Catalogue Download Link:
https://t.ly/heTO9
Artist: Palash Bhattacharjee
Curator: Sharmillie Rahman
10 -24 November, 2023
Venue: Kalakendra, Lalmatia, Dhaka Bangladesh
''In Palash Bhattacharjee's body of work, interpenetrating narratives emerge, woven around fragments of time and place, mediated through a curious process of techno-aesthetical re-production/presentation. Comprising primarily of video installations, alongside neon installations, photographs, prints, and a small collection of found objects, the current repertoire is a subjective exploration of one's ‘movement’ through places, imaginary or otherwise, as much as of one’s autonomy over time; both of which are claimed as personal. Being relocated within the domestic confines defined by patterns of intimacy and affect (apropos of COVID-19 and subsequent circumstances), made possible a recognition of a free interplay between the artist and his immediate environment. Palash invests his multidisciplinary works with nuanced imagery, often leaning toward the abstract and the absurd, as he aims to reconfigure his social self from an observer’s perspective. His stance is more thoughtful than playful, which is transcribed into his works in a prevalence of purposefulness.
Palash challenges the linearity of time
and the cohesion of spatial configurations while reconstructing the continuum
to unfold in idiosyncratically experiential vignettes. The artist-in-action,
his places and his time, on the whole, appear to co-inscribe each other. In his
works, Palash is seen to embody his past while engaging with his child and her
toys projecting the resurgence of the childlike emotions toward an imagined
future, conversely, envisioned through the lens of his lived experience and the
concurrent premonitions of the unknown. The
disjointed “moment(s) of vision” are reconciled through the interlacing of the
sublime-- of memory, dream, and nostalgia. Relayed through performative gestures/maneuver,
these works articulate his ambiguous relationship with the world at large,
hence, finding their locus in the semiotics of fear, distrust, misgivings, and
a wavering faith in the necessity to persist.
His still and moving images reveal a
self-reflexive disengagement with the politics of bias and consent. His works
cleverly eschew aesthetic finesse, giving precedence to the means over the end.
The result is more akin to a craft overlaid with the markers of the process. He
questions the modalities of disseminating 'news' and dispensing justice through
subtly irreverent performance acts. The fluidity of time and the ephemerality
of subjectivity poses a perennial paradox. The experimental 'stills' are laden
with shadows invoking the idea of ‘lack’ or disorientation due to resistance against a ‘contemporaneity’ driven
by the reductionist logic algorithmic capital. As an artist, Palash is deeply
rooted in this very digitally morphed phenomena/realm of artistic production. However,
his pronounced inclination toward images redolent with the sense of touch,
rendered in a riot of colours, alongside those portraying sleep-induced ‘grotesque’,
let alone the non-narrative, staccato formats of the videos might ring as a
call to a heightened engagement of the sensory-inscribed 'living' body with the
unconscious; toward the formulation of a self, more integrated within and
without, despite being a handyman to neoliberal technology of capital.''
