The Geometry of Ordinary Lives, engineer-turned-artist Prasanta Sahu's ongoing solo exhibition at Emami Art, Kolkata, is a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of memory, labour, and inherited wisdom. Drawing from a decade of research and practice, this body of work offers a deeply reflective inquiry into the lives of subaltern communities, particularly through the lens of generational craft traditions and knowledge systems.
Rooted in both empirical observation and poetic abstraction, Sahu's practice traverses multiple mediums — drawing, sculpture, audio recordings, diagrammatic studies, and interviews. His engagement with artisans such as potters, blacksmiths, and carpenters excavates the endurance of oral transmission and manual skills within increasingly homogenised socio-economic landscapes. These workshops are not just sites of production but active repositories of epistemology, where stories, techniques, and values are passed down, adapted, and recontextualised.
Sahu's engineering background lends his work a unique visual grammar. The cartographic logic of maps, drafts, and technical drawings informs his aesthetic, with geometry serving as both a structuring device and a metaphor for connection and continuity. Numerical and statistical elements, often integrated into his compositions, operate as visual indices — measuring both quantity and the weight of cultural memory.
Yet, within this structured logic lies a deeply lyrical undercurrent. For Sahu, the act of drawing a line or shaping a form is as much about poetics as it is about precision. His work is attentive to the subtle gestures, pauses, and rituals that mark time and identity across generations. This tension between presence and absence, between data and emotion, lends Sahu's body of work its philosophical depth.
"The ancient lingers — in bodies, in objects, in the built and the broken. I’m compelled by these quiet residues of the past, drawn to the ways they endure within the present. My practice navigates this terrain through a hybrid language shaped by engineering, architectural drawing, applied art, and poetry. These tools allow me to trace, translate, and reimagine the layers of memory and form that converge across time."Prasanta Sahu
This body of work is not only a reflection on the persistence of traditional practices, it is a critique of the erasures caused by dominant narratives of progress. Sahu's work reclaims art as a space for epistemological resistance and cultural preservation, reminding viewers that the everyday is imbued with complex geometries of meaning, memory, and resilience.
In reframing artisanal labour as both knowledge and art, Sahu elevates ordinary lives into sites of profound reflection. The exhibition offers not just an archive, but a living cartography — where the poetic and the pragmatic and the ancient and the contemporary, continue to shape each other.
The Geometry of Ordinary Lives is on view at Emami Art, Kolkata, till 21 June 2025.
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