An Ancient Ballad brings together works that return to certain forms, gestures, and materials across different moments. These returns do not stabilise meaning. Each recurrence carries a shift shaped by time, context, and the conditions of making. What appears recognisable begins to alter under attention.
Works drawn from different historical points are placed within the same field, where no single narrative of past and present can hold. Instead, relations emerge through proximity. Echoes surface. Differences persist. A leaf moves between ornament, residue, and matter transformed through process. A body resists fixed identity, opening into unstable, situated forms.
This exhibition spans painting, sculpture, print, and photography bringing earlier works into conversation with recent and newly presented ones. Material remains central to this encounter. Natural dyes register soil and labour. Ceramics carry the imprint of heat and pressure. Metal points to extraction and transformation. Printmaking retains the resistance of surface and repetition. Each work holds the conditions of its making within it.
Seen together, the exhibition unfolds as a set of decisions rather than a unified statement. Questions of form, time, and material remain open.
The “ballad” in the title unfolds as a refrain that shifts with each iteration. It brings into relation the landscapes of L. M. Sen and the imaginative worlds of K. C. Pyne with the practices of Arunima Choudhury, Ajit Kumar Das, Alokananda Sengupta, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Partha Dasgupta, Raja Boro, Rahul Sarkar, Sayandeep Kangsabanik, Subrata Biswas, and Tapas Biswas. Their works remain in tension, without resolution, carrying different tonalities that unfold across the exhibition.
