Cracks in the CULTURE STATION

“An unlucky teacher is the one who is never questioned by his/her students and an unlucky academy is the one who failed to produce collectives in its journey” - Unknown.

Art College was for me like another world for which I was waiting to explore, a world of possibilities, ideas, freedom, creativity, and collective sharing and learning. But I think, it ruined all my imaginations about an art institutional space because of its archaic and out dated structuring of the system as well as superficial understanding of the contemporary, and also because of self acquired alienation from the contemporary and deeply art historical spaces in terms of learning and growing. And also because of the way it celebrates its few self defined local successes within its own boundary.

I sharply remember the first day of my art college when I went in the morning; I was late for the class and the teacher were too late to me. I went in to the class room; I saw the new faces and my future friends. No I am wrong, not my future friends but just a bunch of people who daily used to come and go according to institutional guidelines. And they inspired me in a way that what they were doing I should not do that. Right from the beginning I was looking for a person who can be serious in the process of his or her journey, from here only I became what I was not before, and the one important person who was responsible for shaping me in the direction of being serious through the practice of art and life was my classmate Ashim Roy.

I was very hungry to see new images and on the second day I saw a sketchbook with impressive drawings and watercolors. I was able to locate the fellow and he was Ashim Roy with big curious eyes, and with a hint of smile he looked at me, making me expressionless because I was jealous.

My soul started feeling uncomfortable in the middle of my first year in the art college. And I started looking for an alternative space for my practice and luckily I found it outside of the college campus and inside of my heart.

I started not to waste time in the campus because of its level of pedagogy in building up a creative environment. There were no such deep seriousness between my not future friends and also till now there is no such updated and deep creative infrastructure and deep engagement at the level of practice within and outside of the institution. And because of this continuation of ill and superficial self beneficiary mentality, the Art College is unable to produce even a few artists in its long history with deep engagement of practice who understand both the multidimensional world ideas and his or her local narratives in deeper sense and make something that leads to the new interpretation of reality and can alter the views of the masses about culture and life.

Whenever I encountered that alternative space, I forgot my romance. I loved the color and the pattern of the blue hills which always tries to adjust itself between the blue and the green. And I painted my emotional reaction to the landscape wrapped in color. It was the Borpothar village where I painted many compositions multiple times in between 2005 – 09. I was a tiny flower in the landscape of Borpothar village that emerged out in between the conflicts of millions of grasses in that big field. I used to seat in-between the grasses hiding myself in-between them, making myself part of the landscape and blurring my all ego, superiority, intelligence and otherness. I was not the other and I don’t like to be the other. I am like those soft grasses of the Borpothar, and I want to be like those beautiful hills so strong but so silent and patience. I was like the beautiful hay roofed on the houses of the Borpothar village which now does not exists anymore.

Dear Alternative space,

I am not an Outsider, but an Observer. I'm always with you - standing, running, jumping, sitting, living and ...sleeping. I want to achieve your vastitude, your openness, your variety. I want to learn the power of tranquility, the power of silence, and I want to become as beautiful as you are. I need your stability. I was made intelligent, I ask you to wash away my consciousness, make me raw and innocent like you. I came to you rejecting their open gates; I came here to understand the Self more deeply. I am not interested in common perception of personality. I am interested in those deep conditions, under which the idea of personality unfolds liberating itself in the new open horizon.

you and your stories and all the characters’ of the stories and specially that special person who always used to come in my vision like a rare wind but always created the cyclone in my soul which pushes me towards yourself because she was pushing and pulling my every attention towards her, and my feet powered by her simplicity, her color in sunlight, her yellow dress, her silent gaze and my quite vision about her started moving from my soil to her soil, but I was always with you. She gave me you as a gift and I received you in my routine. I was there to get her but I find you, I was there because of my passion for her, but you become my passion. You changed my identity, you break my personality, you liberated me from the traps of my knowledge and I become more curious about observation. There she and you become the same, pushing my passion at much deeper level and making me mad for forever.

Thank you.

I hold her memory in my works, in each stroke, in each color, in each wash; I painted all my watercolors in her absence to feel her presence. This is a story of a crush which leads to the crush on the beauty (reality) of the landscape and later transformed my identity from a passionate lover in to a serious maker. I think this is impossible in an art institute; they don’t have this type of syllabus because it can’t be designed. I try to fill the blank every time; this feeling of something absent is so powerful that it always kept me looking to fill that gap, that absence. And I am still so blank, so hungry and so empty that I need something to stand. Love defined me very clearly and it opens the possibilities for me to engage with the open spaces and think more widely in terms of practice and tries to challenge all notions related with making and creating. So I see a chain of various layers in the story of my watercolor practice period (early B.F.A days) which begins as a crush on a girl in Bopothar village in the winter of 2005 and then transformed into a love for landscape and open spaces, resulting in many watercolors and because of those works, questioning and collective critique of the academy I become a very bad student of the art college who does good works.

The institute unknowingly claimed my emotions, my innocence, and my passion of being in love and also claimed the origin of that energy produced by the emotional excitement of being in love and declared me their product. It becomes very important that how an institute define its student and on the basis of what that definition is offered out. You don’t think that my story of watercolor practice which defined by Art College in my case and with some of my friends’ case is completely superficial and it happens because of a very deep pedagogical problem.

In the process of doing the watercolors I meet people and came to know about them and they formed their own observations regarding my work and bluntly used to asked questions about the process and result of my watercolor practice. Watercolor group, Discussion group and later Studio group was the names offered by the faculty to us in which I was there with my friends Ashim, Pallov, Nirupam, Ashok, Abhijit, Dhruba, and there were also few friends who used to came with us to do outdoor watercolor in a part time mode.

The degree of feeling of discomforts in our heart and brain started increasing by the each passing day in the art college and we started thinking to solve this problem. And the solution was to build an alternative physical space to work freely and in more experimental and inclusive way.

By realizing this alternative space we collectively realize the solution to the bundles of problems that we were encountering in the art college space regarding the structure, mechanism and the level of art education offered to us. I think it is very important to put oneself in the zone of regular questioning of surrounding spaces. Feeling of comfort is death of a personality. Realizing the layers of problem leads us to Questioning, and questioning leads us to search. And we begin that search because we wanted to start a fresh polarization of ideas regarding the practice of art. And I really thanks to the art college environment, its academic fabric, and minds for providing us this brilliantly outdated academic space to excavate questions and grow in a very different mode. ‘’Collective forms when an academy fails to understand its students’’. And collective forms when students start questioning the academy. A creatively unlucky individual only can feel the comfort in an art academy like Guwahati Art College. And that comfort feeling (compromise) is a sign of settled mentality. It can also be termed as a political silence (opportunism). And this politically motivated silence in an art college will lead to a very flat and dead cultural production in the future. We don’t need revolutions for the material causes in the art college. We need the introspection from where we can locate ourselves in the garden of possibilities of a fresh knowledge production, and dedicate our minds and souls to facilitate the vibrant public spaces, situations, and objects of surprises to the public, instead of only creating the art that is art historically repetitive and narrowly leads us to high value exchange.