How does one negotiate life when everyday one’s identity, citizenship and a sense of belonging to a place itself are the primary questions that one deals with? Sometimes searching for one’s roots and cultural identity, and attempting to recreate the same from the memories that have been passed down the generations, become a challenge in itself.
Published in Domus (News); 25 January 2014
These are some of the issues that Paula Sengupta has tried to project, and narrate, in her exhibition titled Into Exile at the Apparao Gallery in Chennai. The exhibition showcases Tibetan culture, crafts and customs, and unfolds these open-ended questions of a community that has made India their home in the past few decades. The exhibition largely focussed on recreating the way of life that Sengupta developed from the collective stories of the exiled Tibetans, most of whom are second-generation Tibetans in exile, and have never been to Tibet.
One of the works at the exhibition showcases an etching and serigraphy in paper, serigraphy on acrylic sheet and hand-cut wooden box titled Pema’s Story or The Flight of the Ducks. Also, the dioramas on display titled Pema’s Story or The Doll Museum imitates the diorama displays from the 19th century that Sengupta has seen at the Losel Doll Museum situated in the Norbulingka Institute of Tibetan Culture in Dharamshala.
This museum attempts to document and archive the indigenous Tibetan way of life through diorama displays. Her works provide viewers a window into a civilisation that is struggling to survive in a different habitat, and more importantly, in an altogether different country.
www.apparaogalleries.com
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