Eeshwar Darshan

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Eeshwar Darshan (2004)

I wanted to name this image as "Gopal-er Eeshwar Darshan" (Gopal's Meeting With God), but later I decided to remove 'Gopal' and call it just 'Eeshwar Darshan'. Well, why I did that? Only because it was really tough for me to bring out the true meaning of 'Gopal' - the iconic good boy in Bengali Literature.

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Cabomba furcata

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Cabomba furcata (2004)

As a kid, I used to spend almost every bit of my pocket money and piggybank savings for all those glass jars and bowls and glass tanks and little colorful fishes. Later, as I grew up, I started becoming much serious about this hobby. I realized that an aquarium is not a spectacular toy or showpiece like a marble statue or porcelain flower vase on the center table. Rather it is a living mechanism; breathing, growing, aging, just like us.

As I started spending more time with them, a completely new world was unfurled before me. I was moved by the works and philosophies of Karen Randall, the spectacle and organic beauty of Amano Takashi’s aquascapes. I started enjoying the joy of working on a visual composition with living and growing splashes of colors, which keeps on changing every moment. It is a real challenge to foresee the patterns that your plants might create when they grow up and to provide all required elements and environment that they might require.

Click here to visit my Aquarium Blog at http://aquasamit.blogspot.com

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Death of A Mustache

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Death of A Mustache (2004)

When Veerappan died in police encounter, the first thing came to my mind is, 'It's not a death of a man or a sandalwood smuggler or a notorious bandit or the infamous brigand; it is actually a death of a great mustache!'

I might sound funny or weird but I was very much impressed by his mustache, since I have seen his picture on a newspaper when I was in high school!

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Rampage

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Rampage (2007)

A kind of rememberance for all the hours spent on GTA Vice City – scheming a ‘rampage’, ‘wasting the wife', executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’.

These games ought to be part of a much larger political debate. Take a hard look at the representation of the non-whites – cab drivers are men in turbans similar to Indian Sikhs (remeber GTA 3: Liberty City); Cubans comprise a notorious gang of gun-weiding criminals; the most dangerous area of the virtual city is labelled as 'Little Haiti' or 'Little Havana', where gangs of black and brown-skinned criminals play cat and mouse with the white-skinned police.

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My Sleep, Awake & White

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My Sleep, Awake & White (2003)

... was thinking 'bout you and my sleep, awake & whitish, was rolling, rolling and spreading over the whole city ... [ Tr. by Madhuban Mitra ]

... Quand mes sommeils blancs et reveillés diffusaient la cité entièrement ... [ Tr. by Rouflaquettes Dorees ]

Poésie-visuelle de Samit-Rouflaquettes

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I continue to call them Visual Poetry for the lack of a sharper articulation. The text is in Bengali, as in most of my other Visual Poems. This piece is one of my initial efforts to combine visual and textual elements in making a single object. The 'poetry' in these artworks could be questioned, but what I was essentially attempting was to distribute the effort towards building a narrative into two parallel modes of communication - textual and visual. For example, I wanted the audience of this particular object to feel a soporific night in the city, without articulating the same emotion through words. I desisted from using the word 'night' in the text, but reinforced it in the visual, through the suggestion of a city skyline in shades of dark blue and black.

This piece was published in Annetna Nepo (Bulletin 9 Apr 2003), a Multilingual Poetry Review magazine. I hope that they haven't taken it off their archives!

Click here to visit Annetna Nepo >

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