“Perhaps the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all (these) repetitions, with their differences in kind and rhythm, their displacements and disguises.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Things repeat. Forms, gestures, and ways of making. Things reappear. Works surface from different moments of history that bear the ease of recognition even as meanings shift. Leaves, animals, human figures appear and reappear in the show. Yet, they refuse to settle into sameness. With each repetition, a certain displacement registers itself. A leaf deepens into dye drawn from soil; an animal gathers kinship, fear, appetite; a silhouette fractures into something singular, gendered, caste-marked, precarious.
What repeats cannot return intact. It is always already altered. It comes bearing the conditions of its times and spaces--material and affective, social and historical. What gathers isn’t linear progression from past to present. It is a string of vicinages. These works shaped by different moments are held within the same field, where continuity or rupture can't be given in advance. Instead, this is where the act and fact of repetition become a way of placing such diverse practices in a matrix of relations: allowing echoes to surface, dissonances to persist, and differences to emerge through adjacency.
From afar, this exhibition might seem like a gathering of nature and figure studies. Up close, though, it behaves curiously like an archive of decisions: how slowly to let an image form, how much opacity to allow, how much beauty to risk when beauty itself is suspect, how to hold landscape when it is a record of dispossession, how to inhabit lineages without smoothing them into safe heritage, how a queer or hybrid body unsettles the assurance of a centred figure.
The “ballad” of the title is no seamless song recovered intact. It is a refrain altered by time. Its notes carry L.M. Sen’s landscapes, K. C. Pyne’s imaginations and the contemporary urgencies that move through the works of Arunima Choudhury, Ajit Kumar Das, Alakananda Sengupta, Chandra Bhattacharjee, Partha Dasgupta, Raja Boro, Rahul Sarkar, Sayandeep Kangsabanik, Subrata Biswas, and Tapas Biswas. Their voices mix without settling into harmony. One reprieve returns as pastoral, another as lament, another as warning. The listener may follow the tune and see where it takes them.
