Dark Side of the Moon, the way I had conceived and conceptualised it, features a collection of images and the artistic voices of six different contemporary artists from Kolkata, which comprehensively discusses the philosophical, physical, and socio-political mandates of our existence that can lead us towards insanity and ultimately an unfulfilled life. The images and works try to interconnect and coherently exist to showcase the shades of today’s detrimental and hollow times leading us towards madness, intolerance, and violence. They dig deep into today’s dystopia, facilitating them to be a mirror for society, which brings forth the dark realities and sometimes acts as the root cause of this insane time and our self-centric ways of living, which advocate unfulfillment.

A reality check would suggest that there is no dark side to the moon, but while conceiving the narrative of this exhibition, this phrase turned out to be an ideal metaphor for absolute darkness. The darkness that prevails intensively can destroy all of the positive emotions of human beings and humanity as a whole. In effect, the darkness represents insanity. In reality, the light portrayed by the moon is really an illusion; it’s rather fake, as we know the moon reflects the light of the sun. In turn, this mock light of the moon turns out to be an allegory to the times our civilization advertises and the various deceptive and outlandish dimensions and perspectives of our decision-making, along with the barbaric choices we make by merely riding the tide of times and trends. The landscape of our reality, which can jolly well be termed a well-to-do hoax, harmonises and paves the way towards wretched souls, crime scenes, prejudice-driven fanaticism, abandoned relationships, intimate betrayals, and so on.

The body of work also indicates the blindfolded ways in which society goes insane by riding the tide, as I earlier mentioned. Speaking more specifically, I strongly feel we often go insane by doing what we’re told to do all the time. By accepting life for what it is, we have somehow stopped being gutsy, audacious, and critically thoughtful. It’s more like being someone else by forgetting who you are without retrospection, and sadly, that’s really a waste of life.

From ‘Pink Floyd’s song called ‘Breathe’, I thus quote

‘For long you live and high you fly.

But only if you ride the tide.

And balanced on the biggest wave

You race towards an early grave’

The process of contextualising and constructing the show was stimulating for me as a curator. I had to reignite myself throughout the whole journey of the selection of artists and, more precisely, the artworks. For me, it was more about observing and following the plot while picking up the most convincing and conclusive images from the featured artists’ studio spaces, which can create the intended dialogue and dialect with the show’s narrative. Their temperament, vocabulary, and artistic template, along with their philosophical perspective, are expansive and often diasporic. The works (drawings, paintings, graphics, and mixed media), as we can see, are an assimilation of a diversified range of approaches, yet they are interconnected. Six divergent artistic mindscapes with their distinct receptions and responsive voices culminate in a juxtaposed rendition of the exhibition’s narrative. Surreal elocutions, metaphorical elements and forms, lyrical interpretations, an ambiguous approach towards image making, and sometimes an undercurrent of being on your face aggregate and transcend an ambience of engagement and narration, adopting preferred mediums of visual art practices as their tools.

Ayan Mukherjee
Curator