“If someone asks how long it took to put together this show, the answer is 30 years. From the time I was still saving up to buy a pair of chain-boots in New Market, watching ‘The World This Week’ on Doordarshan, or sitting next to a tense passenger in a rickety Fokker F27 plane to Agartala, or thinking of the greater world that lay beyond the Dum Dum airport.”
— Sarnath Banerjee
Project 88 is pleased to present Sarnath Banerjee’s solo Badly Remembered Things.
Badly Remembered Things is a series of drawings and propositions torn from a large and somewhat multi-headed narrative. The drawings and text resemble a glossary — a lexicon of an ill-understood world. Each drawing is a window to a phantom narrative built in collaboration with the viewer. It is the scaffolding of a book that has not been written.
The working title for the show was Walter Shirazi’s Miracle Cures — stories that promise a cure for the anxieties of our times. According to street philosopher Walter Shirazi, anxiety rather than love or hate drives our present society. The drawings are Shirazi’s attempt to make sense of these troubled times, when humanity has turned against itself — to principally maintain ego and short term gains, we have started the process of our own extermination. The end-of-the-world picnic is coming to a close; people are gathering used paper cups and empty bottles and rolling up the mats.
Walter Shirazi, a brown sahib version of Walter Benjamin, takes great pleasure in gathering the material remains of a society. He feels that the present is continually bleeding into an ossified past. It is getting harder and harder to distinguish separate strands of memories, harder and harder still to remember how it felt a few years back.
Banerjee feels "Fiction writers are keepers of time. They are unreliable carriers of other people’s nostalgia. Walter Shirazi too, is a compulsive recorder of his times, times that would soon be fondly remembered but barely recollected."
