In this quiet room, remnants of time pulse with a life we almost forget or overlook—a life stripped bare of immediate function, now existing as relics and artefacts as generational wealth has dipped. Adip Dutta, a sculptor and academic, evokes not just material history but the history of our seeing and being through a vision shaped by fragments and remains in this restored building.
In his work, three distinct voices emerge and merge: a life-sized metal cast of a tree trunk called Vestige, a series of ten drawings titled Ruptures, and sculptural forms recalling tools once vital to construction sites—Boring Instruments. Each speaks in a register of ruin, unearthed and reimagined—a memory made present, yet ambiguously so, lying somewhere between archaeology and anthropology. The tree trunk, a sombre form almost resembling a Natural History Museum exhibit, is neither entirely natural nor entirely historical. It beckons to a life once rooted in soil, now claimed by metal, a material transformation that silences yet retains the life force of what once was.
The sculptural objects are tools that time has almost rendered mute, their original purpose now dissolved. They have been reconfigured into something that speaks, albeit with the tension of glass-bound artefacts—silent yet suggesting stories if we dare listen. And the drawings, with their layered textures, engage in this dialogue as if transcriptions of an ancient language. They mirror archaeological renderings and diagrams to decode a civilization we belong to yet hardly recognize. They are both signposts and surfaces, a map of touch and line that guides us through memories generally forgotten but felt from time to time.
Together, these elements oscillate between the personal and the collective. The objects on display do not merely show a process but participate in a cycle of making and unmaking. Adip Dutta describes a practice that swings between drawing and sculpture—a movement of inquiry, as if the two mediums speak back and forth, answering questions the other cannot. The viewer is invited to witness this dialogue, to feel the tremors of the past through metal, paper, and form.
In each object and drawing, there is a spark of wonder. For the artist, even the unnoticed tool or a fallen tree trunk holds an allure, a significance that others might overlook. But the magic lies in this transformation, in coaxing the ordinary into a state of deep presence, where the aesthetics and the wealth of knowledge of another era could still mark its presence. In rendering it visible, Dutta shares an intimate encounter, inviting us to pause, to reclaim our own gaze and trace it across these textures and forms—drawing us closer to a past that is alive, in this building and outside in the old Calcutta that continues to live inside the modern metropolis.