MGM Foundation x BEADS
Ritaban Ghosh deploys queries into the cusps of the contemporary rippling across pluralities of time. Through image, sculpture, food, and performance, he ponders the scape between the seen and imagined and their intervening capacity, with compassionate scrutiny. Negotiating perimeters of power, evidence and historical conjecture, he segues into diverse discourses of threshold and insolvability to chart the voyage to artisthood. He has received the Toto-Tasveer Award for his work Lonely Side Of Force (2019), published in The Sunday Times and Better Photography magazines. His work Tender Is The Night, supported by MurthyNayak Foundation (2020) was shown at KHOJ (2021). His video piece NAINAN (2021) was a finalist for Sundance Ignite X Adobe Fellowship, screened at CineToro and Harkat Studios. His lecture performance hydra-morphing (2023) was aired at La Straordinaria and his sculpture Oppressive Stillness In The Air (2023) was exhibited at LATITUDE 28. Working with broken Buddha, trampled snakes, yellow nights, and capsulised waste, it never ceases to amaze him how we exist and continually adapt ourselves to any and everything and never be the same person again.
Artist Statement
Making, in other words, is just as relational as it is material.
Taking this material turn as a rhetorical agent to understand ‘agency’ as distributed among assemblages of human and more-than-human actors, this research thinks about how power can structure, infuse, and inform that making. Like language is not simply an ability of the body, but a cultural acquisition; craft too, is not simply somatic ability, but constellations of relational epistemes and dexterities within histories and their cultures. It is the involutions of the ways of life and its shared cosmologies.
Silent videos of copper, zinc, tin in transformation are mapped onto ve torn brass pieces. Turn left and there is a large cropped portrait - speaking without speech. From the face, incomplete movements draw the viewer to listen. They hear: What do you think of people like us? How do you dene yourself? Does your expertise die with you? The answers index dismissal and estrangement. Walk further, and a fog screen precipitates a rhythmic clanging of toil and labour.
Through a sensory ethnographic approach towards the community of Balakati, this research traces the bleeding nomenclatures of art/craft/artefact/shilpa/kala to argue that the visions of beauty, utility, and value conceived and hegemonized by high art, overwhelm and obscure opportunities for the marginalized to realise and dene these percepts in their own ways. It is hoped that this dialogic togetherness of bringing the process, practice and thought of production generates potentialites of frictions and developments in understanding and accentuating the intricacies of bell metal communities.
Lazzarato, Maurizio (1996). "Immaterial labor". In Virno, Paolo; Hardt, Michael (eds.). Radical Thought in Italy : A Potential Politics. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 142–157.
