A cherished time of the day in lots of elements of India is the convivial gathering round a cup of tea. In tea stalls, the chatter ranges from the raucous to the intimate and from the political to the non-public, so when one beholds artist Prasanta Sahu’s set up Tea Table Talk, it makes one pause.
Three-thousand commissioned terracotta cups, shattered, have been piled atop a desk — acquainted shards as a result of a mud cup is what one discards when one is finished with tea. Sahu, an ardent tea stall customer, inscribes every terracotta piece with handwritten snippets of overheard conversations: “…but do not know he will…”, “play a cricket match in the school field…”, “… I love to gossip…”. Miraculously, these confessions convey a single desk alive with a thousand discarded conversations and units the tempo for Sahu’s newest solo exhibition The Geometry of Ordinary Lives, which presents an artist’s exploration introduced by way of sculptural installations, work, video and sketches.
Prasanta Sahu’s Tea Table Talk set up
| Photo Credit:
Vivian Sarky
A thousand discarded conversations
| Photo Credit:
Vivian Sarky
Cartographic strategy
Sahu’s penchant for artwork intersects firmly between analysis, inquiry and the human lived expertise. And this new exhibition is tough-hitting and highly effective not solely as a result of it sees an artist at his peak kind with practically 4 many years of observe, but in addition as a result of it’s an exquisite interplay with generational data and its transmission. In our world that constanty seeks technological bridges, his artwork is a throwback to the fantastic thing about what the human physique and reminiscence alone can create and transmit.
Mapping My Neighbourhood (acrylic and photograph switch on acid-free paper)
With a agency inventive expression formed by his early profession expertise as a technical draftsman and a surveyor, his methodical, cartographic strategy is deeply embedded in his work. It can also be knowledgeable by his decade-lengthy interactions with communities in his native, rural Odisha, and present place of residence, Santiniketan — from blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, and craftsmen to farmers and different “ordinary” individuals who he sees as dynamic repositories of information. For instance, in a quartet of line drawing sketches within the exhibition that traces tradesman work motions, the artist overlays his observations with a portray of a main software. Even as a trowel or screwdriver holds your consideration, the tactile intimacy of a employee and his environment, and the taught abilities in a tradesman’s palms, are introduced into sharp focus by way of Sahu’s astute observations in drawings beneath.
Vessels of Memory (acrylic on acid-free paper)
Reframing artisanal labour
This exhibition presents a lens that’s deeply acquainted and but is a refreshingly new spatial tackle life research and traditions. As the curatorial observe places it merely: in “understanding the fluidity of knowledge as it is practised, adapted, and transferred”.
It is clear that Sahu continuously sketches, listens, pictures and videographs, and is all the time mapping an concept, a thought, a terrain or a panorama. One can’t assist however marvel what his archive appears like. A repository of the agricultural and suburban peoples and geographies of our instances and maybe additionally of a pondering artist of our instances?
Tools That Hold Memories (ink, graphite and watercolour on acid-free paper)
For these , Sahu presents right here an attractive interaction between archival inquiry and methods of seeing ‘ordinary lives’. It’s an artist’s silent tribute too, to a world of people that work with their palms, with abilities taught from one pair of palms to the opposite, between generations, and a world that’s threatened by the way forward for mechanisation and synthetic intelligence.
Prasanta Sahu: The Geometry of Ordinary Lives is on until June 21 at Emami Art in Kolkata.
The author is the founder-director of Eka Archiving Services.
Published – June 05, 2025 03:54 pm IST
