Gallery Espace presents ‘a river of unrest…a delta of dreams’, a solo exhibition by Paula Sengupta featuring a body of works that arise from her twin engagements with Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and his menagerie in Matiyaburj ( “tower of mud”) on the banks of the Hooghly near Calcutta where he lived in exile for the last three decades of his life, and the landscape of the Sunderbans delta – beautiful, rich in biodiversity, and in danger of being lost to climate change.
Connecting the disparate narratives are the animation “A Palace of Porcelain on a Tower of Mud by the River of Unrest”, a symbolic fable about the destruction of the Nawab’s palace by the restless waters of the river, and the eponymous “a river of unrest … a delta of dreams”, a series of eight silk panels mounted on an antique sheesham room-divider and displayed at the entrance to the exhibition. This latter artwork depicts the narrative of Nawab’s journey from Avadh to Calcutta on a royal red barge which floats down the meandering river in which swim Indigenous and exotic animals – tigers, lions, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, deer, crocodiles, giraffes, and zebra. The two banks of the river represent disparate geographies – on top, silhouetted against the black sky, are the tangled prop roots of the Great Banyan’s canopy in The Botanics near Kolkata. At the bottom are the aerial, peg-like roots of the mangrove forests arising from the brown, clayey soil of the Sunderbans.
“The gardens that Paula Sengupta creates through different mediums are places of poetic explorations and expositions,” writes Swiss curator Damien Christinger in his essay on the exhibition. “Detailed blooming flowers, a menagerie of domestic and exotic animals, flowing waters, abstracted and life-like, life-giving, remind her and us of impossible pasts and possible futures. The animals take centre stage. Through them, the artist creates a language of longing, a metaphor for artistic languages beyond the spoken word.”
The exhibition brings together a wide range of materials and processes. Besides textiles and animation, there are prints, drawings, and sculptures in paper pulp and jute, and each medium is chosen carefully for its contextual connection with the narratives. For instance, the large paper pulp wall panels were layered by hand, simulating a process used to construct dwellings in the Sunderbans traditionally. The wall panels have shapes cut into them resembling Nipa palms, the different mangrove roots, and pneumatophores, while long lengths of jute rope and fibre embedded in the pulp trail to the ground, reminiscent of the snaking roots of the mangroves. Interspersed among the snaking roots are toy-like figurines made of paper-pulp of animals commonly found in the Sunderbans, such as crocodiles and tigers, others like the rhinoceros that have disappeared from the areas, and also exotic species like the lion and zebra that never inhabited the region!
The artist exercises considerable ingenuity in creating not just the topography but also the visual effects of the Sunderbans landscape. For instance, “Shadows on the Estuary”, a series of six works focused on the elusive birds in these estuarine canals, are complex assemblages of jute-rope grids woven and knotted and then immersed in a trough of rice paper pulp and water. A second frame with a drawing of endangered bird species is screwed behind, which, when backlit, creates an eerie and elusive viewing experience evocative of the constantly shifting landscape of this unique ecosystem.
The Sunderbans, the artist writes in her statement, “is a landscape of contradictions – the rhinoceros has vanished; the tiger struggles to survive; the crocodile, native as he is, rules; and the prey base, planted as they are by humanity, ne’er have a chance of survival. Much like Nawab’s famed menagerie of collectables that roamed his manicured lawns, alienated from their native habitat, yet prized for their exoticism.”
