An Interstitial Intimacy- Prints Group Show (August 24,2012 to 8 September, 2012)

Here in this exhibition works of the printmakers, Abdul Salam, Amitabha Banerjee, Atin Basak, Kasa Vinay Kumar, Rajesh Deb, Sayak Mitra, Soghra Khurasani, Vijay Bagodi, V Nagdas  living in India scrutinize the living reality, which is diverse, but direct and different position of art confront the viewer in an overwhelming and dizzying fashion-exciting that it contrasts the work of major printmakers with widely disparate styles. Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions through which spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These spheres of life are linked through an 'in between' temporality that takes the measure of dwelling at home in various centres of art-practice, while producing an image of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative a double edge. We are at a crucial point here. It is high time to stop defending printmaking as a valid art form and simply begin to recognize its enormous potential. Printing is meditative, explorative, and creative and can incorporate carving, painting, drawing and using one's full artistic potential to create a work of art.

The staging of the otherness and alteration that constitutes in these prints, for us serve the essential aspects of a fictional universe. The beauty and ideas of these works are extreme promises of post independent nation. These artists of some were trained to be a painter or a sculptor but do not fear to go into a unchartered territory, their growing mastery as a sculptor, painter and printmaker deserve a wider recognition. Their art speak from the depths of the soul and reaches out to us to a world of infinitely rich theatre of their soul that weave and re- weave a potent spell for all of who dare to share in the drama. An entire process through which these printmakers tear up the conventions, ways of seeing and saying. The exhibition's real importance is not only to challenge representation as 'formidable tool of domination' but to contribute to a redefinition of realism, abstraction and cultural representation. The exhibition also reveals that one of the important problems facing non-centrist (non-western) international culture in all parts of the world- the need to come to terms with essentialist thinking in order to create new concepts of true open-ended fields of cultural construction. These tear up the spectator, who finds himself or herself torn between received ides/ feelings that dismembered by each printmaker's plate. “A visual text that is seized with desire, mirth, resemblance, vaginates, laughs, covers, itself with spots, different sexes and century effects, and unfold itself, Nile, neither the one nor the other, nor oneself, but crossed over, running, extraordinary, natural, neither Achilles, nor Amazon, nor Hamlet father or Hamlet on, but the child of all: his mother is unlimited, and he rejoices”(-Helene Cixous).

The exhibition can be viewed from Monday to Saturday, 12 to 7 p.m. excepting Sundays and is also available online at www.aakritiartgallery.com