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Vanishing Point

Sukanya Ghosh

Set in the idea of the photograph as a repository of recollection and memory, ‘Vanishing Point’ plays with time and memory to build imagined histories and geographies. Many of the photos I have found are images of travel and leisure, some annotated, some unknown. I approach this disjunctured past by skewing perspectives, inverting vistas and fragmenting spatial geographies. The ‘ghosting’ of spaces and people in the images of the past, the considerations of time ruptured and forgotten, leads one to deliberate on the elasticity of the spectral image.

I accompany intrepid travellers and deconstruct their destinations, their identity through these devices. I create figures, transplanted, posing among created landscapes; portraits with x-rays, creatures out of time – alienated by their surroundings; objects transplanted into a modern day world of reflections that are all slightly askew. I play with the sense of familiarity and distance that uses photographs to construct an obverse and oblique reality; to create a membrane of memory which acts as a filter for nostalgia and remembrance and stretches taut the constructed singular instance.

‘Kortababu: Seated’, Digital photo collage, 20×30”, Framed archival print, antique animal horn, chair, 2018.

‘Detail from Wood for the Trees’, Lightbox with digital photo collage, 20×30”, 2018.

‘Where Do You Go’, Archival print, digital collage with ink and acrylic, Diptych, 28×18”, 2018.

 

‘A Chair Walks into a Landscape’, Single channel animation, archival photographs and animation, 2017.

From the series: Vanishing point

Artists commission for the exhibition: ‘Mutations’ at 24 Jor Bagh, New Delhi, curated by Rahaab Allana and François Cheval.

Text, images and video © Sukanya Ghosh.

Sukanya Ghosh is an artist, animator and designer. She works with popular imagery, photographs, collage, poetry and the moving image. She trained in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharajah Sayajirao University (MSU) of Baroda and Animation Film Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has received the Charles Wallace India Trust Award and the Sarai Independent Fellowship. She has been Artist-in-Residence at Khoj, New Delhi, Spike Island, Bristol, and AIR Vallauris. Most recently, her works have been shown at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, and Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur. She currently lives and works between Delhi and Calcutta.