New World Chronicles Of An Old World Colour
Last winter, I spent three weeks in Poland in an old city called Gdańsk at the mouth of the Motława River.
While there, I often thought of how it shared with my home city and state the many burdens of a communist past. This serendipitous connection became the locus of my attempts to connect to a place I was otherwise a stranger to.
I was deeply inspired by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s seminal work ‘ Three Colors Trilogy’. Taking a cue from his film, I wanted to react to everything that was going on around me, through individual shades. I had my own baggage because I came from Calcutta where the communists had ruled for the past three decades. I failed terribly, the colours in my memory were different from what I was encountering here. Soon disillusioned, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for anymore. I sought out every glimpse of the accidental flare of hues, looking in and out, unnoticed and unseen. Capturing colours, seeking them out and arranging them in order would reveal meaning, I had thought. But what I ended up photographing were mundane things, seemingly regular, even banal, which only furthered the obscurity I had meant to resolve in the very beginning. In the strange and melancholic Polish winter, I grappled anew with the fading of the left and of red –the colour which had been its most enduring symbol in the past. Desolate, I looked thus for its chance traces and eventually moved to other things, left behind unnoticed in crevices, there in the streets where Solidarity had once emerged.
New World Chronicles of an Old World Colour is on display at Gallery Latitude 28, New Delhi (F 208 G/F Lado Sarai) until November 8, 2015.
The exhibition is also a partnering event of the Delhi Photo Festival.
Photographs & Text: Ronny Sen | Website: http://ronnysen.photoshelter.com
~
Share
Comments 1
Hi,
In case you don’t know, the writing on the broken glass says: there in no God if there are no believers.
I must admit that I don’t know much about history of socialist goverment in India but I dont think it had very much in common with the totalitarian regime we had here in Poland. Also I personally don’t see any traces of the communist past here anymore. It’s been over 25 years of constant growth and, contrary to many Poles who tend to be constantly upset and unsatisfied, I think the country is thriving. Both communism and Solidarity movement are things of the long gone past. In this year’s election the social-democrats did not even make it to the parliamemt and the most social party is the right wing conservative catholic PiS party what is like a joke.
See you in Poland :-)