Telling the Story of Her City - Leena Kejriwal’s Kolkata Photographs
Anirudh Chari
Leena Kejriwal’s works create a narrative between the environment of fantasy and the expression of reality. The narrative element – telling the story of her city, Kolkata, and its inhabitants – is a crucial element in her body of work. These are real people in real spaces, so it is the expression of that reality; the fantasy element lies in unlocking the stories lurking behind this reality: of vast, hidden worlds which the image facilitates and provides a clue or a hint about. It is all about evoking an atmosphere where reality and fantasy blend within the pictorial space and trigger associations for the viewer.
For Kejriwal it is both important and significant to draw back the curtain, so to speak, on an image, to reveal its details and the ephemeral nature of the reality that is being captured. The essence of the image lies in its details. It is the details through which the mood or the moment is evoked. It could be the most banal of subjects but its importance within the image cannot be stressed enough. An object, a posture, a hint of mystery, these are the sorts of details which help create a sense of reality and allow both the artist and the viewer to distinguish between a technically competent image which merely documents a scene and one which captures the spirit of a moment or indeed a mood and, therefore, makes a point.
Kejriwal entices the imagination of the viewer by creating visual narrative journeys and developing paths down which viewers can travel and relate themselves to the situations and people she presents. Her intention is to create a space with the ability to open the floodgates of associations and allow viewers to dream and fantasize, to invoke and awaken vague or specific personal memories; to weave their own stories and sensations into the narrative and to, ideally, wonder anew. Viewers may be familiar with the places or the imagery in her photographs but she feels it is important for her to get them to re-evaluate those spaces and their perceptions of them.
Kejriwal’s practice involves documenting subcultures in Calcutta. This lends itself to a particular aesthetic which is especially exciting in today’s world of mass culture. She takes delight in finding subjects who personify and embody their cultural traditions (she is not keen to use the term ‘stereotypes’) and are comfortable in their own environments. By focusing on the city of Calcutta and the subcultures therein she does not, in any way, however, attempt to be exotic. The self is culturally constructed through a range of representations, and she conveys the essence of this authenticity to her audience. Intriguingly, one does not get the impression that familiarity with the subject of the works is necessarily important; it merely makes the understanding slightly more nuanced. That is to say, a local audience would be better placed to grasp some of the subtleties, although in purely visual terms it is universal.
Experimentation is a vital part of Kejriwal’s creative process. The convergence or marriage of traditional and new media practices has fundamentally changed her practice. Where formerly she was concerned with notions of artistic and aesthetic purity and authenticity, she has now decided to experiment with a variety of media. There is a strong graphic quality about her new works which has come about only after the move from traditional photography. These works are also more participatory and quirky, as well as more layered in terms of form and content, in the sense that the connection between the image and its subject is encoded within the image.
Photography has traditionally been a socially engaged medium and Kejriwal is, after all, a documenter of people and places; it is necessary to place this work within a societal context. How do these individuals function within society? How are they perceived by outsiders? How do they perceive the outsiders who are documenting them? These are all essential questions which she asks herself. It is not enough for a work of art to be beautiful; in order to stand the test of time it has to convey a notion or a concept which is, in some real sense, engaged with the artist’s concerns and interests. The growing fluidity in the existing boundaries of image making has, to a great extent, altered the form of the artistic statement Kejriwal wishes to make but has not changed its essence. The use of technical tools, she feels, should alter not what the artist aims to portray but how he or she portrays it. She tries to make her medium and primary instrument – the camera – as non-intrusive as possible. She blends in with the environment. Her gaze is that of a Calcuttan looking at her city and its inhabitants and trying to plumb the depths of all that it has to offer.
Anirudh Chari is an art critic and curator based in Kolkata.
Copyright: Goethe-Institut 2012
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