MASH India, curator Ina Puri, and Kolkata Centre for Creativity Bring to you a fundraiser Stand with Bengal for restoration post cyclonic devastation.
When Bengal, the land of poetry and art, once known as the cradle of culture, gets rocked by a storm, the result is not anger but poetry. The people’s indestructible love of art and culture is what makes Bengal so unique. Even if faced with strife where their life is torn apart by the Cyclone Amphan, they turn to art and poetry in solace. The Cyclone killed over 100 people, wiped out thousands of homes, broke embankments, and destroyed crops.
The youth of Bengal has created several poetry blogs, one of them titled Mirakee,
(https://www.mirakee.com/explore/tags/cyclone) giving them a space to express their experience of the storm in their beloved poetic medium.
Neighbors in Delhi, the capital of India, have also decided to use artistic means to lend a helping hand by arranging an online fundraiser, titled Stand with Bengal. The online auction is hosted by MASH India and donated by Ina Puri. This movement features artworks by indigenous and contemporary artists, Gond and Warli painters alongside contemporary artists who employ or work around the visual language of indigenous art.
“Watching from afar and being unable to help immediately, was deeply troubling. Like me,
friends and members of the art fraternity based elsewhere all felt we had to help as individuals and as a community,” says Puri who is from Bengal but settled in Delhi. Puri tells us that Stand with Bengal began with a plea to the people willing to help by coming forward and planning an initiative that would raise funds for Bengal.
The collection of works addresses a variety of ideas, myths, and narratives in a diverse range of styles and mediums, from acrylic on wood-board to canvas and cloth. Some artists have used natural dyes and colors, handmade paper, and other local techniques for creating their works.
Gond artist Rita Shyam visits the deep-sea creatures with her acrylic on canvas, where the work imaginatively captures the lively world of the ocean that we don’t really get to see. Suresh Kumar pays tribute to Ann Dai, a Gond deity that protects animals and birds. Anita Mhaske captures a contemporary landscape in Geru and Acrylic on Cloth rendering a powerful Durga Mata standing in a temple at the top of a small town that fans into a city, beginning with peaceful huts but gives way to a busy urban sprawl that appears a bit chaotic. Her work made from cow-dung and acrylic on cloth captures the happy forest life of the fox and crocodile, but this leads to her last work that depicts flood and famine post the cyclone in Bengal.
Jyoti Uikey reaches for a more colorful and hopeful gathering of animals, stylistically painted in the Gond art manner, with acrylic on canvas. The stylized beings are elephants upon whose back grows a fabulous tree adorned with peacocks, tigers with ‘Baigas’ that appear to be feminine forms leaning with content against the fearsome beast.
In the contemporary section, artist Jayasri Burman presents a beautiful Lakshmi. Her style blends some elements of Madhubani painting with her own modern approach and technique. Burman captures Lakshmi surrounded by swans upon the lake, parrots, Brown Thrashers, and long-tailed Cuckoos that gather around the Goddess. Placed before she is a large basket full of seeds and edibles for the birds. With flowers sprouting out of her crown, which is also festooned with these birds, the Goddess Lakshmi is symbolic of plenitude, hope for the future. Paresh Maity evokes the reunion of people through his trademark stylized elongated faces, that come together over the light of a single oil lamp. His large oil and acrylic work on canvas is titled Unity, and it also conveys a sense of hope.
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Waswo X. Waswo pays a kind of poetic tribute to the Workshop for Durga, (2017) with his digital black-and-white photograph individually hand-colored by Rajesh Soni. It captures the artist at work creating the armatures of the Durga idol. It is usually made of straw and coir and it is often finally used to create the ornate and beautiful Durga statues during Pooja. It sets an interesting dynamic between God and mankind, flipping the position of hierarchy between the creator and his creation.
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Late master painter Manjit Bawa brings an interesting and playful element to mythology. He expressed heroic epics with graceful dance-like postures. Here it is the large bluebird and a man with a knife in his hand. Is it the mythical evocation of Ravan and Jatayu? Bawa’s gentler interpretation leaves it open-ended. The theme of Gentleness and love is carried onto KS Radhakrishnan S bronze sculpture of Tapasya-Tarangini; a couple who are earth- bound yet ethereal, migrant yet historical.
Log on as the artworks are on display now at www.mashindia.com & www.emamiart.com.
Buy a work & support a life.
Text By Georgina Maddox
Images Courtesy: Rita Shyam, Suresh Kumar, Anita Mhase, Yashpal, Jyoti Uikey, Anita Shyam, Rajesh Mor, Waswo X. Waswo and KS Radhakrishnan
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://www.instagram.com/inapuri02/
https://www.emamiart.com/modern-contemporary-art/
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/suresh-kumar
https://www.instagram.com/suresh1314kumar/
https://www.facebook.com/anitachoubey13/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/manjit-bawa/
