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 metaphorical 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 the 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, rhinocerous, deer, crocodile, giraffe, 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.
Find out more about the show here.