यह दाग़-दाग़ उजाला, यह शब गज़ीदा सहर/ वो इंतज़ार था जिसका यह वो सहर तो नहीं/ यह वो सहर तो नहीं जिसकी आरज़ू लेकर/ चले थे यार कि मिल जाएगी कहीं न कहीं

Painting has been to me an expression of the innermost and an intrusion into the farthest. It is through the forms that breathe out of my canvas that I have known, named and lived life. Every thought, every strife, every defeat and every renewed effort have come to assume ‘real’ dimensions in my painting.

Looking back at my work over the years, I would class my earliest productions (that range between 2006 and 2008) as emerging out of that urge to mirror the personal into a truth truer than the living person. They arise out of the intimate – situations, circumstances and contexts – but then move on to question the possibility of the private in painting. Working with different media (charcoal, ink, acrylic and oil on paper and canvas), I have tried to recreate visions of myself – often at war with the immediate and the everyday. Distorted bodies and dismembered feelings have found artistic expression through a deliberate blending of the ideas of form and formless, human and inhuman/animal, thing and no(n)thing, movement and (ar)rest, image and the imagined. With a deliberate insistence of the colours red and black, I have attempted to highlight the violence in beauty and the truth in ordinary.

The next series of my work spans over a period of almost a year from late‐2009 to 2010. Titled ‘Migratory Birds’, this series began with my own migration from a small town in Bengal to the national capital and its metropolitan panoramas. In my journey I read an allegory of a thousand other limbs that had then precariously perched the capital for sustenance. Delhi at that time was basking in the cosmetic colours of the Commonwealth Games, touted as the symbol of national pride. My work ‘Migratory Birds’ was an attempt to look beyond “what is on” and “what is inside” the glamorous face of the CWG in order to unravel “what is behind it” (Picasso). Through the means of my art, I wanted to pay tribute to the unnoticed physical investment of those migrant workers in orange vests and yellow helmets who have sealed each brick with their sweat to raise the resplendence of the CWG. Whether in oil, acrylic, water colour or pen‐and‐ink, this series spoke for my political and social commitment in hues that again borrowed from the everyday and the everyman.

My current work strives towards a thoughtful confluence of the social and the individual, by often resorting to my own poetry. It is a poetry of the prosaic in living, making a bread crumb of a sliced moon. These paintings articulate a new idiom of seeing – the sight/site of my self becoming another, many others. Noticeably, there has been a curious sense of continuity in my work so far – which however does not preclude a development across time. I have straddled the realms of the inner and the outer, sometimes privileging one and at others balancing both. Inasmuch as my ideas do not take off from the ideal, they question the validity of the latter and the possibility of its existence. Is the idea bred in the vacancies advertised by the Imagination, or are they lived in reality? Can it have one shape, one form and one image? My attempts at answering these questions make my work various yet continuous, and the choice of medium again differs with the demands of the idea.

2011................

Anupam Roy

+91 9717818197

something about me................

No more can I ignore the dark events flowing down from history to the present.  I am a part of the occurrences around me. My father is a retired army serviceman.  Since childhood to my present I have not known the idea of a stable home. From Silchar to Ladakh, from Jharkhand to Bengal  my life has been deemed in a course of constant movement and migration from one colony to the other. The crisis of space and belonging has been a constant preoccupation that channels into my work.

For the past 4-5 years I have been addressing sociopolitical issues through my art practice. I have created  posters and paintings on the issue of ‘anti corruption’, on the issue of  labour exploitation in ‘commonwealth games’ and on the issue of women’s rights and freedom. The content of my work is of utmost importance and I try to formulate a language around it to visually express myself. I engage myself in research before working on any specific issue through fieldwork, surfing the internet and reading articles in the print media. Rather than coming up with an immediate response , it is important for me to dissect the events and try to comprehend the social structure around it to reach at the core of any cause, so that that I am capable of coming up with a form of contingent expression.  

As an art practitioner revisiting histories of past practices and producing critique of critique may help one to make perceptible a discontinuity with the present police modes of practice, which brutally imposed on you from outside and thus it can help to locate the impossibility of constructed one. Constructed binary antagonism (high art against low art) even produces moral biases, more or less each one practice in economic production and social condition determines all human creations and artistic production, as like economic and other productions are radically alienated. However from the last century capitalist system consumed such alienation of art like other modes of production family, religion, morality, state and among others. But such multilayered power relation in each case, we can’t define as superstructural mode, because power relation lies in the chess board not in the chess pieces. Like other cases in ‘police order’ (RANCIERE), it is not that some person policing rather the signs and its signifiers control our behaviors (red light in road, aura of a gallery or museum structure, family structure) and the language is the foremost dominant apparatus in our everyday life. So the cultural praxis is the one of key processor of our everyday life as like economy. Praxis because its holds both visible invisible, major minor and that’s why practice itself produces contradiction. But because throughout history our dominant cultural practitioner through their appropriation of subaltern's voice they invisibilized minor practices, so questioning and exposing such marginalization is the political act. Operation of language and language is itself center of power relation and similarly it always evokes the question of counter hegemonic possibility. But the modes of counter politics aren't following the oppositional or the binary mode; reasonably it pushes the limit of a given structure. In one sense it sound problematic, but it always tries to indicate the impossibility to reach a totally new stage from the existing dominance of language or the hegemony of language rather through locating the impossibility, it pushes the limit of the existing language system and questioning the ‘Contemporary’ itself, like, what’s constitute our contemporary life? It some extents try to identify the crisis of our contemporary moment or intensifying the present. But that is not any way suggesting a process, achieving success or even failure in this movement rather what is it going to be an ‘unknown’ result. So making programmatic action is not the blueprint at all, rather make continuous interruption into the homogenize production relation. But that strategy was not following any singular way, somewhat it tries to make multi-processor machineries, to overcome from that situation, not any fixed or ideologically motivated way of doing rather in an experimental manner like as ‘music’ not the ‘system of musical notation’(as KAFKA use).