IFA@Kolkata: Accessing Archives: An Exhibition of Three Exploratory Projects | June 10, 2016

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
in collaboration with
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
presents
Accessing Archives: An Exhibition of Three Exploratory Projects
by
Afrah Shafiq, Sujaan Mukherjee & Vishwajyoti Ghosh
Opening & Presentations: June 10, 2016 | 04:00 PM
On view between: June 11 - 18, 2016 | 02:00 PM – 07:00 PM
Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre (JBMRC)
10 Lake Terrace, Kolkata - 700 029

Join us for an exhibition of three projects from Afrah Shafiq, Sujaan Mukherjee, and Vishwajyoti Ghosh's explorations into the CSSSC archives, Kolkata. The cultural history archives of the CSSSC contain a wide variety of visual genres of 19th and 20th century Bengal - an eclectic mix of pictorial, graphic, and photographic images, from an assortment of private and public holdings in the city.

In Accessing the Archive: An Exhibition of Three Exploratory Projects, Afrah leads us on a multimedia journey into women's histories and relationships with the written word; Sujaan takes us on a stroll down the lanes of a bygone Calcutta, through the gaze of an intrepid tourist; and Vishwajyoti guides us through Nripendra Kumar Basu's works on sexuality, eroticism, and romance, from a fresh perspective.

This exhibition brings together the results of a year-long Archival and Museum Fellowship, supported by IFA, in collaboration with the CSSSC. The Archival and Museum Fellowships of India Foundation for the Arts support practitioners to engage with archives and museum collections and re-present them through a new framework.

Afrah's Sultana's Reality is a multimedia story about the relationship between women and books in India. In an Alice in Wonderland style adventure a girl takes a trip into women's history and reads about how women were introduced to books, avoided them, read them, hated them, loved them and eventually wrote them.

Sujaan's project Chance Directed: A Guide to Calcutta Tourism tries to recall the different ways in which Calcutta has been seen and remembered by the 'outsider'. Through used postcards, stereoscopic images, old guidebooks, and memoirs, the city is seen not as a static object at one given point of time, but unfolding over the decades.

Vishwajyoti's Bengali Spring/Winter Sun draws on texts from Nripendra Kumar Basu's instructional books on sexuality and juxtaposes them with archival images. The artworks disrupt and even subvert the intended meanings of the original texts, much like the changing instruments of authentic education in our own times.

These projects have been made possible with an Archival and Museum Fellowship from India Foundation for the Arts, in collaboration with CSSSC, with support from Voltas Limited.