The latest show At Exhibit 320, The Possibility of Being curated by Rahul Bhattacharya explores the manner in which the five participating artists immersed in image-making with a constant dialogue with Painting and Drawing both in terms of medium and practice. The curation is dedicated to (re) exploring linkages between the image, the socio-political and painterly practices as we come to the end of an era which was (is being) called Contemporary. One notices a continuous engagement with the notion and aspects of reality, hyper-reality and virtual reality that has been thrown up by digital image revolution and it’s use in art. The constant questioning of the same can be seen in the works of these artists who use the illusion of digital virtuality through painting and drawing; thereby manipulating digitality, breaking it down to its constituent parts and playing with it. Painting and drawing may be called the old fashioned way of art, the age of the analog, which was labour intensive and detail oriented as can be seen in the works of Muktyinath Mondal. His photograph like portrayal of three women-goddesses-leaders with their vahanas/animals such as a goat or cow standing on a Padma or carpets not only reinterprets notions of the popular calendric art but also lays wide open the question of gender and iconographies. Rekha Rodwittiya is another artist who uses the body of the universal feminine, as well as the particular body as a site on which socio-political, with its entire gamut of a sexual, psychological, material and now virtual contention takes place. The woman’s body is kind of a meta-space, like the proverbial kamadhenu on which the entire shrishti or created space took refuge; it is a space on which all kinds of maternal and sensual gender stereotypes are created and played out, socialisation, inversions and submerging all take shape.
