Artist Prasanta Sahu Makes The Ordinary Extraordinary

A cherished time of the day in many parts of India is the convivial gathering Around a cup of tea. In tea stalls, the Chatter ranges from the Raucous to the intimate and from the Political to the Personal, So When One Behlds Artist Prasanta Sahu’s installation Tea Table TalkIt makes one pause.

Three-Thousand Commissioned Terracotta Cups, SHATTERED, Have Been PILED ATOP A Table-Familiar Shards BeCause a Mud Cup is What One Discards What One Done One IS DONE TEA TEA. Sahu, an ardent tea stall visitor, inscribes each terracotta piece with handwritten snippets of overheard conversations: “…… but do not know he will…” “… I love to gossip…”. Miraculously, these confessions brings a single table alive with a thousand discarded conversions and sets the pace for saahu’s latest solo exhibition The geometry of order.

Prasanta sahu’s Tea Table Talk Installation | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky

A Thousand Discarded Conversations | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarky

Cartographic Approach

Sahu’s Penchant for Art Interacts Firmly Between Research, Inquiry and the Human Live Experience. And this new exhibition is hard-Hitting and powerful not only because it sees an artist at his peak form with nearly four decades of practice, but also believe it is a wonderful interaction white love Generational Knowledge and Its Transmission. In our world that Constanty seeks technological bridges, his art is a throwback to the beauty of what the human body and memory alone can create and transmit.

Mapping My NeighBourhood (Acrylic and Photo Transfer on Acid-Free Paper)

With a firm artistic expression shaped by his ear Early Career Experience as a Technical Draftsman and A Surveyor, His Methodical, CARTHODICAL, CARTOGRAPHIC APPROACH IS Deeeply Embedded In His Work. It is also informed by his decade-long interactions with communities in his native, rural odisha, and current place of Residence, Residence, Santiniketan-From Blacksmiths, Carpents, Carpents, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, Potters, CarPents, Carphens To Farmers and other “Ordinary” People who He Sees as Dynamic Repositories of Knowledge. For example, in a Quartet of Line Drawing sketches in the exhibition that traces tradesman work motions, the artist overlays his observations with a painting of a primery tool. Even as a trowel or screenwdriver holds your attention, the tactil intimacy of a worker and his surroundings, and the tauckt skills in a tradesman’s hands, are brough into sharp focus thinking Astute observations in drawings beneath.

Vessels of memory (Acrylic on acid-free paper)

Reframing Artisanal Labor

This exhibition presents a lens that is Deeply Familiar and Yet is a refreshingly new spatial take on life studies and traditions. As the Curatorial Note puts it simply: in “undersrstanding the fluidity of knowledge as it is practiced, adapted, and transferred”.

It is evident that Sahu Constantly sketches, listens, photos and videoographs, and is always mapping an idea, a thought, a terrain or a landscape. One can’t help but wonder what his archive looks like. A repository of the rural and suburban people and geographies of our times and perhaps also of a thinking artist of our times?

Tools that hold memory (Ink, graphite and watercolour on acid-free paper)

For that Interested, Sahu Presents Here an Engaging Interplay Between Archival Inquiry and Ways of Seeing ‘Ordinary Lives’. It’s an artist’s Silent Tribute Too, to a World of People who Work With Their Hands, With Skills Taught from one Pair of Hands to the Other, Between Generations, Between Generations, Between generations Mechanisation and artificial intelligence.

Prasanta Sahu: The Geometry of Ordinary Lives is on Till June 21 at Emami Art in Kolkata.

The writer is the founder-director of eka Archiving services.