Portraying Absence: A Kolkata Exhibition Examines Existence In The Absence

Nei Tai Khachchho, Thakle Kotahay Petey is an age-old Bengali riddle. It roughly translates to: You’re enjoying your meal because of an absence/where would you get it from if it were present?

How does absence impact presence? Dialectics in the Upanishads tell us that existence and void are inseparable. Karl Marx would say that you own more property because some people don’t. Does void create existence, just as existence vanishes into void?

In the case of painter-installation artist Shambhavi, the lost time and space of her childhood in a Bihar village grew deep roots in her mindscape as she moved to live and work in cities. The lost moments of standing beneath a tall palm tree and watching its leaves fall took the shape of an installation, recently displayed at a Kolkata exhibition.

Spread over one and a half walls in a dimly lit room, the seven falling leaves of different shapes, angles and shadows are frozen in motion. You stand there, you close your eyes, breathe and smell the silence, and you may rediscover your personal displacement from your native space, your own lost time buried in busyness. The very old, small Kali temple with a tiny door, nestled beneath the tall palm tree that remained etched in her memory does not appear in the work. It’s the slow-falling palm leaves that represent her whole experience.

Leaves fall and float, while the child witness remains lost in timelessness. Then, one day, the child is lost. The child loses her idyllic time and space because she must make good use of her time and find her own space. She loses herself and rediscovers herself in the absence. Whose absence? It’s about the return to the roots, the roots living in absence.

Absence is the theme of the exhibition—the ‘Miracle of Absence: The Embrace of Time’. Curated by Gayatri Sinha, it includes the works of Abir Karmakar, Amitava, Anandajit Ray, Baaraan Ijlal, Buddhadev Mukherjee, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Gigi Scaria, Mithu Sen, Ratheesh T, Ricky Vasan and T Venkanna. This show marked the launch of the city-based gallery Art Exposure’s new space in south Kolkata. The pieces brought together the search for the meaning of absence.

According to Sinha, the exhibition “marks the quickening of the spirit of the contemporary in the city of Kolkata,” plays upon “the binary of presence and absence, of the self and the other” and “draws on the sentiments, images and energies that course through the vast metropolis, its galis (lanes) and paras (neighbourhoods) and beyond”.

However, works of artists from outside Kolkata have also been included. Somak Mitra, the gallery’s founder and a young art connoisseur, says some of the artworks on display have already been acquired by reputed museums.

The theme draws inspiration from a line by Mirza Ghalib, the legendary Urdu poet of the nineteenth century: “The miracle of your absence is that I found myself while searching for you.” Similarly, while searching for one’s true self, one may end up finding her or his significant other. Or, shall we call them the necessary other?

In Baaraan Ijlal’s ‘Always The Moon: Diary Entry 2024 I and II’, the lady painter in the moonlit room is not present; her presence is only physical, while her mind wanders away. Moon-bathed, the painter in her solitary night has gifted herself wings of fancy to search for the absent—whose absence, perhaps, turned her room into a dull prison cell.

Mithu Sen’s works tend to withdraw from existence. The colourless dots created on bright white papers by painstakingly pricking on the other sides make the stretched-out leg and the caressing hands appear like they are fading into absence. What are they withdrawing from? Attachments? The tiredness of existence? The burden of reality? Can we really live a full life without experiencing absence? Without knowing and feeling them?

In Sen’s words, “It is a withdrawal of presence and the opening of absence, validating and accepting the Invisibles—the mnemonic world of traces, leftovers, wounds, erasures, violence, remainders and intentionally ignored reminders.” She describes her set of four works as “Happy Prick Drawings” with “Zarina, metallic paper, watercolour ink, acrylic and intentionally ignored emotions and muted violence on acid-free khadi handmade paper”. 

Anandajit Ray’s ‘Fantasies of Flight’, a watercolour and gouache work on paper, depicts a man driving a car on which a hand has grown like a tall, plump and bare tree. A paper plane hangs in balance on one of the fingertips of the hand casually leaning against the air like the Tower of Pisa. A bird flies in the background. The paper plane may want to join the bird in its flight. But can the man drive the car fast enough, while being weighed down by the heavily imposing hand?

In the next room, there is a room-size piece of art made of two wall-full of floor-to-ceiling canvases supplemented by a smaller one on the third wall. The viewer is suddenly in the middle of a middle-class drawing-cum-dining, complete with wash basins, wall cabinets with mirrors, garlanded black-and-white photos of the past generation, the tube-light, the landline phone, the half-open doors to the kitchen, glimpses of the bedroom through the half-drawn curtains, clothes dumped on hangers behind the door.

This is Abir Karmakar’s gigantic piece, titled ‘Displacement’. Two of the doors are actually door-shaped empty spaces curved out on the canvas and can be used to add further dimensions, depending on the backdrop. What’s absent? What, or who, has been displaced? The artist? The people who lived, or still live here, absent in the frame but present in their clothes hanging from the door? 

Absence creates space for us to fill. Absence drives desire. Absence suffocates. Absence kills. The question is how you deal with them­—YOUR absence, the absence/s that matter/s to you.