KAW Questioning the Identity

The whole story revolves around the acronym ‘KAW’, constituting three bodies of work, Khalna Bati, Armour of Weaknesses & Otherworldly. Swarup finds it more than a curious and amusing coincidence that all the interrogative questioning words in Bengali start with the letter ‘Kaw’? the first Bengali consonant? Ki(What?), Key(Who?), Keno(Why?), Kokhon(When?), Kothay(Where?) and Ki Bhabey(How?).

- Swarup Dutta

Our practice as artists is not far away from the lives we lead and the art we admire. Swarup started his questioning early. As a student of fashion, passionate about photography, experimenting in imagery came early to him. As a photographer, scenographer, artist, and designer, his practice everyday engulfs visual imagery of forms, lines, shapes and silhouettes on one hand and pursuing their meaning on the other. The body is a reservoir of memories. It is subjected to gaze, presumption, judgement, and biases, becoming a bed of politics and layers of subtexts.

Swarup’s practice as an artist who visualises and actualises images is to question the why and wherewithal of this process of subjection that the body undergoes and explore if in some realm of artistic suspension of disbelief the body can be free; free off every trope of identity construction that traditionally dictates what it should be and what it cannot or should not.

Swarup weaves in this labyrinth of interrogations about our identities and how we manifest them in our displayed and secret lives; how our identities are constructed and how they gradually dismantle. Swarup Dutta’s solo show KAW is an enquiry into these myths about our identity, who we are and how we become.