Posted on 22/06/2023 (GMT 11:00 hrs)
About Rajib Chowdhury
Rajib Chowdhury is a Kolkata, West Bengal born practicing visual artist lives and works in Baroda, Gujarat. He completed his Bachelor’s in Painting from Govt. College of Art & Craft, Kolkata (1991 to 1996) and studied Printmaking at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University, Baroda (1997 to 1999). The artist has been exhibiting his works nationally and internationally through several shows since 2000. Prominent shows include “s-o-n-d-e-r”, presented by Vis-à-vis Artists Studio at Art Cube Space, Kochi (2022-2023); “Code Decode” at Exhibition Hall, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (2022); and “Malhar: A Lyrical Exposition at Anant Art, New Delhi (2020); “Enter – Alt – Space” at Exhibition Hall, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (2019); “CIMA Award Show” at CIMA Gallery, Kolkata (2017 & 2015); “Fragile Hands: A curatorial essay on stated subjectivities”, curated by Shaheen Merali, Exhibition center at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Heiligenkreuzer Hof, Vienna, Austria (2014); “When Violence Becomes Decadent”, curated by Shaheen Merali at ACC Gallerie, Weimar (2013) and at Freies Museum, Berlin (2012); “Desh Pardesh” at Gallery Artcore, Derbyshire, UK (2010); “Ophelia” at Gallery OED, Kochi (2007); “Whispering Palette” at Red Earth Gallery, Baroda (2007); “Metamorphosis”, presented by Rhea Arts & Paperwasp Studio at Asian Fusion Gallery, Asian Cultural Center, Manhattan, New York (2005). Rajib is the recipient of National Scholarship from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, AIFACS Award, Bombay Art Society Award and Gujarat State Lalit Kala Academy Award. Rajib’s works are in several collections in India, Israel, Belgium, France and U.K. His works published in Hakara (A bi-lingual journal of creative expression), Edition 04: Chaos, April, 2018, Guftugu Journal, August, 2018 and Art Dose Zine (Issue – 4), 2019.
Artist’s Statement:
My affair with art for almost two decades has given my art practice a vocabulary that I am still dealing with, both in terms of use of materials and visual language. Nevertheless, a certain maturity and control that may have sipped into my language of expression justifies my concerns both as an artist and as a human being that I have been experiencing in my day-to-day life, both personal and political. The common man’s plea, socio-political chaos and terror in various forms canopying our lives presently have greatly influenced the visuals of my works. Social media and news lend a lot of fodder to my thought-process, which gets expressed metaphorically in many of my works. Religious and political terror erupting in micro and macro forms across the globe these days has become a subject of investigation in many of my works, where at times I directly portray these incidents and at times veil them under texts and shrouded imagery that may otherwise lend a journalistic approach.
Investigating history and its aftermath, many of my works deal with mass slaughter in the name of the so-called “holy” war. My canvases are stained with drops of fresh blood of innocent people whose lives have been endangered or lost by various degrees of violent acts. Curfew, stone pelting, pellet gun shots, splatters and stains of wailing woman and screaming people play hide’ n seek in my works. Enshrouded in an invisible veil through layers of text and images, I weave tapestries of violence and terror that history has witnessed and that has become the focal point of our activities at the present juncture. Through the device of false promises, we are making lines and boundaries according to our convenience, both political and geographical strangling, our will of liberation and self-knowledge. Our lives these days oscillate between the peace-maker and the peace-breaker.
My works are just the outcome of such things. In this way, I can sum up my work as a depiction of what is going on around us. The present scenario has somehow forced me to create what I do not like, as I want people to have a glimpse of what we have made our world to be.
Rajib Chowdhury
21-06-2023
Editor’s Note:
Can you define something called “fascist art” or “fascist song”? You might easily name Goya or Picasso, but not any Goebbelsian artist. How would you designate then the violin-player Nero or painter Hitler? It is quite evident that nothing creative can ever emerge from coercive ideology. For Example, Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), a tragi-black comedy of fascism as well as Nazism, can be construed as a classical parody of the dictators’ violently ridiculous (re-)presentation. However, the movie “PM Narendra Modi” (2019) is a disposable text, which cannot be considered as an artwork. Instead, it is a propagandist film with politically vested “truth”(?)-claims to manufacture “bhakti” or unquestioning, blind devotion to a fake master, a paper-tiger. However, as a commodity, the film “The Kashmir Files” (2022) (or even The Kerala Story, 2023) that exaggerates the fact of annihilating a group of people and earned huge amount of money at the box office, but the money-signifier solely enriched the producer and director’s coffers while neglecting the actual plight of that particular group of people, for which it displays (or merely pretends to display) utmost concern in the film. The suffering of the victims, viz., Kashmiri Pandits, are in oblivion.
In the contemporary India, in the context of market fundamentalism veiled by religious extremism, the Indian economy is within crony and monopoly capitalism. With regard to the press, the Freedom of Speech is infringed; justice is denied.
In this bleak scenario, the suffering subjects’ cognitive ability, or rather, creativity, is obviously crippled⤡. However, the artist, Rajib Chowdhury, bypasses these constraints with his valiant brush-strokes of vivifying resistance. He uses his brush by filling the blank canvas of scared, voiceless and apathetic Indian subjects. As an eye-witness of the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom, Chowdhury has not only vented out his agony and rage through his creations, but it is also a testimony on the violent time under fascists’ ethnic cleansing that cannot be captured in the verdicts of law. Therefore, Chowdhury negates the crippling of creativity at the time of all-pervasive Saffron censorship.
He is so engaged with the wounded India⤡ that he has depicted bibhatsya rasa (saliva of terribleness) whilst simultaneously participating with and alienating himself from (i.e., the cohabitation of empathy and positive apathy) the hegemonic violence and domination of the ruling governmentality.
On behalf of the Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA), we are proud to present to our viewers the following selected artworks of Chowdhury to demonstrate the dissenter’s responses to the world of merciless annihilation, marginalization, termination– the measures taken by the Sangh Parivar. We hope that all these strokes of dissent by Chowdhury will further encourage others to disseminate their works of resistance against the autocracy.
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