Cracking the code

Contemporary artist Abhishek Hazra explains why the visual arts excite him

Abhishek Hazra describes himself as a contemporary visual artist. He won a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, under the Extending Arts Programme, to research into the origin and development of science pedagogy in Bengali. His solo exhibition, a celebration of modern visual art, is on at Gallerysky on St Mark's Road till February 21.

What message do you want to convey through your art?
I want people to join me on my explorations of the social history of science. I want them to make connections between discourses and contexts that are perhaps not readily apparent. I chose visual art instead of, say, documentary films, because of its porous and dynamic nature.u00a0

Didn't you fear that calling the exhibition 'An inheritance of alphanumeric characters' would make it sound intimidating?
It is about dealing with the inheritance of discourses like Orientalism or Stalinism and finding ways of engaging critically with that legacy. At one level, the show title can be parsed as an allusion to the centrality of language in this entire process. It is also a reference to the phrase, Inheritance of Acquired Characters, a popular one-liner on Lamarckism, an influential early 19th century theory of evolution that was discredited by the Darwinian-Mendelian paradigm. Also, in the digital world of font encoding and text display, 'alphanumeric character' refers to the standardised set of alphabets and numerals (and special characters) that are set for every font. So in one way it's a reference to language and how our usage and construction of a given language actively shapes and modulates the very structure of our thinking. But also in ways, the title is a reference to the entire popular obsession with the genetic code and cracking the mysteries locked up in the permutations of A, C, T, and G and how a certain idea of biological determinism (the idea that everything, every human trait can be eventually traced back to the genetic code) colours much of our recent thinking.

Who plays the role of sounding board?
Apart from members from within the artistic community-fellow artists and art critics-I interact with technologists, mathematicians, social scientists, historians, Open Source evangelists. They give me valuable feedback.

On display at Gallerysky till February 21 The Presidency 82, St. Marks Road
Ph: 41120873/ 65951972