Artist’s Statement: On the Cover Art/ Anupam Roy/ Issue 05
Title: Alienation
Media: Black Pigment, Tea-Liquor, Water Colour and distemper on paper
Size: 96” x 60”
Year: 2021
Title: Conservation (cover page of this issue)
Media: Black Pigment with Distemper and Water Colour on Paper
Size: 96” x 60”
Year: 2021
Title: Agitation
Media: Black Pigment with Distemper and Water Colour on Paper
Size: 96” x 60”
Year: 2021
In this set of three works, I construct a non-narrative dilemma between fact and fiction emerging from the studies of the bio-political synergies of my native land (focusing on Wet-Land in North 24 Parganas and its historical, political and geographical specificities). Here, my position is unique and eccentric, being that of a partaking insider and a distant observer. Pictorial elements and their broader referential networks oscillate between the visual language and his sphere of thinking. We see the prominent pictorial elements directing us into the conceptual frameworks emerging from research, subjectivity, and practice of politics. Be it the common vegetation like banana leaves with a burning horn speaker or obsolescent Red Canna Indica plant and a Water monitor protecting a Constitution-like book, or a struggling fish and a woman’s body with common water hyacinth, they narrate several distant/absent realisations and observations, generating elusive disquiet among visual prominence in the works. The broken figures with multiple limbs depict not only a critical introspection of self but show a propagandist remark on bodies in continuous movement. The complex referencing of the constitutional discourse within the order of endangered organisms, protecting each other within the unreality of being and the reality of violation and violence, creates a space for longer engagement outside and around the image. It is the analysed synthesis of real and surreal that evolves as conditions of ‘irreality’ in these images. The combination of minimal green, red, and blue with the constant array of black within the powerfully woven visual marks an interesting addition to the visual vocabulary. Self-reflectivity and political consciousness unite with the economic and semiotic perceptions of colour, pigment, and complexion. The coloured zones register different shades of truth over the black and while scaffoldings of the images.
This set of works continues to engage with the contradiction between self and society, a recurring theme in my thought process on artistic singularity. Experiencing the long monotony of lockdown in an alien land and surviving the enduring conditions of this emerging world of political-pharmaceutical regulation makes its way into bringing together contexts of artistic, virological, political, and agitational. These images interrupt the flow of the political construct of landscape, its culturalization, and sustainable design; bring into focus the ethico-political responsibility for counter-narrative and action. A utopian continuum places the proposition of a critical conservatism in the post-environmental world. At the passing moment of the ‘long death of environmentalism’ and the global trend of politico-industrial green-washing, my works vouch for a counter-politics of land conservation and environmental protection, asserting the questions of disproportionate ownership of land and resources.
These three artworks are a part of Elephant in the Room project (2022) by Conflictorium, Ahmedabad.
To know more about Anupam’s work, visit anupampropaganda.wixsite.com. Read his views under A Propagandist’s Statement and A Practitioner’s Statement.
Anupam Roy is an artist, or as he puts it, “a practitioner of visual propaganda making.” To know more about his practice and politics, visit anupampropaganda.wixsite.com. He also posts his works on Instagram @burningbarricade.