Mahirwan Mamtani: Everywhere a Stranger, Everywhere at Home by Prabuddha Ghosh The ICIA Gallery Kala Ghoda, Mumbai presents Everywhere a Stranger, Everywhere at Home , an exhibition exploring the artistic vision of Mahirwan Mamtani, a significant figure in Indian modernism and the Neo-Tantric Art movement. Bringing together ten works from his Centrovision and Cosmic Geometry series of the 1990s, the exhibition offers an insight into the artist’s lifelong engagement with geometry, spirituality and the search for belonging. Borrowed from the writings of German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the exhibition’s title captures the paradox of feeling both at home and a stranger. For Mamtani, born in 1935 in Sindh, this idea is rooted in personal history. Following Partition in 1947, he migrated to India with his family, an experience that profoundly shaped his artistic outlook. His search for belonging gradually moved beyond geographical identity towards an exploration of the inn...
Prabuddha Dasgupta: Between the Frame and the Unspoken By Prabuddha Ghosh A photograph by Prabuddha Dasgupta rarely ends at its frame: Look at the sleeping woman. The modest Goan interior. The Buddhist boy moving almost insignificantly through the vastness of Ladakh. The naked body suspended between intimacy and anonymity. A flower, a staircase, a landscape, a face. These are not simply subjects encountered by a camera; they are fragments of larger, unfinished narratives . Dasgupta leaves something deliberately unresolved, allowing the viewer to enter the image rather than merely look at it. This is where his practice becomes particularly significant. He photographs what is visible, but constructs what is not: His visual language operates through subtraction. Black and white, stillness, isolated forms, controlled light, deep shadows and pared-down compositions repeatedly bring the image towards an essential state. His own assertion that the superficial did not interest him, a...