In rural West Bengal—Sundarbans’ Kumirmari, more specifically—Soumya Sankar Bose returned the art he created to the context it was born in. The Marichjhapi island and the massacre that took place in 1979, resulting in the forcible eviction of Bengali lower caste refugees, are the subject of his series Where the Birds Never Sing. Over a long period, Bose engaged with the disenfranchised survivors, creating images of the landscape. With Kolkata-based contemporary art gallery Experimenter, Bose put up enlarged versions of the images that became “sentinels” and “silent witnesses” to a complex history marked by loss.
Bose’s endeavour and Experimenter’s support for it are signs of shifts taking place in the Indian art landscape, including a changing notion of what constitutes art, who consumes and buys it, and how art spaces are moulding their curatorial voices. Inevitably, this will impact who can be an artist, and who visits galleries to be transformed by the art exhibited in them.
These shifts are not removed from history, or the larger art world; art anywhere has always responded to political and social factors. In India, specifically, a different trajectory began two decades ago, with the participation of Indian artists at Documenta 11, as curator, art critic and poet Ranjit Hoskote observes. The current shift is a response to the social churning of the last decade, coupled with the entry of younger artists from newer domains, and the rise of a new art patron.