Date: April 25 – June 21, 2025
Venue: Gallery 2, Ground Floor, Emami Art
Re:Figuring showcases some of the recent works by ten contemporary visual art practitioners working across media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, prints and photography. At the core of the exhibition lies a pressing question: What does a figure objectify? Through diverse approaches, from hyper-figurative renderings to fragmented, semi-abstract forms and documentation, the exhibition interrogates the complex rendering of figures in the real, imagined, or psycho-social spaces they inhabit. It considers the spaces and environments as active collaborators in shaping the meanings of the figures. Here, the figure may not be a static iconic entity, but a convulsive becoming, an unravelling. It becomes a recurring discursive site to depict the dialectics of the visible/invisible, presence/absence, and subjection/agency.
The representation of the body is never a stable rendering. It is like a chameleon shaped by its environment in an era defined by ecological collapse, algorithmic control, and the spectre of late capitalism. The materiality of the body and its spatial dissolution heighten the instability, radically disconnecting from the sacred and establishing a complicated dynamic with the space and surroundings. It is now quantified, surveilled, and gentrified within the spatial regimes. To understand the figure is to refuse to look at the figure as an isolated entity, but as an entangled nexus, made and unmade by ecological, technological, and economic rubrics that envelope it. There is a compulsion to see the world through the collapsing ecosystems and their grids of control. The figure is neither subject nor object; it signifies a site of continuous conflict between person and institution, nature and technology, collective belonging and digital isolation. Its irreducible fluidity reflects the shift in gaze as well as gesturing towards the possibility for unlearning.
The exhibition showcases artworks by Avishek Das, Bholanath Rudra, Janhavi Khemka, Swastik Pal, Priti Roy, Santanu Debnath, Sayanee Sarkar, Kushan Bhattacharya, Tapas Biswas, and Ushnish Mukhopadhyay. Situating the idea of the figure within spaces of hypervisibility and erasure, it frames the figures as a question to explore.