Water, Flesh, & Stone: The Metaphors Of Chris Basumatary’s Multidisciplinary Practice

There is something unsettling and oddly intimate about Chris Basumatary’s sculptures — like looking inside a gaping wound. Made out of cement-concrete, granite, paint, and polyurethane varnish, Basumatary’s sculptures appear flesh-like and almost alive. It's almost as if they’ll throb and breathe if you keep looking. Corporeality — the quality of having a physical material body — is a recurrent theme in the artist’s work. By repurposing materials such as cement, stone, and paint into organic shapes and forms, Basumatary transforms them into metaphors for his own bodily memories, desires, and fears.

“I grew up by this rivulet, it’s called Chhota Rangit,” Basumatary says, “and water somehow has been a very important part of my life. Because I grew up by the river and this water body, I kind of feel that I have this unexplainable relationship with the water, so much so that it keeps recurring in my dreams. When I think of myself and when I think of my own subconscious self, I somehow see a space of water, and me being inside a space of water.”

Like in his dreams, water plays an important, recurring role in Basumatary’s multidisciplinary artistic practice. In his debut solo exhibition ‘I have so much poetry inside me, but it is in the wrong language’ at the Shrine Empire gallery in New Delhi earlier this year, the Darjeeling-based artist used water as a metaphor to talk about the visible and invisible violence inflicted on minorities, especially women and the Trans community.

“Water has also been a representation of desire in my case,” the artist says, “because while growing up by the rivulet, I never used to go visit the water. It kind of scared me. I was also restricted from visiting the river alone. I’ve always been a kind of lonely kid and I had a hard time making friends. But then I think that’s the reason water became very special to me. I used to hear that incessant sound of the river and I used to wonder what it was like being inside the water. And when I grew up and started exploring the water, the ambience, and the presence of the force of the river itself. It was so subliminal and the feeling was a very overwhelming experience. That’s how water as desire came to be.”

Like water, the artist also uses his personal feelings and memories about flesh, the texture of flesh, and the visuality of flesh to talk about how marginalised individuals sometimes cannot speak to their fullest potential. For them, flesh somehow becomes the texture and the medium through which they can actually express themselves.

“When I’m working on flesh and trying to imitate flesh, it kind of suffocates me,” Basumatary says. “It’s a very shallow space, in that sense, where one kind of breathes, and feels uncomfortable. I think that’s why I’ve been interested in working with this because as a marginalised individual, those frustrations are really icky, very shallow and uncomfortable, as if you are in that space where you know there is no escape and there is no breathing space.”

The artist tries to evoke this claustrophobic feeling in his sculptures and paintings with thick layers of paint and polyurethane varnish. “There are things I want to say,” he says, alluding to the title of the show, “because we live in a society where people feel they know more about our own experience. The world loves to erase the existence of the most vulnerable. But there are silent witnesses.”

Basumatary is currently exploring water as a metaphor for “hope”: a future where he imagines a world that is safe, free, and equal to those for those that have been suffering psychologically as well as structurally in the margins of society.

Follow Chris Basumatary here.

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