A city’s skin

Adip Dutta’s Skin of Elsewhere (presented by Experimenter at Tokaroun, Santiniketan) involves a way of looking at Calcutta, a city observed up close and from afar, its surfaces altered by construction, occupation and time.

The larger drawings are dense fields of colour, line and detail. Roofs, tarpaulins, walls, pathways and makeshift structures press against one another. Seen from above without its teeming people, the city becomes almost topographical, though there is no fixed point from which to comprehend it. Alongside these are smaller monochromatic drawings, quieter and more elusive. Their lines suggest roads, roots, cracks or networks, moving between image and diagram. Across both bodies of work, Dutta asks us to stay with the surface where fragments of habitation accumulate and human presence is registered through what people build, use and leave behind. Drawing becomes a form of excavation into the layers of the present.

In Running Woods, this enquiry takes a different material form. Rough lengths of wood are arranged within a metal framework, recalling both branches and the temporary structures of a building site. The irony is central to the work. Wood taken from the natural landscape becomes part of the process through which the concrete city is built. The forest is not simply replaced by construction; its material is enlisted in that construction. Dutta holds the natural and the built within the same frame. A cast tree trunk with branches, transformed into bronze, carries a related tension, retaining the memory of its organic origin while becoming something inanimate and more permanent.

At Tokaroun, the exhibition acquires another resonance. Dutta’s Calcutta has travelled to Santiniketan where art, architecture and landscape were meant to meet differently. Looking at the skin of Calcutta from here, one begins to wonder how different these landscapes remain today. Is this skin really so different from that? Perhaps the elsewhere in Dutta’s title is not elsewhere at all. Perhaps it is already here.