Prasanta Sahu’s subaltern focus

In many parts of India, there is a gathering around a cup of tea in many parts of India. In tea stalls, nonsense ranges from husk to intimate and political to individual, so when an artist admits the establishment of Prasanta Sahau Talk of tea tableIt creates a break.

Three-thousand commission terracotta cups, shattered, piled on top of a table-a shark because a mud cup is that when one is one with a tea. Sahu, an enthusiastic tea stall visitor, represents each terracotta piece with handwritten snippets of overrod conversations: “… but he doesn’t know that he will be …”, “Play a cricket match in the school field …”, “… I like to gossip …”. Miraculously, these confessions bring a single table alive with a thousand discarding conversation and determine the speed for Sahu’s latest single exhibition Geometry of ordinary lifeWhich presents the discovery of an artist presented through sculpture installations, pictures, videos and sketches.

Prasant Sahu Talk of tea table Establishment | Photo Credit: Vivian Sarki

One thousand renunciation conversation. Photo Credit: Vivian Sarki

Cartographic approach

Sahu’s penc in the art for art strongly intensify between research, inquiries and human living experiences. And this new exhibition is not only hard-touching and powerful because it sees an artist in its peak form with about four decades of practice, but also because it is a wonderful interaction with generational knowledge and its transmission. The art in our world that looks for technical bridges, its art is a throw for the beauty of human body and memory alone.

Maps my neighborhood (Acrylic and photo transfer on acid-free paper)

His systematic, cartographic approach is deeply inherent in his work, with a technical draftsman and a surveyor’s experience of his early career experience, with a firm artistic expression of size. It is also informed for farmers and other “ordinary” people from their original, rural Odisha to farmers and other “ordinary” from the present location of their decades and residences, Santinicate, carpentry, potters and craftsmen, which he sees as a dynamic repository of knowledge. For example, in a quarter of the line drawing sketch in the exhibition, which detects the trademan work movements, the artist overlays his comments with a primary tool painting. Even a trowel or screwdriver attracts your attention, a worker and the touchful intimacy of his surroundings, and the skills taught in the hands of a tradman, are brought to sharp attention through Sahu’s amazing comments in the picture below.

Memory family (Acrylic on acid-free paper)

Artisanal labor

The exhibition presents a lens that is deeply familiar and still a fresh new spatial on life studies and traditions. As the curatorial note keeps it directly: “In understanding the liquidity of knowledge, as it is practiced, adapted and transferred”.

It is clear that Sahu constantly sketches, listens, photographs and videograph, and always maping an idea, an idea, an area or a landscape. No one can help, but wonder what his collection looks like. Rural and suburban people and the geography of our time and perhaps a stock of a thinking artist of our time?

Tools that have memories (Ink, graphite and watercolor on acid-free paper)

For those interested, Sahu presents an attractive interaction between the rertultibility and ways of watching the ‘ordinary life’. It is also an artist’s silent tribute, which is in the world of people working with his hands, from one pair to another, between generations, and a world that threatens the future of mechanization and artificial intelligence.

Prasanta Sahu: The geometry of normal life is in Emami Art in Kolkata till 21 June.

The author is the founder-director of EKA collection services.