The exhibition space at Project 88, Colaba, Mumbai, resembles a transit area right now. Sculptures are propped up against wooden crates while paintings featuring hieroglyph-like patterns have been stitched onto the walls. Makeshift display areas can be seen across the space. It feels as if the gallery has turned into a brief halting station for the artworks as they rest and breathe before continuing onto their journey. This unique display is part of Bite the Bullet, a solo exhibition by artist Goutam Ghosh, who lives and works across spaces in Jharkhand, Bhuj, and Kolkata. “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?” states writer-curator Sonali Bhagchandani in the accompanying essay. Be it in the paintings or the sculptures, there is an interesting coming together of disciplines in Ghosh’s works. Geology, archaeology, and formal mathematical knowledge meet philosophy, music and tantra.
In Ghosh’s works, narratives unfold in a non-linear fashion. “It is an urge to reconfigure the progression of time in a variable direction—future, past and present,” he says. The style of abstraction on display is marked by repetition and rhythm. In Ghosh’s view, repetition, in a way, is the very foundation of mathematics. “Abstraction marks a departure, whether it is in the field of mathematics or visual arts…calculus, equation, geometry, probabilities, and repetition have emerged as the aesthetics of mathematics,” he adds. Ghosh’s paintings are marked by repetition of painterly gestures—memories are recalled and then marked by the body. “A timeline—marked and coded—appears on the mental horizon…,” says Ghosh.
In her essay, Bhagchandani states that Ghosh’s sculptural practice 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. The artist gathers clay from landscapes that he works out of, “awakening the materiality of fossilised remnants,” she writes. “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.” Each step has its own significance, from gathering of clay, understanding the materiality, and then layering those with the artist’s own memories. “The mind of our planet is a layered one—added to by the geological events and forms. These leave their own gestures and traces on the surface of rocks. Take, for instance, the texture of veins, bubbles and glittering minerals on the rocks. What are they all saying together? That’s how archaeology, geology and palaeontology come together with the patina of my own memories to create meaning,” says Ghosh.
