Punascha Parry — Samit Das — Villa Vassilieff — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 14 → December 23, 2017

In the framework of Samit Das’ 2017 Pernod Ricard Fellowship
From October 14th to December 23rd, 2017

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Punascha Parry — a title borrowed from the eponymous book by the painter Nirode Mazumdar, which could be translated as « a resonance of Paris » — is an exhibition conceived as a journey, in which archives and images come together to form a narrative, a possible memory .
The history of the colonization of India is long and complex, the archives scattered and incomplete — especially regarding art history. An observation that Samit Das (Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017) makes as an historian and an artist, leading him to propose an original mapping of India. The exhibition examines the visual vocabulary of Indian modern art in an attempt to re-evaluate the idea of modernism through the lives, works and destinies of Indian artists in Paris. Samit Das, revisiting some ignored sections of the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the twentieth century, combines his works with those of Indian artists who have stayed or lived in Paris and whose trajectories remain ignored or unknown.

Most of the exhibited works have never been shown in Paris; their display is the result of an investigation conducted by Samit Das and Sumesh Sharma (associate research curator) with witnesses of that time, but also their families, friends and fellows artists. It is therefore aesthetic but also political and intimate articulations that the exhibition will show, putting into perspective the constitution of a discourse on the history of art in the context of contemporary Indian nationalism of the years of struggle for independence.