The Shape of Home by Tanmoy Samanta

About

The artworks in this exhibition showcase Samanta’s exploration of the material and imaginative aspects of our domestic spaces at a time when we are confined within those very spaces. Created during the ongoing pandemic, these artworks are evocative of the memories and stories that these domestic spaces hold. Also present in this show is the artist’s leitmotif of birds. Samanta often uses birds as a vehicle to examine certain dualities like the macabre and the fantastic, moment and eternity, and presence and absence. Using his preferred medium of rice paper on paper board, Samanta has succeeded in creating works that are quietly poetic.

As described by Samanta, “These works are about memory and the idea of home; about longing, belonging and unbelonging. They are about the presence and absence; evocation and poignancy. The stencil like images on the cut-out surfaces are an act of assemblage of memory of different times - some subdued and others stark. They are in the shapes of objects at home—some carefully preserved, forgotten or discarded, heirlooms, layered with tactile experiences and mind-travel to the constellations.”   

This exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Ranjit Hoskote.