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Kolkata, November 2018: Our practice as artists are not far away from the lives we lead and the art we admire. Swarup started his questioning early. As a student of fashion, passionate about photography, experiments in imagery came early to him. As a photographer-scenographer-artist-designer, his practice everyday engulfs visual imagery of forms, lines, shapes, and silhouettes on one hand and pursuing their meaning on the other. The body is a reservoir of memories. It is subjected to gaze, to presumption, to judgment, to biases becoming a bed of politics and layers of subtexts. Swarup’s practice as an artist who visualises and actualises images to question the why and wherewithal of this process of subjection that the body undergoes and explore if in some realm of artistic suspension of disbelief the body can be free; free off every trope of identity construction that traditionally dictates what it should be and what it cannot or should not. Swarup finds it more than a curious and amusing coincidence that all the interrogative questioning words in Bengali start with the letter ‘Kaw’? the first Bengali consonant? Ki? (What), Key? (Who?), Keno? (Why), Kokhon? (When?), Kothay? (Where?) and Ki bhabey?(How?). Swarup weaves in this labyrinth of interrogations about our identities and how we manifest them in our displayed and secret lives; how our identities are constructed and how they gradually dismantle. Swarup Dutta’s solo show KAW is an inquiry into these myths about our identity, who we are and how we become. Kaw is a series of three bodies of work if viewed in the order in which they have evolved – Khelna-bati, Armour of Weaknesses, and Otherworldly progressing thematically from a space of androgyny to the periphery of struggle, to the eventual evolution of the mutant, ambiguous in both gender and identity. The three bodies of work raise questions about a few dominant ideas. First being ‘play’. This theme becomes a juxtaposition of child-like indulgence, unfettered dalliance to play-acting in a performative sense. His bodies play. With each other, with themselves, with an odd collection of kitchen props which placed out of the usual kitchen context become weapons, sex organs, costumes, and many more things. There is the play of power and there is the play of light. Androgyny is another theme that runs through all the three series. Swarup comments “It would be great if everyone is both male and female”. Swarup’s bodies are androgynous and never sexually obvious, they are various...
