets and meets with gusto. Who would have imagined that a shoebox discovered in an estate sale at Chicago would metamorphose into a tinderbox firing imagination and exquisite artwork fusing civilisations, overrunning history and timeIJ
The exhibition details the sense and sensibility of an American soldier posted 70 years ago around the Salua Airbase near Kharagpur in World War II Bengal. Today lost in oblivion, the invisible soldier, picture-framed in mid 1940s, shares a brief history of civilisational fusions overlaid with lust, hatred, diplomacy, war and misery. Their negative manifestations notwithstanding, the photographs were thematically woven with love and respect.
The shoebox stuffed with 127 “beautiful” negatives and photographs took curators Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral half-way around the world even as they followed its source. As they followed the box to try and unravel the mystery behind who took these compelling shots and for what purpose, they gather ten Indian artists who draw varied inspiration from these images.
While their research brought them to India they were overwhelmed at the thought of a wartime soldier grabbing his Speed Graphic 4x5” press camera hopping into a jeep and going off into a countryside to photograph. “Who was heIJ Why did he leave his airbase to do thatIJ We have no idea. What we do know is that he created remarkable images often depicting misery but delicately packaged in compassion, sympathy and respect. The unique idea and initiative to develop the stories behind each snap into a cobweb of ideas developed by the artists is no less an effort. It is fantastic to witness how each artist interpreted these images in their own unique way shaped by their personal artistic vision,” say Alan and Jerry adding, “We were fortunate to find ten contemporary Indian artists in various disciplines who shared our excitement.”
Backing up the contention that wars have never been fought for the common people but by them, artist Chhatrapati Dutta says, “Photographs bring back memories known and learnt but FTB prints lets one indulge in speculation and imagination.”
Even as artists wonder how delicately the contents of the photographs depicted one of the worst man-made holocausts, the famine of 1940s, Dutta writes, “Unspoken by the empire, all signs of one of the worst human-made holocausts presumably disappear in the FTB photos. The 1943 famine of Bengal, which claimed the lives of four million people, remain shadowed but not forgotten nor forgiven — it becomes an important part of the layering.”
The exhibition continues till March 7.