Time Travel

Sukanya Ghosh straddles past and present by transforming old discarded photographs into works of art at her show at Cymroza Art Gallery in Mumbai

- Soumitra Das

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term ‘bricolage’ is derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning “to putter about”) and is related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Quite in keeping with the English usage of the word since the 1960s, Sukanya Ghosh—whose exhibition (curated by Rahab Allana) titled The Parting of Ways, is on at Cymroza Art Gallery in Mumbai till October 17—makes creative use of leftovers and cobbles together disparate parts as well. Her work can also be described as a bricolage of the past and present, as the artist, who is based in both Delhi and Kolkata, attempts to put her imprint and mark on things that belong to a period long before her time—in this particular case, discarded bromide prints from her family archive— turning these inside out, upside down, tearing them apart, sewing fragments together digitally, adding splashes of colour till only traces of the original photographs remain. Elements of the original shots are still recognisable, but have been manipulated in strange and even bizarre ways when juxtaposed with scraps of totally unrelated images.