The week-long national painting and sculpture workshop which concluded last week at the Buddha Jayanti Park in the Capital proved to be a pathbreaking event which presented the city with priceless works of art created by reputed artists from within the State and outside.
Based on the theme ‘Art & Ecology: Search for Sustainability’, the workshop provided the Buddha Jayanti Park the much-needed face-lift. About a dozen sculptures were created during the workshop which will find a permanent place in the park, transforming it into a unique gallery of contemporary art in Bhubaneswar. Though many galleries and institutions in the State have good collections of contemporary art, this is the first instance when sculptures by present day leading artists will be kept for public view. About 15 artists had participated in the workshop who deliberated on the theme and presented diverse forms of artistic creations.
The brainchild behind the event was artist Jagannath Panda of city-based Utsha Foundation. He said the workshop was an effort to make people aware of the ecology and their immediate environment. “The subject of climate change and environment has time and again called for responses from every discipline and art is not an exception. Even as there has been a large body of art work addressing ecological issues, there is no platform for discussion on the subject between artists and other stakeholders. This is why we decided to host the workshop on the theme of art and ecology,” said Panda.
Panda himself created a documentary along with Ramakanta Samantray where they showed how people failed to recollect even the name of a common tree inside the park. “These installations are a projection of how the concrete jungles are fast encroaching upon the green spaces,” he said. The artists were divided into groups and they presented one work of sculpture or installation each.
While Smritikant Rout created a beautiful installation with pebbles and a dried up tree in the park, Archana Handa, an artist and curator from Mumbai, created an interesting work of landscape involving medicinal herbs, green vegetable saplings. She dedicated the work to a gardener of the Buddha Jayanti Park.
Smruti Sai Mishra, a young artist from the city, showed in his work ‘Lost Innocence’ how the concrete structures in a urban landscape have come up killing green foliage and endangered nature. With two other artists Trinath Mohanty and Somnath Rout, Smruti constructed a model of apartment blocks inside a bed of flowers. With videos on nature and ecology screened on the polythene coated walls of the miniature housing model, the artists tried to give a message of the ill-effects of urban development on nature through art. Another installation made up of discarded plastic bottles, titled ‘Airdrop’, looked like a dew drop containing a palm tree. Nityananda Ojha used straw to create ‘Archive of the Ecologist’ and Nilansubala Sasmal, Priyadarshini Mohanty and Biswajita Moharana worked on a sculpture ‘Mother Earth’.
The workshop inaugurated by senior artist and art historian Dinanath Pathy, was divided into sections like ‘Eco-Sustainability’, Art-Ecology-Continuity’, ‘Science and Art’, ‘Art and Ayurveda’, ‘Ekamravan:Conversation/Art’.
Documentaries like ‘Chilika - A Fragile Eco System’ by Nirad Mohapatra, ‘Citizens at Risk’ by New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, Nilamadhab Panda’s ‘Climate’s First Orphans’, Sanjay Barnela’s ‘Village of Dust’ and ‘City of Water’ and Madhumita Nag Chakraborty’s ‘Cherrapunji - Rain, Rain Everywhere But Not a Drop of water to Drink’ were screened throughout the week-long event.
Culture Secretary Arabinda Padhee and Vice-chairman of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority Vishal Kumar Dev suggested that the art activities should be an annual affair in other city parks as well.
