Kolkata, Jan 7 (PTI) A group exhibition featuring works by contemporary Indian artists, including Zarina Hashmi, Mithu Sen, Birender Yadav, and Sumedh Rajendran, will reflect on land as inheritance, resource, memory, and contested ground at the 59th annual celebration of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture.
Opening on January 9 in Kolkata, “Zameen” will examine how land shapes identity, labour, ecology, and collective life in a time of growing political and environmental fracture through diverse material practices and personal narratives.
“At its heart, ‘Zameen’ centres the artist as a witness to shifting meanings of land and belonging, from Zarina Hashmi to Vikrant Bhise and many other, powerful voices from the hinterlands are coming together for this dialogue,” curator Ina Puri said.
In “Debris of Fate” (2015), Yadav reassembles construction waste into mosaic-like forms marked with tools of labour, representing embedded violence, oppression, and erasure, while Debasish Mukherjee’s “Forty Five Attempts at Remembering a Familiar Land” (2025) traces the changing landscape of Varanasi through memory and repetition.
Working with rice paper and mixed media, Mukherjee maps the city as a site of lived intimacy and political transformation, where land persists as origin, imprint, and unstable ground shaped by time.
Mithu Sen in “Non-Spinal” (2025) stages the body as a site where land, labour, and power converge. Centred on a pickaxe, the work exposes how tools of survival transform into instruments of control.
Hashmi’s “In Delhi” I, II, III (2000) renders the city as a cartographic abstraction. Incised lines and measured divisions evoke bureaucratic regimes of surveying and ownership, foregrounding displacement and loss.
Other participating artists include Shambhavi Singh, K R Sunil, V Vinu, Riyas Komu and Ratheesh T.
The academy’s annual celebrations will also include a mono-act by Anjana Chandak titled “Draupadi”; Sanskrit dance drama “Sharaccaru Chakram” by Chidakash Kalalaya Centre for Art and Divinity; and a classical vocal rendition titled Swar Ranjani, by renowned vocalist Ajoy Chakrabarty.
The academy will also launch “Projects” — a section dedicated to the emergence and evolution of public art installations in West Bengal.
As part of this initiative, the academy will host “Terra Kolkata | Burnt Earth and Living City” by Anirban Das.
A site-specific installation that traces its origins to the rural hinterland of West Bengal, the project was developed as a tribute to the unrecognised clay artisans of Dakshindari, skilled in their artistry and striving to keep these age-long traditions alive.
The exhibtion, along with the annual celebrations, will come to a close on February 8. PTI MAH MAH MG MG
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