Prasanta Sahu’s multi-dimensional practice straddles paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures and photography, asserting all the cross-cultural influences of his life, such as - a small town upbringing and love for his ancestral village, Chaughari, in Odisha, watching and assisting his father make survey maps along with the technical experience gained from initial training in electrical engineering (1983-88), followed by an experience of advertisement and hoarding paintings. The artistic skill and critical approach learned in his years studying in art school - five of which were spent in Santiniketan for a BFA degree in painting (1993-98) and the other two acquiring a master’s degree from MSU Vadodara (1998-2000), as well as his experience as a pedagogue (Sahu has been teaching at his alma mater Kala Bhavana since 2001) combined with an ‘insider-outsider’ vision of a diasporic. Hence, these eclectic experiences remain essential in Sahu’s practice, adding complex layers to a visual praxis rooted in documentation, research and personal ruminations.
At the core of his work is a critical engagement with generational knowledge and its transmission. He considers the workshops of blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, and craftsmen as dynamic repositories where techniques, philosophies, and stories are orally shared and safeguarded. Sahu’s work examines how these traditions persist despite the homogenization of economic and socio-political forces. His research-driven approach incorporates textual documentation, diagrammatic studies, object casting, interviews, and audio recordings of artisans engaged in generational occupations. The numerical, statistical, and diagrammatic elements in his work function as representational devices and indices of traditions, offering a methodological framework for understanding the fluidity of knowledge as it is practised, adapted, and transferred.
Sahu's artistic vocabulary is shaped by his engineering background and early experiences with survey mapping and technical drafting. The principles of cartography profoundly influence his visual lexicon, where spatial logic and geometric structuring serve as conceptual frameworks to illustrate the interconnectedness of craft, oral traditions, and embodied knowledge. Beyond this systematic approach, poetry plays a crucial role in his practice, offering both a conceptual and emotional foundation. He often perceives the inherent logic of certain acts as poetic, situating them within an abstract, almost metaphysical realm. The interplay of absence and presence, along with the non-linearity of narratives, resonates with poetic sensibilities, transforming his work into a site of cultural continuity where practice and memory intertwine.
