konkal
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Konkal
Animation, photography, drawing The moving image work ‘Konkal’ creates an image stream that creates a sensory evocation of space and texture. ‘Konkal’ in Bengali, is simply - ‘skeleton’. The word speaks to a skeletal framework, a grid that for me, symbolizes the cities I inhabit, and the politics of location and time within them. The idea of decay and what remains, the reinforced idea of the spectral that keeps re-emerging in my work, and the fascination with the idea of ‘structure’ in a visual sense. Made entirely with B&W images shot on 35mm film, this work expreses the formula of frame-by-frame animation. Disparate images shot between Kolkata (Calcutta), and Delhi, include empty billboard frames and tangled wires on telegraph poles, construction sites, flyovers and signaling poles on railway lines. Alongside these topographies are also the quieter micro views of interiors, walls, debris etc. Konkal imagines how decay and detritus become visual symbols of the city –an urban carcass laid bare. A combination of the past and present, of age and modernity. Sounds and images of construction become the punctuation in a flow of images dissolving into each other as uncertain and ephemeral beauty.. The bare bones of cities – every city – have a universal language, a shared politics. It speaks of the past, the present, the ambition, the fantasy, the cruelty and the exploitation. It also speaks concurrently of loss but also beauty. An altered yet recognizable topography– the poetry of iron and cement expressed in light, paint and paper. In my artistic practice I work with archives, erasures and layering and this project bring these concepts together in a unique way. I acknowledge the rupturing of time and rebuild a new image language that surpasses the bounds of cultural reclamation and re-locate them in constructed narratives as imaginary histories. In destroying /re-imagining the photographic image, I remove the specifics of time, place, event and juxtapose my own interpretations and mythologies. I am delving further into the question of the role loss, recollection and imagination play in how we build identities – both individual and collective. |