SHARAD DAS: 2019

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Thonga, Community Art Project [Govindpuri(J.J. Colony) , New Delhi, 2017]

Thonga, Community Art Project [Govindpuri(J.J. Colony), New Delhi, 2017]

( Sharad Das, Khadokar Ohida, Dhrubajit Sarma)

Tracing Art in Public (TAP) is an online-based magazine aiming to address the lack of art in the cities and force a dialogue about art outside the museum. To celebrate its commencement, the organization planned to create a large-scale work inside a residential colony in south Delhi. Their focus was to co-create an evolving work with the residence of the community and work with community engagement.

Tracing Art in Public’ (TAP) invited some young Artists to participate in that community-based art project in south Delhi. Govindpuri(J.J. Colony) is an urban village or slum, based in South Delhi, mainly populated by the migrated Bengali and Bihari laborers, where I collaborated with some Indian artists in that project. We decided to work with the beauty of the residence of that community as a part of the initial plan. For that, we started taking photographs in that slum with the help of some local volunteers while we found some young curious people. So next we decided to organize three days ‘Thonga’ (Recycled Paper Carry Bag) making Workshop at ‘Kantha Community Centre’ with that printed photograph. The aim of the workshop is not only to guide the people to earn this skill but also to encourage them in artistic approach. Finally, we made an installation with 500 printed Thonga, displayed in an open ground at Govindpuri Slum area for the community's engagement.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

LINES THAT I COULDN'T CHANGE-3(2017)

SPEED BREAKER(2012)

Worldwide over 1.2 million people die per annum due to road accidents, the 6^th cause of death according to World Health Organization (WHO, 2004).

Just few days before this public art project, in 13 August,2011 we lost two of ours very important peoples ,Tareq Masud and Mishuk Munir.

We also lost 44 young students in another read accident in Miresoray before that...and every day we read many more in newspapers

So we need to think how, when, who will start to act against the situation, May be u..

“You can change everything...”

In this project I used an optical illusion to create a false speed breaker to the driver.

INTROSPECTION(2019)

My current body of work employs with searching the unknown mystery of life. In our whole life we are in a path to identify ourselves. Knowing ourselves is a journey. It is about discovering what I am as a human being- yes the real i. The journey is unpredictable and engages ourselves deeply as it brings me face to face with myself, with deepest fears, self doubts, vulnerabilities and insecurities. Knowing yourself means giving you permission to not knowing whilst unraveling the deeper truth of who you are .The process is very much connecting with fear, with fear of death, in a way with fear of arrival too. But the really terrifying fear must be the fear you bring yourself and made to encounter it as something that you already know and telling and retelling of something we already know but don’t realize we know. Back to the proto experience which is always surprising, always new.

We can feel the same searching in Baul’s philosophy that employed to probe the inherent the divinity of the body search within the self for meaning, discover ’moner manush’(The Man of My Heart) in the deep lonely path. The human body occupies a central place in the baul ideology. Lalon Fakhir has variously described the human body in his music –as ‘abode’,’cage’,’boat’,’arshi nagar’. The body is a temple, a vessel for the soul and ultimately the Supreme Being. There is no truth outside the material body. The body is the universe and the universe is the body- it is the first axiomatic principle meaning of tantra for Lalon. Body as a material being is the way to know the universe. It assumes greater significance in that way and exploring the innermost essence of one’s being and there by determining one’s true place in life can lead to the discovery of moner manush.