In আই আর ছত্তিরিশ (IR36), Arpan Mukherjee brings forth a journey etched in fragile glass—a portrait of a world left behind yet lingering in memory. Through the archaic medium of ambrotype, Mukherjee harnesses the wet plate collodion process, a 19th-century technique as vulnerable to the elements as the landscapes it captures. Each glass plate, laden with dust and heat, absorbs the rural textures he once called home, evoking a tactile, almost spectral presence of the past.
This body of work is a meditation on the migration that transformed rural India, echoing the artist’s own departure from his ancestral village. His art probes the fractures created by modernity’s inexorable pull, documenting the shift from a life once rooted in the soil to one redefined by urban ambition. What Mukherjee examines is not merely physical distance, but the severed connections that ripple through family structures, cultural memory, and landscapes now reshaped by new demands.
Mukherjee explores the landscape along the road connecting his village to the nearest town, presented as a long scroll narrating the journey from village to city. His prints are punctuated by audio interviews with individuals who significantly contributed to the village’s social fabric before leaving. Through their stories, they share their experiences of the landscape as they remember it. Each photograph holds a fragment of a vanished world, offering viewers glimpses of an ‘absent presence’—the guava tree, the pond, the footpaths and fields lost to an increasingly distant past. Accompanying these images, the voices of those who migrated speak like echoes through time, layering the work with the complex emotional topography of displacement.
Mukherjee’s process renders the landscapes unrepeatable, each glass plate a singular object. The collodion’s sensitivity captures not only light but a sense of impermanence, as if these images themselves might dissolve, like memories, over time. In this way, ‘IR36’ does more than a document; it resurrects and reclaims. Mukherjee urges us to confront symbiotic and ecological relations sustaining local life and culture lost in the relentless march toward a ‘better life’—a better life symbolised here by the promise of IR36. This hybrid high-yield paddy was promoted as part of the green revolution that promised food self-sufficiency but killed native diversity.
The wet plate collodion process itself is bound to the colonial history of India, arriving with the British at a time when the empire sought to catalogue and control its territories. British administrators and photographers wielded this technology as a tool of power, creating a visual archive of India that defined it as exotic, vast, and ultimately subordinate. These images mapped landscapes, documented people, and consolidated the narrative of British dominance. Mukherjee’s use of this same colonial technique reclaims it, transforming a tool once used to control and categorise into a medium of personal and cultural memory.
Through IR36, Mukherjee not only revives personal history but also rewrites a narrative that was once imposed, turning his gaze back upon the past to confront what has been displaced, uprooted, and, through memory and art, resurrected.