In Person: Susanta Mandal on Erasure
The second episode of In Person, our series of live sessions, was with artist and curator Susanta Mandal. A multidisciplinary practitioner, he brings together quotidian materials with light, sound, movement, text and image to create interactive and sensory experiences. He is interested in questions of memory, history, identity and truth; creating unsettling works that excavate these themes.
In this conversation, Mandal speaks to us about his most recent curatorial venture, a group exhibition titled Erasure, on view at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. According to his curatorial note, the exhibition:
"...initiates an exchange of ideas around the thematics of the creative process through an exhibition format, inviting artists Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Dayanita Singh, Gieve Patel, Ayisha Abraham, Mithu Sen and Ranbir Kaleka, along with (Susanta Mandal) himself, to weigh in on their artistic sources and cognitive triggers."
With the process of art-making as the context, Mandal unpacks the multiple meanings of erasure: of deliberate absence and modes of forgetting. It is, he says,
"An exercise in drawing analogies between two kinds of erasure: one that looks at the discipline of history as an ideological tool, which selectively structures the past and re-writes it at will, and the other, more clinical and pathological process of dementia, where the memory of the affected individual is tragically wiped out."
The works on display represent, therefore, both a collective and individual imagining of the past. At its core, the exhibition goes back to the fundamental questions around the concept of identity: whose stories are being told, in what context, and by whom?
For those who missed the episode or for those who wish to revisit it, the full conversation is available below. Mandal walks through the exhibition as he describes in detail his curatorial framework, how the pandemic influenced the making of the show and how each artist responded to the theme.
Erasure is on view at the Vadehra Art Gallery till 2 April 2021.
Live streamed on 11 March 2021.
In case you missed the first episode in the series In Person, featuring Anshika Varma on the GUFTGU Zine Box, you can watch it here.
