Sanchayan Ghosh is Associate Professor in the Department of Painting, Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University. Over the years, his exploration of site-specific, interactive art practice has deepened to focus on direct engagement with community and public spaces including interdisciplinary activities, multilayered installations and performances. He was the Artistic Director of the project marking 100 years of Jallianwala Bagh at the Victoria Memorial Hall. Through his work, he has traversed spaces between institution and pedagogy, engaged with different systems of knowledge production and dissemination and succeeded in extending the reach of art and performance to include, crucially, the public elements of collective engagement.
A house built in 1968, with Roman arches and patios, stands quietly here in Santiniketan. At its inception, this house mirrored the expanse it inhabited—the Khoai’s undulating void, the serpentine flow of the Kopai River, and the stretch of open skies that seemed infinite. The house and the land conversed then, each shaping and reflecting the other. Today, images of the house taken in 1968 seem like fragments of another reality. The geography has been transformed, and with it, the relationship between the built and the natural has been severed. This conflict—the rupture between what land was and what it has become—lies at the heart of Sanchayan Ghosh’s exhibition. Through a decade-long collaboration with farmers, poets, musicians, and academics, Ghosh upcycles the land as a living entity, insisting on its stories, scars, and silences.
