The narrow mountain ranges rising from below and the forests growing around it imperceptibly criss-cross each other except for a few stretches along its Western foothills where the grasslands offer to untangle the view along its soft contours of greenish yellow; the high-low ravines bearing in its womb the mineral caves, like the proverbial Achilles heels.
A helicopter hovering above the forest hills, its sharp metal blades continuously cutting through the air created a vortex of air and vibration, a pure field of sound with vibration. After a while, when the air pressure has turned downward, the vibration travels in obedience to laws of physics, at a speed of 80 km/h, to the deepest bowel of the mountain and into the numerous rings and holes scattered on the floor. Beneath the floor, lies another world; a cave of minerals.
The cave does not allow the sound to go out. It echoes from one wall to the other at an equal angular distance and continues to multiply under the influence of excessive pulls from both gravitational and magnetic force. Inside this mineral-rich cave is a very active and strong magnetic influence, causing the air mixed with iron powder to hit the inner metal walls of the cave at high speed.
This creates a strong vibration in the heart of the enclosed canyon, much like the heavy heartbeats of the canyon. The villagers seem confused. They find the heartbeat as though it is their ancestors who are breathing heavily by racing the local time like a flying horse. The clock is not the same as before.
There are numerous meetings and protests, more movements at night and rapid call transfer all across the station in that sub division. This confusion can only be quelled by aggregating information. An interrogation is taking place at the edge of the site where the south range of Labhtuliya forest merged.
Who are they, walking on the trail in the forest so late?
— Angshuman Phukan and Goutam Ghosh
An unspoken urgency — an eerie silence — stirs inside the gallery; is this a warehouse for exhumed artefacts in transit, to be smuggled elsewhere across the border? Objects that appear to bear the imprint of history, an ancestral residue, emerge in horizontal formations — but remain close to the ground, waiting. Hieroglyphic paintings are stitched upon the walls; a make-shift tent attempts to constrain stacks of wooden crates, but a few sculptures wander outside. Are we encountering the aftermath of an archaeological excavation, or the beginnings of a landscape site survey? Or perhaps, are we in the midst of a quarry itself, the cave in the womb of a mountain, resounding against its intruder? Goutam Ghosh’s second exhibition at Project 88 — titled Bite the bullet — compels viewers with an immediate force to be unstuck in time.
Temporality loses its linear and sequential anchor in the face of an unfolding catastrophe; as trespassers penetrate the forest, Ghosh doesn’t turn to romanticise — or essentialise — its past secrets, nor does he succumb to an escapist utopia of infinite futures. Time is untethered from the clock; a bare scaffolding that lies suspended. Refusing any sedative, Bite the bullet calls for a reckoning with this disjointed shadow of our contemporary: to register the inner rift (and depth) of our moving worlds. We are at the site of interrogation: how does knowledge — our ways of seeing — come into being? As you encounter the unknown, what patterns or algorithms are deployed to recognize, aggregate, and sterilize data? What would it look like if these patterns slowly begin to unravel?
Ghosh counters the extractive colonial logic of archaeology through a rigorous exploration of the intersections between geology, mathematics, and animism — the ‘non-human’ is no longer a passive entity, nor is it subsumed into an anthropomorphic discourse of the self. As you look closer, these haunting artefacts are not ‘found objects’ but sculptures composed with an embodied precision: Ghosh gathers clay from landscapes across eastern India, awakening the materiality of fossilised remnants, charged with the historicity of thousands of years. And it is in their negative traces — residual surfaces — that we can fathom a former presence, be it through scorched ashen patinas or feral claw incisions, gestural leftovers in the aftermath of violence.
Such an estranged invisibility pronounces the space: Ghosh deliberately refrains from representation, seeking a subtractive ontology of vision. Despite their flat surface, his paintings appear sculpted — a threadbare palimpsest of time. Ghosh conjures this depth through erasure, a removal of layered entanglements, opposing the logic of accrual. This rhythmic sensation underscores each abstracted cipher; for in his enigmatic explorations of ‘form’ against recognition, Ghosh captures a shadow that must “disappear in the process of becoming.” 1
— Sonali Bhagchandani
1 Goutam Ghosh, ‘Morph, Blend and Flatten (Space) of Bird, Reptiles and Flower’, Exhibition Text, Standard (Oslo), 2018.
