(Credit: Chatterjee & Lal and the artist)

The ontology of the past has always been a recurring artistic concern for Ashish Avikunthak, the director of several transgressively experimental films such as Rati Chakravyuh and Kalkimanthankatha. While the devoted followers of the contemporary cinematic avant-garde, both in India and globally, are already familiar with his singular body of work, the latest exhibition at Mumbai’s Chatterjee and Lal offers a different look at his creative sensibilities.

Titled ‘Rummaging for Pasts’ after his eponymous 2001 film essay, the exhibition not only showcases two rare early shorts but also his works in other mediums that are not usually associated with Avikunthak. Including drawings on New Jersey Transit tickets that he often collected from trash cans to Khadi sculptures, these art pieces also engage with the processes of ritualistic creation that are omnipresent in his cinematic output.

Throughout his journey as an artist, Avikunthak has brought forward innovative and interesting re-definitions of both the cinematic medium as well as the narrative form. The exhibition is an extension of that endeavour, showcasing the manifestation of his distinctive politico-philosophical ideas outside the domain of cinema. While the two films on display are highly inspired by his academic pursuits as a student of archaeology, the multidisciplinary art is informed by deeply personal experiences.

During an interview with the gallery, he opened up his own relationship with theoretical concepts and praxis. While commenting on the range of his oeuvre both as an artist and academic, Avikunthak noted: “I imagine myself as a person who thinks through practice. This thinking involves not just the works that I produce as a filmmaker or photographer but also those that I produce as a scholar and now as a painter and sculptor.”

“I have been doing pen and ink work for even longer, although I do not think that I had done any interesting or important work that deserved to have a public life. Even this present work remained in the cupboard for nearly a decade before I decided to show it,” he added. “The Khadi sculptural works is connected to my lifetime’s engagement with the materiality of hand-spun yarn and its political and philosophical valence in the world that we live in.”

Cultural juxtapositions are the dominant theme of the short films that are included as a part of the exhibition. Rummaging for Pasts is a particularly fascinating work that eludes the rigid frameworks of documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology, existing in a completely different creative space. Combining interviews of archaeologists with found footage of Indian families picked up from the Chor Bazaar in Mumbai, Avikunthak constructs a strangely intimate but simultaneously vast exploration of the infinitely nuanced contours of human memory.

As experts talk about the significance of the events that took place in the 8th Century BC in Monte Polizzo, Sicily, the audience absorbs a stream of footage depicting festivities such as Indian weddings from the 1970s. Although the connection isn’t apparent at once, the multiplicities that are fundamentally chained to the act of remembering become overwhelmingly clear. Through these reconstructions and revisitations, the colonial foundations of these historical projects interact with a curiously familiar nostalgia to create a layered anthropological chronicle.

Similarly, jarring cultural encounters are also present in Performing Death, the 2002 work that contains footage from an especially heterotopic space in Kolkata – the Park Street Cemetery. Presented in a visually disruptive flow of images that confront the unique postcolonial irony of the cemetery, whose cultural identity has morphed beyond recognition, the camera participates in a radical act of remembrance.

Divided into two segments, “the dead” and “the non-dead”, the latter depicts the ritualistic visions that define the biggest annual cultural event of the city: Durga Pujo. These remarkably potent contrasts form the basis of Avikunthak’s cinematic representation of the postcolonial condition, fuelled by highly complex symbolic economies and self-reflexive meditations on the mediums themselves.

The exhibition is on display at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, until October 28th, 2023. Check out images from the event below.